City Of God

Within the depth-psychology corpus, ‘City of God’ operates on several intersecting registers that resist reduction to a single theological meaning. The term’s most sustained treatment appears in the Augustinian tradition, where it functions as a cosmological dualism—the civitas Dei set against the civitas terrena—a framework that Richard Tarnas correlates precisely with Saturn-Pluto archetypal cycles, reading Augustine’s composition of the work as synchronically and diachronically shaped by planetary alignment and historical catastrophe. Edward Edinger approaches the symbol through Revelation’s heavenly Jerusalem, interpreting it as a mandala of psychic totality in which the coniunctio of heaven and earth heals the ego-Self split. Jung himself, in both Answer to Job and Psychology and Alchemy, treats the heavenly city as an image of the Anthropos and of the lapis—a quaternary mandala expressing the fourfold synthesis of the unconscious. Bruce Alexander reads Augustine’s City of God sociologically and critically, noting its restriction to exclusively Christian emotions and its segregation of the divine from genuine psychosocial integration. Eliade and Jonas offer comparative-religious contexts: the heavenly city as archetype of sacred space and the Stoic cosmos-as-polis respectively. The tension between eschatological transcendence and immanent psychological wholeness constitutes the central productive ambiguity the corpus explores.

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Augustine conceived and began writing The City of God during the first Saturn-Pluto conjunction of the fifth century, in 410–12… awareness of which deeply shaped Augustine’s historical understanding and the vision set forth in The City of God.

Tarnas argues that Augustine’s City of God was both conceived and structurally shaped by the Saturn-Pluto archetypal complex, linking its moral dualism, eschatological severity, and historical catastrophism to a precise planetary configuration.

Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View, 2006thesis

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the new (that is, purified) Jerusalem is the bride of God (the Lamb). Heaven and earth, which were separated at the beginning of creation, are to be rejoined, healing the split in the psyche and reconnecting ego and Self.

Edinger interprets the heavenly Jerusalem—the City of God in its Revelation form—as a psychological symbol of the coniunctio, wherein the cosmic separation of heaven and earth is resolved through the reunification of ego and Self.

Edinger, Edward F., Anatomy of the Psyche: Alchemical Symbolism in Psychotherapy, 1985thesis

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it is evident from this passage that the City, the heavenly bride who is here promised to the Son, is the mother or mother-imago. In Babylon the impure maid was cast out… in order that the mother-bride might be the more surely attained in the heavenly Jerusalem.

Jung identifies the heavenly City of God (Jerusalem) with the archetype of the mother-imago, reading its appearance in Revelation as the psychological goal of the individuation drama after the purgation symbolized by Babylon.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Symbols of Transformation, 1952thesis

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the parallel description of God and city points to their common nature: they… correspond to the tetrameria of the lapis philosophorum, of which the description of the heavenly city reminds us: everything sparkles with precious gems, crystal and glass.

Jung equates the heavenly city of Revelation with the lapis philosophorum and the fourfold synthesis of unconscious luminosities, grounding the City of God within the alchemical-psychological framework of quaternary wholeness.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Answer to Job, 1952thesis

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‘So the City of God, far from being a book about flight from the world, is a book… about being otherworldly in the world.’ Augustine’s City of God is a holy mystery… an ideal Christian community in which truly faithful Christians dwell with the angels and Jesus Himself while they are on earth.

Alexander, citing Peter Brown, presents Augustine’s City of God as a paradox of immanent transcendence—an invisible community enacted within worldly life—while simultaneously critiquing its restriction of authentic emotion and psychosocial integration.

Alexander, Bruce K., The Globalisation of Addiction: A Study in Poverty of the Spirit, 2008thesis

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he spoke of life in the City of God as involving exclusively Christian emotions, service to fellow Christians by exhorting them to the true faith and punishing their sins, and contemplation of God.

Alexander critiques Augustine’s City of God for prescribing an emotionally and socially restrictive form of community that divorces the divine from fuller psychosocial integration.

Alexander, Bruce K., The Globalisation of Addiction: A Study in Poverty of the Spirit, 2008supporting

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in the manner of a city, filled with all races of mankind… This same is the Mother-City (μητρóπολις) of the Only-Begotten. In another place the Anthropos himself is the city and his members are the four gates.

Jung presents the Gnostic Mother-City as a structural analogue to the City of God, identifying the Anthropos with the city-form and establishing its quaternary mandala architecture as equivalent to the New Jerusalem of the Apocalypse.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958supporting

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And he carried me away in the spirit to a great and high mountain, and shewed me that great city, the holy Jerusalem, descending out of heaven from God, And her light was like… a jasper stone, clear as crystal.

Edinger’s close reading of Revelation 21 treats the descending holy Jerusalem as the culminating symbol of the individuation process, connecting it directly to the psychological question of whether redeemable and damned souls exist.

Edinger, Edward F., Transformation of the God-Image: An Elucidation of Jung’s Answer to Job, 1992supporting

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In the Hebrew scriptures the two great symbolic cities are Babylon and Jerusalem… Babylon, from this period on, is the despicable city to be destroyed, and in Revelation that same symbolism was applied to Rome.

Edinger traces the biblical polarity of Jerusalem and Babylon as the archetypal opposition between sacred and profane cities, a duality that grounds the City of God’s psychological meaning in the contrast between Self-aligned and ego-driven existence.

Edinger, Edward F., Transformation of the God-Image: An Elucidation of Jung’s Answer to Job, 1992supporting

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not without influence on the quotations in this parable, is put forward in St. Augustine’s City of God, where he says that a reflection of the Trinity is to be found in every creature, namely essence (Father), knowledge (Son), and love (Holy Spirit).

Von Franz identifies Augustine’s City of God as a source for the Trinitarian pattern embedded in alchemical and mystical imagery, connecting Augustinian theology to the depth-psychological reading of number and measure in creation.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Aurora Consurgens: A Document Attributed to Thomas Aquinas on the Problem of Opposites in Alchemy, 1966supporting

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it was the cosmos that was declared to be the great ‘city of gods and men,’ and to be a citizen of the universe, a cosmopolites, was now considered to be the goal by which otherwise isolated man could set his course.

Jonas situates the Stoic concept of the cosmos as ‘city of gods and men’ as a secular philosophical precursor to the City of God, showing how the collapse of the city-state transferred religious belonging from the polis to a universal divine order.

Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity, 1958supporting

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A celestial Jerusalem was created by God before the city was built by the hand of man… ‘This building now built in your midst is not that which is revealed with Me, that which was prepared beforehand here from the time when I took counsel to make Paradise.’

Eliade’s analysis of the heavenly Jerusalem as a celestial archetype preceding its earthly counterpart provides the mythological infrastructure within which the City of God concept operates as a paradigmatic sacred space.

Eliade, Mircea, The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History, 1954supporting

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in contradistinction to rural unconscious patterns, they developed and spiritually exalted the archetype of the Polis or Metropolis, the image of consciousness-making known as the city.

Hoeller, drawing on Jungian and Gnostic perspectives, frames the city archetype—including its divine form—as a symbol of consciousness-development and heroic individuation, contrasting it with the unconscious conservatism of rural life.

Hoeller, Stephan A., The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead, 1982supporting

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the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are [the city’s] temple… Since there will be no sin in the new Jerusalem, however, there will be no need for a temple to symbolize the distance that sin placed between God and his people.

Thielman’s exegesis of the new Jerusalem in Revelation treats the elimination of the temple within the divine city as a theological statement about the abolition of the distance between God and humanity—a structural feature also central to depth-psychological readings of the symbol.

Frank S. Thielman, Theology of the New Testament: A Canonical and Synthetic Approach, 2005aside

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the religious sense of urban populations is gravely impoverished. The cosmic liturgy, the mystery of nature’s participation in the Christological drama, have become inaccessible to Christians living in a modern city.

Eliade notes the paradox that the modern city, despite its proximity to the concept of the City of God, has severed its inhabitants from the cosmic-liturgical experience that once animated Christian urban religiosity.

Eliade, Mircea, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, 1957aside

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