Read City of God (Penguin Classics) Online
Authors: Saint Augustine
This form of propitiation of such gods as these – with all its lascivious impurity, its shameless, filthy corruption, and its actors whom the Romans, with a laudable, instinctive sense of honour, debarred from all political office and expelled from their tribes, marked as beneath contempt and condemned to outlawry – this disreputable propitiation of these gods, was abominable and detestable in the eyes of true religion. These scandalous and slanderous stories about the gods, those disgraceful actions attributed to them, infamous and outrageous if really committed, still more infamous and outrageous if invented, all those were presented to the eyes and ears of the public for the instruction of the whole community. Men observed that the divine beings take pleasure in such offences, and therefore believed that they should not only be displayed to the gods but also imitated by mankind. They reckoned nothing of that wholesome and decent teaching (whatever it was) which was dispensed (if at all) so secretly and to so few as to suggest a fear that it should become more known, not that it should fail to be practised.
28.
The wholesomeness of the Christian religion
Men have been rescued, through the name of Christ, from the hellish yoke of those polluted powers and from a share in their condemnation; they have passed from the night of blasphemy and perdition into the daylight of salvation and true godliness. This fact evokes complaints and murmurs from the malicious and spiteful who are held tight in the close grip of that wicked fiend. They resent the streams of people who gather in the church in a modest assembly, where there is a decent separation of the sexes, where they can hear how they ought to live a good life on earth for a space, so that they may deserve hereafter to live a life of bliss for ever, and where the words of holy Scripture and of the teaching of righteousness are read aloud from a raised position
75
in the sight of all; those who observe the teaching hear it for their profit, and those who do not, for their condemnation. And though some come there to scoff at these instructions, all their insolence is either abandoned in a sudden change of heart, or at least suppressed by fear or shame. For nothing degrading
or disreputable is set before them for contemplation or imitation; but there the commandments of the true God are made known, his marvellous works are related, thanks are offered for his gifts, and prayers are sent up for his favours.
29.
An exhortation to the Romans to abandon the worship of the gods
All this should be the object of your chief desire, you people of Rome, with all your fine natural qualities, your descendants of men like Regulus, Scaevola, the Scipios, and Fabricius.
76
Observe how different all this is from the degraded folly and the malignant imposture of the demons. The admirable and excellent qualities which nature has bestowed on you can only come to purity and perfection through true godliness; ungodliness will bring them to ruin and punishment. Choose now which course to follow, so that you may receive men’s praise without illusion, not for what you are in yourself but in the true God. In former times you had glory from the peoples, but, through the inscrutable decision of divine providence, the true religion was not there for you to choose. Awake! The day has come. You have already awakened in the persons of some of your people, in whose perfect virtue we Christians boast, and even in their sufferings for the true faith; they have wrestled everywhere against hostile powers, have conquered them by the courage of their deaths, and ‘have won this country for us by their blood’.
77
It is to this country that we invite you, and exhort you to add yourself to the number of our citizens. The refuge
78
we offer is the true remission of sins. Do not listen to those degenerate sons of yours who disparage Christ and the Christians, and criticize these times as an unhappy age, when the kind of period they would like is one which offers not a life of tranquility but security for their vicious pursuits. Such satisfactions have never been enough for you, even in respect of your earthly country. Now take possession of the Heavenly Country, for which you will have to endure but little hardship; and you will
reign there in truth and for ever. There you will find no Vestal hearth, no Capitoline stone,
79
but the one true God, who
Fixes no bounds for you of space or time
But will bestow an empire without end.
80
You must not regret the loss of those false and deceitful gods; abandon them in contempt and spring out to genuine liberty. They are not gods, but malignant fiends, and your eternal felicity is their eternal punishment. It seems that Juno did not grudge the Trojans (from whom you derive by physical descent) their possession of the Roman citadel as much as those demons (whom up to now you have reckoned gods) grudge the human race their everlasting abode. You yourself, to a great degree, have passed judgement on such fiends, in that you have appeased them with games and decided to treat the performers in those shows as outlaws. Allow us to assert your freedom against those unclean spirits who imposed upon you, like a yoke on your neck, the duty of sanctifying and celebrating their own shame. You shut out the actors of those divine scandals from all political office; pray to the true God that he will shut out those gods who delight in their own scandals, shameful, if they are true, malicious, if they are false. You acted rightly when of your own accord you refused to allow actors and players a share in the rights of citizenship. Now become fully awake! It is impossible for the divine majesty to be propitiated by arts which cast a stain on human dignity. How can you think that gods who delight in such observances can be ranked among the holy powers of heaven, when you have decided that men who perform those ceremonies are not to be ranked as Roman citizens of any kind? The Heavenly City outshines Rome, beyond comparison. There, instead of victory, is truth; instead of high rank, holiness; instead of peace, felicity; instead of life, eternity. If you blushed to have such men as partners in your city, how could the Heavenly City admit such gods? Gods who are appeased through the performances of rogues have no right to be worshipped by honourable men. Let those gods be removed from your religion by a Christian purge, as those actors were removed from your honours by the censors’ ban.
As for material satisfactions (which are all that the wicked desire to
enjoy) and material ills (which are all that they wish to avoid) those demons have not the power over these which they are thought to have – although if they had, we ought rather to despise those things than to worship the demons for their sake and, by worshipping them, to be unable to reach those blessings which they grudge us. Still, even in these things they have not the power ascribed to them by those who maintain that they should be worshipped for the sake of material benefits. This we shall see to be true in our discussion. So here we may bring this book to its close.
1.
The adversities that are the only dread of the wicked; the world always suffered them although it worshipped the gods
I
THINK
I have now said enough about the evils which affect the character and the mind. We need to be especially on our guard against those, and I have said that the false gods had no concern to help their worshipping people to avoid being overwhelmed by their weight – rather they tried to increase this oppression as much as possible.
It is clear to me that I must now treat of those ills which are the only disasters which our adversaries dread; such things as famine, disease, war, spoliation, captivity, massacre and the like, which we have already mentioned in the first book. The only things which evil men count as evil are those which do not make men evil; and they are not ashamed that when surrounded by the ‘good things’ which they approve, they themselves are evil, who approve those ‘goods’; and they are more disgusted by a bad house than by a bad life, as if man’s highest good was to have all his possessions good – except himself.
Now those gods of theirs, when they received their unstinted adoration, never averted from them the only evils they dreaded. At different periods and in different places, before the coming of our Redeemer, the human race was oppressed by innumerable disasters, often of incredible gravity. And at that time did the world worship any other gods than those? Except, that is, for one people, the Hebrews, and some few outside that nation, wherever, by the inscrutable and most just decision of God, men were found worthy of divine grace. However, to keep my account within reasonable bounds, I will say nothing of the grievous disasters inflicted on other nations all over the world. I shall confine myself to what concerns Rome and its Empire, that is, to the city itself and its allied and subject countries, and the disasters they suffered before the coming of Christ, at a time when they formed as it were part of the body of the Roman republic.
2.
Had the gods, worshipped alike by Greeks and Romans, any reason for allowing the destruction of Ilium
?
To begin with, why was Troy (or Ilium), the source of the Roman people, conquered, captured and destroyed by the Greeks, when it possessed and worshipped the same gods as the Greeks? I have touched on this point in my first book,
1
but I must not pass it over or suppress it. ‘Priam’, they say, ‘paid the penalty for the perjury of Laomedon, his father.’
2
It is true, then, that Apollo and Neptune were Laomedon’s hired labourers?
3
For the tale is that he broke his sworn promise to pay their wages. I am astonished that Apollo, entitled ‘The Foreseer’, should have worked so hard on the job, in ignorance that Laomedon was going to back out of his undertaking. Apart from that, it was odd that his uncle Neptune, Jupiter’s brother, the Lord of the sea, should not have known what was going to happen. For Homer, a poet who is said to have lived before the foundation of Rome, ascribes to Neptune a notable prophecy
4
about the line of Aeneas, whose descendants founded Rome. Homer tells how Neptune carried off Aeneas in a cloud, to save him from death at the hands of Achilles though (as he admits in Virgil’s poem) he himself
Was fain to batter down the ramparts
Reared by his hands, of faithless, perjured Troy.
5
Thus those great gods, Apollo and Neptune, did not know that Laomedon would refuse to pay. They built the walls of Troy and received neither gratuity nor gratitude. It is up to them to decide whether it is not more risky to believe in such gods than to let them down! Homer himself did not find it easy to credit this tale, since he represents Neptune as fighting against the Trojans while Apollo supports them, whereas, the story goes, they were both wronged by that breach of contract.
If our opponents believe the stories, they should blush to worship such divinities as those; if they disbelieve them, then they should not put forward the Trojan perjury as an explanation, or be astonished
that the gods punished Trojan bad faith, while approving Roman perjury. For how is it that Catiline’s conspiracy found in that great and corrupt city such an abundant supply of men ‘who supported life by their tongues and their strong right arms, by perjury and bloodshed’?
6
Perjury, and nothing else, was the offence of the senators who were so often bribed to give their votes, or their verdicts in cases tried before their assemblies. For in the utter corruption of morality, the reason why the traditional custom of the oath was kept up was not to stop men from crime by religious fear, but to add perjury to those other misdemeanours.
3.
The gods could not have been offended at the adultery of Paris; according to the stories, adultery was common amongst the gods
There is then no reason why the gods who are said to have maintained that empire,
7
should be represented as angry with the perjured Trojans when, as it turned out, they were conquered by the Greeks. It was not that (as some urge in their defence
8
) they were so incensed at the adultery of Paris as to abandon Troy; it is their general practice to be suggesters and counsellors of crime, not its avengers. ‘The city of Rome’, says Sallust, ‘was first founded and inhabited, according to tradition, by Trojan refugees who were wandering with no fixed abode under the leadership of Aeneas.’
9
If the gods judged the adultery of Paris as deserving vengeance, then the Romans deserved to be punished more, or at least equally, seeing that Aeneas’s mother was an adulteress. How was it then that in the case of Paris the gods hated the sin, but did not hate it in the case of their colleague Venus (not to mention others), when she sinned with Anchises and gave birth to Aeneas? Was it because Menelaus was indignant, but Vulcan complaisant? The gods, we are to suppose, are not jealous of their wives; so they are even content to share them with human beings!
Perhaps I may be thought to be laughing at those fables, and not treating so weighty a matter with proper seriousness. All right, then, let us stop believing that Aeneas was son of Venus. Very good; and, by the same token, Romulus was not the son of Mars. Why make one concession and not the other? Is it allowed for gods to have intercourse
with women, but forbidden for men to mate with goddesses? This would be a harsh or rather an incredible condition, if Mars was permitted by the law of Venus a licence in love forbidden to Venus under her own law. But both stories are guaranteed by the authority of Roman tradition; and in modern times Caesar was as convinced that Venus was his ancestress as Romulus was certain that Mars was his father.