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A saga of his inward life, and its successors and imitators over the centuries, would allow the world to share the spiritual travail and posturings of the most restless men and women. In this tradition of the internal Odyssey, Rousseau a millennium and a halflater would stir poets, novelists, drama- tists, and revolutionaries. The City of God (413-426), Augustine's scheme of universal history, as we shall see, helped man off the "wheel" of again- and-again, toward a new view of the Creator. Providing a vocabulary for Christian thinking in the West for centuries, his work was occasioned by the trauma of his own lifetime.At midnight on August 24, 4io, as the gates of Rome were opened, and the city was awakened by Gothic battle trumpets sounding their victory, Alaric and his hordes poured in. "Eleven hundred and sixty-three years after the Louboutins On Sale foundation of Rome, the Imperial City, which had subdued and civilized so considerable a part of mankind," Gibbon records, "was delivered to the licentious fury of the tribes of Germany and Scythia." Rome had fallen!For the people of that age this event, which for us is only another episode in the long barbarian invasions, was apocalyptic. "When the brightest light on the whole earth was extinguished," wrote Saint Jerome, who heard the news in Bethlehem, "when the Roman empire was deprived ofits head and when, to speak more correctly, the whole world perished in one city, then*I was dumb with silence, I held Christian Louboutin Slingbacks my peace, even from good, and my sorrow was stirred.' " "Who would believe," he asked "that Rome, built up by the conquest of the whole world, has collapsed, that the mother of nations Christian Louboutin Pumps has also become their tomb?"There is no modern counterpart for that catastrophe, for no modern city has the mystique of Rome. Following Virgil's prophecy in the Aeneid that Romans would have "dominion without end," Rome had been known as the Eternal City. Obeying Jesus' exhortation to "render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's" and Saint Paul's warning that "the powers that dence in the rise of the Roman Empire. Augustus (27 B.C.-A.D. i4) and Jesus were contemporaries, and the rising empire seemed a bulwark of the faith. So Tertullian (160?-230?) justified Christian prayers for the health of Roman emperors. "For we know that only the continued existence of the Roman Empire retarded the mighty power which threatens the whole earth, and postpones the very end of this world with its menace of horrible affiictions." When the Romans tired of Christian Louboutin Platforms civil war, Ambrose recalled, they conferred the imperium on Augustus Caesar, "thus bringing to an end their intestine strife. But this also made it possible for the Apostles to travel throughout the whole world as the Lord Jesus had bidden them: 'Go forth and teach all nations,' " "Let the Church march on!" intoned Augustine,"The Way is open; our road has been built for us by the emperor."