City of God 2.2–2.15

Chapter 2. On the matters dealt with in the first book.

In the previous book, then, when I had resolved to speak of the city of God, from which this whole work, with his help, has been taken in hand, it occurred to me that I must first resist those who attribute these wars by which the world is being crushed, and above all the recent devastation of the city of Rome by the barbarians, to the Christian religion, by which they are forbidden to serve demons with unspeakable sacrifices; whereas they ought rather to attribute it to Christ that for his name's sake the barbarians, contrary to the practice and custom of war, provided them with religious places of great size, free, to which they could flee, and in many cases so honored service devoted to Christ, not only genuine but even feigned out of fear, that they judged unlawful for themselves what the law of war would have allowed against them. From this arose the question why these divine benefits reached even the ungodly and ungrateful, and why likewise those harsh things that were done by the enemy afflicted the godly together with the ungodly. This question spreads over many matters (for in all the daily gifts of God and disasters of men, both of which often befall those who live well and those who live ill mixed together and without distinction, it usually troubles many); and in order to resolve it, as the undertaken work required, I dwelt on it for some time, above all to console the holy and godly chaste women against whom the enemy perpetrated something that brought the pain of shame, though it did not take away the firmness of chastity, so that they may not regret their life, since they have no wickedness to regret. Then I said a little against those who, with most shameless insolence, harass Christians afflicted by those adversities, and especially the shame of the humiliated women, chaste and holy though they are; while they themselves are most wicked and irreverent, far degenerate from those very Romans whose many famous deeds are praised and celebrated in the record of literature, and indeed are violently opposed to their glory. For they had made Rome, won and enlarged by the labors of the ancients, fouler standing than falling, since in its fall stones and timbers fell, but in their lives all the defenses and ornaments, not of walls, but of morals fell, when their hearts burned with more deadly desires than the fires with which the roofs of that city burned. With these words I ended the first book. Next, then, I have resolved to speak of the evils that city suffered from its origin, whether at home or in the provinces already subject to it, all of which they would attribute to the Christian religion if the gospel teaching had already been sounding then with its most free testimony against their false and deceitful gods.

Chapter 3. On taking up history to show what evils befell the Romans when they worshipped the gods, before the Christian religion grew.

Remember, however, that in recalling these things I am still dealing with the uneducated, from whose ignorance that common proverb also arose: “No rain: the Christians are the cause.” For those among them who have been trained in liberal studies and love history know these things very well; but to make the crowds of the unlearned most hostile to us, they pretend not to know them, and try to confirm among the common people that the disasters by which the human race must be afflicted at certain intervals of places and times happen because of the Christian name, which is spreading everywhere against their gods with immense fame and most brilliant renown. Let them recall with us, then, by what calamities, many and various, the Roman state was crushed before Christ came in the flesh, before his name became known to the peoples with that glory which they vainly envy; and in these let them defend their gods, if they can, if they are worshipped so that their worshippers may not suffer these evils, since, if their worshippers now suffer any of them, they argue that it must be blamed on us. For why did they allow the things I am about to tell to happen to their worshippers before the proclaimed name of Christ offended them and forbade their sacrifices?

Chapter 4. That the worshippers of the gods never received any precepts of goodness from their gods, and celebrated all kinds of shameful things in their rites.

First, why were their gods unwilling to take care that their morals should not be most wicked? The true God rightly neglected those by whom he was not worshipped; but those gods, from whose worship these most ungrateful men complain that they are prohibited, why did they not help their worshippers to live well by any laws? Surely it was fitting that, as these men cared for the gods' rites, the gods should care for these men's deeds. But the answer is that each man is wicked by his own will. Who would deny it? Yet it belonged to gods who counsel men not to hide the precepts of a good life from the peoples who worshipped them, but to offer them by clear proclamation, to meet and rebuke sinners through their seers too, openly to threaten punishment to evildoers and to promise rewards to those who live rightly. What of this kind ever rang out in the temples of those gods with a ready and resounding voice? We too, when we were young, used to go to the spectacles and mockeries of sacrileges; we watched the possessed, we listened to the musicians, we enjoyed the most shameful shows that were put on for the gods and goddesses, for the Heavenly Virgin and for Berecynthia, the mother of all, before whose litter, on the solemn day of her washing, such things were sung in public by the vilest actors as would not be fit, I do not say for the mother of the gods, but for the mother of any senators or of any honorable men, or indeed for the mother of the actors themselves, to hear. For human modesty has something toward parents that not even wickedness itself can take away. So the actors themselves would be ashamed to perform at home before their mothers, by way of rehearsal, that foulness of obscene words and deeds which they performed in public before the mother of the gods, while a great crowd of both sexes watched and listened. If that crowd could stand around, drawn by curiosity, it ought at least to have gone away confounded, its chastity offended. What are sacrileges, if those are sacred rites? Or what is defilement, if that is washing? And these were called “courses,” as if a banquet were being celebrated at which unclean demons were fed as on their own feast. For who does not perceive what kind of spirits delight in such obscenities, unless he either does not know whether there are any unclean spirits at all deceiving under the name of gods, or leads such a life that he both wishes these to be favorable and fears them angry rather than the true God?

Chapter 5. On the obscenities with which the mother of the gods was honored by her worshippers.

I would want as judge of this matter not these people, who are eager to take pleasure in the vices of a most shameful custom rather than to struggle against them, but that same Scipio Nasica who was chosen by the senate as the best man, into whose hands the image of this same demon was received and carried into the City. Let him tell us whether he would want his own mother to deserve so well of the state that divine honors should be decreed to her, just as it is known that the Greeks and Romans and other nations decreed them to certain mortals whose benefits toward them they had valued highly, and whom they had believed to have become immortal and been received into the number of the gods. Surely he would wish such happiness for his mother, if it could be. Further, if we then asked him whether he would want those foul things to be celebrated among her divine honors, would he not cry out that he would rather his mother lay dead without any feeling than live as a goddess in order to hear such things with pleasure? Far be it that a senator of the Roman people, endowed with the mind by which he forbade a theater to be built in a city of brave men, should want his mother to be worshipped in such a way that as a goddess she would be propitiated by rites whose words would offend her as a matron. Nor would he in any way believe that the modesty of a praiseworthy woman would be so changed into its opposite by divinity that her worshippers would invoke her with honors such that, if such insults had been hurled at anyone while she lived among men, her relatives, husband, and children would blush for her unless she stopped her ears and withdrew. So the mother of the gods, such a mother as even the worst man would be ashamed to have, when about to take possession of Roman minds, sought the best man, not to make him so by advice and help, but to deceive him by trickery, like her of whom it is written: “But a woman captures the precious souls of men”; so that that mind of great natural gifts, exalted by this seemingly divine testimony and truly thinking itself the best, might not seek true godliness and religion, without which every talent, however praiseworthy, vanishes and falls through pride. How then could that goddess seek the best man except treacherously, since she seeks in her rites such things as the best men shrink from bringing to their banquets?

Chapter 6. That the gods of the pagans never laid down a teaching for living well.

Hence it is that those deities did not care about the life and morals of the cities and peoples by whom they were worshipped, so that they allowed them, without any fearful prohibition of their own, to be filled with such horrible and detestable evils and to become utterly wicked, not in their fields and vines, not in their house and money, not even in the body itself, which is subject to the mind, but in the mind itself, in the very spirit that rules the flesh. Or if they did forbid it, let this rather be shown, let this be proved. And let them not boast to us of some whispers or other, breathed into the ears of a very few and handed down as a secret religion, by which uprightness and chastity of life might be learned; but let the places be shown or named that were ever consecrated to such gatherings; not where plays were acted with the obscene words and gestures of actors, nor where the Fugalia are celebrated with every license of foulness let loose (truly Fugalia, the flight of modesty and decency), but where the peoples might hear what the gods commanded about restraining avarice, breaking ambition, reining in luxury; where the wretched might learn what Persius rebukes them to learn, saying: “Learn, you wretched, and come to know the causes of things: what we are, and for what life we are born; what rank is given us, or where and from where the gentle turn at the goal; what measure of silver; what it is right to pray for; what use the rough coin has; how much it is fitting to bestow on country and dear kin; what God has commanded you to be, and in what part of the human world you are placed.” Let it be said in what places these precepts of teaching gods used to be recited and frequently heard by the peoples who worshipped them, as we point to churches established for this purpose wherever the Christian religion spreads.

Chapter 7. That the discoveries of philosophy are useless without divine authority, since what the gods have done moves anyone prone to vice more than what men have argued.

Or perhaps they will remind us of the schools and debates of the philosophers? First, these are not Roman but Greek; or if they are now Roman because Greece too has become a Roman province, they are not precepts of the gods but discoveries of men, who, endowed with very sharp minds, tried as best they could to track down by reasoning what lay hidden in the nature of things, what should be sought and what avoided in morals, what follows by sure connection in the very rules of reasoning, or what does not follow or even contradicts. And some of them discovered some great things, so far as they were helped by God; but so far as they were hindered as men, they erred, especially since divine providence justly resisted their pride, so as to show, even by comparison with them, the way of godliness rising from humility to the things above; which we shall have occasion to investigate and discuss later, by the will of the true God and Lord. Yet if the philosophers discovered anything that could suffice for leading a good life and attaining a happy one, how much more justly would divine honors be decreed to such men! How much better and more honorable it would be for Plato's books to be read in a temple of Plato than for Galli to be castrated in the temples of demons, effeminates consecrated, madmen gashed, and whatever else, cruel or foul, or foully cruel or cruelly foul, is usually celebrated in the rites of such gods! How much better it would be, for training the youth in justice, for the laws of the gods to be publicly recited than for the laws and institutions of the ancestors to be vainly praised! For all the worshippers of such gods, as soon as lust drives them on, “dipped,” as Persius says, “in burning poison,” look more at what Jupiter did than at what Plato taught or Cato judged. Hence, in Terence, a depraved young man looks at a picture painted on a wall, in which was this painting: “how Jupiter, they say, once sent a golden shower into Danae's lap,” and from this great authority he takes patronage for his own foulness, boasting that in it he imitates a god: “And what a god!” he says, “who shakes the temples of heaven with the loudest thunder. Should I, a little man, not do it? I did it, and gladly.”

Chapter 8. On the stage plays, in which the gods are not offended but appeased by the exhibition of their foul deeds.

But, they say, these things are not handed down by the rites of the gods, but by the fables of the poets. I do not wish to say that those mysteries are fouler than these theatrical shows; I say this, which history proves against those who deny it: that those very plays in which the fictions of the poets reign were not introduced by the Romans into the rites of their gods through ignorant devotion, but that the gods themselves brought it about, by harshly commanding and in a way extorting it, that they should be solemnly exhibited to them and consecrated to their honor; I touched on this briefly in the first book. For when a pestilence was growing worse, stage plays were first instituted at Rome by the authority of the pontiffs. Who, then, in leading his life, would not think he should follow the things acted out in plays instituted by divine authority rather than the things written in laws promulgated by human counsel? If the poets falsely portrayed Jupiter as an adulterer, surely chaste gods ought to have been angry and to have avenged it because so great a wickedness was invented in human plays, not because the plays were neglected. And these are the more tolerable of the stage plays, namely comedies and tragedies, that is, poets' fables to be acted in the shows, with much foulness in their subject matter, but composed at least without any obscenity of words, as many others are; and these boys are even compelled by their elders to read and learn among the studies that are called honorable and liberal.

Chapter 9. What the ancient Romans thought about restraining the license of poets, which the Greeks, following the judgment of the gods, wished to be free.

What the ancient Romans thought about this Cicero testifies in the books he wrote On the Republic, where Scipio, in the discussion, says: “Comedies could never have made their shameful deeds acceptable in the theaters had not the habits of life allowed it.” And the older Greeks kept a certain consistency in their vicious opinion, since among them it was even allowed by law for comedy to say by name what it wished about whom it wished. And so, as Africanus says in the same books, “whom did it not touch, or rather whom did it not harass? Whom did it spare? Granted, it wounded demagogues, wicked men, seditious in the state: Cleon, Cleophon, Hyperbolus. Let us allow it,” he says, “though it is better for such citizens to be branded by the censor than by a poet. But for Pericles, when he had already led his city with the greatest authority for many years in peace and war, to be insulted in verse and for such things to be acted on the stage was no more fitting than if our Plautus,” he says, “or Naevius had wished to abuse Publius and Gnaeus Scipio, or Caecilius Marcus Cato.” Then a little later: “Our Twelve Tables, on the contrary,” he says, “though they made very few things capital offenses, thought that this too should be made one: if anyone sang or composed a song that brought disgrace or shame on another. Excellently. For we ought to have our life exposed to the judgments of magistrates and to lawful trials, not to the wit of poets, and not to hear reproach except on condition that we may answer it and defend ourselves in court.” I thought I should quote this word for word from the fourth book of Cicero's On the Republic, with some things omitted or slightly altered for easier understanding. For it bears very much on the matter I am trying to explain, if I can. He then says other things and concludes this passage so as to show that it displeased the ancient Romans for any living man to be either praised or blamed on the stage. But, as I said, the Greeks wished this to be permitted, more shamelessly but more consistently, since they saw that reproaches not only of men but of the gods themselves in stage fables were acceptable and pleasing to their gods, whether they were invented by the poets or the gods' real shameful deeds were recalled and acted in the theaters; and would that their worshippers had thought them worthy only of laughter and not also of imitation! For it would have been too proud to spare the reputation of the leaders and citizens of the state when the deities did not want their own reputation spared.

Chapter 10. By what art of harming the demons want either false or true crimes to be told of them.

For what is offered in defense, that those things are said of the gods not truly but falsely and fictitiously, is itself the more wicked if you consult the piety of religion; but if you consider the malice of demons, what could be more cunning and crafty for deceiving? For when a reproach is cast on a good and useful leader of the country, is it not the more unworthy the further it is from the truth and the more foreign to his life? What punishments then are enough when so wicked, so notable an injury is done to a god? But the malign spirits whom these people think gods want even shameful deeds they have not committed to be told of them, so long as they entangle human minds in these opinions as in nets and drag them with them to their predestined punishment; whether men committed these things, men whom these spirits, who rejoice in human errors, are glad to have considered gods, and in whose place they interpose themselves by a thousand arts of harming and deceiving so as to be worshipped themselves; or whether these crimes are not true of any men at all, and yet the most deceitful spirits are glad to have them feigned of the deities, so that an authority sufficient for committing wicked and shameful deeds may seem to be brought down to earth, as it were from heaven itself. Since, then, the Greeks felt that they were the servants of such deities, they by no means thought that the poets should spare them amid so many and so great theatrical reproaches of the gods, either desiring to be made like their gods even in this way, or fearing that by seeking a more honorable reputation for themselves and thus setting themselves above the gods they would provoke them to anger.

Chapter 11. On actors admitted by the Greeks to the government of the state, on the ground that those who appease the gods should not unjustly be despised by men.

It belongs to this consistency that they thought the actors of these same fables worthy of no small honor in the state; for, as is also recalled in that book On the Republic, Aeschines of Athens, a most eloquent man, after acting tragedies as a young man, took up public life, and the Athenians often sent Aristodemus, likewise a tragic actor, as envoy to Philip on the greatest matters of peace and war. For they did not think it consistent, since they saw the same arts and the same stage plays were acceptable even to their gods, to count those through whom they were performed in the rank and number of the disgraced. The Greeks did this shamefully, indeed, but quite consistently with their gods: they neither dared to shield the life of citizens from being torn by the tongues of poets and actors, when they saw the life of the gods being carped at by them with the gods' own will and pleasure, nor thought that the very men by whom these things, known to be pleasing to the deities they served, were performed in the theaters should be despised in the state; rather they should be greatly honored. For what reason could they find for honoring priests because through them they offered victims acceptable to the gods, and holding actors as disgraceful, through whom, by the gods' own admonition, they had learned that that pleasure or honor was to be offered to gods who demanded it and were angry if it was not done? Especially since Labeo, whom they proclaim most expert in matters of this kind, distinguishes good deities from evil ones even by this difference of worship, asserting that evil gods are propitiated by slaughter and grim supplications, but good ones by glad and pleasant services, such as, he says, games, banquets, and couch-feasts for the gods. What all this amounts to we shall discuss more carefully later, if God helps us. As far as the present matter is concerned, whether all these things are given to all the gods indiscriminately as if they were good (for there ought not to be evil gods, though rather these, being unclean spirits, are all evil), or whether by a definite distinction, as Labeo thought, some services are assigned to some and others to others, the Greeks most fittingly hold both in honor, both the priests through whom the victims are offered and the actors through whom the plays are shown, lest they be convicted of doing wrong either to all their gods, if the plays are pleasing to all, or, what is more unworthy, to those they think good, if the plays are loved by them alone.

Chapter 12. That the Romans, by taking away from poets the license against men which they gave them against the gods, thought better of themselves than of their gods.

But the Romans, as Scipio boasts in that discussion On the Republic, did not want their life and reputation to be exposed to the reproaches and insults of poets, even making it a capital offense if anyone dared compose such a song. They decided this quite honorably with regard to themselves, but proudly and irreligiously with regard to their gods; for though they knew the gods were torn by the reproaches and curses of the poets not only patiently but even gladly, they considered themselves rather than the gods undeserving of such insults, and even protected themselves from them by law, while they mixed the gods' insults even into their sacred solemnities. Do you really, Scipio, praise the fact that Roman poets were denied the license to inflict reproach on any Roman, when you see that they spared none of your gods? Should the esteem of your senate house really be worth more to you than that of the Capitol, indeed that of Rome alone more than that of the whole heaven, so that poets were even forbidden by law to exercise a slanderous tongue against your fellow citizens, while they hurled such great insults at your gods in safety, with no senator, no censor, no leading man, no pontiff forbidding it? It was unworthy, no doubt, for Plautus or Naevius to abuse Gnaeus Scipio, or Caecilius Marcus Cato, and worthy for your Terence to stir up the wickedness of young men by the shameful deed of Jupiter Best and Greatest?

Chapter 13. That the Romans ought to have understood that their gods, who sought to be worshipped with foul plays, were unworthy of divine honor.

But perhaps he would answer me, if he were alive: How could we want those things to be unpunished which the gods themselves wanted to be sacred, when they both introduced into Roman custom the stage plays, in which such things are celebrated, said, and acted, and ordered them to be dedicated and shown in their honor? Why then were they not rather understood from this not to be true gods, nor at all worthy that the state should offer them divine honors? For if it would be most unfitting and most improper to worship them if they demanded plays to be acted with insults to the Romans, how, I ask, were they thought worthy of worship, how were they not recognized as detestable spirits, when in their greed for deception they demanded that their own crimes be celebrated among their honors? Likewise the Romans, although already so oppressed by harmful superstition that they worshipped those gods whom they saw had wanted stage indecencies consecrated to them, nevertheless, mindful of their dignity and modesty, by no means honored the actors of such fables in the manner of the Greeks; but, as the same Scipio says in Cicero, “since they held the art of acting and the whole stage in disgrace, they wanted that class of men not only to lack the honor of the other citizens but also to be removed from their tribe by the censor's mark.” A splendid prudence, surely, and one to be counted among the praises of the Romans; but I wish it had followed itself, imitated itself. For look: rightly, whoever of the Roman citizens had chosen to be an actor was not only given no place of honor but was not even allowed by the censor's mark to keep his own tribe. O mind of a city greedy for praise and truly Roman! But let me be answered: by what consistent reasoning are actors driven from all honor, and stage plays mixed into the honors of the gods? Roman virtue had long not known those theatrical arts; if they had been sought for the amusement of human pleasure, they would have crept in by a fault of human morals. The gods asked for them to be shown to them: how then is the actor cast out through whom a god is worshipped? And with what face is the performer of that theatrical foulness branded if the one who exacts it is adored? In this dispute let the Greeks and Romans contend. The Greeks think they rightly honor actors because they worship gods who demand stage plays; but the Romans do not allow actors to dishonor even a plebeian tribe, much less the senatorial curia. In this debate a piece of reasoning of this kind settles the whole question. The Greeks propose: If such gods are to be worshipped, surely such men are also to be honored. The Romans assume: But such men are by no means to be honored. The Christians conclude: Therefore such gods are by no means to be worshipped.

Chapter 14. That Plato, who gave poets no place in a well-ordered city, was better than these gods who wanted to be honored with stage plays.

Next we ask why the poets themselves, the composers of such fables, who are forbidden by the law of the Twelve Tables to injure the reputation of citizens, but hurl such shameful insults at the gods, are not held dishonorable like the actors. By what reasoning is it right that the performers of poetic fictions and of disgraced gods should be disgraced, and their authors honored? Or should the palm rather be given to the Greek Plato, who, when he was forming by reason what kind of city ought to exist, judged that poets should be expelled from the city as enemies of truth? He both resented the insults to the gods and did not want the minds of citizens to be painted over and corrupted by fictions. Compare now Plato's humanity, expelling poets from the city so that the citizens would not be deceived, with the gods' divinity, demanding stage plays in its honor. He, though he did not persuade by argument that such things should not even be written, still counseled it to the levity and wantonness of the Greeks; they, by commanding, extorted from the gravity and modesty of the Romans that such things should even be acted. Nor did they want them only acted, but dedicated to themselves, consecrated to themselves, solemnly shown to themselves. To whom, then, would a city more honorably decree divine honors? To Plato, forbidding these foul and unspeakable things, or to demons rejoicing in this deception of men, whom he could not persuade of the truth? Labeo thought this Plato should be named among the demigods, like Hercules, like Romulus. He ranks demigods above heroes, but places both among the deities. Yet I do not doubt that this man whom he calls a demigod should be preferred not only to the heroes but to the gods themselves. The laws of the Romans come close to the arguments of Plato when he condemns all poetic fictions, and they at least take away from poets the license to abuse men; he removes the poets from dwelling in the city itself, they at least remove the actors of poetic fables from the fellowship of the state; and if they dared anything against the gods who demanded stage plays, they would perhaps remove them altogether. In no way, then, could the Romans receive or hope for laws to establish good morals or correct bad ones from their gods, whom they surpass and convict by their own laws. For the gods demand stage plays in their honor; the Romans drive actors from all honors. The gods order the reproaches of the gods to be celebrated for them in poetic fictions; the Romans deter the shamelessness of poets from reproaches of men. But that demigod Plato both resisted the lust of such gods and showed what the Roman character had to carry through to completion, since he did not want the poets themselves to live at all in a well-ordered city, whether they lied as they pleased or set before wretched men the worst deeds of the gods, as it were, to imitate. We, indeed, do not call Plato either a god or a demigod, nor do we compare him with any holy angel of the supreme God, or a truthful prophet, or any apostle, or any martyr of Christ, or any Christian person; the reason for this opinion of ours will be explained, God prospering us, in its place. But since they themselves want him to have been a demigod, we judge that he must be preferred, if not to Romulus and Hercules (though no historian or poet has said or invented that he killed his brother or committed any shameful deed), certainly to Priapus or to some dog-headed god, or finally to Fever, deities which the Romans partly received from abroad and partly consecrated as their own. How then would such gods either prohibit by good precepts and laws such evils of mind and morals when they threatened, or take care to root them out when they had been implanted, gods who even took care to sow and increase shameful deeds, wanting such deeds of theirs, or as if theirs, to become known to the peoples through theatrical celebrations, so that the most wicked human lust would be kindled of its own accord as if by divine authority? And Cicero cries out in vain against this, saying of the poets: “When the shouting and approval of the people is added to them, as though of some great and wise teacher, what darkness they spread, what fears they bring in, what desires they inflame!”

Chapter 15. That the Romans set up certain gods for themselves not by reason but by flattery.

What reason, and not rather flattery, is there in their choice even of these false gods? For they thought this Plato, whom they want to be a demigod, and who labored in so many discussions to keep human morals from being corrupted by evils of the mind, which are above all to be guarded against, worthy of no sacred shrine at all, while they preferred their Romulus to many gods, although their more secret teaching, as it were, commends even him as a demigod rather than a god. For they even established a flamen for him, a kind of priesthood so eminent in the Roman rites, as the priest's peaked cap bears witness, that they had only three flamens, established for three deities: the flamen of Jupiter for Jupiter, the flamen of Mars for Mars, the flamen of Quirinus for Romulus. For by the goodwill of the citizens, as if received into heaven, he was afterwards named Quirinus. And so by this honor Romulus was preferred even to Neptune and Pluto, the brothers of Jupiter, and to Saturn himself, their father, in that the priesthood which they had given to Jupiter as a great thing they gave to him too, and to Mars, as his father, perhaps on his account.