In August 410 Alaric, King of the Goths, entered Rome with his army, and proceeded to carry out a rather impressive version of a “sack”: murder, mayhem, theft, and desecration of churches and consecrated virgins. St. Augustine, then the bishop of Hippo Regius in North Africa, soon received a large number of refugees, both pagan and Christian. These refugees grumbled that Christianity failed to protect the City. After all, what are gods good for if they cannot guarantee the temporal safety and prosperity of Rome? Four months later, Augustine preached a sermon outlining the true lessons of this catastrophe. Within the next year he wrote the first of twenty-two books of the City of God, which is a blueprint for the main moral and spiritual lessons of disaster. Indeed, Book I represents one of the most profound themes of the entire work: Human history is a trial and test of the just and the unjust. The trial is best understood in a comparison of two heroes, one biblical and the other worldly. Namely, Job and Cato.

This is a virtual discussion with Prof. Francis Russell Hittinger, Warren Chair of Catholic Studies and Research Professor of Law at the University of Tulsa.