The Two Standards and the Geometry of God

The two cities, the civitas Dei and civitas terrena of Augustine's seminal work, The City of God, had a profound effect upon the self-perception and development of the Hispano-Christian world. Augustine's work is rhetorical, allegorical and constructed upon the aesthetic principle of the harmonization of opposites. His descriptions, as he writes, were not meant to be understood physically but rather in spiritual or mystical terms, and yet over the centuries his invocation of a godly society diametrically opposed to the earthly city of the damned exerted a radical influence on Christian perceptions of the physical world. Even if the majority of sixteenth-century Spaniards in the Americas were not wholly conversant with the specific writings of this Doctor of the Church, Augustine's influence imbued Hispanic society with a particularly urbanized vision of the civilized world.

Augustine wrote the City of God in the context of an empire profoundly affected by Alaric's sack of Rome in ad 410. The Roman response, not unpredictably, was to give greater impetus to the strategy of walling cities to protect the citizens and Roman civilization within. In addition, Christian bishops had by that time begun to take on an increasingly important role in temporal administrative functions. As David Nicholas writes, they moved ‘into the power vacuum left by the declining municipal senates and provincial governors’. Nicholas adds that ‘in 409 the emperor Honorius ordered that the bishop, the clergy and local landowners not of curial rank should join the decurions in choosing the defender of the city’.