In the first ten books of ciu. Dei, Augustine makes his case for Christian beatitude against the worldly glory of pagan Rome. Book 11 is a pivot. There he tells us – and now “we” seem to be his Christian and not his pagan readership – that we know best of the City of God, that eternal thing that peregrinates through time, from the witness of sacred writings, Psalms especially (87:3, 48:1–2, 48:8, 46:4–5), and from the inspiring love of the city’s founder. Most of us, most of the time, mix self-interest into that love and obscure for ourselves the beauty of the beloved. The moral is not that love must be selfless or worse, self-loathing, but that sacrificial love, sensing what is holy, practices humility. The great mediator between heaven and earth, the Son of God, takes up a human life, his own, without ceasing to be God. His is the original act of humility – think of it also as first love – that speaks consistently through the Scriptures and renders them authoritative (ciu. Dei 11.3). While sin makes it impossible for a mind used to the dark to endure the relentless illumination of pure divinity (incommutabile lumen; ciu. Dei 11:2), Augustine reminds us that we have, by way of mediation, a text to interpret and a spirit of humility to bring to the reading.