Read City of God (Penguin Classics) Online
Authors: Saint Augustine
24.
Arguments adduced in defence of the worship of the divine gifts, as well as gods
I should like to consider the explanations put forward by our opponents. ‘Are we to suppose’, they say, ‘that our ancestors were such idiots that they did not realize that these were the divine gifts and not themselves divinities? But they knew that these gifts were only given by the generosity of a god, and when they did not know the names of the gods concerned they called them by the name of the gifts, which, they felt, were bestowed by them. They made some modifications in the words; thus Bellona from
bellum
(war); Cunina from
cunae
(cradle); Segetia from seges (
crop
); Pomona
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from
poma
(apples); Bubona from
bubus
(ablative of
boves, oxen
). Sometimes they were called by the actual name of their subject, as Pecunia, the goddess who gives money (
pecunia
), which does not mean that money itself is considered a divinity. In the same way, Virtue is the bestower of virtue; Honour, of honour; Concordia gives concord; Victoria gives victory. Thus when Felicity is spoken of as a goddess, the reference is not to the gift, but to the giver of happiness.’
25.
Only one God is to be worshipped. He is recognized as the giver of felicity even if his name is unknown
This explanation will perhaps make it much easier for us to win over to our way of thinking those of our opponents whose hearts are not too hardened. Human nature in its weakness has already felt that happiness can only be given by a god; and that has been realized by men who have been worshipping many gods, including Jupiter himself, the king of the gods. Now because they did not know the name of the giver of happiness, those people decided to call him by the name of the gift for which they believed him responsible. If this is true, they have made it clear that happiness is not given by Jupiter, whom they were already worshipping, but by a deity who was, they held, to be worshipped by the name of happiness itself, the name ‘Felicity’.
I put it quite bluntly. They believed that happiness is the gift of some god, unknown to them. Then let them seek him and worship him, and that is enough. Away with the hubbub of innumerable demons! The only man who would not be satisfied with this God is the man who is not satisfied with his gift. I repeat, the only man who would not be satisfied with God, the giver of happiness, as worthy of
his worship, is the man who is not satisfied with happiness itself as worthy of his acceptance. If a man is content with happiness – and in fact man has nothing which he should desire beyond that – then let him serve the one God, the giver of happiness. And that is not the god they call Jupiter. For if they had recognized Jupiter as the giver of happiness they would not have looked for another deity, male or female, called Felicity, as its giver; nor would they have thought it right to associate the worship of Jupiter with all those slanders; for he was, according to their account, a seducer of the wives of others,
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and a shameless lover and ravisher of a beautiful boy.
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26.
The theatrical shows, demanded by the gods from their worshippers
‘But this’, Cicero asserts, ‘is a fiction of Homer, who transferred human shortcomings to the gods. Would that he had transferred divine powers to us men.’
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The serious-minded Cicero was justifiably displeased with a poet who imputed fictitious crimes to the deities. But those crimes are represented in speech, in song, and in action in the stage shows; and those shows are put on in honour of the gods, and are classed among ‘Divine Matters’ by the most learned authorities. How is this? Cicero ought on this point to cry out, not against the poet’s fictions, but against the traditional institutions, established by his ancestors. But those ancestors would have cried out, in reply,
What have
we
done? It was the gods themselves who clamoured for these exhibitions in their honour, who demanded them with fearful threats, promising disaster if they were withheld, punishing any omission with the utmost harshness, and showing themselves appeased when the omission was repaired. Among the miraculous demonstrations of their power, the following story is told.
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A Roman peasant named Titus Latinius, the father of a family, was told in a dream to inform the senate that the Roman games must be restarted, because on the first day of the games a criminal had been ordered to be led to execution before the eyes of the assembled people, and this command had displeased the gods; no doubt because the divinities looked for cheerful entertainment at those shows. The man who had received this warning dream had not courage to fulfil the order next day; and on the second night he was given the same injunction, in stricter terms. He did not obey; and so he lost his son. On the third night he was
told that a heavier punishment awaited him, if he disobeyed. When his courage again failed him, even after this threat, he fell seriously ill with a fearful disease. Then, on the advice of his friends he did inform the magistrates, and was carried into the senate on a litter. There he recounted his dream; and immediately he was restored to health and left the senate-house on his own legs, completely cured. Astounded by this miracle, the senate voted to recommence the games, with a fourfold increase of the subsidy.
Any man in his senses could see that men who were under the sway of malignant demons – a domination from which only the grace of God, through Jesus Christ our Lord, could free them – were constrained by force to offer to such gods exhibitions which to a right judgement could only appear disgusting. Certainly in those games – which were restarted by order of the senate, under compulsion from the gods – these poetic scandals about the gods were publicly displayed. In those shows the actors portrayed Jupiter, the corrupter of innocence, in song and action; and thus they appeased him! If this was mere fiction, Jupiter would have been angry, surely? Or, if Jupiter took delight in those scandals, even though fictitious, then his worship was nothing but the service of a devil.
Was it really this Jupiter who could have founded, developed, and preserved the Roman Empire? A contemptible reprobate, in comparison with any Roman whatsoever who found such depravities revolting? Was it really a god like this who could have given happiness, who was worshipped in this miserable fashion, and who was even more miserably angry, if that worship was withheld?
27.
Three kinds of gods distinguished by Scaevola, the pontiff
It is recorded that Scaevola,
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a most erudite pontiff, argued that there were three kinds of gods
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in the Roman tradition; one strand of tradition coming through the poets, another through the philosophers, the third through the statesmen. According to Scaevola, the first tradition was trivial nonsense, a collection of discreditable fictions about the gods, while the second had no value for a commonwealth, in that it introduced much that was irrelevant, and also much that was harmful for the people in general to know. The irrelevances are not important. It is a commonplace of jurisprudence that ‘the irrelevant
is not harmful.’ But what are the elements which are harmful, if divulged to the general public? ‘The assertion’, says Scaevola, ‘that Hercules, Aesculapius, Castor and Pollux are not gods. The learned inform us that they were men,
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and that they died, in accordance with the human condition.’ And further, ‘The allegation that communities do not have true images of those who really are gods, because the true God has neither sex nor age, nor has he a denned bodily form.’ The pontiff did not wish the people to be aware of this; he did not think the statements were untrue. Thus he held that it was expedient for communities to be deceived in matters of religion, and Varro himself has no hesitation in saying as much, even in his books on ‘Divine Affairs’.
What a splendid religion for the weak to flee to for liberation! He asks for the truth which will set him free; and it is believed that it is expethent for him to be deceived!
As for the poetic tradition, Roman literature makes it quite clear why Scaevola rejected its teaching. The poets give such a distorted picture of the gods that such deities cannot stand comparison with good men. One god is represented as a thief, another as an adulterer, and so on; all kinds of degradation and absurdity, in word and deed, are ascribed to them. Three goddesses have a beauty contest; Venus wins the prize, and the disappointed candidates overthrow Troy. Jupiter himself is changed into a bull, or a swan, to enjoy the favours of some woman or other.
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A goddess marries a man; Saturn devours his children. Any imaginable marvel, every conceivable vice can be found in this poetic tradition, however remote from the divine nature.
Come, Scaevola, you ‘supreme pontiff’, suppress those spectacles – if you can! Forbid the people to offer such ‘honours’ to the immortal gods – shows in which men enjoy admiring the scandals of the gods and decide to imitate such behaviour, if possible. But if the people retort, ‘It is you pontiffs who have introduced this among us,’ ask the gods to cease demanding these exhibitions; for it was at their instigation that you ordered them to be put on. If those stories are evil, and therefore to be rejected as utterly incongruous with the majesty of the gods, then the wrong offered to the gods is the more serious because such fictions enjoy impunity.
But the gods do not listen to you, Scaevola. They are, in fact, demons, who teach depravity and rejoice in degradation. Far from counting it an outrage that such fictions should be published about them, they actually take it as an intolerable outrage if such shows are not performed in their rites. Appeal against those demons to Jupiter if you will, especially as more scandals are enacted in the stage shows about him than about any other. Yet, though you pontiffs call him Jupiter the God, ruler and disposer of the whole universe, does he not suffer the greatest outrage at your hands? For you think it proper to associate his worship with those demons, and you make him out to be their king.
28.
Did the worship of the gods help the Romans in the acquisition and extension of the Empire
?
It is utterly impossible that the increase and preservation of the Roman Empire could have been due to such gods as these, gods who are appeased – or rather accused – by rites of such a kind that it would be more culpable for them to delight in such exhibitions if the stories were groundless, than if they were based on fact. If it had been in their power, the gods might have preferred to bestow this great blessing of empire upon the Greeks. For in this matter of ‘divine affairs’, that is, in those stage-shows, the Greeks offered a worship more honourable and more worthy of divinity. They did not withdraw themselves out of reach of the poet’s biting tongue, when they saw the gods being so lacerated; they gave the poet liberty to maltreat any man at their pleasure. Nor did they condemn the actors as infamous; they considered them worthy of even the highest honours.
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The Romans could have had gold money without worshipping the god Aurinus, and silver and bronze, without the cult of Argentinus and his father, Aesculanus. And so on through the list, which it would be tedious to repeat. In the same way, though they could not have exercised dominion without the consent of the true God, still, if they had ignored, or despised, that multitude of false gods, and had recognized the one God, and given him the worship of sincere faith and pure lives, they would have had a better dominion – whatever its size – here on earth, and would have received hereafter an eternal kingdom, whether they had enjoyed dominion in this world or no.
29.
The falsity of the augury which seemed to presage the strength and stability of the Roman Empire
I referred just now
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to that story of the ‘splendid presage’, as they described it, when Mars, Terminus, and Juventas refused to yield place to Jupiter, king of the gods. What is the meaning of the tale? ‘Why,’ they say, ‘it signifies that the race of Mars (that is, the Roman people) will never give up to anyone a place that is in their possession; that no one will ever move the Roman frontiers, thanks to the god Terminus; that the young men of Rome will yield to no one, thanks to the goddess Juventas.’ It is up to our opponents to decide how they can conceive Jupiter to be the king of gods, and the giver of their Empire, when this ‘presage’ presents him as an adversary and makes it glorious to refuse to yield to him. And yet, granted the truth of this, they have nothing whatsoever to fear. They are not likely to admit that the gods who refused to yield to Jupiter have yielded to Christ. They have, in fact, been able to yield to Christ, without any loss of territory in the Empire; they have been able to surrender to him their established abodes, and above all the hearts of their believers. But before Christ’s incarnation, before those books from which we have quoted were written, but after the event under king Tarquin that provided the ‘presage’, the Roman army was routed and turned to flight on a number of occasions, which showed the falsity of the ‘presage’. In the ‘presage’. Juventas did not yield to Jupiter. And when the conquering Gauls broke through, the ‘race of Mars’ was crushed in Rome itself, and when many cities defected to Hannibal the frontiers of the Empire were very narrowly restricted. Thus that ‘presage’ lost all its ‘splendour’; all that was left was the insolence shown to Jupiter, not by gods, but by demons. It is one thing not to yield; to regain what has been yielded is another. Even so, the eastern frontiers of the Roman Empire were voluntarily altered by Hadrian in later times;
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in fact he ceded to the Persian Empire three famous provinces, Armenia, Mesopotamia, and Assyria. So it would seem that the god Terminus, who, according to the pagans, was the protector of the imperial frontiers, the god who, according to that ‘splendid presage’ refused to yield to Jupiter, was more afraid of a king of men than of the king of the gods. Those provinces were recovered at a later date; but later still, almost in our own times, Terminus made another cession. This was
when Julian, in his implicit obedience to the oracles of those gods, had the reckless hardihood to order the burning of the food-ships.
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Thus the army was cut off from supplies. Soon after, Julian himself died of wounds; the army was reduced to destitution; the enemy kept up their assaults on troops demoralized by the emperor’s death; and there would have been no survivors, if a peaceful composition had not fixed the imperial frontier on the lines which remain to this day. The loss of territory was not as great as the concessions of Hadrian; the new frontier represented a compromise.