The Eastern Origins of the City of God in Zeno of Citium and Chrysippus of

Soli.

It is the light. According to Plotinus it is the divine light that makes us citizens of the divine city, and Augustine follows him and writes the idea of the heavenly city into western history. But the idea of the heavenly city goes back at least to Zeno of Citium and Chrysippus of Soli, from the East.

Zeno and Chrysippus teach that there are two legitimate cities: the city of the wise, that includes the gods and the wise, and the city of reason that includes the gods and all humans. All humans are bound together under Zeus’ universal law and reason that punishes the evil and rewards the good.

Plotinus adopts the idea of the two cities, but his two cities differ from

Chrysippus’s. His two cities follow Plato’s division of the world into the intelligible and sensible. For Plotinus, the sage is a citizen of the heavenly city and has little time for the earthly city. But like the Stoics, the earthly city is the entire cosmos because it is all governed by God’s wisdom.

Augustine too adopts the idea of two cities, but once again transforms it.

Augustine’s two cities are not divided by their knowledge, but by their wills. The city of God loves God, but the city of the world is defined by its love of self. So the two cities are mutually exclusive, unlike the Stoic cities, in which the gods and the sages are citizens of both cities. For Plotinus too the sage is citizen of both cities, but for Plotinus the sage flees the sensible city. With Augustine, the break is complete. The two cities are defined by two

distinct loves and cannot overlap. But the Augustinian notion of two cities, so definitive of western theology and political theory, had its origins in the East with

Chrysippus of Soli.