"Even today", the "City of God", one of Saint Augustine’s most famous works, remains "a source which aptly defines what true laicism and the jurisdiction of the Church are" in the relation between faith and politics. It was said by the Pope, who, at today’s general audience, resumed, for the fourth time, his speech about the Bishop of Hippo, focusing in particular on a review of his over one thousand surviving writings. Written between 413 and 426 and consisting of 22 books, the "De civitate Dei", recalled Benedict XVI, was written on the occasion of the sack of Rome by the Goths, in 410. "During the age of the pagan Gods, Rome was the ‘caput mundi’ and nobody would imagine that it might be conquered by the enemies; now, with the Christian God, this city is no longer safe, so the God of the Christians cannot be the God to rely on": this is, summarised the Pope, the main "objection" to which Augustine "replied with this grand work, explaining what God was and was not responsible for, what relation should exist between the political sphere and the sphere of the Church". On the background of Augustine’s work, according to the Holy Father, is "the great picture of the history of humanity", conceived as "the history of the fight between two loves: the love of the Self up to indifference for God, and the love of God up to the indifference for the Self, the full freedom from the Self for the others in God’s light".
