They are present here as strangers sojourning in a foreign country, enjoying the blessings the world has to offer, but always ready to move on.[[13]] Heaven is the Christian's true home, and it is to heaven that his affections and his loyalties should be directed.
It was probably the happenstance observation of the analogy that obtained between this metaphor for Christian life and the facts of the situation in Africa after 410 that inspired A. to join the intended work on the two cities with the rejoinder to the skeptics of those years.
The skeptics were to be found among wealthy and discontented refugees from Rome, who found themselves living as aliens in Africa, discontented and frustrated, taking the pleasures of the theaters and shows, but always hankering to return to the great city far away.
The neat, even witty, polemical point of the opening book of ciu. is that the refugees have exactly the right attitude:
they need to realign their loyalties and their longings toward a greater city, farther away, and then only will they see the fate of temporal kingdoms in true perspective. ]
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