Read City of God (Penguin Classics) Online
Authors: Saint Augustine
29.
The taunt of the infidels that Christ did not rescue his servants from the enemy’s rage. What reply should those servants give
?
The whole family of the servants of the supreme and true God has its consolation, which never disappoints, which does not depend on hope in shifting and transitory things; and those servants have no reason to regret even this life of time, for in it they are schooled for eternity. They enjoy their earthly blessings in the manner of pilgrims and they are not attached to them, while these earthly misfortunes serve for testing and correction. But there are those who jeer at their integrity. When any temporal disaster comes upon God’s servants, such people ask, ‘Where is your God now?’
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Let those scoffers tell us where their gods are, when the same things happen to them. After all, it is to escape from such evils that they worship their gods – or maintain that they should be worshipped.
The Christian’s answer is this:
My God is present everywhere, and wholly present everywhere. No limits confine him. He can be present without showing himself: he can depart without moving. When I am troubled with adversity, he is either testing my worth or punishing my faults. And he has an eternal reward in store for me in return for loyal endurance of temporal distress. But why should I deign to discuss your God with people like you? Still less should I speak with you about my God who ‘is to be feared above all gods; since all the gods of the nations are demons; while the Lord made the heavens’.
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30.
Those who complain of the Christian era really wish to wallow in shameful self-indulgence
In the terrible time of the Punic War a man of the highest character had to be chosen to introduce a cult from Phrygia, and the senate unanimously selected Scipio Nasica, who was then your pontiff.
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If he were living now I doubt if you would dare to look him in the face, since he would certainly put a stop to your present effrontery. For why is it that you put the blame on this Christian era, when things go wrong? Is it not because you are anxious to enjoy your vices without interference, and to wallow in your corruption, untroubled and unrebuked? For if you are concerned for peace and general prosperity, it is not because you want to make decent use of these blessings, with
moderation, with restraint, with self-control, with reverence. No! It is because you seek an infinite variety of pleasure with a crazy extravagance, and your prosperity produces a moral corruption far worse than all the fury of an enemy.
The great Scipio, your
pontifex maximus
, the finest character in Rome in the unanimous judgement of the senate, dreaded that this calamity might come upon you. For that reason he opposed the destruction of Carthage, Rome’s imperial rival at that time, and resisted Cato’s proposal for its demolition.
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He was afraid of security, as being a danger to weak characters; he looked on the citizens as wards, and fear as a kind of suitable guardian, giving the protection they needed. And his policy was justified; the event proved him right. The abolition of Carthage certainly removed a fearful threat to the State of Rome; and the extinction of that threat was immediately followed by disasters arising from prosperity. To begin with, harmony was broken and destroyed by savage and bloody insurrections; then followed a succession of disastrous quarrels and all the slaughter of the civil wars, all the torrents of bloodshed, all the greed and monstrous seething cruelty of proscriptions and expropriations, so that the Romans, who in a period of high moral standards stood in fear of their enemies, suffered a harsher fate from their fellow-citizens when those standards collapsed. And the lust for power, which of all human vices was found in its most concentrated form in the Roman people as a whole, first established its victory in a few powerful individuals, and then crushed the rest of an exhausted country beneath the yoke of slavery.
31.
The stages of corruption by which the lust for power increased among the Romans
For when can that lust for power in arrogant hearts come to rest until, after passing from one office to another, it arrives at sovereignty? Now there would be no occasion for this continuous progress if ambition were not all-powerful; and the essential context for ambition is a people corrupted by greed and sensuality. And greed and sensuality in a people is the result of that prosperity which the great Nasica in his wisdom maintained should be guarded against, when he opposed the removal of a great and strong and wealthy enemy state. His intention was that lust should be restrained by fear, and should not issue in debauchery, and that the check on debauchery should stop greed from running riot. With those vices kept under restraint, the morality
which supports a country flourished and increased, and permanence was given to the liberty which goes hand-in-hand with such morality.
It was the same conviction, the same patriotic forethought, which lead the same
pontifex maximus
of yours (who, as I must often repeat, was unanimously chosen by the senate of that time as the best man in Rome), to restrain the senate’s project to build a theatre.
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He deflected them from this ambitious design, and used all the weight of his authority in a speech which persuaded them not to allow Greek corruption to infiltrate into the virile morality of Rome, and to have no truck with foreign depravity which would undermine and weaken the Roman moral character. Such was the force of his authority that the senate, moved by his eloquence, had the wisdom to forbid for the future the erection of the temporary stands which the State had by now begun to provide for the spectators at the games.
What energy he would have shown in banishing from Rome the spectacles themselves, if he had dared to take a stand against the authority of those whom he supposed to be gods! He did not realize that they were harmful demons; or if he did, even he thought it better to appease than to despise them! For the nations had not yet received the revelation from heaven of the teaching which can cleanse the heart by faith and turn the interest of men in humble reverence towards things in heaven, or above the heavens, and free them from the oppressive domination of demonic powers.
32. The
establishment of stage spectacles
Some of you do not know the facts; some of you pretend not to know, and you raise an outcry against the One who frees you from such oppressions. Well, here are the facts. The public games, those disgusting spectacles of frivolous immorality, were instituted at Rome not by the viciousness of men but by the orders of those gods of yours. It would be less offensive to decree divine honour to the great Scipio than to worship gods of this kind. Those gods were of less worth than their pontiff. Listen to me, if your minds allow you to think sensibly, after they have been drunk so long on the liquor of nonsense! The gods ordered theatrical shows to be put on in their honour to allay a plague which attacked the body,
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while the pontiff stopped the erection
of a theatre to prevent a plague which would infect the soul. If you have enough light in your minds to prefer the soul to the body, choose which you should worship! For if the bodily plague did come to a halt, it was not because the more sophisticated craze for theatrical shows had intruded itself into a warlike people who had hitherto been used only to circus games. The truth is that the powers of evil foresaw, in their cleverness, that the plague would soon come to its natural end, and they craftily used this opportunity to bring upon you a far more serious pestilence, which gives them greater satisfaction. For this disease attacks not the body but the character. It has blinded the minds of the sufferers with such darkness, and has so deformed and degraded them, that quite recently, when Rome was sacked, those who were infected with this plague, and who managed to reach Carthage as refugees, attend the theatres every day as raving supporters of the rival actors! I wonder if posterity will be able to believe this, when they hear of it!
33.
The vices of the Romans were not corrected by their country’s overthrow
What insanity this is! This is not error but plain madness. When, by all accounts, nations in the East were bewailing your catastrophe, when the greatest cities in the farthest parts of the earth were keeping days of public grief and mourning,
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you were asking the way to the theatres, and going in, making full houses, in fact, behaving in a much more crazy fashion than before. It was just this corruption, this moral disease, this overthrow of all integrity and decency, that the great Scipio dreaded for you, when he stopped the building of theatres, when he saw how easily you could be corrupted and perverted by prosperity, and did not want you to be relieved from the enemy’s threats. He did not think that a city is fortunate when its walls are standing, while its morals are in ruins. But the temptations of wicked demons had more effect on you than the precautions of men endowed with foresight. Thus you refuse to be held
responsible for the evil that you do, while you hold the Christian era responsible for the evil which you suffer. You seek security not for the peace of your country but for your own impunity in debauchery. Prosperity depraved you; and adversity could not reform you. Scipio’s desire was that you should be threatened by the enemy, to prevent you from wallowing in sensuality. But now that you have been crushed by the enemy, you have not restrained your sensuality. You have learned no salutary lesson from calamity; you have become the most wretched, and you have remained the most worthless, of mankind.
34.
The mercy of God in moderating the city’s destruction
And yet it is thanks to God’s grace that you are still alive. In sparing you he warns you to amend your ways by penitence. Despite your ingratitude he gave you the means of escape from the enemy’s hands either by passing as his servants or by taking refuge in the shrines of his martyrs. We are told that Romulus and Remus established a refuge, their aim being to increase the population of their city, and anyone who fled there was secure from any harm.
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This formed a precedent for a remarkable honour done to Christ; the destroyers of Rome followed the example of its founders. Now it is not surprising that the founders should have taken this course to increase the numbers of their citizens; but the destroyers acted in the same way to preserve large numbers of their enemies.
35.
Sons of the Church lie hidden among the ungodly; and there are false Christians within the Church
Such is the reply (which could have been amplified and extended) which the redeemed household of servants of the Lord Christ – the pilgrim City of Christ the King – may return to its enemies.
She must bear in mind that among these very enemies are hidden her future citizens; and when confronted with them she must not think it a fruitless task to bear with their hostility until she finds them confessing the faith. In the same way, while the City of God is on pilgrimage in this world, she has in her midst some who are united with her in participation in the sacraments, but who will not join with her in the eternal destiny of the saints. Some of these are hidden; some are well known, for they do not hesitate to murmur against God,
whose sacramental sign they bear, even in the company of his, acknowledged enemies. At one time they join his enemies in filling the theatres, at another they join with us in filling the churches.
But, such as they are, we have less right to despair of the reformation of some of them, when some predestined friends, as yet unknown even to themselves, are concealed among our most open enemies. In truth, those two cities are interwoven and intermixed in this era, and await separation at the last judgement. My task, as far as I shall receive divine assistance, will be to say what I think necessary in explanation of the origin, development, and appointed end of those two cities. And this I shall do to enhance the glory of the City of God, which will shine the more brightly when set in contrast with cities of other allegiance.
36.
The subjects to be treated in the following discussion
But there are still certain points that have to be made against those who ascribe the disaster of the Roman State to our religion, which forbids the offering of sacrifice to Rome’s gods. For we must mention the ills which that city, or the provinces belonging to its Empire, suffered before their sacrifices had been forbidden – or at least such calamities as may come to mind, or as many as seem sufficient for my purpose. They would without doubt have held us responsible for all those, if our religion had by then revealed its splendour to them, or had forbidden their sacrilegious rites.
After that we must show how the true God, in whose power are all kingdoms, deigned to assist them in attaining the moral qualities needed for the increase of their Empire, and why he did so, although those reputed gods of theirs gave them no assistance; in fact we shall show how those gods did them harm by deceiving and misleading them. Lastly we shall answer those who, in spite of being disproved and refuted by unanswerable proofs, persist in the assertion that the gods are to be worshipped not with a view to any advantage in this life but with a view to the life after death.
Unless I am much mistaken, this argument will be more difficult and will require discussion of greater subtlety. We shall have to engage with philosophers, and philosophers of no ordinary sort, but those who enjoy the most eminent reputation amongst our adversaries and who are in agreement with us on many points – on the immortality of the soul, on God’s creation of the universe, and on his providence which governs his creation. But even these must be re
butted on the points on which they disagree with us; and therefore we must not fail in our duty, so that, when we have refuted their impious attacks – in so far as God gives us strength – we may establish the City of God, and true religion, and the true worship of God. For in this alone is the genuine promise of eternal bliss.
So I bring this book to an end; and after this I shall begin in my second volume to deal with the subjects thus outlined.