Augustine is considered to be the greatest Christian thinker of the first thousand years of the Church, and the City of God is his greatest book. It is a book that influenced Western society more powerfully than perhaps any other book except the Bible.
 
To study the City of God is to study the source of some of Western society’s greatest and most cherished beliefs. The book serves as the cultural fountainhead of all that followed, and it is unlikely that it will ever be equaled.