City of God 6.6–6.11

Chapter 6. On mythical, that is fabulous, theology, and on civil theology, against Varro.

O Marcus Varro, you are the most acute of all men and without any doubt the most learned, but still a man, not God, nor lifted up by the Spirit of God into truth and freedom to see and announce divine things. You do indeed perceive how far divine things ought to be separated from human trifles and lies; but you fear to offend the most corrupt opinions and customs of the peoples in the public superstitions. You yourself feel, when you consider them from every side, that these are repugnant to the nature of the gods, even of such gods as the weakness of the human mind suspects to be in the elements of this world, and all your literature echoes it round about. What can human talent, however excellent, do here? What does human learning, however manifold and vast, avail you in these straits? You long to worship the natural gods; you are compelled to worship the civil. You have found others, the fabulous, on whom you may more freely vomit out what you think, and with the spray of which, willing or unwilling, you may drench these civil gods too. For you say that the fabulous gods are suited to the theater, the natural to the world, the civil to the city, although the world is a divine work, while cities and theaters are works of men; and the gods laughed at in the theaters are none other than those adored in the temples, and you exhibit games to none other than those to whom you sacrifice victims. How much more freely and more subtly would you have divided these things by saying that some gods are natural and others instituted by men, but that about those instituted the literature of the poets says one thing and that of the priests another, and yet that both are so friendly to each other in their partnership of falsehood that both are pleasing to the demons, to whom the teaching of truth is hostile! Setting aside for a little while, then, the theology they call natural, which is to be discussed later, is it at all acceptable to seek or hope for eternal life from the poetic, theatrical, playful, stage gods? Far from it; indeed, may the true God avert so monstrous and sacrilegious a madness. What? Is eternal life to be demanded from those gods whom these things please and whom these things appease, when their crimes are rehearsed there again and again? No one, I think, is so insane as to go over such a precipice of most furious impiety. Neither by fabulous nor by civil theology, then, does anyone obtain everlasting life. For the one sows shameful things about the gods by inventing them, the other reaps them by favoring them; the one scatters lies, the other gathers them; the one assails divine things with false crimes, the other embraces the performances of those crimes among divine things; the one makes men's unspeakable fictions about the gods resound in songs, the other consecrates them in the festivals of the gods themselves; the one sings the crimes and outrages of the deities, the other loves them; the one reveals or invents them, the other either bears witness to true ones or takes delight even in false ones. Both are shameful and both are damnable; but the theatrical one professes public shamefulness, while the urban one is adorned with the other's shamefulness. Is eternal life to be hoped for from the source by which this brief temporal life is polluted? Or does the company of wicked men pollute life, if they insinuate themselves into our affections and assents, and does the society of demons, who are worshipped with their own crimes, not pollute it? If the crimes are real, how wicked the demons are! If false, how wickedly they are worshipped! When we say these things, it may perhaps seem to someone quite ignorant of these matters that only those things about such gods which are sung in poetic songs and acted out in stage plays are celebrated as unworthy of the divine majesty, ridiculous and detestable, but that the sacred rites performed not by actors but by priests are clean and free of all disgrace. If this were so, no one would ever have judged that theatrical indecencies should be celebrated in their honor, nor would the gods themselves ever have commanded that these be presented to them. But people are not ashamed to do such things in the theaters in the service of the gods precisely because similar things are done in the temples. In short, when the author mentioned tried to distinguish civil theology from the fabulous and the natural as a third of its own kind, he wished it to be understood as blended from both rather than separated from both. For he says that what the poets write is less than the peoples ought to follow, and what the philosophers write is more than it is expedient for the common crowd to investigate. “These differ,” he says, “in such a way that nevertheless not a few things from both kinds have been taken up into civil accounts. Therefore we shall write what is common to them together with what is proper to the civil; and of these our fellowship ought to be greater with the philosophers than with the poets.” So it is not without some fellowship with the poets. And yet in another place he says that concerning the generations of the gods the peoples have been more inclined to the poets than to the natural philosophers. For here he said what ought to be done, there what is done. He said that the natural philosophers wrote for the sake of usefulness, the poets for the sake of delight. And so the things written by the poets which the peoples ought not to follow are the crimes of the gods, which nevertheless delight both peoples and gods. For the poets write, as he says, for the sake of delight, not usefulness; yet they write things that the gods demand and the peoples exhibit.

Chapter 7. On the likeness and agreement of fabulous and civil theology.

The fabulous, theatrical, stage theology, full of unworthiness and shamefulness, is thus brought back to civil theology; and this whole theology, which is rightly judged fit to be blamed and rejected, is a part of the one that is thought fit to be worshipped and observed. It is not, as I have undertaken to show, an incongruous part, foreign to the whole body and awkwardly attached and hung on to it, but entirely in harmony with it and most fittingly joined to it as a member of the same body. For what else do those images show — the forms, ages, sexes, and dress of the gods? Do the poets have a bearded Jupiter and a beardless Mercury, and the pontiffs not? Did the mimes give Priapus enormous private parts, and not the priests as well? Does he stand to be adored in the holy places otherwise than he comes forward to be laughed at in the theaters? Are old Saturn and the youthful Apollo characters of the actors in such a way that they are not also statues in the shrines? Why are Forculus, who presides over doors, and Limentinus, who presides over the threshold, male gods, while between them Cardea, who guards the hinge, is female? Are not things found in the books on divine matters which serious poets thought unworthy of their verses? Does the theatrical Diana carry arms while the city's Diana is simply a maiden? Is the stage Apollo a lyre-player while the Delphic Apollo has nothing to do with that art? But these things are respectable in comparison with more shameful ones. What did they think of Jupiter himself, who set up his nurse on the Capitol? Did they not bear witness to Euhemerus, who wrote, not with fabulous chatter but with historical diligence, that all such gods had been men and mortals? And those who set the Epulones, the gods who are Jupiter's parasites, at his table — what else did they intend than that the rites should be mimes? For if a mime had said that Jupiter's parasites were brought to his banquet, he would certainly seem to have been seeking a laugh. Varro said it! He said it not when mocking the gods but when commending them; his books on divine, not human, things testify that he wrote it, and not where he was setting out the stage games but where he was expounding the laws of the Capitol. In short, he is overcome by such things and confesses that, as men made the gods in human form, so they believed that the gods delight in human pleasures. For the malignant spirits did not fail in their business either, of confirming these harmful opinions by making sport of human minds. Hence also that story: a sacristan of Hercules, being idle and on holiday, played at dice by himself, alternating hands, assigning Hercules to one and himself to the other, on the condition that if he won, he would provide himself a dinner from the temple offerings and hire a mistress; but if the victory went to Hercules, he would provide the same out of his own money for Hercules' pleasure. Then, when he had been beaten by himself as though by Hercules, he gave the god Hercules the dinner he owed and Larentina, a most famous harlot. She, having slept in the temple, saw in a dream that Hercules had lain with her and had told her that, on leaving, she would find her payment with the first young man she met, and she should consider it paid to her by Hercules. And so as she went away, the first to meet her was a very rich young man, Tarutius, who loved her and kept her with him a long time, and died leaving her his heir. Having acquired a very large fortune, she, not to seem ungrateful for the divine payment, did what she thought most acceptable to the deities and herself made the Roman people her heir; and when she disappeared, the will was found. For these merits, they say, she even earned divine honors. If the poets invented these things, if the mimes acted them, they would no doubt be said to belong to fabulous theology and be judged fit to be separated from the dignity of civil theology. But when these disgraces are reported by so great an author as belonging not to the poets but to the peoples, not to the mimes but to the sacred rites, not to the theaters but to the temples — that is, not to fabulous but to civil theology — then it is not in vain that actors with their playful arts portray the shamefulness of the gods, which is so great; but it is plainly in vain that priests, with their so-called sacred rites, try to portray a respectability of the gods which does not exist. There are the rites of Juno, and these were celebrated in her beloved island of Samos, where she was given in marriage to Jupiter; there are the rites of Ceres, in which Proserpina, carried off by Pluto, is sought; there are the rites of Venus, in which her beloved Adonis, a most beautiful youth killed by a boar's tusk, is lamented; there are the rites of the Mother of the gods, in which the handsome young Attis, loved by her and castrated through a woman's jealousy, is mourned even by the misery of castrated men whom they call Galli. Since these things are uglier than any stage indecency, why do they strive to separate the poets' fabulous fictions about the gods, which of course belong to the theater, from civil theology, which they want to belong to the city, as though separating unworthy and shameful things from honorable and worthy ones? There is rather reason to be grateful to the actors, who spared the eyes of men and did not lay bare in their shows everything that is hidden by the walls of the sacred buildings. What good is to be thought of their rites that are covered in darkness, when those brought out into the light are so detestable? And certainly what they do in secret through castrated and effeminate men is their own affair; yet they could by no means hide those same men, unhappily and shamefully unmanned and corrupted. Let them persuade whom they can that they do anything holy through such men, whom they cannot deny are counted among their holy things and busy about them. We do not know what they do, but we know through whom they do it. For we know what is done on the stage, where no castrated or effeminate man has ever entered, even in a chorus of harlots; and yet even these things are acted by base and disreputable persons, for they ought not to be acted by respectable ones. What, then, are those sacred rites, for whose performance holiness has chosen such men as not even the obscenity of the stage has admitted?

Chapter 8. On the interpretations by natural explanations which pagan teachers attempt to give for their gods.

But, they say, these things have certain physiological interpretations, as they call them, that is, interpretations by natural explanations. As if in this discussion we were seeking physiology and not theology, that is, an account not of nature but of God! For although he who is the true God is God not by opinion but by nature, yet not every nature is God; for there is certainly a nature of man and of beast, of tree and of stone, and none of these is God. But if, when the rites of the Mother of the gods are in question, the chief point of this interpretation is certainly that the Mother of the gods is the earth, what more do we seek, why do we examine the rest? What more clearly supports those who say that all these gods were men? For thus they are earth-born; thus the earth is their mother. But in true theology the earth is God's work, not his mother. Yet however they interpret her rites and refer them to the nature of things, for men to be used as women is not according to nature but against nature. This disease, this crime, this disgrace is openly professed in those rites, when among the vicious habits of men it can hardly be confessed even under torture. Further, if these rites, which are shown to be fouler than the indecencies of the stage, are excused and cleansed on the ground that they have interpretations of their own, by which they are shown to signify the nature of things, why should not the poetic fictions likewise be excused and cleansed? For many have interpreted these too in the same way, so far that the thing they call most monstrous and most unspeakable, that Saturn devoured his own sons, some interpret as meaning that length of time, which is signified by the name of Saturn, consumes whatever it begets; or, as the same Varro thinks, that Saturn has to do with seeds, which fall back again into the earth from which they spring. And others interpret it in another way, and the rest likewise. And yet it is called fabulous theology, and with all its interpretations of this kind it is blamed, rejected, and disapproved; and not only by natural theology, which belongs to the philosophers, but also by this civil theology we are discussing, which is claimed to belong to cities and peoples, it is set apart as rightly to be repudiated, because it has invented things unworthy of the gods. Their plan, surely, was this. The most acute and most learned men who wrote these things understood that both were to be disapproved, the fabulous and the civil; but they dared to disapprove the fabulous and did not dare to disapprove the civil. So they set out the one to be blamed, and exhibited the other, which resembles it, to be compared with it — not so that the civil might be chosen and held in preference to the fabulous, but so that it might be understood to be fit for rejection along with it. And so, without danger to those who were afraid to censure civil theology, both would be despised, and the theology they call natural would find a place in better minds. For the civil and the fabulous are both fabulous and both civil. Whoever wisely examines the vanities and obscenities of both will find both fabulous; whoever notices that the stage games belonging to the fabulous are part of the festivals of the civil gods and of the divine rites of the cities will find both civil. How, then, is the power of giving eternal life attributed to any of these gods, whose images and rites prove them to be most like the fabulous gods, so openly rejected — in forms, ages, sex, dress, marriages, generations, and rites? In all these things they are understood either to have been men, for whose life or death rites and solemnities were instituted, with demons insinuating and confirming this error; or at least to be most unclean spirits who crept in on some occasion or other to deceive human minds.

Chapter 9. On the duties of the individual gods.

What then? Do not these very duties of the deities, so cheaply cut up into little pieces — for which reason they say that each should be entreated for his own special function, about which we have already said much, though not everything — suit a mime's buffoonery rather than divine dignity? If anyone engaged two nurses for an infant, one of whom gave nothing but food and the other nothing but drink, as these men engaged two goddesses, Educa and Potina, for this purpose, he would surely seem to be out of his mind and to be acting something like a mime in his own house. They want Liber to be named from liberation, because by his favor males in intercourse are liberated by the emission of seed; and they say that Libera, whom they also consider to be Venus, does the same for women, because they say that women too emit seed; and for this reason the male member is placed in the temple for Liber, and the female for Libera. To these things they add women assigned to Liber, and wine, for arousing lust. Thus the Bacchanalia were celebrated with the utmost madness; and there Varro himself confesses that such things could not have been done by the Bacchants except with their minds deranged. These things, however, afterwards displeased a saner senate, and it ordered them abolished. Here at least, perhaps, they at last perceived what unclean spirits can do in the minds of men while they are taken for gods. Such things certainly would not be done in the theaters; for there they play, they do not rave — although to have gods who delight even in such plays is close to madness. But what of this? Varro distinguishes the religious man from the superstitious by saying that the gods are feared by the superstitious man, but by the religious man only revered as parents, not feared as enemies; and he says that they are all so good that it is easier for them to spare the guilty than to harm anyone innocent. Yet he records that three gods are brought in as guardians for a woman after childbirth, so that the god Silvanus may not come in by night and trouble her; and to represent these guardians three men go round the thresholds of the house at night, and first strike the threshold with an axe, then with a pestle, and thirdly sweep it with brooms, so that by these signs of cultivation the god Silvanus may be prevented from entering, since trees are not cut and pruned without iron, nor is spelt ground without a pestle, nor is grain heaped up without brooms. From these three things three gods are named: Intercidona from the cutting (intercisio) of the axe, Pilumnus from the pestle (pilum), Deverra from the brooms (deverrere, to sweep); by these guardian gods the mother would be protected against the violence of the god Silvanus. So the guardianship of good gods would not avail against the cruelty of a harmful god unless they were several against one, and unless they fought against him, rough, horrid, uncultivated as he is, being a god of the woods, with the signs of cultivation as with things opposed to him. Is this the innocence of the gods, this their harmony? Are these the saving deities of cities, more laughable than the farces of the theaters? When male and female are united, the god Jugatinus is brought in; let that be tolerated. But she who marries must be led home; the god Domiducus is brought in too; that she may be in the house, the god Domitius is brought in; that she may stay with her husband, the goddess Manturna is added. What more is sought? Let human modesty be spared; let the desire of flesh and blood accomplish the rest, the privacy of shame having been secured. Why is the bedchamber filled with a crowd of deities, when even the groomsmen leave it? And it is filled not so that the thought of their presence may increase concern for chastity, but so that the woman, weak by sex and fearful from the newness of it, may with their cooperation lose her virginity without any difficulty. For there are present the goddess Virginensis, and the god father Subigus, and the goddess mother Prema, and the goddess Pertunda, and Venus and Priapus. What is this? If the man laboring at that task had to be helped by the gods at all, would not some one god or some one goddess suffice? Would Venus alone be too little, who is even said to be named for this, that without force (vis) a woman does not cease to be a virgin? If there is any shame in men, which there is not in the deities, would not married couples, believing that so many gods of both sexes are present and intent on this work, be so affected by shame that he would be less aroused and she would resist more? And certainly, if the goddess Virginensis is there to loosen the virgin's girdle, if the god Subigus is there that she may be subdued to the man, if the goddess Prema is there that, once subdued, she may be held down so as not to move, what is the goddess Pertunda doing there? Let her blush and go outside; let the husband too do something. It is most indecent that anyone but he should accomplish what her name signifies. But perhaps she is tolerated because she is said to be a goddess and not a god. For if she were believed to be male and were called Pertundus, the husband would call for more help against him for his wife's chastity than the new mother against Silvanus. But why do I say this, when Priapus too is there, all too male, on whose most huge and most shameful phallus the new bride was ordered to sit, according to the most respectable and most religious custom of matrons? Let them go on, then, and try with what subtlety they can to distinguish civil theology from fabulous theology, cities from theaters, temples from stages, the rites of the pontiffs from the poems of the poets, as honorable things from shameful, truthful from false, grave from light, serious from playful, things to be sought from things to be rejected. We understand what they are doing. They know that the theatrical and fabulous theology hangs on the civil and is reflected from it in the poems of the poets as from a mirror; and therefore, having set out the civil, which they do not dare to condemn, they more freely accuse and censure its image, so that those who recognize what they mean may detest also the very face of which that is the image. Yet the gods themselves, looking at themselves as in the same mirror, love it so much that who and what they are is better seen in both. Hence they also compelled their worshippers by terrible commands to dedicate the uncleanness of fabulous theology to them, to set it in their solemnities, to hold it among divine things. Thus they both showed themselves more plainly to be most unclean spirits, and made that rejected and disapproved theatrical theology a member and part of this urban theology, as though the latter were chosen and approved; so that, while the whole is shameful and deceitful and contains fictitious gods, one part of it is in the books of the priests, the other in the poems of the poets. Whether it has other parts too is another question; for now, following Varro's division, I have shown sufficiently, I think, that both the urban and the theatrical theology belong to the one civil theology. Therefore, since both are of like shamefulness, absurdity, unworthiness, and falsehood, far be it from truly religious men to hope for eternal life from either the one or the other. Finally, Varro himself began to record and enumerate the gods from the conception of a man, beginning their number with Janus; and he carried the series right up to the death of a man in decrepit old age, and closed the list of gods pertaining to man himself with the goddess Nenia, who is sung at the funerals of old people. Then he began to show other gods, who pertain not to man himself but to what belongs to man, such as food and clothing and whatever else is necessary for this life, showing in all cases what is the function of each and for what each should be entreated. In all this diligence he pointed out or named no gods from whom eternal life is to be asked — the one thing for which, properly speaking, we are Christians. Who, then, is so slow as not to understand what this man was doing? By expounding and laying open civil theology so diligently, by showing it to be like that unworthy and disgraceful fabulous theology, and by teaching clearly enough that the fabulous is a part of the civil, he was working to make room in men's minds only for the natural theology, which he says belongs to the philosophers. He did it with such subtlety that he censures the fabulous, and does not dare to censure the civil, yet shows it to be censurable by disclosing it; and so, both being rejected by the judgment of those who rightly understand, the natural alone would remain to be chosen. Of this, with the help of the true God, we must speak more carefully in its place.

Chapter 10. On the freedom of Seneca, who censured civil theology more vehemently than Varro censured the fabulous.

The freedom which Varro lacked, so that he did not dare to censure this urban theology openly, though it is most like the theatrical, as he censured the theatrical, was not lacking — not wholly, but in some measure — to Annaeus Seneca, who, as we find from some indications, flourished in the times of our apostles. It was present to him as a writer; it was absent from him in his life. For in the book he wrote against superstitions he censured this civil and urban theology much more fully and vehemently than Varro censured the theatrical and fabulous. When he was dealing with images, he says: “They dedicate the sacred, immortal, inviolable gods in the cheapest and lifeless material; they clothe them with the shapes of men, of wild beasts, and of fishes, and some with mixed sex and differing bodies; they call them deities, which, if they received breath and suddenly met us, would be held to be monsters.” Then somewhat later, after commending natural theology and setting out the opinions of certain philosophers, he put a question to himself and said: “Here someone says: Shall I believe that the sky and the earth are gods, and that some are above the moon and some below it? Shall I bear either Plato or the Peripatetic Strato, one of whom made God without a body, the other without a mind?” And in answer to this he says: “Well then, do the dreams of Titus Tatius or Romulus or Tullus Hostilius seem truer to you? Tatius dedicated the goddess Cloacina; Romulus, Picus and Tiberinus; Hostilius, Fear and Pallor, the foulest of human feelings, one of which is a movement of a terrified mind, the other not even a disease of the body but a color. Will you rather believe these to be deities and receive them into heaven?” And how freely he wrote of the cruelly shameful rites themselves! “One man,” he says, “cuts off his male parts; another slashes his arms. How do they fear the gods when angry, who win their favor like this? Gods ought not to be worshipped in any way at all if they want this. So great is the frenzy of a mind disturbed and driven from its seat that the gods are appeased in a way in which not even the foulest men rage, men whose cruelty has passed into legend. Tyrants have mangled the limbs of some; they ordered no one to mangle his own. Some have been castrated for the pleasure of royal lust; but no one, at a master's order, laid hands on himself to cease to be a man. They slaughter themselves in the temples; they make supplication with their own wounds and blood. If anyone has leisure to observe what they do and what they suffer, he will find things so unbecoming to respectable men, so unworthy of free men, so unlike the sane, that no one would doubt they were mad if they were mad with fewer people; as it is, the crowd of the insane is their warrant of sanity.” And then the things he records as commonly done on the Capitol itself, and fearlessly exposes — who would believe they are done except by mockers or madmen? For he had derided the Egyptian rites, in which Osiris is mourned as lost and soon found with great joy — since his loss and finding are a fiction, yet that grief and gladness are genuinely expressed by people who have lost nothing and found nothing. “Yet this madness,” he says, “has a fixed time. It is tolerable to be mad once a year. Go to the Capitol: you will be ashamed of the madness on display, of the duties that an empty frenzy has assigned itself. One tells the names of worshippers to the god, another announces the hours to Jupiter; one is a bather, another an anointer, who with empty movement of his arms imitates one anointing. There are women who arrange the hair of Juno and Minerva (standing far off, not only from the image but from the temple, they move their fingers like hairdressers); there are those who hold a mirror; there are men who summon the gods to stand surety for them in court, men who present petitions and explain their case to them. A learned chief mime, now a decrepit old man, used to perform a mime daily on the Capitol, as if the gods would gladly watch one whom men had stopped watching. Every kind of craftsman sits there idle, working for the immortal gods.” And shortly after: “Yet these,” he says, “though they promise the god a superfluous service, do not promise a shameful or infamous one. Certain women sit on the Capitol who think they are loved by Jupiter; they are not frightened even by regard for Juno, who, if you will believe the poets, is most wrathful.” Varro did not have this freedom. He dared to censure only poetic theology; he did not dare to censure the civil, which Seneca cut to pieces. But if we attend to the truth, the temples where these things are done are worse than the theaters where they are feigned. Hence, in these rites of civil theology, Seneca chose for the wise man this role: not to hold them in the religion of his mind, but to feign them in his acts. For he says: “All these things the wise man will observe as commanded by the laws, not as pleasing to the gods.” And shortly after: “What of the fact,” he says, “that we even join the gods in marriage, and not even piously, brothers with sisters? We marry Bellona to Mars, Venus to Vulcan, Salacia to Neptune. Some, however, we leave unmarried, as if no match could be found, especially since some are widows, like Populonia or Fulgora and the goddess Rumina; I do not wonder that no suitor came for them. All this ignoble crowd of gods, which a long superstition has piled up over a long age, we shall adore,” he says, “in such a way as to remember that its worship pertains more to custom than to reality.” So neither those laws nor custom established in civil theology what was pleasing to the gods or pertained to reality. But this man, whom philosophy made, as it were, free, nevertheless, because he was a distinguished senator of the Roman people, worshipped what he censured, did what he refuted, adored what he blamed. Philosophy had evidently taught him something great: not to be superstitious in the world, but, for the sake of the laws of the citizens and the customs of men, not indeed to play the part of an actor in the theater, but to imitate one in the temple. He was all the more damnable, in that he performed falsely the things he performed in such a way that the people thought he performed them sincerely; whereas the actor would rather delight by playing than deceive by lying.

Chapter 11. What Seneca thought about the Jews.

Among the other superstitions of civil theology, Seneca also censures the sacred rites of the Jews, and especially their sabbaths, declaring that they act unprofitably, because by those seventh days coming at intervals they lose almost a seventh part of their life in idleness, and suffer loss by not doing many urgent things in their time. The Christians, however, who were already then most hostile to the Jews, he did not dare to mention either way, lest he either praise them against the ancient custom of his own country, or censure them against, perhaps, his own will. When he spoke of those Jews, he said: “Meanwhile the custom of this most criminal nation has gained such strength that it is now received through all lands: the conquered have given laws to the conquerors.” He marveled as he said this, and, not knowing what was being done by divine providence, he added a statement that plainly showed what he thought of the reason for their sacred rites. For he says: “They, however, know the reasons for their rite; the greater part of the people does what it does not know why it does.” But about the sacred rites of the Jews — why and how far they were instituted by divine authority, and how afterwards, at the proper time, they were taken away by the same authority from the people of God, to whom the mystery of eternal life has been revealed — we have spoken elsewhere, especially when we were dealing with the Manichaeans, and we must speak of it in this work in a more suitable place.