Writings of Augustine. The City of God.
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The City of God.
translated by Rev. Marcus Dods, D.D.
Published in 1886 by Philip Schaff,
New York: Christian Literature Publishing Co.
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Book I.
Argument--Augustin censures the pagans, who attributed the calamities
of the world, and especially the recent sack of Rome by the Goths, to
the Christian religion, and its prohibition of the worship of the
gods. He speaks of the blessings and ills of life, which then, as
always, happened to good and bad men alike. Finally, he rebukes the
shamelessness of those who cast up to the Christians that their women
had been violated by the soldiers.
Preface, Explaining His Design in Undertaking This Work.
The glorious city of God [28] is my theme in this work, which you, my
dearest son Marcellinus, [29] suggested, and which is due to you by my
promise. I have undertaken its defence against those who prefer their
own gods to the Founder of this city,--a city surpassingly glorious,
whether we view it as it still lives by faith in this fleeting course
of time, and sojourns as a stranger in the midst of the ungodly, or as
it shall dwell in the fixed stability of its eternal seat, which it
now with patience waits for, expecting until "righteousness shall
return unto judgment," [30] and it obtain, by virtue of its
excellence, final victory and perfect peace. A great work this, and
an arduous; but God is my helper. For I am aware what ability is
requisite to persuade the proud how great is the virtue of humility,
which raises us, not by a quite human arrogance, but by a divine
grace, above all earthly dignities that totter on this shifting
scene. For the King and Founder of this city of which we speak, has
in Scripture uttered to His people a dictum of the divine law in these
words: "God resisteth the proud, but giveth grace unto the humble."
[31]But this, which is God's prerogative, the inflated ambition of
a proud spirit also affects, and dearly loves that this be numbered
among its attributes, to
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"Show pity to the humbled soul,
And crush the sons of pride." [32]
And therefore, as the plan of this work we have undertaken requires,
and as occasion offers, we must speak also of the earthly city, which,
though it be mistress of the nations, is itself ruled by its lust of
rule.
Footnotes
[28] [Augustin uses the term civitas Dei (polis theou) of the church
universal as a commonwealth and community founded and governed by
God. It is applied in the Bible to Jerusalem or the church of the Old
Covenant (Ps. xl. 6, 4; xlviii. 1, 8; lxxxvii. 3), and to the heavenly
Jerusalem or the church perfect (Heb. xi. 10, 16; xii. 22; Rev. iii.
12; xxi. 2; xxii. 14, 19). Augustin comprehends under the term the
whole Kingdom of God under the Jewish and Christian dispensation both
in its militant and triumphant state, and contrasts it with the
perishing kingdoms of this world. His work treats of both, but he
calls it, a meliore, The City of God.--P.S.]
[29] [Marcellinus was a friend of Augustin, and urged him to write
this work. He was commissioned by the Emperior Honorius to convene a
conference of Catholic and schismatic Donatist bishops in the summer
of 411, and conceded the victory to the Catholics; but on account of
his rigor in executing the laws against the Donatists, he fell a
victim to their revenge, and was honored by a place among the
martyrs. See the Letters of Augustin, 133, 136, 138, 139, 143, 151,
the notes in this ed., vol. I., 470 and 505, and the Translator's
Preface --P.S.]
[30] Ps. xciv. 15, rendered otherwise in Eng. ver. [In the Revised
Vers.: "Judgment shall return unto righteousness." In Old Testament
quotations, Augustin, being ignorant of Hebrew, had to rely on the
imperfect Latin version of his day, and was at first even opposed to
the revision of Jerome.--P.S.]
[31] Jas. iv. 6 and 1 Pet. v. 5.
[32] Virgil, Æneid, vi. 854. [Parcere subjectis et debellare
superbos.--P.S.]
Chapter 1.--Of the Adversaries of the Name of Christ, Whom the
Barbarians for Christ's Sake Spared When They Stormed the City.
For to this earthly city belong the enemies against whom I have to
defend the city of God. Many of them, indeed, being reclaimed from
their ungodly error, have become sufficiently creditable citizens of
this city; but many are so inflamed with hatred against it, and are so
ungrateful to its Redeemer for His signal benefits, as to forget that
they would now be unable to utter a single word to its prejudice, had
they not found in its sacred places, as they fled from the enemy's
steel, that life in which they now boast themselves. [33]Are not
those very Romans, who were spared by the barbarians through their
respect for Christ, become enemies to the name of Christ? The
reliquaries of the martyrs and the churches of the apostles bear
witness to this; for in the sack of the city they were open sanctuary
for all who fled to them, whether Christian or Pagan. To their very
threshold the blood-thirsty enemy raged; there his murderous fury
owned a limit. Thither did such of the enemy as had any pity convey
those to whom they had given quarter, lest any less mercifully
disposed might fall upon them. And, indeed, when even those murderers
who everywhere else showed themselves pitiless came to those spots
where that was forbidden which the license of war permitted in every
other place, their furious rage for slaughter was bridled, and their
eagerness to take prisoners was quenched. Thus escaped multitudes who
now reproach the Christian religion, and impute to Christ the ills
that have befallen their city; but the preservation of their own
life--a boon which they owe to the respect entertained for Christ by
the barbarians--they attribute not to our Christ, but to their own
good luck. They ought rather, had they any right perceptions, to
attribute the severities and hardships inflicted by their enemies, to
that divine providence which is wont to reform the depraved manners of
men by chastisement, and which exercises with similar afflictions the
righteous and praiseworthy,--either translating them, when they have
passed through the trial, to a better world, or detaining them still
on earth for ulterior purposes. And they ought to attribute it to the
spirit of these Christian times, that, contrary to the custom of war,
these bloodthirsty barbarians spared them, and spared them for
Christ's sake, whether this mercy was actually shown in promiscuous
places, or in those places specially dedicated to Christ's name, and
of which the very largest were selected as sanctuaries, that full
scope might thus be given to the expansive compassion which desired
that a large multitude might find shelter there. Therefore ought they
to give God thanks, and with sincere confession flee for refuge to His
name, that so they may escape the punishment of eternal fire--they who
with lying lips took upon them this name, that they might escape the
punishment of present destruction. For of those whom you see
insolently and shamelessly insulting the servants of Christ, there are
numbers who would not have escaped that destruction and slaughter had
they not pretended that they themselves were Christ's servants. Yet
now, in ungrateful pride and most impious madness, and at the risk of
being punished in everlasting darkness, they perversely oppose that
name under which they fraudulently protected themselves for the sake
of enjoying the light of this brief life.
Footnotes
[33] [Aug. refers to the sacking of the city of Rome by the
West-Gothic King Alaric, 410. He was the most humane of the barbaric
invaders and conquerors of Rome, and had embraced Arian Christianity
(probably from the teaching of Ulphilas, the Arian bishop and
translator of the Bible). He spared the Catholic Christians.--For
particulars see Gibbon's Decline and Fall, and Millman's Latin
Christianity.--P.S.]
Chapter 2.--That It is Quite Contrary to the Usage of War, that the
Victors Should Spare the Vanquished for the Sake of Their Gods.
There are histories of numberless wars, both before the building of
Rome and since its rise and the extension of its dominion; let these
be read, and let one instance be cited in which, when a city had been
taken by foreigners, the victors spared those who were found to have
fled for sanctuary to the temples of their gods; [34] or one instance
in which a barbarian general gave orders that none should be put to
the sword who had been found in this or that temple. Did not Æneas
see
"Dying Priam at the shrine,
Staining the hearth he made divine?" [35]
Did not Diomede and Ulysses
"Drag with red hands, the sentry slain,
Her fateful image from your fane,
Her chaste locks touch, and stain with gore
The virgin coronal she wore?" [36]
Neither is that true which follows, that
"Thenceforth the tide of fortune changed,
And Greece grew weak." [37]
For after this they conquered and destroyed Troy with fire and sword;
after this they beheaded Priam as he fled to the altars. Neither did
Troy perish because it lost Minerva. For what had Minerva herself
first lost, that she should perish? Her guards perhaps? No doubt;
just her guards. For as soon as they were slain, she could be
stolen. It was not, in fact, the men who were preserved by the image,
but the image by the men. How, then, was she invoked to defend the
city and the citizens, she who could not defend her own defenders?
Footnotes
[34] The Benedictines remind us that Alexander and Xenophon, at least
on some occasions, did so.
[35] Virgil, Æneid, ii. 501-2. The renderings of Virgil are from
Conington.
[36] Ibid.. ii. 166.
[37] Ibid.
Chapter 3.--That the Romans Did Not Show Their Usual Sagacity When
They Trusted that They Would Be Benefited by the Gods Who Had Been
Unable to Defend Troy.
And these be the gods to whose protecting care the Romans were
delighted to entrust their city! O too, too piteous mistake! And
they are enraged at us when we speak thus about their gods, though, so
far from being enraged at their own writers, they part with money to
learn what they say; and, indeed, the very teachers of these authors
are reckoned worthy of a salary from the public purse, and of other
honors. There is Virgil, who is read by boys, in order that this
great poet, this most famous and approved of all poets, may impregnate
their virgin minds, and may not readily be forgotten by them,
according to that saying of Horace,
"The fresh cask long keeps its first tang." [38]
Well, in this Virgil, I say, Juno is introduced as hostile to the
Trojans, and stirring up Æolus, the king of the winds, against them in
the words,
"A race I hate now ploughs the sea,
Transporting Troy to Italy,
And home-gods conquered" [39] ...
And ought prudent men to have entrusted the defence of Rome to these
conquered gods? But it will be said, this was only the saying of
Juno, who, like an angry woman, did not know what she was saying.
What, then, says Æneas himself,--Æneas who is so often designated
"pious?" Does he not say,
"Lo! Panthus, 'scaped from death by flight,
Priest of Apollo on the height,
His conquered gods with trembling hands
He bears, and shelter swift demands?" [40]
Is it not clear that the gods (whom he does not scruple to call
"conquered") were rather entrusted to Æneas than he to them, when it
is said to him,
"The gods of her domestic shrines
Your country to your care consigns?" [41]
If, then, Virgil says that the gods were such as these, and were
conquered, and that when conquered they could not escape except under
the protection of a man, what a madness is it to suppose that Rome had
been wisely entrusted to these guardians, and could not have been
taken unless it had lost them! Indeed, to worship conquered gods as
protectors and champions, what is this but to worship, not good
divinities, but evil omens? [42]Would it not be wiser to believe,
not that Rome would never have fallen into so great a calamity had not
they first perished, but rather that they would have perished long
since had not Rome preserved them as long as she could? For who does
not see, when he thinks of it, what a foolish assumption it is that
they could not be vanquished under vanquished defenders, and that they
only perished because they had lost their guardian gods, when, indeed,
the only cause of their perishing was that they chose for their
protectors gods condemned to perish? The poets, therefore, when they
composed and sang these things about the conquered gods, had no
intention to invent falsehoods, but uttered, as honest men, what the
truth extorted from them. This, however, will be carefully and
copiously discussed in another and more fitting place. Meanwhile I
will briefly, and to the best of my ability, explain what I meant to
say about these ungrateful men who blasphemously impute to Christ the
calamities which they deservedly suffer in consequence of their own
wicked ways, while that which is for Christ's sake spared them in
spite of their wickedness they do not even take the trouble to notice;
and in their mad and blasphemous insolence, they use against His name
those very lips wherewith they falsely claimed that same name that
their lives might be spared. In the places consecrated to Christ,
where for His sake no enemy would injure them, they restrained their
tongues that they might be safe and protected; but no sooner do they
emerge from these sanctuaries, than they unbridle these tongues to
hurl against Him curses full of hate.
Footnotes
[38] Horace, Ep. I. ii. 69.
[39] Æneid, i. 71.
[40] Ibid, ii. 319.
[41] Ibid. 293.
[42] Non numina bona, sed omina mala.
Chapter 4.--Of the Asylum of Juno in Troy, Which Saved No One from the
Greeks; And of the Churches of the Apostles, Which Protected from the
Barbarians All Who Fled to Them.
Troy itself, the mother of the Roman people, was not able, as I have
said, to protect its own citizens in the sacred places of their gods
from the fire and sword of the Greeks, though the Greeks worshipped
the same gods. Not only so, but
"Phoenix and Ulysses fell
In the void courts by Juno's cell
Were set the spoils to keep;
Snatched from the burning shrines away,
There Ilium's mighty treasure lay,
Rich altars, bowls of massy gold,
And captive raiment, rudely rolled
In one promiscuous heap;
While boys and matrons, wild with fear,
In long array were standing near." [43]
In other words, the place consecrated to so great a goddess was
chosen, not that from it none might be led out a captive, but that in
it all the captives might be immured. Compare now this "asylum"--the
asylum not of an ordinary god, not of one of the rank and file of
gods, but of Jove's own sister and wife, the queen of all the
gods--with the churches built in memory of the apostles. Into it were
collected the spoils rescued from the blazing temples and snatched
from the gods, not that they might be restored to the vanquished, but
divided among the victors; while into these was carried back, with the
most religious observance and respect, everything which belonged to
them, even though found elsewhere. There liberty was lost; here
preserved. There bondage was strict; here strictly excluded. Into
that temple men were driven to become the chattels of their enemies,
now lording it over them; into these churches men were led by their
relenting foes, that they might be at liberty. In fine, the gentle
[44] Greeks appropriated that temple of Juno to the purposes of their
own avarice and pride; while these churches of Christ were chosen even
by the savage barbarians as the fit scenes for humility and mercy.
But perhaps, after all, the Greeks did in that victory of theirs spare
the temples of those gods whom they worshipped in common with the
Trojans, and did not dare to put to the sword or make captive the
wretched and vanquished Trojans who fled thither; and perhaps Virgil,
in the manner of poets, has depicted what never really happened? But
there is no question that he depicted the usual custom of an enemy
when sacking a city.
Footnotes
[43] Virgil, Æneid. ii. 761.
[44] Though levis was the word usually employed to signify the
inconstancy of the Greeks, it is evidently here used, in opposition to
immanis of the following clause, to indicate that the Greeks were more
civilized than the barbarians, and not relentless, but, as we say,
easily moved.
Chapter 5.--Cæsar's Statement Regarding the Universal Custom of an
Enemy When Sacking a City.
Even Cæsar himself gives us positive testimony regarding this custom;
for, in his deliverance in the senate about the conspirators, he says
(as Sallust, a historian of distinguished veracity, writes [45] )
"that virgins and boys are violated, children torn from the embrace of
their parents, matrons subjected to whatever should be the pleasure of
the conquerors, temples and houses plundered, slaughter and burning
rife; in fine, all things filled with arms, corpses, blood, and
wailing." If he had not mentioned temples here, we might suppose that
enemies were in the habit of sparing the dwellings of the gods. And
the Roman temples were in danger of these disasters, not from foreign
foes, but from Catiline and his associates, the most noble senators
and citizens of Rome. But these, it may be said, were abandoned men,
and the parricides of their fatherland.
Footnotes
[45] De Conj. Cat. c. 51.
Chapter 6.--That Not Even the Romans, When They Took Cities, Spared
the Conquered in Their Temples.
Why, then, need our argument take note of the many nations who have
waged wars with one another, and have nowhere spared the conquered in
the temples of their gods? Let us look at the practice of the Romans
themselves; let us, I say, recall and review the Romans, whose chief
praise it has been "to spare the vanquished and subdue the proud," and
that they preferred "rather to forgive than to revenge an injury;"
[46] and among so many and great cities which they have stormed,
taken, and overthrown for the extension of their dominion, let us be
told what temples they were accustomed to exempt, so that whoever took
refuge in them was free. Or have they really done this, and has the
fact been suppressed by the historians of these events? Is it to be
believed, that men who sought out with the greatest eagerness points
they could praise, would omit those which, in their own estimation,
are the most signal proofs of piety? Marcus Marcellus, a
distinguished Roman, who took Syracuse, a most splendidly adorned
city, is reported to have bewailed its coming ruin, and to have shed
his own tears over it before he spilt its blood. He took steps also
to preserve the chastity even of his enemy. For before he gave orders
for the storming of the city, he issued an edict forbidding the
violation of any free person. Yet the city was sacked according to
the custom of war; nor do we anywhere read, that even by so chaste and
gentle a commander orders were given that no one should be injured who
had fled to this or that temple. And this certainly would by no means
have been omitted, when neither his weeping nor his edict preservative
of chastity could be passed in silence. Fabius, the conqueror of the
city of Tarentum, is praised for abstaining from making booty of the
images. For when his secretary proposed the question to him, what he
wished done with the statues of the gods, which had been taken in
large numbers, he veiled his moderation under a joke. For he asked of
what sort they were; and when they reported to him that there were not
only many large images, but some of them armed, "Oh," says he, "let us
leave with the Tarentines their angry gods." Seeing, then, that the
writers of Roman history could not pass in silence, neither the
weeping of the one general nor the laughing of the other, neither the
chaste pity of the one nor the facetious moderation of the other, on
what occasion would it be omitted, if, for the honor of any of their
enemy's gods, they had shown this particular form of leniency, that in
any temple slaughter or captivity was prohibited?
Footnotes
[46] Sallust, Cat. Conj. ix.
Chapter 7.--That the Cruelties Which Occurred in the Sack of Rome Were
in Accordance with the Custom of War, Whereas the Acts of Clemency
Resulted from the Influence of Christ's Name.
All the spoiling, then, which Rome was exposed to in the recent
calamity--all the slaughter, plundering, burning, and misery--was the
result of the custom of war. But what was novel, was that savage
barbarians showed themselves in so gentle a guise, that the largest
churches were chosen and set apart for the purpose of being filled
with the people to whom quarter was given, and that in them none were
slain, from them none forcibly dragged; that into them many were led
by their relenting enemies to be set at liberty, and that from them
none were led into slavery by merciless foes. Whoever does not see
that this is to be attributed to the name of Christ, and to the
Christian temper, is blind; whoever sees this, and gives no praise, is
ungrateful; whoever hinders any one from praising it, is mad. Far be
it from any prudent man to impute this clemency to the barbarians.
Their fierce and bloody minds were awed, and bridled, and marvellously
tempered by Him who so long before said by His prophet, "I will visit
their transgression with the rod, and their iniquities with stripes;
nevertheless my loving-kindness will I not utterly take from them."
[47]
Footnotes
[47] Ps. lxxxix. 32.
Chapter 8.--Of the Advantages and Disadvantages Which Often
Indiscriminately Accrue to Good and Wicked Men.
Will some one say, Why, then, was this divine compassion extended even
to the ungodly and ungrateful? Why, but because it was the mercy of
Him who daily "maketh His sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and
sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust." [48]For though some of
these men, taking thought of this, repent of their wickedness and
reform, some, as the apostle says, "despising the riches of His
goodness and long-suffering, after their hardness and impenitent
heart, treasure up unto themselves wrath against the day of wrath and
revelation of the righteous judgment of God, who will render to every
man according to his deeds:" [49] nevertheless does the patience of
God still invite the wicked to repentance, even as the scourge of God
educates the good to patience. And so, too, does the mercy of God
embrace the good that it may cherish them, as the severity of God
arrests the wicked to punish them. To the divine providence it has
seemed good to prepare in the world to come for the righteous good
things, which the unrighteous shall not enjoy; and for the wicked evil
things, by which the good shall not be tormented. But as for the good
things of this life, and its ills, God has willed that these should be
common to both; that we might not too eagerly covet the things which
wicked men are seen equally to enjoy, nor shrink with an unseemly fear
from the ills which even good men often suffer.
There is, too, a very great difference in the purpose served both by
those events which we call adverse and those called prosperous. For
the good man is neither uplifted with the good things of time, nor
broken by its ills; but the wicked man, because he is corrupted by
this world's happiness, feels himself punished by its unhappiness.
[50]Yet often, even in the present distribution of temporal things,
does God plainly evince His own interference. For if every sin were
now visited with manifest punishment, nothing would seem to be
reserved for the final judgment; on the other hand, if no sin received
now a plainly divine punishment, it would be concluded that there is
no divine providence at all. And so of the good things of this life:
if God did not by a very visible liberality confer these on some of
those persons who ask for them, we should say that these good things
were not at His disposal; and if He gave them to all who sought them,
we should suppose that such were the only rewards of His service; and
such a service would make us not godly, but greedy rather, and
covetous. Wherefore, though good and bad men suffer alike, we must
not suppose that there is no difference between the men themselves,
because there is no difference in what they both suffer. For even in
the likeness of the sufferings, there remains an unlikeness in the
sufferers; and though exposed to the same anguish, virtue and vice are
not the same thing. For as the same fire causes gold to glow
brightly, and chaff to smoke; and under the same flail the straw is
beaten small, while the grain is cleansed; and as the lees are not
mixed with the oil, though squeezed out of the vat by the same
pressure, so the same violence of affliction proves, purges, clarifies
the good, but damns, ruins, exterminates the wicked. And thus it is
that in the same affliction the wicked detest God and blaspheme, while
the good pray and praise. So material a difference does it make, not
what ills are suffered, but what kind of man suffers them. For,
stirred up with the same movement, mud exhales a horrible stench, and
ointment emits a fragrant odor.
Footnotes
[48] Matt. v. 45.
[49] Rom. ii. 4.
[50] So Cyprian (Contra Demetrianum) says: Pænam de adversis mundi
ille sentit, cui et loetitia et gloria omnis in mundo est.
Chapter 9.--Of the Reasons for Administering Correction to Bad and
Good Together.
What, then, have the Christians suffered in that calamitous period,
which would not profit every one who duly and faithfully considered
the following circumstances? First of all, they must humbly consider
those very sins which have provoked God to fill the world with such
terrible disasters; for although they be far from the excesses of
wicked, immoral, and ungodly men, yet they do not judge themselves so
clean removed from all faults as to be too good to suffer for these
even temporal ills. For every man, however laudably he lives, yet
yields in some points to the lust of the flesh. Though he do not fall
into gross enormity of wickedness, and abandoned viciousness, and
abominable profanity, yet he slips into some sins, either rarely or so
much the more frequently as the sins seem of less account. But not to
mention this, where can we readily find a man who holds in fit and
just estimation those persons on account of whose revolting pride,
luxury, and avarice, and cursed iniquities and impiety, God now smites
the earth as His predictions threatened? Where is the man who lives
with them in the style in which it becomes us to live with them? For
often we wickedly blind ourselves to the occasions of teaching and
admonishing them, sometimes even of reprimanding and chiding them,
either because we shrink from the labor or are ashamed to offend them,
or because we fear to lose good friendships, lest this should stand in
the way of our advancement, or injure us in some worldly matter, which
either our covetous disposition desires to obtain, or our weakness
shrinks from losing. So that, although the conduct of wicked men is
distasteful to the good, and therefore they do not fall with them into
that damnation which in the next life awaits such persons, yet,
because they spare their damnable sins through fear, therefore, even
though their own sins be slight and venial, they are justly scourged
with the wicked in this world, though in eternity they quite escape
punishment. Justly, when God afflicts them in common with the wicked,
do they find this life bitter, through love of whose sweetness they
declined to be bitter to these sinners.
If any one forbears to reprove and find fault with those who are doing
wrong, because he seeks a more seasonable opportunity, or because he
fears they may be made worse by his rebuke, or that other weak persons
may be disheartened from endeavoring to lead a good and pious life,
and may be driven from the faith; this man's omission seems to be
occasioned not by covetousness, but by a charitable consideration.
But what is blame-worthy is, that they who themselves revolt from the
conduct of the wicked, and live in quite another fashion, yet spare
those faults in other men which they ought to reprehend and wean them
from; and spare them because they fear to give offence, lest they
should injure their interests in those things which good men may
innocently and legitimately use,--though they use them more greedily
than becomes persons who are strangers in this world, and profess the
hope of a heavenly country. For not only the weaker brethren who
enjoy married life, and have children (or desire to have them), and
own houses and establishments, whom the apostle addresses in the
churches, warning and instructing them how they should live, both the
wives with their husbands, and the husbands with their wives, the
children with their parents, and parents with their children, and
servants with their masters, and masters with their servants,--not
only do these weaker brethren gladly obtain and grudgingly lose many
earthly and temporal things on account of which they dare not offend
men whose polluted and wicked life greatly displeases them; but those
also who live at a higher level, who are not entangled in the meshes
of married life, but use meagre food and raiment, do often take
thought of their own safety and good name, and abstain from finding
fault with the wicked, because they fear their wiles and violence.
And although they do not fear them to such an extent as to be drawn to
the commission of like iniquities, nay, not by any threats or violence
soever; yet those very deeds which they refuse to share in the
commission of they often decline to find fault with, when possibly
they might by finding fault prevent their commission. They abstain
from interference, because they fear that, if it fail of good effect,
their own safety or reputation may be damaged or destroyed; not
because they see that their preservation and good name are needful,
that they may be able to influence those who need their instruction,
but rather because they weakly relish the flattery and respect of men,
and fear the judgments of the people, and the pain or death of the
body; that is to say, their non-intervention is the result of
selfishness, and not of love.
Accordingly this seems to me to be one principal reason why the good
are chastised along with the wicked, when God is pleased to visit with
temporal punishments the profligate manners of a community. They are
punished together, not because they have spent an equally corrupt
life, but because the good as well as the wicked, though not equally
with them, love this present life; while they ought to hold it cheap,
that the wicked, being admonished and reformed by their example, might
lay hold of life eternal. And if they will not be the companions of
the good in seeking life everlasting, they should be loved as enemies,
and be dealt with patiently. For so long as they live, it remains
uncertain whether they may not come to a better mind. These selfish
persons have more cause to fear than those to whom it was said through
the prophet, "He is taken away in his iniquity, but his blood will I
require at the watchman's hand." [51]For watchmen or overseers of
the people are appointed in churches, that they may unsparingly rebuke
sin. Nor is that man guiltless of the sin we speak of, who, though he
be not a watchman, yet sees in the conduct of those with whom the
relationships of this life bring him into contact, many things that
should be blamed, and yet overlooks them, fearing to give offence, and
lose such worldly blessings as may legitimately be desired, but which
he too eagerly grasps. Then, lastly, there is another reason why the
good are afflicted with temporal calamities--the reason which Job's
case exemplifies: that the human spirit may be proved, and that it
may be manifested with what fortitude of pious trust, and with how
unmercenary a love, it cleaves to God. [52]
Footnotes
[51] Ezek. xxxiii. 6.
[52] Compare with this chapter the first homily of Chrysostom to the
people of Antioch.
Chapter 10.--That the Saints Lose Nothing in Losing Temporal Goods.
These are the considerations which one must keep in view, that he may
answer the question whether any evil happens to the faithful and godly
which cannot be turned to profit. Or shall we say that the question
is needless, and that the apostle is vaporing when he says, "We know
that all things work together for good to them that love God?" [53]
They lost all they had. Their faith? Their godliness? The
possessions of the hidden man of the heart, which in the sight of God
are of great price? [54]Did they lose these? For these are the
wealth of Christians, to whom the wealthy apostle said, "Godliness
with contentment is great gain. For we brought nothing into this
world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. And having food
and raiment, let us be therewith content. But they that will be rich
fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful
lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition. For the love of
money is the root of all evil; which, while some coveted after, they
have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many
sorrows." [55]
They, then, who lost their worldly all in the sack of Rome, if they
owned their possessions as they had been taught by the apostle, who
himself was poor without, but rich within,--that is to say, if they
used the world as not using it,--could say in the words of Job,
heavily tried, but not overcome: "Naked came I out of my mother's
womb, and naked shall I return thither: the Lord gave, and the Lord
hath taken away; as it pleased the Lord, so has it come to pass:
blessed be the name of the Lord." [56]Like a good servant, Job
counted the will of his Lord his great possession, by obedience to
which his soul was enriched; nor did it grieve him to lose, while yet
living, those goods which he must shortly leave at his death. But as
to those feebler spirits who, though they cannot be said to prefer
earthly possessions to Christ, do yet cleave to them with a somewhat
immoderate attachment, they have discovered by the pain of losing
these things how much they were sinning in loving them. For their
grief is of their own making; in the words of the apostle quoted
above, "they have pierced themselves through with many sorrows." For
it was well that they who had so long despised these verbal
admonitions should receive the teaching of experience. For when the
apostle says, "They that will be rich fall into temptation," and so
on, what he blames in riches is not the possession of them, but the
desire of them. For elsewhere he says, "Charge them that are rich in
this world, that they be not high-minded, nor trust in uncertain
riches, but in the living God, who giveth us richly all things to
enjoy; that they do good, that they be rich in good works, ready to
distribute, willing to communicate; laying up in store for themselves
a good foundation against the time to come, that they may lay hold on
eternal life." [57]They who were making such a use of their
property have been consoled for light losses by great gains, and have
had more pleasure in those possessions which they have securely laid
past, by freely giving them away, than grief in those which they
entirely lost by an anxious and selfish hoarding of them. For nothing
could perish on earth save what they would be ashamed to carry away
from earth. Our Lord's injunction runs, "Lay not up for yourselves
treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where
thieves break through and steal; but lay up for yourselves treasures
in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves
do not break through nor steal: for where your treasure is, there
will your heart be also." [58]And they who have listened to this
injunction have proved in the time of tribulation how well they were
advised in not despising this most trustworthy teacher, and most
faithful and mighty guardian of their treasure. For if many were glad
that their treasure was stored in places which the enemy chanced not
to light upon, how much better founded was the joy of those who, by
the counsel of their God, had fled with their treasure to a citadel
which no enemy can possibly reach! Thus our Paulinus, bishop of Nola,
[59] who voluntarily abandoned vast wealth and became quite poor,
though abundantly rich in holiness, when the barbarians sacked Nola,
and took him prisoner, used silently to pray, as he afterwards told
me, "O Lord, let me not be troubled for gold and silver, for where all
my treasure is Thou knowest." For all his treasure was where he had
been taught to hide and store it by Him who had also foretold that
these calamities would happen in the world. Consequently those
persons who obeyed their Lord when He warned them where and how to lay
up treasure, did not lose even their earthly possessions in the
invasion of the barbarians; while those who are now repenting that
they did not obey Him have learnt the right use of earthly goods, if
not by the wisdom which would have prevented their loss, at least by
the experience which follows it.
But some good and Christian men have been put to the torture, that
they might be forced to deliver up their goods to the enemy. They
could indeed neither deliver nor lose that good which made themselves
good. If, however, they preferred torture to the surrender of the
mammon of iniquity, then I say they were not good men. Rather they
should have been reminded that, if they suffered so severely for the
sake of money, they should endure all torment, if need be, for
Christ's sake; that they might be taught to love Him rather who
enriches with eternal felicity all who suffer for Him, and not silver
and gold, for which it was pitiable to suffer, whether they preserved
it by telling a lie or lost it by telling the truth. For under these
tortures no one lost Christ by confessing Him, no one preserved wealth
save by denying its existence. So that possibly the torture which
taught them that they should set their affections on a possession they
could not lose, was more useful than those possessions which, without
any useful fruit at all, disquieted and tormented their anxious
owners. But then we are reminded that some were tortured who had no
wealth to surrender, but who were not believed when they said so.
These too, however, had perhaps some craving for wealth, and were not
willingly poor with a holy resignation; and to such it had to be made
plain, that not the actual possession alone, but also the desire of
wealth, deserved such excruciating pains. And even if they were
destitute of any hidden stores of gold and silver, because they were
living in hopes of a better life,--I know not indeed if any such
person was tortured on the supposition that he had wealth; but if so,
then certainly in confessing, when put to the question, a holy
poverty, he confessed Christ. And though it was scarcely to be
expected that the barbarians should believe him, yet no confessor of a
holy poverty could be tortured without receiving a heavenly reward.
Again, they say that the long famine laid many a Christian low. But
this, too, the faithful turned to good uses by a pious endurance of
it. For those whom famine killed outright it rescued from the ills of
this life, as a kindly disease would have done; and those who were
only hunger-bitten were taught to live more sparingly, and inured to
longer fasts.
Footnotes
[53] Rom. viii. 28.
[54] 1 Pet. iii. 4.
[55] l Tim. vi. 6-10.
[56] Job i. 21.
[57] 1 Tim. vi. 17-19.
[58] Matt. vi. 19-21.
[59] Paulinus was a native of Bordeaux, and both by inheritance and
marriage acquired great wealth, which, after his conversion in his
thirty-sixth year, he distributed to the poor. He became bishop of
Nola in A.D. 409, being then in his fifty-sixth year. Nola was taken
by Alaric shortly after the sack of Rome.
Chapter 11.--Of the End of This Life, Whether It is Material that It
Be Long Delayed.
But, it is added, many Christians were slaughtered, and were put to
death in a hideous variety of cruel ways. Well, if this be hard to
bear, it is assuredly the common lot of all who are born into this
life. Of this at least I am certain, that no one has ever died who
was not destined to die some time. Now the end of life puts the
longest life on a par with the shortest. For of two things which have
alike ceased to be, the one is not better, the other worse--the one
greater, the other less. [60]And of what consequence is it what
kind of death puts an end to life, since he who has died once is not
forced to go through the same ordeal a second time? And as in the
daily casualties of life every man is, as it were, threatened with
numberless deaths, so long as it remains uncertain which of them is
his fate, I would ask whether it is not better to suffer one and die,
than to live in fear of all? I am not unaware of the poor-spirited
fear which prompts us to choose rather to live long in fear of so many
deaths, than to die once and so escape them all; but the weak and
cowardly shrinking of the flesh is one thing, and the well-considered
and reasonable persuasion of the soul quite another. That death is
not to be judged an evil which is the end of a good life; for death
becomes evil only by the retribution which follows it. They, then,
who are destined to die, need not be careful to inquire what death
they are to die, but into what place death will usher them. And since
Christians are well aware that the death of the godly pauper whose
sores the dogs licked was far better than of the wicked rich man who
lay in purple and fine linen, what harm could these terrific deaths do
to the dead who had lived well?
Footnotes
[60] Much of a kindred nature might be gathered from the Stoics.
Antoninus says (ii. 14): "Though thou shouldest be going to live 3000
years, and as many times 10,000 years, still remember that no man
loses any other life than this which he now lives, nor lives any other
than this which he now loses. The longest and the shortest are thus
brought to the same."
Chapter 12.--Of the Burial of the Dead: that the Denial of It to
Christians Does Them No Injury. [61]
Further still, we are reminded that in such a carnage as then
occurred, the bodies could not even be buried. But godly confidence
is not appalled by so ill-omened a circumstance; for the faithful bear
in mind that assurance has been given that not a hair of their head
shall perish, and that, therefore, though they even be devoured by
beasts, their blessed resurrection will not hereby be hindered. The
Truth would nowise have said, "Fear not them which kill the body, but
are not able to kill the soul," [62] if anything whatever that an
enemy could do to the body of the slain could be detrimental to the
future life. Or will some one perhaps take so absurd a position as to
contend that those who kill the body are not to be feared before
death, and lest they kill the body, but after death, lest they deprive
it of burial? If this be so, then that is false which Christ says,
"Be not afraid of them that kill the body, and after that have no more
that they can do;" [63] for it seems they can do great injury to the
dead body. Far be it from us to suppose that the Truth can be thus
false. They who kill the body are said "to do something," because the
deathblow is felt, the body still having sensation; but after that,
they have no more that they can do, for in the slain body there is no
sensation. And so there are indeed many bodies of Christians lying
unburied; but no one has separated them from heaven, nor from that
earth which is all filled with the presence of Him who knows whence He
will raise again what He created. It is said, indeed, in the Psalm:
"The dead bodies of Thy servants have they given to be meat unto the
fowls of the heaven, the flesh of Thy saints unto the beasts of the
earth. Their blood have they shed like water round about Jerusalem;
and there was none to bury them." [64]But this was said rather to
exhibit the cruelty of those who did these things, than the misery of
those who suffered them. To the eyes of men this appears a harsh and
doleful lot, yet "precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of
His saints." [65]Wherefore all these last offices and ceremonies
that concern the dead, the careful funeral arrangements, and the
equipment of the tomb, and the pomp of obsequies, are rather the
solace of the living than the comfort of the dead. If a costly burial
does any good to a wicked man, a squalid burial, or none at all, may
harm the godly. His crowd of domestics furnished the purple-clad
Dives with a funeral gorgeous in the eye of man; but in the sight of
God that was a more sumptuous funeral which the ulcerous pauper
received at the hands of the angels, who did not carry him out to a
marble tomb, but bore him aloft to Abraham's bosom.
The men against whom I have undertaken to defend the city of God laugh
at all this. But even their own philosophers [66] have despised a
careful burial; and often whole armies have fought and fallen for
their earthly country without caring to inquire whether they would be
left exposed on the field of battle, or become the food of wild
beasts. Of this noble disregard of sepulture poetry has well said:
"He who has no tomb has the sky for his vault." [67]How much less
ought they to insult over the unburied bodies of Christians, to whom
it has been promised that the flesh itself shall be restored, and the
body formed anew, all the members of it being gathered not only from
the earth, but from the most secret recesses of any other of the
elements in which the dead bodies of men have lain hid!
Footnotes
[61] Augustin expresses himself more fully on this subject in his
tract, De cura pro mortuis gerenda.
[62] Matt. x. 28.
[63] Luke xii. 4.
[64] Ps. lxxix. 2, 3.
[65] Ps. cxvi. 15.
[66] Diogenes especially, and his followers. See also Seneca, De
Tranq. c. 14, and Epist. 92; and in Cicero's Tusc. Disp. i. 43, the
answer of Theodorus, the Cyrenian philosopher, to Lysimachus, who
threatened him with the cross: "Threaten that to your courtiers; it
is of no consequence to Theodorus whether he rot in the earth or in
the air."
[67] Lucan, Pharsalia, vii. 819, of those whom Cæsar forbade to be
buried after the battle of Pharsalia.
Chapter 13.--Reasons for Burying the Bodies of the Saints.
Nevertheless the bodies of the dead are not on this account to be
despised and left unburied; least of all the bodies of the righteous
and faithful, which have been used by the Holy Spirit as His organs
and instruments for all good works. For if the dress of a father, or
his ring, or anything he wore, be precious to his children, in
proportion to the love they bore him, with how much more reason ought
we to care for the bodies of those we love, which they wore far more
closely and intimately than any clothing! For the body is not an
extraneous ornament or aid, but a part of man's very nature. And
therefore to the righteous of ancient times the last offices were
piously rendered, and sepulchres provided for them, and obsequies
celebrated; [68] and they themselves, while yet alive, gave
commandment to their sons about the burial, and, on occasion, even
about the removal of their bodies to some favorite place. [69]And
Tobit, according to the angel's testimony, is commended, and is said
to have pleased God by burying the dead. [70]Our Lord Himself, too,
though He was to rise again the third day, applauds, and commends to
our applause, the good work of the religious woman who poured precious
ointment over His limbs, and did it against His burial. [71]And the
Gospel speaks with commendation of those who were careful to take down
His body from the cross, and wrap it lovingly in costly cerements, and
see to its burial. [72]These instances certainly do not prove that
corpses have any feeling; but they show that God's providence extends
even to the bodies of the dead, and that such pious offices are
pleasing to Him, as cherishing faith in the resurrection. And we may
also draw from them this wholesome lesson, that if God does not forget
even any kind office which loving care pays to the unconscious dead,
much more does He reward the charity we exercise towards the living.
Other things, indeed, which the holy patriarchs said of the burial and
removal of their bodies, they meant to be taken in a prophetic sense;
but of these we need not here speak at large, what we have already
said being sufficient. But if the want of those things which are
necessary for the support of the living, as food and clothing, though
painful and trying, does not break down the fortitude and virtuous
endurance of good men, nor eradicate piety from their souls, but
rather renders it more fruitful, how much less can the absence of the
funeral, and of the other customary attentions paid to the dead,
render those wretched who are already reposing in the hidden abodes of
the blessed! Consequently, though in the sack of Rome and of other
towns the dead bodies of the Christians were deprived of these last
offices, this is neither the fault of the living, for they could not
render them; nor an infliction to the dead, for they cannot feel the
loss.
Footnotes
[68] Gen. xxv. 9, xxxv. 29, etc.
[69] Gen. xlvii. 29, l. 24.
[70] Tob. xii. 12.
[71] Matt. xxvi. 10-13.
[72] John xix. 38.
Chapter 14.--Of the Captivity of the Saints, and that Divine
Consolation Never Failed Them Therein.
But, say they, many Christians were even led away captive. This
indeed were a most pitiable fate, if they could be led away to any
place where they could not find their God. But for this calamity also
sacred Scripture affords great consolation. The three youths [73]
were captives; Daniel was a captive; so were other prophets: and God,
the comforter, did not fail them. And in like manner He has not
failed His own people in the power of a nation which, though
barbarous, is yet human,--He who did not abandon the prophet [74] in
the belly of a monster. These things, indeed, are turned to ridicule
rather than credited by those with whom we are debating; though they
believe what they read in their own books, that Arion of Methymna, the
famous lyrist, [75] when he was thrown overboard, was received on a
dolphin's back and carried to land. But that story of ours about the
prophet Jonah is far more incredible,--more incredible because more
marvellous, and more marvellous because a greater exhibition of power.
Footnotes
[73] Dan. iii.
[74] Jonah.
[75] "Second to none," as he is called by Herodotus, who first of all
tells his well-known story (Clio. 23, 24).
Chapter 15.--Of Regulus, in Whom We Have an Example of the Voluntary
Endurance of Captivity for the Sake of Religion; Which Yet Did Not
Profit Him, Though He Was a Worshipper of the Gods.
But among their own famous men they have a very noble example of the
voluntary endurance of captivity in obedience to a religious scruple.
Marcus Attilius Regulus, a Roman general, was a prisoner in the hands
of the Carthaginians. But they, being more anxious to exchange their
prisoners with the Romans than to keep them, sent Regulus as a special
envoy with their own embassadors to negotiate this exchange, but bound
him first with an oath, that if he failed to accomplish their wish, he
would return to Carthage. He went and persuaded the senate to the
opposite course, because he believed it was not for the advantage of
the Roman republic to make an exchange of prisoners. After he had
thus exerted his influence, the Romans did not compel him to return to
the enemy; but what he had sworn he voluntarily performed. But the
Carthaginians put him to death with refined, elaborate, and horrible
tortures. They shut him up in a narrow box, in which he was compelled
to stand, and in which finely sharpened nails were fixed all round
about him, so that he could not lean upon any part of it without
intense pain; and so they killed him by depriving him of sleep. [76]
With justice, indeed, do they applaud the virtue which rose superior
to so frightful a fate. However, the gods he swore by were those who
are now supposed to avenge the prohibition of their worship, by
inflicting these present calamities on the human race. But if these
gods, who were worshipped specially in this behalf, that they might
confer happiness in this life, either willed or permitted these
punishments to be inflicted on one who kept his oath to them, what
more cruel punishment could they in their anger have inflicted on a
perjured person? But why may I not draw from my reasoning a double
inference? Regulus certainly had such reverence for the gods, that
for his oath's sake he would neither remain in his own land nor go
elsewhere, but without hesitation returned to his bitterest enemies.
If he thought that this course would be advantageous with respect to
this present life, he was certainly much deceived, for it brought his
life to a frightful termination. By his own example, in fact, he
taught that the gods do not secure the temporal happiness of their
worshippers; since he himself, who was devoted to their worship, as
both conquered in battle and taken prisoner, and then, because he
refused to act in violation of the oath he had sworn by them, was
tortured and put to death by a new, and hitherto unheard of, and all
too horrible kind of punishment. And on the supposition that the
worshippers of the gods are rewarded by felicity in the life to come,
why, then, do they calumniate the influence of Christianity? why do
they assert that this disaster has overtaken the city because it has
ceased to worship its gods, since, worship them as assiduously as it
may, it may yet be as unfortunate as Regulus was? Or will some one
carry so wonderful a blindness to the extent of wildly attempting, in
the face of the evident truth, to contend that though one man might be
unfortunate, though a worshipper of the gods, yet a whole city could
not be so? That is to say, the power of their gods is better adapted
to preserve multitudes than individuals,--as if a multitude were not
composed of individuals.
But if they say that M. Regulus, even while a prisoner and enduring
these bodily torments, might yet enjoy the blessedness of a virtuous
soul, [77] then let them recognize that true virtue by which a city
also may be blessed. For the blessedness of a community and of an
individual flow from the same source; for a community is nothing else
than a harmonious collection of individuals. So that I am not
concerned meantime to discuss what kind of virtue Regulus possessed;
enough, that by his very noble example they are forced to own that the
gods are to be worshipped not for the sake of bodily comforts or
external advantages; for he preferred to lose all such things rather
than offend the gods by whom he had sworn. But what can we make of
men who glory in having such a citizen, but dread having a city like
him? If they do not dread this, then let them acknowledge that some
such calamity as befell Regulus may also befall a community, though
they be worshipping their gods as diligently as he; and let them no
longer throw the blame of their misfortunes on Christianity. But as
our present concern is with those Christians who were taken prisoners,
let those who take occasion from this calamity to revile our most
wholesome religion in a fashion not less imprudent than impudent,
consider this and hold their peace; for if it was no reproach to their
gods that a most punctilious worshipper of theirs should, for the sake
of keeping his oath to them, be deprived of his native land without
hope of finding another, and fall into the hands of his enemies, and
be put to death by a long-drawn and exquisite torture, much less ought
the Christian name to be charged with the captivity of those who
believe in its power, since they, in confident expectation of a
heavenly country, know that they are pilgrims even in their own homes.
Footnotes
[76] Augustin here uses the words of Cicero ("vigilando peremerunt"),
who refers to Regulus, in Pisonem. c 19. Aulus Gellius, quoting
Tubero and Tuditanus (vi. 4), adds some further particulars regarding
these tortures.
[77] As the Stoics generally would affirm.
Chapter 16.--Of the Violation of the Consecrated and Other Christian
Virgins, to Which They Were Subjected in Captivity and to Which Their
Own Will Gave No Consent; And Whether This Contaminated Their Souls.
But they fancy they bring a conclusive charge against Christianity,
when they aggravate the horror of captivity by adding that not only
wives and unmarried maidens, but even consecrated virgins, were
violated. But truly, with respect to this, it is not Christian faith,
nor piety, nor even the virtue of chastity, which is hemmed into any
difficulty; the only difficulty is so to treat the subject as to
satisfy at once modesty and reason. And in discussing it we shall not
be so careful to reply to our accusers as to comfort our friends. Let
this, therefore, in the first place, be laid down as an unassailable
position, that the virtue which makes the life good has its throne in
the soul, and thence rules the members of the body, which becomes holy
in virtue of the holiness of the will; and that while the will remains
firm and unshaken, nothing that another person does with the body, or
upon the body, is any fault of the person who suffers it, so long as
he cannot escape it without sin. But as not only pain may be
inflicted, but lust gratified on the body of another, whenever
anything of this latter kind takes place, shame invades even a
thoroughly pure spirit from which modesty has not departed,--shame,
lest that act which could not be suffered without some sensual
pleasure, should be believed to have been committed also with some
assent of the will.
Chapter 17.--Of Suicide Committed Through Fear of Punishment or
Dishonor.
And consequently, even if some of these virgins killed themselves to
avoid such disgrace, who that has any human feeling would refuse to
forgive them? And as for those who would not put an end to their
lives, lest they might seem to escape the crime of another by a sin of
their own, he who lays this to their charge as a great wickedness is
himself not guiltless of the fault of folly. For if it is not lawful
to take the law into our own hands, and slay even a guilty person,
whose death no public sentence has warranted, then certainly he who
kills himself is a homicide, and so much the guiltier of his own
death, as he was more innocent of that offence for which he doomed
himself to die. Do we justly execrate the deed of Judas, and does
truth itself pronounce that by hanging himself he rather aggravated
than expiated the guilt of that most iniquitous betrayal, since, by
despairing of God's mercy in his sorrow that wrought death, he left to
himself no place for a healing penitence? How much more ought he to
abstain from laying violent hands on himself who has done nothing
worthy of such a punishment! For Judas, when he killed himself,
killed a wicked man; but he passed from this life chargeable not only
with the death of Christ, but with his own: for though he killed
himself on account of his crime, his killing himself was another
crime. Why, then, should a man who has done no ill do ill to himself,
and by killing himself kill the innocent to escape another's guilty
act, and perpetrate upon himself a sin of his own, that the sin of
another may not be perpetrated on him?
Chapter 18.--Of the Violence Which May Be Done to the Body by
Another's Lust, While the Mind Remains Inviolate.
But is there a fear that even another's lust may pollute the
violated? It will not pollute, if it be another's: if it pollute, it
is not another's, but is shared also by the polluted. But since
purity is a virtue of the soul, and has for its companion virtue, the
fortitude which will rather endure all ills than consent to evil; and
since no one, however magnanimous and pure, has always the disposal of
his own body, but can control only the consent and refusal of his
will, what sane man can suppose that, if his body be seized and
forcibly made use of to satisfy the lust of another, he thereby loses
his purity? For if purity can be thus destroyed, then assuredly
purity is no virtue of the soul; nor can it be numbered among those
good things by which the life is made good, but among the good things
of the body, in the same category as strength, beauty, sound and
unbroken health, and, in short, all such good things as may be
diminished without at all diminishing the goodness and rectitude of
our life. But if purity be nothing better than these, why should the
body be perilled that it may be preserved? If, on the other hand, it
belongs to the soul, then not even when the body is violated is it
lost. Nay more, the virtue of holy continence, when it resists the
uncleanness of carnal lust, sanctifies even the body, and therefore
when this continence remains unsubdued, even the sanctity of the body
is preserved, because the will to use it holily remains, and, so far
as lies in the body itself, the power also.
For the sanctity of the body does not consist in the integrity of its
members, nor in their exemption from all touch; for they are exposed
to various accidents which do violence to and wound them, and the
surgeons who administer relief often perform operations that sicken
the spectator. A midwife, suppose, has (whether maliciously or
accidentally, or through unskillfulness) destroyed the virginity of
some girl, while endeavoring to ascertain it: I suppose no one is so
foolish as to believe that, by this destruction of the integrity of
one organ, the virgin has lost anything even of her bodily sanctity.
And thus, so long as the soul keeps this firmness of purpose which
sanctifies even the body, the violence done by another's lust makes no
impression on this bodily sanctity, which is preserved intact by one's
own persistent continence. Suppose a virgin violates the oath she has
sworn to God, and goes to meet her seducer with the intention of
yielding to him, shall we say that as she goes she is possessed even
of bodily sanctity, when already she has lost and destroyed that
sanctity of soul which sanctifies the body? Far be it from us to so
misapply words. Let us rather draw this conclusion, that while the
sanctity of the soul remains even when the body is violated, the
sanctity of the body is not lost; and that, in like manner, the
sanctity of the body is lost when the sanctity of the soul is
violated, though the body itself remains intact. And therefore a
woman who has been violated by the sin of another, and without any
consent of her own, has no cause to put herself to death; much less
has she cause to commit suicide in order to avoid such violation, for
in that case she commits certain homicide to prevent a crime which is
uncertain as yet, and not her own.
Chapter 19.--Of Lucretia, Who Put an End to Her Life Because of the
Outrage Done Her.
This, then, is our position, and it seems sufficiently lucid. We
maintain that when a woman is violated while her soul admits no
consent to the iniquity, but remains inviolably chaste, the sin is not
hers, but his who violates her. But do they against whom we have to
defend not only the souls, but the sacred bodies too of these outraged
Christian captives,--do they, perhaps, dare to dispute our position?
But all know how loudly they extol the purity of Lucretia, that noble
matron of ancient Rome. When King Tarquin's son had violated her
body, she made known the wickedness of this young profligate to her
husband Collatinus, and to Brutus her kinsman, men of high rank and
full of courage, and bound them by an oath to avenge it. Then,
heart-sick, and unable to bear the shame, she put an end to her life.
What shall we call her? An adulteress, or chaste? There is no
question which she was. Not more happily than truly did a declaimer
say of this sad occurrence: "Here was a marvel: there were two, and
only one committed adultery." Most forcibly and truly spoken. For
this declaimer, seeing in the union of the two bodies the foul lust of
the one, and the chaste will of the other, and giving heed not to the
contact of the bodily members, but to the wide diversity of their
souls, says: "There were two, but the adultery was committed only by
one."
But how is it, that she who was no partner to the crime bears the
heavier punishment of the two? For the adulterer was only banished
along with his father; she suffered the extreme penalty. If that was
not impurity by which she was unwillingly ravished, then this is not
justice by which she, being chaste, is punished. To you I appeal, ye
laws and judges of Rome. Even after the perpetration of great
enormities, you do not suffer the criminal to be slain untried. If,
then, one were to bring to your bar this case, and were to prove to
you that a woman not only untried, but chaste and innocent, had been
killed, would you not visit the murderer with punishment
proportionably severe? This crime was committed by Lucretia; that
Lucretia so celebrated and lauded slew the innocent, chaste, outraged
Lucretia. Pronounce sentence. But if you cannot, because there does
not appear any one whom you can punish, why do you extol with such
unmeasured laudation her who slew an innocent and chaste woman?
Assuredly you will find it impossible to defend her before the judges
of the realms below, if they be such as your poets are fond of
representing them; for she is among those
"Who guiltless sent themselves to doom,
And all for loathing of the day,
In madness threw their lives away."
And if she with the others wishes to return,
"Fate bars the way: around their keep
The slow unlovely waters creep,
And bind with ninefold chain." [78]
Or perhaps she is not there, because she slew herself conscious of
guilt, not of innocence? She herself alone knows her reason; but what
if she was betrayed by the pleasure of the act, and gave some consent
to Sextus, though so violently abusing her, and then was so affected
with remorse, that she thought death alone could expiate her sin?
Even though this were the case, she ought still to have held her hand
from suicide, if she could with her false gods have accomplished a
fruitful repentance. However, if such were the state of the case, and
if it were false that there were two, but one only committed adultery;
if the truth were that both were involved in it, one by open assault,
the other by secret consent, then she did not kill an innocent woman;
and therefore her erudite defenders may maintain that she is not among
that class of the dwellers below "who guiltless sent themselves to
doom." But this case of Lucretia is in such a dilemma, that if you
extenuate the homicide, you confirm the adultery: if you acquit her
of adultery, you make the charge of homicide heavier; and there is no
way out of the dilemma, when one asks, If she was adulterous, why
praise her? if chaste, why slay her?
Nevertheless, for our purpose of refuting those who are unable to
comprehend what true sanctity is, and who therefore insult over our
outraged Christian women, it is enough that in the instance of this
noble Roman matron it was said in her praise, "There were two, but the
adultery was the crime of only one." For Lucretia was confidently
believed to be superior to the contamination of any consenting thought
to the adultery. And accordingly, since she killed herself for being
subjected to an outrage in which she had no guilty part, it is obvious
that this act of hers was prompted not by the love of purity, but by
the overwhelming burden of her shame. She was ashamed that so foul a
crime had been perpetrated upon her, though without her abetting; and
this matron, with the Roman love of glory in her veins, was seized
with a proud dread that, if she continued to live, it would be
supposed she willingly did not resent the wrong that had been done
her. She could not exhibit to men her conscience but she judged that
her self-inflicted punishment would testify her state of mind; and she
burned with shame at the thought that her patient endurance of the
foul affront that another had done her, should be construed into
complicity with him. Not such was the decision of the Christian women
who suffered as she did, and yet survive. They declined to avenge
upon themselves the guilt of others, and so add crimes of their own to
those crimes in which they had no share. For this they would have
done had their shame driven them to homicide, as the lust of their
enemies had driven them to adultery. Within their own souls, in the
witness of their own conscience, they enjoy the glory of chastity. In
the sight of God, too, they are esteemed pure, and this contents them;
they ask no more: it suffices them to have opportunity of doing good,
and they decline to evade the distress of human suspicion, lest they
thereby deviate from the divine law.
Footnotes
[78] Virgil, Æneid, vi. 434.
Chapter 20.--That Christians Have No Authority for Committing Suicide
in Any Circumstances Whatever.
It is not without significance, that in no passage of the holy
canonical books there can be found either divine precept or permission
to take away our own life, whether for the sake of entering on the
enjoyment of immortality, or of shunning, or ridding ourselves of
anything whatever. Nay, the law, rightly interpreted, even prohibits
suicide, where it says, "Thou shalt not kill." This is proved
especially by the omission of the words "thy neighbor," which are
inserted when false witness is forbidden: "Thou shalt not bear false
witness against thy neighbor." Nor yet should any one on this account
suppose he has not broken this commandment if he has borne false
witness only against himself. For the love of our neighbor is
regulated by the love of ourselves, as it is written, "Thou shalt love
thy neighbor as thyself." If, then, he who makes false statements
about himself is not less guilty of bearing false witness than if he
had made them to the injury of his neighbor; although in the
commandment prohibiting false witness only his neighbor is mentioned,
and persons taking no pains to understand it might suppose that a man
was allowed to be a false witness to his own hurt; how much greater
reason have we to understand that a man may not kill himself, since in
the commandment, "Thou shalt not kill," there is no limitation added
nor any exception made in favor of any one, and least of all in favor
of him on whom the command is laid! And so some attempt to extend
this command even to beasts and cattle, as if it forbade us to take
life from any creature. But if so, why not extend it also to the
plants, and all that is rooted in and nourished by the earth? For
though this class of creatures have no sensation, yet they also are
said to live, and consequently they can die; and therefore, if
violence be done them, can be killed. So, too, the apostle, when
speaking of the seeds of such things as these, says, "That which thou
sowest is not quickened except it die;" and in the Psalm it is said,
"He killed their vines with hail." Must we therefore reckon it a
breaking of this commandment, "Thou shalt not kill," to pull a
flower? Are we thus insanely to countenance the foolish error of the
Manichæans? Putting aside, then, these ravings, if, when we say, Thou
shalt not kill, we do not understand this of the plants, since they
have no sensa tion, nor of the irrational animals that fly, swim,
walk, or creep, since they are dissociated from us by their want of
reason, and are therefore by the just appointment of the Creator
subjected to us to kill or keep alive for our own uses; if so, then it
remains that we understand that commandment simply of man. The
commandment is, "Thou shall not kill man;" therefore neither another
nor yourself, for he who kills himself still kills nothing else than
man.
Chapter 21.--Of the Cases in Which We May Put Men to Death Without
Incurring the Guilt of Murder.
However, there are some exceptions made by the divine authority to its
own law, that men may not be put to death. These exceptions are of
two kinds, being justified either by a general law, or by a special
commission granted for a time to some individual. And in this latter
case, he to whom authority is delegated, and who is but the sword in
the hand of him who uses it, is not himself responsible for the death
he deals. And, accordingly, they who have waged war in obedience to
the divine command, or in conformity with His laws, have represented
in their persons the public justice or the wisdom of government, and
in this capacity have put to death wicked men; such persons have by no
means violated the commandment, "Thou shalt not kill." Abraham indeed
was not merely deemed guiltless of cruelty, but was even applauded for
his piety, because he was ready to slay his son in obedience to God,
not to his own passion. And it is reasonably enough made a question,
whether we are to esteem it to have been in compliance with a command
of God that Jephthah killed his daughter, because she met him when he
had vowed that he would sacrifice to God whatever first met him as he
returned victorious from battle. Samson, too, who drew down the house
on himself and his foes together, is justified only on this ground,
that the Spirit who wrought wonders by him had given him secret
instructions to do this. With the exception, then, of these two
classes of cases, which are justified either by a just law that
applies generally, or by a special intimation from God Himself, the
fountain of all justice, whoever kills a man, either himself or
another, is implicated in the guilt of murder.
Chapter 22.--That Suicide Can Never Be Prompted by Magnanimity.
But they who have laid violent hands on themselves are perhaps to be
admired for their greatness of soul, though they cannot be applauded
for the soundness of their judgment. However, if you look at the
matter more closely, you will scarcely call it greatness of soul,
which prompts a man to kill himself rather than bear up against some
hardships of fortune, or sins in which he is not implicated. Is it
not rather proof of a feeble mind, to be unable to bear either the
pains of bodily servitude or the foolish opinion of the vulgar? And
is not that to be pronounced the greater mind, which rather faces than
flees the ills of life, and which, in comparison of the light and
purity of conscience, holds in small esteem the judgment of men, and
specially of the vulgar, which is frequently involved in a mist of
error? And, therefore, if suicide is to be esteemed a magnanimous
act, none can take higher rank for magnanimity than that Cleombrotus,
who (as the story goes), when he had read Plato's book in which he
treats of the immortality of the soul, threw himself from a wall, and
so passed from this life to that which he believed to be better. For
he was not hard pressed by calamity, nor by any accusation, false or
true, which he could not very well have lived down; there was, in
short, no motive but only magnanimity urging him to seek death, and
break away from the sweet detention of this life. And yet that this
was a magnanimous rather than a justifiable action, Plato himself,
whom he had read, would have told him; for he would certainly have
been forward to commit, or at least to recommend suicide, had not the
same bright intellect which saw that the soul was immortal, discerned
also that to seek immortality by suicide was to be prohibited rather
than encouraged.
Again, it is said many have killed themselves to prevent an enemy
doing so. But we are not inquiring whether it has been done, but
whether it ought to have been done. Sound judgment is to be preferred
even to examples, and indeed examples harmonize with the voice of
reason; but not all examples, but those only which are distinguished
by their piety, and are proportionately worthy of imitation. For
suicide we cannot cite the example of patriarchs, prophets, or
apostles; though our Lord Jesus Christ, when He admonished them to
flee from city to city if they were persecuted, might very well have
taken that occasion to advise them to lay violent hands on themselves,
and so escape their persecutors. But seeing He did not do this, nor
proposed this mode of departing this life, though He were addressing
His own friends for whom He had promised to prepare everlasting
mansions, it is obvious that such ex amples as are produced from the
"nations that forget God," give no warrant of imitation to the
worshippers of the one true God.
Chapter 23.--What We are to Think of the Example of Cato, Who Slew
Himself Because Unable to Endure Cæsar's Victory.
Besides Lucretia, of whom enough has already been said, our advocates
of suicide have some difficulty in finding any other prescriptive
example, unless it be that of Cato, who killed himself at Utica. His
example is appealed to, not because he was the only man who did so,
but because he was so esteemed as a learned and excellent man, that it
could plausibly be maintained that what he did was and is a good thing
to do. But of this action of his, what can I say but that his own
friends, enlightened men as he, prudently dissuaded him, and therefore
judged his act to be that of a feeble rather than a strong spirit, and
dictated not by honorable feeling forestalling shame, but by weakness
shrinking from hardships? Indeed, Cato condemns himself by the advice
he gave to his dearly loved son. For if it was a disgrace to live
under Cæsar's rule, why did the father urge the son to this disgrace,
by encouraging him to trust absolutely to Cæsar's generosity? Why did
he not persuade him to die along with himself? If Torquatus was
applauded for putting his son to death, when contrary to orders he had
engaged, and engaged successfully, with the enemy, why did conquered
Cato spare his conquered son, though he did not spare himself? Was it
more disgraceful to be a victor contrary to orders, than to submit to
a victor contrary to the received ideas of honor? Cato, then, cannot
have deemed it to be shameful to live under Cæsar's rule; for had he
done so, the father's sword would have delivered his son from this
disgrace. The truth is, that his son, whom he both hoped and desired
would be spared by Cæsar, was not more loved by him than Cæsar was
envied the glory of pardoning him (as indeed Cæsar himself is reported
to have said [79] ); or if envy is too strong a word, let us say he
was ashamed that this glory should be his.
Footnotes
[79] Plutarch's Life of Cato, 72.
Chapter 24.--That in that Virtue in Which Regulus Excels Cato,
Christians are Pre-Eminently Distinguished.
Our opponents are offended at our preferring to Cato the saintly Job,
who endured dreadful evils in his body rather than deliver himself
from all torment by self-inflicted death; or other saints, of whom it
is recorded in our authoritative and trustworthy books that they bore
captivity and the oppression of their enemies rather than commit
suicide. But their own books authorize us to prefer to Marcus Cato,
Marcus Regulus. For Cato had never conquered Cæsar; and when
conquered by him, disdained to submit himself to him, and that he
might escape this submission put himself to death. Regulus, on the
contrary, had formerly conquered the Carthaginians, and in command of
the army of Rome had won for the Roman republic a victory which no
citizen could bewail, and which the enemy himself was constrained to
admire; yet afterwards, when he in his turn was defeated by them, he
preferred to be their captive rather than to put himself beyond their
reach by suicide. Patient under the domination of the Carthaginians,
and constant in his love of the Romans, he neither deprived the one of
his conquered body, nor the other of his unconquered spirit. Neither
was it love of life that prevented him from killing himself. This was
plainly enough indicated by his unhesitatingly returning, on account
of his promise and oath, to the same enemies whom he had more
grievously provoked by his words in the senate than even by his arms
in battle. Having such a contempt of life, and preferring to end it
by whatever torments excited enemies might contrive, rather than
terminate it by his own hand, he could not more distinctly have
declared how great a crime he judged suicide to be. Among all their
famous and remarkable citizens, the Romans have no better man to boast
of than this, who was neither corrupted by prosperity, for he remained
a very poor man after winning such victories; nor broken by adversity,
for he returned intrepidly to the most miserable end. But if the
bravest and most renowned heroes, who had but an earthly country to
defend, and who, though they had but false gods, yet rendered them a
true worship, and carefully kept their oath to them; if these men, who
by the custom and right of war put conquered enemies to the sword, yet
shrank from putting an end to their own lives even when conquered by
their enemies; if, though they had no fear at all of death, they would
yet rather suffer slavery than commit suicide, how much rather must
Christians, the worshippers of the true God, the aspirants to a
heavenly citizenship, shrink from this act, if in God's providence
they have been for a season delivered into the hands of their enemies
to prove or to correct them! And certainly, Christians subjected to
this humiliating condition will not be deserted by the Most High, who
for their sakes humbled Himself. Neither should they forget that they
are bound by no laws of war, nor military orders, to put even a
conquered enemy to the sword; and if a man may not put to death the
enemy who has sinned, or may yet sin against him, who is so infatuated
as to maintain that he may kill himself because an enemy has sinned,
or is going to sin, against him?
Chapter 25.--That We Should Not Endeavor By Sin to Obviate Sin.
But, we are told, there is ground to fear that, when the body is
subjected to the enemy's lust, the insidious pleasure of sense may
entice the soul to consent to the sin, and steps must be taken to
prevent so disastrous a result. And is not suicide the proper mode of
preventing not only the enemy's sin, but the sin of the Christian so
allured? Now, in the first place, the soul which is led by God and
His wisdom, rather than by bodily concupiscence, will certainly never
consent to the desire aroused in its own flesh by another's lust.
And, at all events, if it be true, as the truth plainly declares, that
suicide is a detestable and damnable wickedness, who is such a fool as
to say, Let us sin now, that we may obviate a possible future sin; let
us now commit murder, lest we perhaps afterwards should commit
adultery? If we are so controlled by iniquity that innocence is out
of the question, and we can at best but make a choice of sins, is not
a future and uncertain adultery preferable to a present and certain
murder? Is it not better to commit a wickedness which penitence may
heal, than a crime which leaves no place for healing contrition? I
say this for the sake of those men or women who fear they may be
enticed into consenting to their violator's lust, and think they
should lay violent hands on themselves, and so prevent, not another's
sin, but their own. But far be it from the mind of a Christian
confiding in God, and resting in the hope of His aid; far be it, I
say, from such a mind to yield a shameful consent to pleasures of the
flesh, howsoever presented. And if that lustful disobedience, which
still dwells in our mortal members, follows its own law irrespective
of our will, surely its motions in the body of one who rebels against
them are as blameless as its motions in the body of one who sleeps.
Chapter 26.--That in Certain Peculiar Cases the Examples of the Saints
are Not to Be Followed.
But, they say, in the time of persecution some holy women escaped
those who menaced them with outrage, by casting themselves into rivers
which they knew would drown them; and having died in this manner, they
are venerated in the church catholic as martyrs. Of such persons I do
not presume to speak rashly. I cannot tell whether there may not have
been vouchsafed to the church some divine authority, proved by
trustworthy evidences, for so honoring their memory: it may be that
it is so. It may be they were not deceived by human judgment, but
prompted by divine wisdom, to their act of self-destruction. We know
that this was the case with Samson. And when God enjoins any act, and
intimates by plain evidence that He has enjoined it, who will call
obedience criminal? Who will accuse so religious a submission? But
then every man is not justified in sacrificing his son to God, because
Abraham was commendable in so doing. The soldier who has slain a man
in obedience to the authority under which he is lawfully commissioned,
is not accused of murder by any law of his state; nay, if he has not
slain him, it is then he is accused of treason to the state, and of
despising the law. But if he has been acting on his own authority,
and at his own impulse, he has in this case incurred the crime of
shedding human blood. And thus he is punished for doing without
orders the very thing he is punished for neglecting to do when he has
been ordered. If the commands of a general make so great a
difference, shall the commands of God make none? He, then, who knows
it is unlawful to kill himself, may nevertheless do so if he is
ordered by Him whose commands we may not neglect. Only let him be
very sure that the divine command has been signified. As for us, we
can become privy to the secrets of conscience only in so far as these
are disclosed to us, and so far only do we judge: "No one knoweth the
things of a man, save the spirit of man which is in him." [80]But
this we affirm, this we maintain, this we every way pronounce to be
right, that no man ought to inflict on himself voluntary death, for
this is to escape the ills of time by plunging into those of eternity;
that no man ought to do so on account of another man's sins, for this
were to escape a guilt which could not pollute him, by incurring great
guilt of his own; that no man ought to do so on account of his own
past sins, for he has all the more need of this life that these sins
may be healed by repentance; that no man should put an end to this
life to obtain that better life we look for after death, for those who
die by their own hand have no better life after death.
Footnotes
[80] 1 Cor. ii. 11.
Chapter 27.--Whether Voluntary Death Should Be Sought in Order to
Avoid Sin.
There remains one reason for suicide which I mentioned before, and
which is thought a sound one,--namely, to prevent one's falling into
sin either through the blandishments of pleasure or the violence of
pain. If this reason were a good one, then we should be impelled to
exhort men at once to destroy themselves, as soon as they have been
washed in the laver of regeneration, and have received the forgiveness
of all sin. Then is the time to escape all future sin, when all past
sin is blotted out. And if this escape be lawfully secured by
suicide, why not then specially? Why does any baptized person hold
his hand from taking his own life? Why does any person who is freed
from the hazards of this life again expose himself to them, when he
has power so easily to rid himself of them all, and when it is
written, "He who loveth danger shall fall into it?" [81]Why does he
love, or at least face, so many serious dangers, by remaining in this
life from which he may legitimately depart? But is any one so blinded
and twisted in his moral nature, and so far astray from the truth, as
to think that, though a man ought to make away with himself for fear
of being led into sin by the oppression of one man, his master, he
ought yet to live, and so expose himself to the hourly temptations of
this world, both to all those evils which the oppression of one master
involves, and to numberless other miseries in which this life
inevitably implicates us? What reason, then, is there for our
consuming time in those exhortations by which we seek to animate the
baptized, either to virginal chastity, or vidual continence, or
matrimonial fidelity, when we have so much more simple and compendious
a method of deliverance from sin, by persuading those who are fresh
from baptism to put an end to their lives, and so pass to their Lord
pure and well-conditioned? If any one thinks that such persuasion
should be attempted, I say not he is foolish, but mad. With what
face, then, can he say to any man, "Kill yourself, lest to your small
sins you add a heinous sin, while you live under an unchaste master,
whose conduct is that of a barbarian?" How can he say this, if he
cannot without wickedness say, "Kill yourself, now that you are washed
from all your sins, lest you fall again into similar or even
aggravated sins, while you live in a world which has such power to
allure by its unclean pleasures, to torment by its horrible cruelties,
to overcome by its errors and terrors?" It is wicked to say this; it
is therefore wicked to kill oneself. For if there could be any just
cause of suicide, this were so. And since not even this is so, there
is none.
Footnotes
[81] Ecclus. iii. 27.
Chapter 28.--By What Judgment of God the Enemy Was Permitted to
Indulge His Lust on the Bodies of Continent Christians.
Let not your life, then, be a burden to you, ye faithful servants of
Christ, though your chastity was made the sport of your enemies. You
have a grand and true consolation, if you maintain a good conscience,
and know that you did not consent to the sins of those who were
permitted to commit sinful outrage upon you. And if you should ask
why this permission was granted, indeed it is a deep providence of the
Creator and Governor of the world; and "unsearchable are His
judgments, and His ways past finding out." [82]Nevertheless,
faithfully interrogate your own souls, whether ye have not been unduly
puffed up by your integrity, and continence, and chastity; and whether
ye have not been so desirous of the human praise that is accorded to
these virtues, that ye have envied some who possessed them. I, for my
part, do not know your hearts, and therefore I make no accusation; I
do not even hear what your hearts answer when you question them. And
yet, if they answer that it is as I have supposed it might be, do not
marvel that you have lost that by which you can win men's praise, and
retain that which cannot be exhibited to men. If you did not consent
to sin, it was because God added His aid to His grace that it might
not be lost, and because shame before men succeeded to human glory
that it might not be loved. But in both respects even the
faint-hearted among you have a consolation, approved by the one
experience, chastened by the other; justified by the one, corrected by
the other. As to those whose hearts, when interrogated, reply that
they have never been proud of the virtue of virginity, widowhood, or
matrimonial chastity, but, condescending to those of low estate,
rejoiced with trembling in these gifts of God, and that they have
never envied any one the like excellences of sanctity and purity, but
rose superior to human applause, which is wont to be abundant in
proportion to the rarity of the virtue applauded, and rather desired
that their own number be increased, than that by the smallness of
their numbers each of them should be conspicuous;--even such faithful
women, I say, must not complain that permission was given to the
barbarians so grossly to outrage them; nor must they allow themselves
to believe that God overlooked their character when He permitted acts
which no one with impunity commits. For some most flagrant and wicked
desires are allowed free play at present by the secret judgment of
God, and are reserved to the public and final judgment. Moreover, it
is possible that those Christian women, who are unconscious of any
undue pride on account of their virtuous chastity, whereby they
sinlessly suffered the violence of their captors, had yet some lurking
infirmity which might have betrayed them into a proud and contemptuous
bearing, had they not been subjected to the humiliation that befell
them in the taking of the city. As, therefore, some men were removed
by death, that no wickedness might change their disposition, so these
women were outraged lest prosperity should corrupt their modesty.
Neither those women then, who were already puffed up by the
circumstance that they were still virgins, nor those who might have
been so puffed up had they not been exposed to the violence of the
enemy, lost their chastity, but rather gained humility; the former
were saved from pride already cherished, the latter from pride that
would shortly have grown upon them.
We must further notice that some of those sufferers may have conceived
that continence is a bodily good, and abides so long as the body is
inviolate, and did not understand that the purity both of the body and
the soul rests on the steadfastness of the will strengthened by God's
grace, and cannot be forcibly taken from an unwilling person. From
this error they are probably now delivered. For when they reflect how
conscientiously they served God, and when they settle again to the
firm persuasion that He can in nowise desert those who so serve Him,
and so invoke His aid and when they consider, what they cannot doubt,
how pleasing to Him is chastity, they are shut up to the conclusion
that He could never have permitted these disasters to befall His
saints, if by them that saintliness could be destroyed which He
Himself had bestowed upon them, and delights to see in them.
Footnotes
[82] Rom. xi. 33.
Chapter 29.--What the Servants of Christ Should Say in Reply to the
Unbelievers Who Cast in Their Teeth that Christ Did Not Rescue Them
from the Fury of Their Enemies.
The whole family of God, most high and most true, has therefore a
consolation of its own,--a consolation which cannot deceive, and which
has in it a surer hope than the tottering and falling affairs of earth
can afford. They will not refuse the discipline of this temporal
life, in which they are schooled for life eternal; nor will they
lament their experience of it, for the good things of earth they use
as pilgrims who are not detained by them, and its ills either prove or
improve them. As for those who insult over them in their trials, and
when ills befall them say, "Where is thy God?" [83] we may ask them
where their gods are when they suffer the very calamities for the sake
of avoiding which they worship their gods, or maintain they ought to
be worshipped; for the family of Christ is furnished with its reply:
our God is everywhere present, wholly everywhere; not confined to any
place. He can be present unperceived, and be absent without moving;
when He exposes us to adversities, it is either to prove our
perfections or correct our imperfections; and in return for our
patient endurance of the sufferings of time, He reserves for us an
everlasting reward. But who are you, that we should deign to speak
with you even about your own gods, much less about our God, who is "to
be feared above all gods? For all the gods of the nations are idols;
but the Lord made the heavens." [84]
Footnotes
[83] Ps. xlii. 10.
[84] Ps. xcvi. 4, 5.
Chapter 30.--That Those Who Complain of Christianity Really Desire to
Live Without Restraint in Shameful Luxury.
If the famous Scipio Nasica were now alive, who was once your pontiff,
and was unanimously chosen by the senate, when, in the panic created
by the Punic war, they sought for the best citizen to entertain the
Phrygian goddess, he would curb this shamelessness of yours, though
you would perhaps scarcely dare to look upon the countenance of such a
man. For why in your calamities do you complain of Christianity,
unless because you desire to enjoy your luxurious license
unrestrained, and to lead an abandoned and profligate life without the
interruption of any uneasiness or disaster? For certainly your desire
for peace, and prosperity, and plenty is not prompted by any purpose
of using these blessings honestly, that is to say, with moderation,
sobriety, temperance, and piety; for your purpose rather is to run
riot in an endless variety of sottish pleasures, and thus to generate
from your prosperity a moral pestilence which will prove a
thousandfold more disastrous than the fiercest enemies. It was such a
calamity as this that Scipio, your chief pontiff, your best man in the
judgment of the whole senate, feared when he refused to agree to the
destruction of Carthage, Rome's rival and opposed Cato, who advised
its destruction. He feared security, that enemy of weak minds, and he
perceived that a wholesome fear would be a fit guardian for the
citizens. And he was not mistaken; the event proved how wisely he had
spoken. For when Carthage was destroyed, and the Roman republic
delivered from its great cause of anxiety, a crowd of disastrous evils
forthwith resulted from the prosperous condition of things. First
concord was weakened, and destroyed by fierce and bloody seditions;
then followed, by a concatenation of baleful causes, civil wars, which
brought in their train such massacres, such bloodshed, such lawless
and cruel proscription and plunder, that those Romans who, in the days
of their virtue, had expected injury only at the hands of their
enemies, now that their virtue was lost, suffered greater cruelties at
the hands of their fellow-citizens. The lust of rule, which with
other vices existed among the Romans in more unmitigated intensity
than among any other people, after it had taken possession of the more
powerful few, subdued under its yoke the rest, worn and wearied.
Chapter 31.--By What Steps the Passion for Governing Increased Among
the Romans.
For at what stage would that passion rest when once it has lodged in a
proud spirit, until by a succession of advances it has reached even
the throne. And to obtain such advances nothing avails but
unscrupulous ambition. But unscrupulous ambition has nothing to work
upon, save in a nation corrupted by avarice and luxury. Moreover, a
people becomes avaricious and luxurious by prosperity; and it was this
which that very prudent man Nasica was endeavouring to avoid when he
opposed the destruction of the greatest, strongest, wealthiest city of
Rome's enemy. He thought that thus fear would act as a curb on lust,
and that lust being curbed would not run riot in luxury, and that
luxury being prevented avarice would be at an end; and that these
vices being banished, virtue would flourish and increase the great
profit of the state; and liberty, the fit companion of virtue, would
abide unfettered. For similar reasons, and animated by the same
considerate patriotism, that same chief pontiff of yours--I still
refer to him who was adjudged Rome's best man without one dissentient
voice--threw cold water on the proposal of the senate to build a
circle of seats round the theatre, and in a very weighty speech warned
them against allowing the luxurious manners of Greece to sap the Roman
manliness, and persuaded them not to yield to the enervating and
emasculating influence of foreign licentiousness. So authoritative
and forcible were his words, that the senate was moved to prohibit the
use even of those benches which hitherto had been customarily brought
to the theatre for the temporary use of the citizens. [85]How
eagerly would such a man as this have banished from Rome the scenic
exhibitions themselves, had he dared to oppose the authority of those
whom he supposed to be gods! For he did not know that they were
malicious devils; or if he did, he supposed they should rather be
propitiated than despised. For there had not yet been revealed to the
Gentiles the heavenly doctrine which should purify their hearts by
faith, and transform their natural disposition by humble godliness,
and turn them from the service of proud devils to seek the things that
are in heaven, or even above the heavens.
Footnotes
[85] Originally the spectators had to stand, and now (according to
Livy, Ep.. xlviii.) the old custom was restored.
Chapter 32.--Of the Establishment of Scenic Entertainments.
Know then, ye who are ignorant of this, and ye who feign ignorance be
reminded, while you murmur against Him who has freed you from such
rulers, that the scenic games, exhibitions of shameless folly and
license, were established at Rome, not by men's vicious cravings, but
by the appointment of your gods. Much more pardonably might you have
rendered divine honors to Scipio than to such gods as these. The gods
were not so moral as their pontiff. But give me now your attention,
if your mind, inebriated by its deep potations of error, can take in
any sober truth. The gods enjoined that games be exhibited in their
honor to stay a physical pestilence; their pontiff prohibited the
theatre from being constructed, to prevent a moral pestilence. If,
then, there remains in you sufficient mental enlightenment to prefer
the soul to the body, choose whom you will worship. Besides, though
the pestilence was stayed, this was not because the voluptuous madness
of stage-plays had taken possession of a warlike people hitherto
accustomed only to the games of the circus; but these astute and
wicked spirits, foreseeing that in due course the pestilence would
shortly cease, took occasion to infect, not the bodies, but the morals
of their worshippers, with a far more serious disease. And in this
pestilence these gods find great enjoyment, because it benighted the
minds of men with so gross a darkness and dishonored them with so foul
a deformity, that even quite recently (will posterity be able to
credit it?) some of those who fled from the sack of Rome and found
refuge in Carthage, were so infected with this disease, that day after
day they seemed to contend with one another who should most madly run
after the actors in the theatres.
Chapter 33.--That the Overthrow of Rome Has Not Corrected the Vices of
the Romans.
Oh infatuated men, what is this blindness, or rather madness, which
possesses you? How is it that while, as we hear, even the eastern
nations are bewailing your ruin, and while powerful states in the most
remote parts of the earth are mourning your fall as a public calamity,
ye yourselves should be crowding to the theatres, should be pouring
into them and filling them; and, in short, be playing a madder part
now than ever before? This was the foul plague-spot, this the wreck
of virtue and honor that Scipio sought to preserve you from when he
prohibited the construction of theatres; this was his reason for
desiring that you might still have an enemy to fear, seeing as he did
how easily prosperity would corrupt and destroy you. He did not
consider that republic flourishing whose walls stand, but whose morals
are in ruins. But the seductions of evil-minded devils had more
influence with you than the precautions of prudent men. Hence the
injuries you do, you will not permit to be imputed to you: but the
injuries you suffer, you impute to Christianity. Depraved by good
fortune, and not chastened by adversity, what you desire in the
restoration of a peaceful and secure state, is not the tranquillity of
the commonwealth, but the impunity of your own vicious luxury. Scipio
wished you to be hard pressed by an enemy, that you might not abandon
yourselves to luxurious manners; but so abandoned are you, that not
even when crushed by the enemy is your luxury repressed. You have
missed the profit of your calamity; you have been made most wretched,
and have remained most profligate.
Chapter 34.--Of God's Clemency in Moderating the Ruin of the City.
And that you are yet alive is due to God, who spares you that you may
be admonished to repent and reform your lives. It is He who has
permitted you, ungrateful as you are, to escape the sword of the
enemy, by calling yourselves His servants, or by finding asylum in the
sacred places of the martyrs.
It is said that Romulus and Remus, in order to increase the population
of the city they founded, opened a sanctuary in which every man might
find asylum and absolution of all crime,--a remarkable foreshadowing
of what has recently occurred in honor of Christ. The destroyers of
Rome followed the example of its founders. But it was not greatly to
their credit that the latter, for the sake of increasing the number of
their citizens, did that which the former have done, lest the number
of their enemies should be diminished.
Chapter 35.--Of the Sons of the Church Who are Hidden Among the
Wicked, and of False Christians Within the Church.
Let these and similar answers (if any fuller and fitter answers can be
found) be given to their enemies by the redeemed family of the Lord
Christ, and by the pilgrim city of King Christ. But let this city
bear in mind, that among her enemies lie hid those who are destined to
be fellow-citizens, that she may not think it a fruitless labor to
bear what they inflict as enemies until they become confessors of the
faith. So, too, as long as she is a stranger in the world, the city
of God has in her communion, and bound to her by the sacraments, some
who shall not eternally dwell in the lot of the saints. Of these,
some are not now recognized; others declare themselves, and do not
hesitate to make common cause with our enemies in murmuring against
God, whose sacramental badge they wear. These men you may to-day see
thronging the churches with us, to-morrow crowding the theatres with
the godless. But we have the less reason to despair of the
reclamation even of such persons, if among our most declared enemies
there are now some, unknown to themselves, who are destined to become
our friends. In truth, these two cities are entangled together in
this world, and intermixed until the last judgment effects their
separation. I now proceed to speak, as God shall help me, of the
rise, progress, and end of these two cities; and what I write, I write
for the glory of the city of God, that, being placed in comparison
with the other, it may shine with a brighter lustre.
Chapter 36.--What Subjects are to Be Handled in the Following
Discourse.
But I have still some things to say in confutation of those who refer
the disasters of the Roman republic to our religion, because it
prohibits the offering of sacrifices to the gods. For this end I must
recount all, or as many as may seem sufficient, of the disasters which
befell that city and its subject provinces, before these sacrifices
were prohibited; for all these disasters they would doubtless have
attributed to us, if at that time our religion had shed its light upon
them, and had prohibited their sacrifices. I must then go on to show
what social well-being the true God, in whose hand are all kingdoms,
vouchsafed to grant to them that their empire might increase. I must
show why He did so, and how their false gods, instead of at all aiding
them, greatly injured them by guile and deceit. And, lastly, I must
meet those who, when on this point convinced and confuted by
irrefragable proofs, endeavor to maintain that they worship the gods,
not hoping for the present advantages of this life, but for those
which are to be enjoyed after death. And this, if I am not mistaken,
will be the most difficult part of my task, and will be worthy of the
loftiest argument; for we must then enter the lists with the
philosophers, not the mere common herd of philosophers, but the most
renowned, who in many points agree with ourselves, as regarding the
immortality of the soul, and that the true God created the world, and
by His providence rules all He has created. But as they differ from
us on other points, we must not shrink from the task of exposing their
errors, that, having refuted the gainsaying of the wicked with such
ability as God may vouchsafe, we may assert the city of God, and true
piety, and the worship of God, to which alone the promise of true and
everlasting felicity is attached. Here, then, let us conclude, that
we may enter on these subjects in a fresh book.
.
Book II.
Argument--In this book Augustin reviews those calamities which the
Romans suffered before the time of Christ, and while the worship of
the false gods was universally practised; and demonstrates that, far
from being preserved from misfortune by the gods, the Romans have been
by them overwhelmed with the only, or at least the greatest, of all
calamities--the corruption of manners, and the vices of the soul.
Chapter 1.--Of the Limits Which Must Be Put to the Necessity of
Replying to an Adversary.
If the feeble mind of man did not presume to resist the clear evidence
of truth, but yielded its infirmity to wholesome doctrines, as to a
health-giving medicine, until it obtained from God, by its faith and
piety, the grace needed to heal it, they who have just ideas, and
express them in suitable language, would need to use no long discourse
to refute the errors of empty conjecture. But this mental infirmity
is now more prevalent and hurtful than ever, to such an extent that
even after the truth has been as fully demonstrated as man can prove
it to man, they hold for the very truth their own unreasonable
fancies, either on account of their great blindness, which prevents
them from seeing what is plainly set before them, or on account of
their opinionative obstinacy, which prevents them from acknowledging
the force of what they do see. There therefore frequently arises a
necessity of speaking more fully on those points which are already
clear, that we may, as it were, present them not to the eye, but even
to the touch, so that they may be felt even by those who close their
eyes against them. And yet to what end shall we ever bring our
discussions, or what bounds can be set to our discourse, if we proceed
on the principle that we must always reply to those who reply to us?
For those who are either unable to understand our arguments, or are so
hardened by the habit of contradiction, that though they understand
they cannot yield to them, reply to us, and, as it is written, "speak
hard things," [86] and are incorrigibly vain. Now, if we were to
propose to confute their objections as often as they with brazen face
chose to disregard our arguments, and so often as they could by any
means contradict our statements, you see how endless, and fruitless,
and painful a task we should be undertaking. And therefore I do not
wish my writings to be judged even by you, my son Marcellinus, nor by
any of those others at whose service this work of mine is freely and
in all Christian charity put, if at least you intend always to require
a reply to every exception which you hear taken to what you read in
it; for so you would become like those silly women of whom the apostle
says that they are "always learning, and never able to come to the
knowledge of the truth." [87]
Footnotes
[86] Ps. xciv. 4.
[87] 2 Tim. iii. 7.
Chapter 2.--Recapitulation of the Contents of the First Book.
In the foregoing book, having begun to speak of the city of God, to
which I have resolved, Heaven helping me, to consecrate the whole of
this work, it was my first endeavor to reply to those who attribute
the wars by which the world is being devastated, and especially the
recent sack of Rome by the barbarians, to the religion of Christ,
which prohibits the offering of abominable sacrifices to devils. I
have shown that they ought rather to attribute it to Christ, that for
His name's sake the barbarians, in contravention of all custom and law
of war, threw open as sanctuaries the largest churches, and in many
instances showed such reverence to Christ, that not only His genuine
servants, but even those who in their terror feigned themselves to be
so, were exempted from all those hardships which by the custom of war
may lawfully be inflicted. Then out of this there arose the question,
why wicked and ungrateful men were permitted to share in these
benefits; and why, too, the hardships and calamities of war were
inflicted on the godly as well as on the ungodly. And in giving a
suitably full answer to this large question, I occupied some
considerable space, partly that I might relieve the anxieties which
disturb many when they observe that the blessings of God, and the
common and daily human casualties, fall to the lot of bad men and good
without distinction; but mainly that I might minister some consolation
to those holy and chaste women who were outraged by the enemy, in such
a way as to shock their modesty, though not to sully their purity, and
that I might preserve them from being ashamed of life, though they
have no guilt to be ashamed of. And then I briefly spoke against
those who with a most shameless wantonness insult over those poor
Christians who were subjected to those calamities, and especially over
those broken-hearted and humiliated, though chaste and holy women;
these fellows themselves being most depraved and unmanly profligates,
quite degenerate from the genuine Romans, whose famous deeds are
abundantly recorded in history, and everywhere celebrated, but who
have found in their descendants the greatest enemies of their glory.
In truth, Rome, which was founded and increased by the labors of these
ancient heroes, was more shamefully ruined by their descendants, while
its walls were still standing, than it is now by the razing of them.
For in this ruin there fell stones and timbers; but in the ruin those
profligates effected, there fell, not the mural, but the moral
bulwarks and ornaments of the city, and their hearts burned with
passions more destructive than the flames which consumed their
houses. Thus I brought my first book to a close. And now I go on to
speak of those calamities which that city itself, or its subject
provinces, have suffered since its foundation; all of which they would
equally have attributed to the Christian religion, if at that early
period the doctrine of the gospel against their false and deceiving
gods had been as largely and freely proclaimed as now.
Chapter 3.--That We Need Only to Read History in Order to See What
Calamities the Romans Suffered Before the Religion of Christ Began to
Compete with the Worship of the Gods.
But remember that, in recounting these things, I have still to address
myself to ignorant men; so ignorant, indeed, as to give birth to the
common saying, "Drought and Christianity go hand in hand." [88]
There are indeed some among them who are thoroughly well-educated men,
and have a taste for history, in which the things I speak of are open
to their observation; but in order to irritate the uneducated masses
against us, they feign ignorance of these events, and do what they can
to make the vulgar believe that those disasters, which in certain
places and at certain times uniformly befall mankind, are the result
of Christianity, which is being everywhere diffused, and is possessed
of a renown and brilliancy which quite eclipse their own gods. [89]
Let them then, along with us, call to mind with what various and
repeated disasters the prosperity of Rome was blighted, before ever
Christ had come in the flesh, and before His name had been blazoned
among the nations with that glory which they vainly grudge. Let them,
if they can, defend their gods in this article, since they maintain
that they worship them in order to be preserved from these disasters,
which they now impute to us if they suffer in the least degree. For
why did these gods permit the disasters I am to speak of to fall on
their worshippers before the preaching of Christ's name offended them,
and put an end to their sacrifices?
Footnotes
[88] Pluvia defit, causa Christiani. Similar accusations and similar
replies may be seen in the celebrated passage of Tertullian's Apol. c.
40, and in the eloquent exordium of Arnobius, C. Gentes.
[89] Augustin is supposed to refer to Symmachus, who similarly accused
the Christians in his address to the Emperor Valentinianus in the year
384. At Augustin's request, Paulus Orosius wrote his history in
confutation of Symmachus' charges.
Chapter 4.--That the Worshippers of the Gods Never Received from Them
Any Healthy Moral Precepts, and that in Celebrating Their Worship All
Sorts of Impurities Were Practiced.
First of all, we would ask why their gods took no steps to improve the
morals of their worshippers. That the true God should neglect those
who did not seek His help, that was but justice; but why did those
gods, from whose worship ungrateful men are now complaining that they
are prohibited, issue no laws which might have guided their devotees
to a virtuous life? Surely it was but just, that such care as men
showed to the worship of the gods, the gods on their part should have
to the conduct of men. But, it is replied, it is by his own will a
man goes astray. Who denies it? But none the less was it incumbent
on these gods, who were men's guardians, to publish in plain terms the
laws of a good life, and not to conceal them from their worshippers.
It was their part to send prophets to reach and convict such as broke
these laws, and publicly to proclaim the punishments which await
evil-doers, and the rewards which may be looked for by those that do
well. Did ever the walls of any of their temples echo to any such
warning voice? I myself, when I was a young man, used sometimes to go
to the sacrilegious entertainments and spectacles; I saw the priests
raving in religious excitement, and heard the choristers; I took
pleasure in the shameful games which were celebrated in honor of gods
and goddesses, of the virgin Coelestis, [90] and Berecynthia, [91] the
mother of all the gods. And on the holy day consecrated to her
purification, there were sung before her couch productions so obscene
and filthy for the ear--I do not say of the mother of the gods, but of
the mother of any senator or honest man--nay, so impure, that not even
the mother of the foul-mouthed players themselves could have formed
one of the audience. For natural reverence for parents is a bond
which the most abandoned cannot ignore. And, accordingly, the lewd
actions and filthy words with which these players honored the mother
of the gods, in presence of a vast assemblage and audience of both
sexes, they could not for very shame have rehearsed at home in
presence of their own mothers. And the crowds that were gathered from
all quarters by curiosity, offended modesty must, I should suppose,
have scattered in the confusion of shame. If these are sacred rites,
what is sacrilege? If this is purification, what is pollution? This
festivity was called the Tables, [92] as if a banquet were being given
at which unclean devils might find suitable refreshment. For it is
not difficult to see what kind of spirits they must be who are
delighted with such obscenities, unless, indeed, a man be blinded by
these evil spirits passing themselves off under the name of gods, and
either disbelieves in their existence, or leads such a life as prompts
him rather to propitiate and fear them than the true God.
Footnotes
[90] Tertullian (Apol. c. 24) mentions Coelestis as specially
worshipped in Africa. Augustin mentions her again in the 26th chapter
of this book, and in other parts of his works.
[91] Berecynthia is one of the many names of Rhea or Cybele. Livy
(xxix. 11) relates that the image of Cybele was brought to Rome the
day before the ides of April, which was accordingly dedicated as her
feast-day. The image, it seems, had to be washed in the stream Almon,
a tributary of the Tiber, before being placed in the temple of
Victory; and each year, as the festival returned, the washing was
repeated with much pomp at the same spot. Hence Lucan's line (i.
600), Et lotam parvo revocant Almone Cybelen, and the elegant verses
of Ovid. Fast. iv. 337 et seq.
[92] Fercula, dishes or courses.
Chapter 5.--Of the Obscenities Practiced in Honor of the Mother of the
Gods.
In this matter I would prefer to have as my assessors in judgment, not
those men who rather take pleasure in these infamous customs than take
pains to put an end to them, but that same Scipio Nasica who was
chosen by the senate as the citizen most worthy to receive in his
hands the image of that demon Cybele, and convey it into the city. He
would tell us whether he would be proud to see his own mother so
highly esteemed by the state as to have divine honors adjudged to her;
as the Greeks and Romans and other nations have decreed divine honors
to men who had been of material service to them, and have believed
that their mortal benefactors were thus made immortal, and enrolled
among the gods. [93]Surely he would desire that his mother should
enjoy such felicity were it possible. But if we proceeded to ask him
whether, among the honors paid to her, he would wish such shameful
rites as these to be celebrated, would he not at once exclaim that he
would rather his mother lay stone-dead, than survive as a goddess to
lend her ear to these obscenities? Is it possible that he who was of
so severe a morality, that he used his influence as a Roman senator to
prevent the building of a theatre in that city dedicated to the manly
virtues, would wish his mother to be propitiated as a goddess with
words which would have brought the blush to her cheek when a Roman
matron? Could he possibly believe that the modesty of an estimable
woman would be so transformed by her promotion to divinity, that she
would suffer herself to be invoked and celebrated in terms so gross
and immodest, that if she had heard the like while alive upon earth,
and had listened without stopping her ears and hurrying from the spot,
her relatives, her husband, and her children would have blushed for
her? Therefore, the mother of the gods being such a character as the
most profligate man would be ashamed to have for his mother, and
meaning to enthral the minds of the Romans, demanded for her service
their best citizen, not to ripen him still more in virtue by her
helpful counsel, but to entangle him by her deceit, like her of whom
it is written, "The adulteress will hunt for the precious soul." [94]
Her intent was to puff up this high- souled man by an apparently
divine testimony to his excellence, in order that he might rely upon
his own eminence in virtue, and make no further efforts after true
piety and religion, without which natural genius, however brilliant,
vapors into pride and comes to nothing. For what but a guileful
purpose could that goddess demand the best man seeing that in her own
sacred festivals she requires such obscenities as the best men would
be covered with shame to hear at their own tables?
Footnotes
[93] See Cicero, De Nat. Deor, ii. 24.
[94] Prov. vi. 26.
Chapter 6.--That the Gods of the Pagans Never Inculcated Holiness of
Life.
This is the reason why those divinities quite neglected the lives and
morals of the cities and nations who worshipped them, and threw no
dreadful prohibition in their way to hinder them from becoming utterly
corrupt, and to preserve them from those terrible and detestable evils
which visit not harvests and vintages, not house and possessions, not
the body which is subject to the soul, but the soul itself, the spirit
that rules the whole man. If there was any such prohibition, let it
be produced, let it be proved. They will tell us that purity and
probity were inculcated upon those who were initiated in the mysteries
of religion, and that secret incitements to virtue were whispered in
the ear of the élite; but this is an idle boast. Let them show or
name to us the places which were at any time consecrated to
assemblages in which, instead of the obscene songs and licentious
acting of players, instead of the celebration of those most filthy and
shameless Fugalia [95] (well called Fugalia, since they banish modesty
and right feeling), the people were commanded in the name of the gods
to restrain avarice, bridle impurity, and conquer ambition; where, in
short, they might learn in that school which Persius vehemently lashes
them to, when he says: "Be taught, ye abandoned creatures, and
ascertain the causes of things; what we are, and for what end we are
born; what is the law of our success in life; and by what art we may
turn the goal without making shipwreck; what limit we should put to
our wealth, what we may lawfully desire, and what uses filthy lucre
serves; how much we should bestow upon our country and our family;
learn, in short, what God meant thee to be, and what place He has
ordered you to fill." [96]Let them name to us the places where such
instructions were wont to be communicated from the gods, and where the
people who worshipped them were accustomed to resort to hear them, as
we can point to our churches built for this purpose in every land
where the Christian religion is received.
Footnotes
[95] Fugalia. Vives is uncertain to what feast Augustin refers.
Censorinus understands him to refer to a feast celebrating the
expulsion of the kings from Rome. This feast, however (celebrated on
the 24th of February), was commonly called Regifugium.
[96] Persius, Sat. iii. 66-72.
Chapter 7.--That the Suggestions of Philosophers are Precluded from
Having Any Moral Effect, Because They Have Not the Authority Which
Belongs to Divine Instruction, and Because Man's Natural Bias to Evil
Induces Him Rather to Follow the Examples of the Gods Than to Obey the
Precepts of Men.
But will they perhaps remind us of the schools of the philosophers,
and their disputations? In the first place, these belong not to Rome,
but to Greece; and even if we yield to them that they are now Roman,
because Greece itself has become a Roman province, still the teachings
of the philosophers are not the commandments of the gods, but the
discoveries of men, who, at the prompting of their own speculative
ability, made efforts to discover the hidden laws of nature, and the
right and wrong in ethics, and in dialectic what was consequent
according to the rules of logic, and what was inconsequent and
erroneous. And some of them, by God's help, made great discoveries;
but when left to themselves they were betrayed by human infirmity, and
fell into mistakes. And this was ordered by divine providence, that
their pride might be restrained, and that by their example it might be
pointed out that it is humility which has access to the highest
regions. But of this we shall have more to say, if the Lord God of
truth permit, in its own place. [97]However, if the philosophers
have made any discoveries which are sufficient to guide men to virtue
and blessedness, would it not have been greater justice to vote divine
honors to them? Were it not more accordant with every virtuous
sentiment to read Plato's writings in a "Temple of Plato," than to be
present in the temples of devils to witness the priests of Cybele [98]
mutilating themselves, the effeminate being consecrated, the raving
fanatics cutting themselves, and whatever other cruel or shameful, or
shamefully cruel or cruelly shameful, ceremony is enjoined by the
ritual of such gods as these? Were it not a more suitable education,
and more likely to prompt the youth to virtue, if they heard public
recitals of the laws of the gods, instead of the vain laudation of the
customs and laws of their ancestors? Certainly all the worshippers of
the Roman gods, when once they are possessed by what Persius calls
"the burning poison of lust," [99] prefer to witness the deeds of
Jupiter rather than to hear what Plato taught or Cato censured. Hence
the young profligate in Terence, when he sees on the wall a fresco
representing the fabled descent of Jupiter into the lap of Danaë in
the form of a golden shower, accepts this as authoritative precedent
for his own licentiousness, and boasts that he is an imitator of God.
"And what God?" he says. "He who with His thunder shakes the loftiest
temples. And was I, a poor creature compared to Him, to make bones of
it? No; I did it, and with all my heart." [100]
Footnotes
[97] See below, books viii.-xii.
[98] "Galli," the castrated priests of Cybele, who were named after
the river Gallus, in Phrygia, the water of which was supposed to
intoxicate or madden those who drank it. According to Vitruvius
(viii. 3), there was a similar fountain in Paphlagonia. Apuleius
(Golden Ass, viii.) gives a graphic and humorous description of the
dress, dancing and imposture of these priests; mentioning, among other
things, that they lashed themselves with whips and cut themselves with
knives till the ground was wet with blood.
[99] Persius, Sat. iii. 37.
[100] Ter. Eun. iii. 5. 36; and cf. the similar allusion in Aristoph.
Clouds, 1033-4. It may be added that the argument of this chapter was
largely used by the wiser of the heathen themselves. Dionysius Hal.
(ii. 20) and Seneca (De Brev Vit. c. xvi.) make the very same
complaint; and it will be remembered that his adoption of this
reasoning was one of the grounds on which Euripides was suspected of
atheism.
Chapter 8.--That the Theatrical Exhibitions Publishing the Shameful
Actions of the Gods, Propitiated Rather Than Offended Them.
But, some one will interpose, these are the fables of poets, not the
deliverances of the gods themselves. Well, I have no mind to
arbitrate between the lewdness of theatrical entertainments and of
mystic rites; only this I say, and history bears me out in making the
assertion, that those same entertainments, in which the fictions of
poets are the main attraction, were not introduced in the festivals of
the gods by the ignorant devotion of the Romans, but that the gods
themselves gave the most urgent commands to this effect, and indeed
extorted from the Romans these solemnities and celebrations in their
honor. I touched on this in the preceding book, and mentioned that
dramatic entertainments were first inaugurated at Rome on occasion of
a pestilence, and by authority of the pontiff. And what man is there
who is not more likely to adopt, for the regulation of his own life,
the examples that are represented in plays which have a divine
sanction, rather than the precepts written and promulgated with no
more than human authority? If the poets gave a false representation
of Jove in describing him as adulterous, then it were to be expected
that the chaste gods should in anger avenge so wicked a fiction, in
place of encouraging the games which circulated it. Of these plays,
the most inoffensive are comedies and tragedies, that is to say, the
dramas which poets write for the stage, and which, though they often
handle impure subjects, yet do so without the filthiness of language
which characterizes many other performances; and it is these dramas
which boys are obliged by their seniors to read and learn as a part of
what is called a liberal and gentlemanly education. [101]
Footnotes
[101] This sentence recalls Augustin's own experience as a boy, which
he bewails in his Confessions.
Chapter 9.--That the Poetical License Which the Greeks, in Obedience
to Their Gods, Allowed, Was Restrained by the Ancient Romans.
The opinion of the ancient Romans on this matter is attested by Cicero
in his work De Republica, in which Scipio, one of the interlocutors,
says, "The lewdness of comedy could never have been suffered by
audiences, unless the customs of society had previously sanctioned the
same lewdness." And in the earlier days the Greeks preserved a
certain reasonableness in their license, and made it a law, that
whatever comedy wished to say of any one, it must say it of him by
name. And so in the same work of Cicero's, Scipio says, "Whom has it
not aspersed? Nay, whom has it not worried? Whom has it spared?
Allow that it may assail demagogues and factions, men injurious to the
commonwealth--a Cleon, a Cleophon, a Hyperbolus. That is tolerable,
though it had been more seemly for the public censor to brand such
men, than for a poet to lampoon them; but to blacken the fame of
Pericles with scurrilous verse, after he had with the utmost dignity
presided over their state alike in war and in peace, was as unworthy
of a poet, as if our own Plautus or Nævius were to bring Publius and
Cneius Scipio on the comic stage, or as if Cæcilius were to caricature
Cato." And then a little after he goes on: "Though our Twelve Tables
attached the penalty of death only to a very few offences, yet among
these few this was one: if any man should have sung a pasquinade, or
have composed a satire calculated to bring infamy or disgrace on
another person. Wisely decreed. For it is by the decisions of
magistrates, and by a well-informed justice, that our lives ought to
be judged, and not by the flighty fancies of poets; neither ought we
to be exposed to hear calumnies, save where we have the liberty of
replying, and defending ourselves before an adequate tribunal." This
much I have judged it advisable to quote from the fourth book of
Cicero's De Republica; and I have made the quotation word for word,
with the exception of some words omitted, and some slightly
transposed, for the sake of giving the sense more readily. And
certainly the extract is pertinent to the matter I am endeavoring to
explain. Cicero makes some further remarks, and concludes the passage
by showing that the ancient Romans did not permit any living man to be
either praised or blamed on the stage. But the Greeks, as I said,
though not so moral, were more logical in allowing this license which
the Romans forbade; for they saw that their gods approved and enjoyed
the scurrilous language of low comedy when directed not only against
men, but even against themselves; and this, whether the infamous
actions imputed to them were the fictions of poets, or were their
actual iniquities commemorated and acted in the theatres. And would
that the spectators had judged them worthy only of laughter, and not
of imitation! Manifestly it had been a stretch of pride to spare the
good name of the leading men and the common citizens, when the very
deities did not grudge that their own reputation should be blemished.
Chapter 10.--That the Devils, in Suffering Either False or True Crimes
to Be Laid to Their Charge, Meant to Do Men a Mischief.
It is alleged, in excuse of this practice, that the stories told of
the gods are not true, but false, and mere inventions, but this only
makes matters worse, if we form our estimate by the morality our
religion teaches; and if we consider the malice of the devils, what
more wily and astute artifice could they practise upon men? When a
slander is uttered against a leading statesman of upright and useful
life, is it not reprehensible in proportion to its untruth and
groundlessness? What punishment, then, shall be sufficient when the
gods are the objects of so wicked and outrageous an injustice? But
the devils, whom these men repute gods, are content that even
iniquities they are guiltless of should be ascribed to them, so long
as they may entangle men's minds in the meshes of these opinions, and
draw them on along with themselves to their predestinated punishment:
whether such things were actually committed by the men whom these
devils, delighting in human infatuation, cause to be worshipped as
gods, and in whose stead they, by a thousand malign and deceitful
artifices, substitute themselves, and so receive worship; or whether,
though they were really the crimes of men, these wicked spirits gladly
allowed them to be attributed to higher beings, that there might seem
to be conveyed from heaven itself a sufficient sanction for the
perpetration of shameful wickedness. The Greeks, therefore, seeing
the character of the gods they served, thought that the poets should
certainly not refrain from showing up human vices on the stage, either
because they desired to be like their gods in this, or because they
were afraid that, if they required for themselves a more unblemished
reputation than they asserted for the gods, they might provoke them to
anger.
Chapter 11.--That the Greeks Admitted Players to Offices of State, on
the Ground that Men Who Pleased the Gods Should Not Be Contemptuously
Treated by Their Fellows.
It was a part of this same reasonableness of the Greeks which induced
them to bestow upon the actors of these same plays no inconsiderable
civic honors. In the above-mentioned book of the De Republica, it is
mentioned that Aeschines, a very eloquent Athenian, who had been a
tragic actor in his youth, became a statesman, and that the Athenians
again and again sent another tragedian, Aristodemus, as their
plenipotentiary to Philip. For they judged it unbecoming to condemn
and treat as infamous persons those who were the chief actors in the
scenic entertainments which they saw to be so pleasing to the gods.
No doubt this was immoral of the Greeks, but there can be as little
doubt they acted in conformity with the character of their gods; for
how could they have presumed to protect the conduct of the citizens
from being cut to pieces by the tongues of poets and players, who were
allowed, and even enjoined by the gods, to tear their divine
reputation to tatters? And how could they hold in contempt the men
who acted in the theatres those dramas which, as they had ascertained,
gave pleasure to the gods whom they worshipped? Nay, how could they
but grant to them the highest civic honors? On what plea could they
honor the priests who offered for them acceptable sacrifices to the
gods, if they branded with infamy the actors who in behalf of the
people gave to the gods that pleasure or honour which they demanded,
and which, according to the account of the priests, they were angry at
not receiving. Labeo, [102] whose learning makes him an authority on
such points, is of opinion that the distinction between good and evil
deities should find expression in a difference of worship; that the
evil should be propitiated by bloody sacrifices and doleful rites, but
the good with a joyful and pleasant observance, as, e.g. (as he says
himself), with plays, festivals, and banquets. [103]All this we
shall, with God's help, hereafter discuss. At present, and speaking
to the subject on hand, whether all kinds of offerings are made
indiscriminately to all the gods, as if all were good (and it is an
unseemly thing to conceive that there are evil gods; but these gods of
the pagans are all evil, because they are not gods, but evil spirits),
or whether, as Labeo thinks, a distinction is made between the
offerings presented to the different gods the Greeks are equally
justified in honoring alike the priests by whom the sacrifices are
offered, and the players by whom the dramas are acted, that they may
not be open to the charge of doing an injury to all their gods, if the
plays are pleasing to all of them, or (which were still worse) to
their good gods, if the plays are relished only by them.
Footnotes
[102] Labeo, a jurist of the time of Augustus, learned in law and
antiquities, and the author of several works much prized by his own
and some succeeding ages. The two articles in Smith's Dictionary on
Antistius and Cornelius Labeo should be read.
[103] Lectisternia, feasts in which the images of the gods were laid
on pillows in the streets, and all kinds of food set before them.
Chapter 12.--That the Romans, by Refusing to the Poets the Same
License in Respect of Men Which They Allowed Them in the Case of the
Gods, Showed a More Delicate Sensitiveness Regarding Themselves than
Regarding the Gods.
The Romans, however, as Scipio boasts in that same discussion,
declined having their conduct and good name subjected to the assaults
and slanders of the poets, and went so far as to make it a capital
crime if any one should dare to compose such verses. This was a very
honorable course to pursue, so far as they themselves were concerned,
but in respect of the gods it was proud and irreligious: for they
knew that the gods not only tolerated, but relished, being lashed by
the injurious expressions of the poets, and yet they themselves would
not suffer this same handling; and what their ritual prescribed as
acceptable to the gods, their law prohibited as injurious to
themselves. How then, Scipio, do you praise the Romans for refusing
this license to the poets, so that no citizen could be calumniated,
while you know that the gods were not included under this protection?
Do you count your senate-house worthy of so much higher a regard than
the Capitol? Is the one city of Rome more valuable in your eyes than
the whole heaven of gods, that you prohibit your poets from uttering
any injurious words against a citizen, though they may with impunity
cast what imputations they please upon the gods, without the
interference of senator, censor, prince, or pontiff? It was,
forsooth, intolerable that Plautus or Nævus should attack Publius and
Cneius Scipio, insufferable that Cæcilius should lampoon Cato; but
quite proper that your Terence should encourage youthful lust by the
wicked example of supreme Jove.
Chapter 13.--That the Romans Should Have Understood that Gods Who
Desired to Be Worshipped in Licentious Entertainments Were Unworthy of
Divine Honor.
But Scipio, were he alive, would possibly reply: "How could we attach
a penalty to that which the gods themselves have consecrated? For the
theatrical entertainments in which such things are said, and acted,
and performed, were introduced into Roman society by the gods, who
ordered that they should be dedicated and exhibited in their honor."
But was not this, then, the plainest proof that they were no true
gods, nor in any respect worthy of receiving divine honours from the
republic? Suppose they had required that in their honor the citizens
of Rome should be held up to ridicule, every Roman would have resented
the hateful proposal. How then, I would ask, can they be esteemed
worthy of worship, when they propose that their own crimes be used as
material for celebrating their praises? Does not this artifice expose
them, and prove that they are detestable devils? Thus the Romans,
though they were superstitious enough to serve as gods those who made
no secret of their desire to be worshipped in licentious plays, yet
had sufficient regard to their hereditary dignity and virtue, to
prompt them to refuse to players any such rewards as the Greeks
accorded them. On this point we have this testimony of Scipio,
recorded in Cicero: "They [the Romans] considered comedy and all
theatrical performances as disgraceful, and therefore not only
debarred players from offices and honors open to ordinary citizens,
but also decreed that their names should be branded by the censor, and
erased from the roll of their tribe." An excellent decree, and
another testimony to the sagacity of Rome; but I could wish their
prudence had been more thorough-going and consistent. For when I hear
that if any Roman citizen chose the stage as his profession, he not
only closed to himself every laudable career, but even became an
outcast from his own tribe, I cannot but exclaim: This is the true
Roman spirit, this is worthy of a state jealous of its reputation.
But then some one interrupts my rapture, by inquiring with what
consistency players are debarred from all honors, while plays are
counted among the honors due to the gods? For a long while the virtue
of Rome was uncontaminated by theatrical exhibitions; [104] and if
they had been adopted for the sake of gratifying the taste of the
citizens, they would have been introduced hand in hand with the
relaxation of manners. But the fact is, that it was the gods who
demanded that they should be exhibited to gratify them. With what
justice, then, is the player excommunicated by whom God is
worshipped? On what pretext can you at once adore him who exacts, and
brand him who acts these plays? This, then, is the controversy in
which the Greeks and Romans are engaged. The Greeks think they justly
honor players, because they worship the gods who demand plays; the
Romans, on the other hand, do not suffer an actor to disgrace by his
name his own plebeian tribe, far less the senatorial order. And the
whole of this discussion may be summed up in the following syllogism.
The Greeks give us the major premise: If such gods are to be
worshipped, then certainly such men may be honored. The Romans add
the minor: But such men must by no means be honoured. The Christians
draw the conclusion: Therefore such gods must by no means be
worshipped.
Footnotes
[104] According to Livy (vii. 2), theatrical exhibitions were
introduced in the year 392 a.u.c. Before that time, he says, there
had only been the games of the circus. The Romans sent to Etruria for
players, who were called histriones, hister being the Tuscan word for
a player. Other particulars are added by Livy.
Chapter 14.--That Plato, Who Excluded Poets from a Well-Ordered City,
Was Better Than These Gods Who Desire to Be Honoured by Theatrical
Plays.
We have still to inquire why the poets who write the plays, and who by
the law of the twelve tables are prohibited from injuring the good
name of the citizens, are reckoned more estimable than the actors,
though they so shamefully asperse the character of the gods? Is it
right that the actors of these poetical and God-dishonoring effusions
be branded, while their authors are honored? Must we not here award
the palm to a Greek, Plato, who, in framing his ideal republic, [105]
conceived that poets should be banished from the city as enemies of
the state? He could not brook that the gods be brought into
disrepute, nor that the minds of the citizens be depraved and
besotted, by the fictions of the poets. Compare now human nature as
you see it in Plato, expelling poets from the city that the citizens
be uninjured, with the divine nature as you see it in these gods
exacting plays in their own honor. Plato strove, though
unsuccessfully, to persuade the light-minded and lascivious Greeks to
abstain from so much as writing such plays; the gods used their
authority to extort the acting of the same from the dignified and
sober-minded Romans. And not content with having them acted, they had
them dedicated to themselves, consecrated to themselves, solemnly
celebrated in their own honor. To which, then, would it be more
becoming in a state to decree divine honors,--to Plato, who prohibited
these wicked and licentious plays, or to the demons who delighted in
blinding men to the truth of what Plato unsuccessfully sought to
inculcate?
This philosopher, Plato, has been elevated by Labeo to the rank of a
demigod, and set thus upon a level with such as Hercules and Romulus.
Labeo ranks demigods higher than heroes, but both he counts among the
deities. But I have no doubt that he thinks this man whom he reckons
a demigod worthy of greater respect not only than the heroes, but also
than the gods themselves. The laws of the Romans and the speculations
of Plato have this resemblance, that the latter pronounce a wholesale
condemnation of poetical fictions, while the former restrain the
license of satire, at least so far as men are the objects of it.
Plato will not suffer poets even to dwell in his city: the laws of
Rome prohibit actors from being enrolled as citizens; and if they had
not feared to offend the gods who had asked the services of the
players, they would in all likelihood have banished them altogether.
It is obvious, therefore, that the Romans could not receive, nor
reasonably expect to receive, laws for the regulation of their conduct
from their gods, since the laws they themselves enacted far surpassed
and put to shame the morality of the gods. The gods demand stageplays
in their own honor; the Romans exclude the players from all civic
honors; [106] the former commanded that they should be celebrated by
the scenic representation of their own disgrace; the latter commanded
that no poet should dare to blemish the reputation of any citizen.
But that demigod Plato resisted the lust of such gods as these, and
showed the Romans what their genius had left incomplete; for he
absolutely excluded poets from his ideal state, whether they composed
fictions with no regard to truth, or set the worst possible examples
before wretched men under the guise of divine actions. We for our
part, indeed, reckon Plato neither a god nor a demigod; we would not
even compare him to any of God's holy angels; nor to the
truth-speaking prophets, nor to any of the apostles or martyrs of
Christ, nay, not to any faithful Christian man. The reason of this
opinion of ours we will, God prospering us, render in its own place.
Nevertheless, since they wish him to be considered a demigod, we think
he certainly is more entitled to that rank, and is every way superior,
if not to Hercules and Romulus (though no historian could ever narrate
nor any poet sing of him that he had killed his brother, or committed
any crime), yet certainly to Priapus, or a Cynocephalus, [107] or the
Fever, [108] --divinities whom the Romans have partly received from
foreigners, and partly consecrated by home-grown rites. How, then,
could gods such as these be expected to promulgate good and wholesome
laws, either for the prevention of moral and social evils, or for
their eradication where they had already sprung up?--gods who used
their influence even to sow and cherish profligacy, by appointing that
deeds truly or falsely ascribed to them should be published to the
people by means of theatrical exhibitions, and by thus gratuitously
fanning the flame of human lust with the breath of a seemingly divine
approbation. In vain does Cicero, speaking of poets, exclaim against
this state of things in these words: "When the plaudits and
acclamation of the people, who sit as infallible judges, are won by
the poets, what darkness benights the mind, what fears invade, what
passions inflame it!" [109]
Footnotes
[105] See the Republic, book iii.
[106] Comp. Tertullian, De Spectac. c. 22.
[107] The Egyptian gods represented with dogs' heads, called by Lucan
(viii. 832) semicanes deos.
[108] The Fever had, according to Vives, three altars in Rome. See
Cicero, De Nat. Deor. iii. 25, and Ælian, Var. Hist. xii. 11.
[109] Cicero, De Republica, v. Compare the third Tusculan Quæst. c.
ii.
Chapter 15.--That It Was Vanity, Not Reason, Which Created Some of the
Roman Gods.
But is it not manifest that vanity rather than reason regulated the
choice of some of their false gods? This Plato, whom they reckon a
demigod, and who used all his eloquence to preserve men from the most
dangerous spiritual calamities, has yet not been counted worthy even
of a little shrine; but Romulus, because they can call him their own,
they have esteemed more highly than many gods, though their secret
doctrine can allow him the rank only of a demigod. To him they
allotted a flamen, that is to say, a priest of a class so highly
esteemed in their religion (distinguished, too, by their conical
mitres), that for only three of their gods were flamens
appointed,--the Flamen Dialis for Jupiter, Martialis for Mars, and
Quirinalis for Romulus (for when the ardor of his fellow-citizens had
given Romulus a seat among the gods, they gave him this new name
Quirinus). And thus by this honor Romulus has been preferred to
Neptune and Pluto, Jupiter's brothers, and to Saturn himself, their
father. They have assigned the same priesthood to serve him as to
serve Jove; and in giving Mars (the reputed father of Romulus) the
same honor, is this not rather for Romulus' sake than to honor Mars?
Chapter 16.--That If the Gods Had Really Possessed Any Regard for
Righteousness, the Romans Should Have Received Good Laws from Them,
Instead of Having to Borrow Them from Other Nations.
Moreover, if the Romans had been able to receive a rule of life from
their gods, they would not have borrowed Solon's laws from the
Athenians, as they did some years after Rome was founded; and yet they
did not keep them as they received them, but endeavored to improve and
amend them. [110]Although Lycurgus pretended that he was authorized
by Apollo to give laws to the Lacedemonians, the sensible Romans did
not choose to believe this, and were not induced to borrow laws from
Sparta. Numa Pompilius, who succeeded Romulus in the kingdom, is said
to have framed some laws, which, however, were not sufficient for the
regulation of civic affairs. Among these regulations were many
pertaining to religious observances, and yet he is not reported to
have received even these from the gods. With respect, then, to moral
evils, evils of life and conduct,--evils which are so mighty, that,
according to the wisest pagans, [111] by them states are ruined while
their cities stand uninjured,--their gods made not the smallest
provision for preserving their worshippers from these evils, but, on
the contrary, took special pains to increase them, as we have
previously endeavored to prove.
Footnotes
[110] In the year a.u. 299, three ambassadors were sent from Rome to
Athens to copy Solon's laws, and acquire information about the
institutions of Greece. On their return the Decemviri were appointed
to draw up a code; and finally, after some tragic interruptions, the
celebrated twelve tables were accepted as the fundamental statutes of
Roman law (fons universi publici privatique juris). These were graven
on brass, and hung up for public information. Livy, iii. 31-34.
[111] Possibly he refers to Plautus' Persa, iv. 4. 11-14.
Chapter 17.--Of the Rape of the Sabine Women, and Other Iniquities
Perpetrated in Rome's Palmiest Days.
But possibly we are to find the reason for this neglect of the Romans
by their gods, in the saying of Sallust, that "equity and virtue
prevailed among the Romans not more by force of laws than of nature."
[112]I presume it is to this inborn equity and goodness of
disposition we are to ascribe the rape of the Sabine women. What,
indeed, could be more equitable and virtuous, than to carry off by
force, as each man was fit, and without their parents' consent, girls
who were strangers and guests, and who had been decoyed and entrapped
by the pretence of a spectacle! If the Sabines were wrong to deny
their daughters when the Romans asked for them, was it not a greater
wrong in the Romans to carry them off after that denial? The Romans
might more justly have waged war against the neighboring nation for
having refused their daughters in marriage when they first sought
them, than for having demanded them back when they had stolen them.
War should have been proclaimed at first; it was then that Mars should
have helped his warlike son, that he might by force of arms avenge the
injury done him by the refusal of marriage, and might also thus win
the women he desired. There might have been some appearance of "right
of war" in a victor carrying off, in virtue of this right, the virgins
who had been without any show of right denied him; whereas there was
no "right of peace" entitling him to carry off those who were not
given to him, and to wage an unjust war with their justly enraged
parents. One happy circumstance was indeed connected with this act of
violence, viz., that though it was commemorated by the games of the
circus, yet even this did not constitute it a precedent in the city or
realm of Rome. If one would find fault with the results of this act,
it must rather be on the ground that the Romans made Romulus a god in
spite of his perpetrating this iniquity; for one cannot reproach them
with making this deed any kind of precedent for the rape of women.
Again, I presume it was due to this natural equity and virtue, that
after the expulsion of King Tarquin, whose son had violated Lucretia,
Junius Brutus the consul forced Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus,
Lucretia's husband and his own colleague, a good and innocent man, to
resign his office and go into banishment, on the one sole charge that
he was of the name and blood of the Tarquins. This injustice was
perpetrated with the approval, or at least connivance, of the people,
who had themselves raised to the consular office both Collatinus and
Brutus. Another instance of this equity and virtue is found in their
treatment of Marcus Camillus. This eminent man, after he had rapidly
conquered the Veians, at that time the most formidable of Rome's
enemies, and who had maintained a ten years' war, in which the Roman
army had suffered the usual calamities attendant on bad generalship,
after he had restored security to Rome, which had begun to tremble for
its safety, and after he had taken the wealthiest city of the enemy,
had charges brought against him by the malice of those that envied his
success, and by the insolence of the tribunes of the people; and
seeing that the city bore him no gratitude for preserving it, and that
he would certainly be condemned, he went into exile, and even in his
absence was fined 10,000 asses. Shortly after, however, his
ungrateful country had again to seek his protection from the Gauls.
But I cannot now mention all the shameful and iniquitous acts with
which Rome was agitated, when the aristocracy attempted to subject the
people, and the people resented their encroachments, and the advocates
of either party were actuated rather by the love of victory than by
any equitable or virtuous consideration.
Footnotes
[112] Sallust, Cat. Con. ix. Compare the similar saying of Tacitus
regarding the chastity of the Germans: Plusque ibi boni mores valent,
quam alibi bonæ leges (Germ. xix.).
Chapter 18.--What the History of Sallust Reveals Regarding the Life of
the Romans, Either When Straitened by Anxiety or Relaxed in Security.
I will therefore pause, and adduce the testimony of Sallust himself,
whose words in praise of the Romans (that "equity and virtue prevailed
among them not more by force of laws than of nature") have given
occasion to this discussion. He was referring to that period
immediately after the expulsion of the kings, in which the city became
great in an incredibly short space of time. And yet this same writer
acknowledges in the first book of his history, in the very exordium of
his work, that even at that time, when a very brief interval had
elapsed after the government had passed from kings to consuls, the
more powerful men began to act unjustly, and occasioned the defection
of the people from the patricians, and other disorders in the city.
For after Sallust had stated that the Romans enjoyed greater harmony
and a purer state of society between the second and third Punic wars
than at any other time, and that the cause of this was not their love
of good order, but their fear lest the peace they had with Carthage
might be broken (this also, as we mentioned, Nasica contemplated when
he opposed the destruction of Carthage, for he supposed that fear
would tend to repress wickedness, and to preserve wholesome ways of
living), he then goes on to say: "Yet, after the destruction of
Carthage, discord, avarice, am bition, and the other vices which are
commonly generated by prosperity, more than ever increased." If they
"increased," and that "more than ever," then already they had
appeared, and had been increasing. And so Sallust adds this reason
for what he said. "For," he says, "the oppressive measures of the
powerful, and the consequent secessions of the plebs from the
patricians, and other civil dissensions, had existed from the first,
and affairs were administered with equity and well-tempered justice
for no longer a period than the short time after the expulsion of the
kings, while the city was occupied with the serious Tuscan war and
Tarquin's vengeance." You see how, even in that brief period after
the expulsion of the kings, fear, he acknowledges, was the cause of
the interval of equity and good order. They were afraid, in fact, of
the war which Tarquin waged against them, after he had been driven
from the throne and the city, and had allied himself with the
Tuscans. But observe what he adds: "After that, the patricians
treated the people as their slaves, ordering them to be scourged or
beheaded just as the kings had done, driving them from their holdings,
and harshly tyrannizing over those who had no property to lose. The
people, overwhelmed by these oppressive measures, and most of all by
exorbitant usury, and obliged to contribute both money and personal
service to the constant wars, at length took arms and seceded to Mount
Aventine and Mount Sacer, and thus obtained for themselves tribunes
and protective laws. But it was only the second Punic war that put an
end on both sides to discord and strife." You see what kind of men
the Romans were, even so early as a few years after the expulsion of
the kings; and it is of these men he says, that "equity and virtue
prevailed among them not more by force of law than of nature."
Now, if these were the days in which the Roman republic shows fairest
and best, what are we to say or think of the succeeding age, when, to
use the words of the same historian, "changing little by little from
the fair and virtuous city it was, it became utterly wicked and
dissolute?" This was, as he mentions, after the destruction of
Carthage. Sallust's brief sum and sketch of this period may be read
in his own history, in which he shows how the profligate manners which
were propagated by prosperity resulted at last even in civil wars. He
says: "And from this time the primitive manners, instead of
undergoing an insensible alteration as hitherto they had done, were
swept away as by a torrent: the young men were so depraved by luxury
and avarice, that it may justly be said that no father had a son who
could either preserve his own patrimony, or keep his hands off other
men's." Sallust adds a number of particulars about the vices of
Sylla, and the debased condition of the republic in general; and other
writers make similar observations, though in much less striking
language.
However, I suppose you now see, or at least any one who gives his
attention has the means of seeing, in what a sink of iniquity that
city was plunged before the advent of our heavenly King. For these
things happened not only before Christ had begun to teach, but before
He was even born of the Virgin. If, then, they dare not impute to
their gods the grievous evils of those former times, more tolerable
before the destruction of Carthage, but intolerable and dreadful after
it, although it was the gods who by their malign craft instilled into
the minds of men the conceptions from which such dreadful vices
branched out on all sides, why do they impute these present calamities
to Christ, who teaches life-giving truth, and forbids us to worship
false and deceitful gods, and who, abominating and condemning with His
divine authority those wicked and hurtful lusts of men, gradually
withdraws His own people from a world that is corrupted by these
vices, and is falling into ruins, to make of them an eternal city,
whose glory rests not on the acclamations of vanity, but on the
judgment of truth?
Chapter 19.--Of the Corruption Which Had Grown Upon the Roman Republic
Before Christ Abolished the Worship of the Gods.
Here, then, is this Roman republic, "which has changed little by
little from the fair and virtuous city it was, and has become utterly
wicked and dissolute." It is not I who am the first to say this, but
their own authors, from whom we learned it for a fee, and who wrote it
long before the coming of Christ. You see how, before the coming of
Christ, and after the destruction of Carthage, "the primitive manners,
instead of undergoing insensible alteration, as hitherto they had
done, were swept away as by a torrent; and how depraved by luxury and
avarice the youth were." Let them now, on their part, read to us any
laws given by their gods to the Roman people, and directed against
luxury and avarice. And would that they had only been silent on the
subjects of chastity and modesty, and had not demanded from the people
indecent and shameful practices, to which they lent a pernicious
patronage by their so-called divinity. Let them read our commandments
in the Prophets, Gospels, Acts of the Apostles or Epistles; let them
peruse the large number of precepts against avarice and luxury which
are everywhere read to the congregations that meet for this purpose,
and which strike the ear, not with the uncertain sound of a
philosophical discussion, but with the thunder of God's own oracle
pealing from the clouds. And yet they do not impute to their gods the
luxury and avarice, the cruel and dissolute manners, that had rendered
the republic utterly wicked and corrupt, even before the coming of
Christ; but whatever affliction their pride and effeminacy have
exposed them to in these latter days, they furiously impute to our
religion. If the kings of the earth and all their subjects, if all
princes and judges of the earth, if young men and maidens, old and
young, every age, and both sexes; if they whom the Baptist addressed,
the publicans and the soldiers, were all together to hearken to and
observe the precepts of the Christian religion regarding a just and
virtuous life, then should the republic adorn the whole earth with its
own felicity, and attain in life everlasting to the pinnacle of kingly
glory. But because this man listens and that man scoffs, and most are
enamored of the blandishments of vice rather than the wholesome
severity of virtue, the people of Christ, whatever be their
condition--whether they be kings, princes, judges, soldiers, or
provincials, rich or poor, bond or free, male or female--are enjoined
to endure this earthly republic, wicked and dissolute as it is, that
so they may by this endurance win for themselves an eminent place in
that most holy and august assembly of angels and republic of heaven,
in which the will of God is the law.
Chapter 20.--Of the Kind of Happiness and Life Truly Delighted in by
Those Who Inveigh Against the Christian Religion.
But the worshippers and admirers of these gods delight in imitating
their scandalous iniquities, and are nowise concerned that the
republic be less depraved and licentious. Only let it remain
undefeated, they say, only let it flourish and abound in resources;
let it be glorious by its victories, or still better, secure in peace;
and what matters it to us? This is our concern, that every man be
able to increase his wealth so as to supply his daily prodigalities,
and so that the powerful may subject the weak for their own purposes.
Let the poor court the rich for a living, and that under their
protection they may enjoy a sluggish tranquillity; and let the rich
abuse the poor as their dependants, to minister to their pride. Let
the people applaud not those who protect their interests, but those
who provide them with pleasure. Let no severe duty be commanded, no
impurity forbidden. Let kings estimate their prosperity, not by the
righteousness, but by the servility of their subjects. Let the
provinces stand loyal to the kings, not as moral guides, but as lords
of their possessions and purveyors of their pleasures; not with a
hearty reverence, but a crooked and servile fear. Let the laws take
cognizance rather of the injury done to another man's property, than
of that done to one's own person. If a man be a nuisance to his
neighbor, or injure his property, family, or person, let him be
actionable; but in his own affairs let everyone with impunity do what
he will in company with his own family, and with those who willingly
join him. Let there be a plentiful supply of public prostitutes for
every one who wishes to use them, but specially for those who are too
poor to keep one for their private use. Let there be erected houses
of the largest and most ornate description: in these let there be
provided the most sumptuous banquets, where every one who pleases may,
by day or night, play, drink, vomit, [113] dissipate. Let there be
everywhere heard the rustling of dancers, the loud, immodest laughter
of the theatre; let a succession of the most cruel and the most
voluptuous pleasures maintain a perpetual excitement. If such
happiness is distasteful to any, let him be branded as a public enemy;
and if any attempt to modify or put an end to it let him be silenced,
banished, put an end to. Let these be reckoned the true gods, who
procure for the people this condition of things, and preserve it when
once possessed. Let them be worshipped as they wish; let them demand
whatever games they please, from or with their own worshippers; only
let them secure that such felicity be not imperilled by foe, plague,
or disaster of any kind. What sane man would compare a republic such
as this, I will not say to the Roman empire, but to the palace of
Sardanapalus, the ancient king who was so abandoned to pleasures, that
he caused it to be inscribed on his tomb, that now that he was dead,
he possessed only those things which he had swallowed and consumed by
his appetites while alive? If these men had such a king as this, who,
while self-indulgent, should lay no severe restraint on them, they
would more enthusiastically consecrate to him a temple and a flamen
than the ancient Romans did to Romulus.
Footnotes
[113] The same collocation of words is used by Cicero with reference
to the well-known mode of renewing the appetite in use among the
Romans.
Chapter 21.--Cicero's Opinion of the Roman Republic.
But if our adversaries do not care how foully and disgracefully the
Roman republic be stained by corrupt practices, so long only as it
holds together and continues in being, and if they therefore pooh-pooh
the testimony of Sallust to its "utterly wicked and profligate"
condition, what will they make of Cicero's statement, that even in his
time it had become entirely extinct, and that there remained extant no
Roman republic at all? He introduces Scipio (the Scipio who had
destroyed Carthage) discussing the republic, at a time when already
there were presentiments of its speedy ruin by that corruption which
Sallust describes. In fact, at the time when the discussion took
place, one of the Gracchi, who, according to Sallust, was the first
great instigator of seditions, had already been put to death. His
death, indeed, is mentioned in the same book. Now Scipio, at the end
of the second book, says: "As among the different sounds which
proceed from lyres, flutes, and the human voice, there must be
maintained a certain harmony which a cultivated ear cannot endure to
hear disturbed or jarring, but which may be elicited in full and
absolute concord by the modulation even of voices very unlike one
another; so, where reason is allowed to modulate the diverse elements
of the state, there is obtained a perfect concord from the upper,
lower, and middle classes as from various sounds; and what musicians
call harmony in singing, is concord in matters of state, which is the
strictest bond and best security of any republic, and which by no
ingenuity can be retained where justice has become extinct." Then,
when he had expatiated somewhat more fully, and had more copiously
illustrated the benefits of its presence and the ruinous effects of
its absence upon a state, Pilus, one of the company present at the
discussion, struck in and demanded that the question should be more
thoroughly sifted, and that the subject of justice should be freely
discussed for the sake of ascertaining what truth there was in the
maxim which was then becoming daily more current, that "the republic
cannot be governed without injustice." Scipio expressed his
willingness to have this maxim discussed and sifted, and gave it as
his opinion that it was baseless, and that no progress could be made
in discussing the republic unless it was established, not only that
this maxim, that "the republic cannot be governed without injustice,"
was false, but also that the truth is, that it cannot be governed
without the most absolute justice. And the discussion of this
question, being deferred till the next day, is carried on in the third
book with great animation. For Pilus himself undertook to defend the
position that the republic cannot be governed without injustice, at
the same time being at special pains to clear himself of any real
participation in that opinion. He advocated with great keenness the
cause of injustice against justice, and endeavored by plausible
reasons and examples to demonstrate that the former is beneficial, the
latter useless, to the republic. Then, at the request of the company,
Lælius attempted to defend justice, and strained every nerve to prove
that nothing is so hurtful to a state as injustice; and that without
justice a republic can neither be governed, nor even continue to
exist.
When this question has been handled to the satisfaction of the
company, Scipio reverts to the original thread of discourse, and
repeats with commendation his own brief definition of a republic, that
it is the weal of the people. "The people" he defines as being not
every assemblage or mob, but an assemblage associated by a common
acknowledgment of law, and by a community of interests. Then he shows
the use of definition in debate; and from these definitions of his own
he gathers that a republic, or "weal of the people," then exists only
when it is well and justly governed, whether by a monarch, or an
aristocracy, or by the whole people. But when the monarch is unjust,
or, as the Greeks say, a tyrant; or the aristocrats are unjust, and
form a faction; or the people themselves are unjust, and become, as
Scipio for want of a better name calls them, themselves the tyrant,
then the republic is not only blemished (as had been proved the day
before), but by legitimate deduction from those definitions, it
altogether ceases to be. For it could not be the people's weal when a
tyrant factiously lorded it over the state; neither would the people
be any longer a people if it were unjust, since it would no longer
answer the definition of a people--"an assemblage associated by a
common acknowledgment of law, and by a community of interests."
When, therefore, the Roman republic was such as Sallust described it,
it was not "utterly wicked and profligate," as he says, but had
altogether ceased to exist, if we are to admit the reasoning of that
debate maintained on the subject of the republic by its best
representatives. Tully himself, too, speaking not in the person of
Scipio or any one else, but uttering his own sentiments, uses the
following language in the beginning of the fifth book, after quoting a
line from the poet Ennius, in which he said, "Rome's severe morality
and her citizens are her safeguard." "This verse," says Cicero,
"seems to me to have all the sententious truthfulness of an oracle.
For neither would the citizens have availed without the morality of
the community, nor would the morality of the commons without
outstanding men have availed either to establish or so long to
maintain in vigor so grand a republic with so wide and just an
empire. Accordingly, before our day, the hereditary usages formed our
foremost men, and they on their part retained the usages and
institutions of their fathers. But our age, receiving the republic as
a chef-d'oeuvre of another age which has already begun to grow old,
has not merely neglected to restore the colors of the original, but
has not even been at the pains to preserve so much as the general
outline and most outstanding features. For what survives of that
primitive morality which the poet called Rome's safeguard? It is so
obsolete and forgotten, that, far from practising it, one does not
even know it. And of the citizens what shall I say? Morality has
perished through poverty of great men; a poverty for which we must not
only assign a reason, but for the guilt of which we must answer as
criminals charged with a capital crime. For it is through our vices,
and not by any mishap, that we retain only the name of a republic, and
have long since lost the reality."
This is the confession of Cicero, long indeed after the death of
Africanus, whom he introduced as an interlocutor in his work De
Republica, but still before the coming of Christ. Yet, if the
disasters he bewails had been lamented after the Christian religion
had been diffused, and had begun to prevail, is there a man of our
adversaries who would not have thought that they were to be imputed to
the Christians? Why, then, did their gods not take steps then to
prevent the decay and extinction of that republic, over the loss of
which Cicero, long before Christ had come in the flesh, sings so
lugubrious a dirge? Its admirers have need to inquire whether, even
in the days of primitive men and morals, true justice flourished in
it; or was it not perhaps even then, to use the casual expression of
Cicero, rather a colored painting than the living reality? But, if
God will, we shall consider this elsewhere. For I mean in its own
place to show that--according to the definitions in which Cicero
himself, using Scipio as his mouthpiece, briefly propounded what a
republic is, and what a people is, and according to many testimonies,
both of his own lips and of those who took part in that same
debate--Rome never was a republic, because true justice had never a
place in it. But accepting the more feasible definitions of a
republic, I grant there was a republic of a certain kind, and
certainly much better administered by the more ancient Romans than by
their modern representatives. But the fact is, true justice has no
existence save in that republic whose founder and ruler is Christ, if
at least any choose to call this a republic; and indeed we cannot deny
that it is the people's weal. But if perchance this name, which has
become familiar in other connections, be considered alien to our
common parlance, we may at all events say that in this city is true
justice; the city of which Holy Scripture says, "Glorious things are
said of thee, O city of God."
Chapter 22.--That the Roman Gods Never Took Any Steps to Prevent the
Republic from Being Ruined by Immorality.
But what is relevant to the present question is this, that however
admirable our adversaries say the republic was or is, it is certain
that by the testimony of their own most learned writers it had become,
long before the coming of Christ, utterly wicked and dissolute, and
indeed had no existence, but had been destroyed by profligacy. To
prevent this, surely these guardian gods ought to have given precepts
of morals and a rule of life to the people by whom they were
worshipped in so many temples, with so great a variety of priests and
sacrifices, with such numberless and diverse rites, so many festal
solemnities, so many celebrations of magnificent games. But in all
this the demons only looked after their own interest, and cared not at
all how their worshippers lived, or rather were at pains to induce
them to lead an abandoned life, so long as they paid these tributes to
their honor, and regarded them with fear. If any one denies this, let
him produce, let him point to, let him read the laws which the gods
had given against sedition, and which the Gracchi transgressed when
they threw everything into confusion; or those Marius, and Cinna, and
Carbo broke when they involved their country in civil wars, most
iniquitous and unjustifiable in their causes, cruelly conducted, and
yet more cruelly terminated; or those which Sylla scorned, whose life,
character, and deeds, as described by Sallust and other historians,
are the abhorrence of all mankind. Who will deny that at that time
the republic had become extinct?
Possibly they will be bold enough to suggest in defence of the gods,
that they abandoned the city on account of the profligacy of the
citizens, according to the lines of Virgil:
"Gone from each fane, each sacred shrine,
Are those who made this realm divine." [114]
But, firstly, if it be so, then they cannot complain against the
Christian religion, as if it were that which gave offence to the gods
and caused them to abandon Rome, since the Roman immorality had long
ago driven from the altars of the city a cloud of little gods, like as
many flies. And yet where was this host of divinities, when, long
before the corruption of the primitive morality, Rome was taken and
burnt by the Gauls? Perhaps they were present, but asleep? For at
that time the whole city fell into the hands of the enemy, with the
single exception of the Capitoline hill; and this too would have been
taken, had not--the watchful geese aroused the sleeping gods! And
this gave occasion to the festival of the goose, in which Rome sank
nearly to the superstition of the Egyptians, who worship beasts and
birds. But of these adventitious evils which are inflicted by hostile
armies or by some disaster, and which attach rather to the body than
the soul, I am not meanwhile disputing. At present I speak of the
decay of morality, which at first almost imperceptibly lost its
brilliant hue, but afterwards was wholly obliterated, was swept away
as by a torrent, and involved the republic in such disastrous ruin,
that though the houses and walls remained standing the leading writers
do not scruple to say that the republic was destroyed. Now, the
departure of the gods "from each fane, each sacred shrine," and their
abandonment of the city to destruction, was an act of justice, if
their laws inculcating justice and a moral life had been held in
contempt by that city. But what kind of gods were these, pray, who
declined to live with a people who worshipped them, and whose corrupt
life they had done nothing to reform?
Footnotes
[114] Æneid, ii. 351-2.
Chapter 23.--That the Vicissitudes of This Life are Dependent Not on
the Favor or Hostility of Demons, But on the Will of the True God.
But, further, is it not obvious that the gods have abetted the
fulfilment of men's desires, instead of authoritatively bridling
them? For Marius, a low-born and self-made man, who ruthlessly
provoked and conducted civil wars, was so effectually aided by them,
that he was seven times consul, and died full of years in his seventh
consulship, escaping the hands of Sylla, who immediately afterwards
came into power. Why, then, did they not also aid him, so as to
restrain him from so many enormities? For if it is said that the gods
had no hand in his success, this is no trivial admission that a man
can attain the dearly coveted felicity of this life even though his
own gods be not propitious; that men can be loaded with the gifts of
fortune as Marius was, can enjoy health, power, wealth, honours,
dignity, length of days, though the gods be hostile to him; and that,
on the other hand, men can be tormented as Regulus was, with
captivity, bondage, destitution, watchings, pain, and cruel death,
though the gods be his friends. To concede this is to make a
compendious confession that the gods are useless, and their worship
superfluous. If the gods have taught the people rather what goes
clean counter to the virtues of the soul, and that integrity of life
which meets a reward after death; if even in respect of temporal and
transitory blessings they neither hurt those whom they hate nor profit
whom they love, why are they worshipped, why are they invoked with
such eager homage? Why do men murmur in difficult and sad
emergencies, as if the gods had retired in anger? and why, on their
account, is the Christian religion injured by the most unworthy
calumnies? If in temporal matters they have power either for good or
for evil, why did they stand by Marius, the worst of Rome's citizens,
and abandon Regulus, the best? Does this not prove themselves to be
most unjust and wicked? And even if it be supposed that for this very
reason they are the rather to be feared and worshipped, this is a
mistake; for we do not read that Regulus worshipped them less
assiduously than Marius. Neither is it apparent that a wicked life is
to be chosen, on the ground that the gods are supposed to have favored
Marius more than Regulus. For Metellus, the most highly esteemed of
all the Romans, who had five sons in the consulship, was prosperous
even in this life; and Catiline, the worst of men, reduced to poverty
and defeated in the war his own guilt had aroused, lived and perished
miserably. Real and secure felicity is the peculiar possession of
those who worship that God by whom alone it can be conferred.
It is thus apparent, that when the republic was being destroyed by
profligate manners, its gods did nothing to hinder its destruction by
the direction or correction of its manners, but rather accelerated its
destruction by increasing the demoralization and corruption that
already existed. They need not pretend that their goodness was
shocked by the iniquity of the city, and that they withdrew in anger.
For they were there, sure enough; they are detected, convicted: they
were equally unable to break silence so as to guide others, and to
keep silence so as to conceal themselves. I do not dwell on the fact
that the inhabitants of Minturnæ took pity on Marius, and commended
him to the goddess Marica in her grove, that she might give him
success in all things, and that from the abyss of despair in which he
then lay he forthwith returned unhurt to Rome, and entered the city
the ruthless leader of a ruthless army; and they who wish to know how
bloody was his victory, how unlike a citizen, and how much more
relentlessly than any foreign foe he acted, let them read the
histories. But this, as I said, I do not dwell upon; nor do I
attribute the bloody bliss of Marius to, I know not what Minturnian
goddess [Marica], but rather to the secret providence of God, that the
mouths of our adversaries might be shut, and that they who are not led
by passion, but by prudent consideration of events, might be delivered
from error. And even if the demons have any power in these matters,
they have only that power which the secret decree of the Almighty
allots to them, in order that we may not set too great store by
earthly prosperity, seeing it is oftentimes vouchsafed even to wicked
men like Marius; and that we may not, on the other hand, regard it as
an evil, since we see that many good and pious worshippers of the one
true God are, in spite of the demons pre-eminently successful; and,
finally, that we may not suppose that these unclean spirits are either
to be propitiated or feared for the sake of earthly blessings or
calamities: for as wicked men on earth cannot do all they would, so
neither can these demons, but only in so far as they are permitted by
the decree of Him whose judgments are fully comprehensible, justly
reprehensible by none.
Chapter 24.--Of the Deeds of Sylla, in Which the Demons Boasted that
He Had Their Help.
It is certain that Sylla--whose rule was so cruel that, in comparison
with it, the preceding state of things which he came to avenge was
regretted--when first he advanced towards Rome to give battle to
Marius, found the auspices so favourable when he sacrificed, that,
according to Livy's account, the augur Postumius expressed his
willingness to lose his head if Sylla did not, with the help of the
gods, accomplish what he designed. The gods, you see, had not
departed from "every fane and sacred shrine," since they were still
predicting the issue of these affairs, and yet were taking no steps to
correct Sylla himself. Their presages promised him great prosperity
but no threatenings of theirs subdued his evil passions. And then,
when he was in Asia conducting the war against Mithridates, a message
from Jupiter was delivered to him by Lucius Titius, to the effect that
he would conquer Mithridates; and so it came to pass. And afterwards,
when he was meditating a return to Rome for the purpose of avenging in
the blood of the citizens injuries done to himself and his friends, a
second message from Jupiter was delivered to him by a soldier of the
sixth legion, to the effect that it was he who had predicted the
victory over Mithridates, and that now he promised to give him power
to recover the republic from his enemies, though with great
bloodshed. Sylla at once inquired of the soldier what form had
appeared to him; and, on his reply, recognized that it was the same as
Jupiter had formerly employed to convey to him the assurance regarding
the victory over Mithridates. How, then, can the gods be justified in
this matter for the care they took to predict these shadowy successes,
and for their negligence in correcting Sylla, and restraining him from
stirring up a civil war so lamentable and atrocious, that it not
merely disfigured, but extinguished, the republic? The truth is, as I
have often said, and as Scripture informs us, and as the facts
themselves sufficiently indicate, the demons are found to look after
their own ends only, that they may be regarded and worshipped as gods,
and that men may be induced to offer to them a worship which
associates them with their crimes, and involves them in one common
wickedness and judgment of God.
Afterwards, when Sylla had come to Tarentum, and had sacrificed there,
he saw on the head of the victim's liver the likeness of a golden
crown. Thereupon the same soothsayer Postumius interpreted this to
signify a signal victory, and ordered that he only should eat of the
entrails. A little afterwards, the slave of a certain Lucius Pontius
cried out, "I am Bellona's messenger; the victory is yours, Sylla!"
Then he added that the Capitol should be burned. As soon as he had
uttered this prediction he left the camp, but returned the following
day more excited than ever, and shouted, "The Capitol is fired!" And
fired indeed it was. This it was easy for a demon both to foresee and
quickly to announce. But observe, as relevant to our subject, what
kind of gods they are under whom these men desire to live, who
blaspheme the Saviour that delivers the wills of the faithful from the
dominion of devils. The man cried out in prophetic rapture, "The
victory is yours, Sylla!" And to certify that he spoke by a divine
spirit, he predicted also an event which was shortly to happen, and
which indeed did fall out, in a place from which he in whom this
spirit was speaking was far distant. But he never cried, "Forbear thy
villanies, Sylla!"--the villanies which were committed at Rome by that
victor to whom a golden crown on the calf's liver had been shown as
the divine evidence of his victory. If such signs as this were
customarily sent by just gods, and not by wicked demons, then
certainly the entrails he consulted should rather have given Sylla
intimation of the cruel disasters that were to befall the city and
himself. For that victory was not so conducive to his exaltation to
power, as it was fatal to his ambition; for by it he became so
insatiable in his desires, and was rendered so arrogant and reckless
by prosperity, that he may be said rather to have inflicted a moral
destruction on himself than corporal destruction on his enemies. But
these truely woeful and deplorable calamities the gods gave him no
previous hint of, neither by entrails, augury, dream, nor prediction.
For they feared his amendment more than his defeat. Yea, they took
good care that this glorious conqueror of his own fellow-citizens
should be conquered and led captive by his own infamous vices, and
should thus be the more submissive slave of the demons themselves.
Chapter 25.--How Powerfully the Evil Spirits Incite Men to Wicked
Actions, by Giving Them the Quasi-Divine Authority of Their Example.
Now, who does not hereby comprehend,--unless he has preferred to
imitate such gods rather than by divine grace to withdraw himself from
their fellowship,--who does not see how eagerly these evil spirits
strive by their example to lend, as it were, divine authority to
crime? Is not this proved by the fact that they were seen in a wide
plain in Campania rehearsing among themselves the battle which shortly
after took place there with great bloodshed between the armies of
Rome? For at first there were heard loud crashing noises, and
afterwards many reported that they had seen for some days together two
armies engaged. And when this battle ceased, they found the ground
all indented with just such footprints of men and horses as a great
conflict would leave. If, then, the deities were veritably fighting
with one another, the civil wars of men are sufficiently justified;
yet, by the way, let it be observed that such pugnacious gods must be
very wicked or very wretched. If, however, it was but a sham-fight,
what did they intend by this, but that the civil wars of the Romans
should seem no wickedness, but an imitation of the gods? For already
the civil wars had begun; and before this, some lamentable battles and
execrable massacres had occurred. Already many had been moved by the
story of the soldier, who, on stripping the spoils of his slain foe,
recognized in the stripped corpse his own brother, and, with deep
curses on civil wars, slew himself there and then on his brother's
body. To disguise the bitterness of such tragedies, and kindle
increasing ardor in this monstrous warfare, these malign demons, who
were reputed and worshipped as gods, fell upon this plan of revealing
themselves in a state of civil war, that no compunction for
fellow-citizens might cause the Romans to shrink from such battles,
but that the human criminality might be justified by the divine
example. By a like craft, too, did these evil spirits command that
scenic entertainments, of which I have already spoken, should be
instituted and dedicated to them. And in these entertainments the
poetical compositions and actions of the drama ascribed such
iniquities to the gods, that every one might safely imitate them,
whether he believed the gods had actually done such things, or, not
believing this, yet perceived that they most eagerly desired to be
represented as having done them. And that no one might suppose, that
in representing the gods as fighting with one another, the poets had
slandered them, and imputed to them unworthy actions, the gods
themselves, to complete the deception, confirmed the compositions of
the poets by exhibiting their own battles to the eyes of men, not only
through actions in the theatres, but in their own persons on the
actual field.
We have been forced to bring forward these facts, because their
authors have not scrupled to say and to write that the Roman republic
had already been ruined by the depraved moral habits of the citizens,
and had ceased to exist before the advent of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Now this ruin they do not impute to their own gods, though they impute
to our Christ the evils of this life, which cannot ruin good men, be
they alive or dead. And this they do, though our Christ has issued so
many precepts inculcating virtue and restraining vice; while their own
gods have done nothing whatever to preserve that republic that served
them, and to restrain it from ruin by such precepts, but have rather
hastened its destruction, by corrupting its morality through their
pestilent example. No one, I fancy, will now be bold enough to say
that the republic was then ruined because of the departure of the gods
"from each fane, each sacred shrine," as if they were the friends of
virtue, and were offended by the vices of men. No, there are too many
presages from entrails, auguries, soothsayings, whereby they
boastingly proclaimed themselves prescient of future events and
controllers of the fortune of war,--all which prove them to have been
present. And had they been indeed absent the Romans would never in
these civil wars have been so far transported by their own passions as
they were by the instigations of these gods.
Chapter 26.--That the Demons Gave in Secret Certain Obscure
Instructions in Morals, While in Public Their Own Solemnities
Inculcated All Wickedness.
Seeing that this is so,--seeing that the filthy and cruel deeds, the
disgraceful and criminal actions of the gods, whether real or feigned,
were at their own request published, and were consecrated, and
dedicated in their honor as sacred and stated solemnities; seeing they
vowed vengeance on those who refused to exhibit them to the eyes of
all, that they might be proposed as deeds worthy of imitation, why is
it that these same demons, who by taking pleasure in such obscenities,
acknowledge themselves to be unclean spirits, and by delighting in
their own villanies and iniquities, real or imaginary, and by
requesting from the immodest, and extorting from the modest, the
celebration of these licentious acts, proclaim themselves instigators
to a criminal and lewd life;--why, I ask, are they represented as
giving some good moral precepts to a few of their own elect, initiated
in the secrecy of their shrines? If it be so, this very thing only
serves further to demonstrate the malicious craft of these pestilent
spirits. For so great is the influence of probity and chastity, that
all men, or almost all men, are moved by the praise of these virtues;
nor is any man so depraved by vice, but he hath some feeling of honor
left in him. So that, unless the devil sometimes transformed himself,
as Scripture says, into an angel of light, [115] he could not compass
his deceitful purpose. Accordingly, in public, a bold impurity fills
the ear of the people with noisy clamor; in private, a feigned
chastity speaks in scarce audible whispers to a few: an open stage is
provided for shameful things, but on the praiseworthy the curtain
falls: grace hides disgrace flaunts: a wicked deed draws an
overflowing house, a virtuous speech finds scarce a hearer, as though
purity were to be blushed at, impurity boasted of. Where else can
such confusion reign, but in devils' temples? Where, but in the
haunts of deceit? For the secret precepts are given as a sop to the
virtuous, who are few in number; the wicked examples are exhibited to
encourage the vicious, who are countless.
Where and when those initiated in the mysteries of Coelestis received
any good instructions, we know not. What we do know is, that before
her shrine, in which her image is set, and amidst a vast crowd
gathering from all quarters, and standing closely packed together, we
were intensely interested spectators of the games which were going on,
and saw, as we pleased to turn the eye, on this side a grand display
of harlots, on the other the virgin goddess; we saw this virgin
worshipped with prayer and with obscene rites. There we saw no
shame-faced mimes, no actress over-burdened with modesty; all that the
obscene rites demanded was fully complied with. We were plainly shown
what was pleasing to the virgin deity, and the matron who witnessed
the spectacle returned home from the temple a wiser woman. Some,
indeed, of the more prudent women turned their faces from the immodest
movements of the players, and learned the art of wickedness by a
furtive regard. For they were restrained, by the modest demeanor due
to men, from looking boldly at the immodest gestures; but much more
were they restrained from condemning with chaste heart the sacred
rites of her whom they adored. And yet this licentiousness--which, if
practised in one's home, could only be done there in secret--was
practised as a public lesson in the temple; and if any modesty
remained in men, it was occupied in marvelling that wickedness which
men could not unrestrainedly commit should be part of the religious
teaching of the gods, and that to omit its exhibition should incur the
anger of the gods. What spirit can that be, which by a hidden
inspiration stirs men's corruption, and goads them to adultery, and
feeds on the full-fledged iniquity, unless it be the same that finds
pleasure in such religious ceremonies, sets in the temples images of
devils, and loves to see in play the images of vices; that whispers in
secret some righteous sayings to deceive the few who are good, and
scatters in public invitations to profligacy, to gain possession of
the millions who are wicked?
Footnotes
[115] 2 Cor. xi. 14.
Chapter 27.--That the Obscenities of Those Plays Which the Romans
Consecrated in Order to Propitiate Their Gods, Contributed Largely to
the Overthrow of Public Order.
Cicero, a weighty man, and a philosopher in his way, when about to be
made edile, wished the citizens to understand [116] that, among the
other duties of his magistracy, he must propitiate Flora by the
celebration of games. And these games are reckoned devout in
proportion to their lewdness. In another place, [117] and when he was
now consul, and the state in great peril, he says that games had been
celebrated for ten days together, and that nothing had been omitted
which could pacify the gods: as if it had not been more satisfactory
to irritate the gods by temperance, than to pacify them by debauchery;
and to provoke their hate by honest living, than soothe it by such
unseemly grossness. For no matter how cruel was the ferocity of those
men who were threatening the state, and on whose account the gods were
being propitiated, it could not have been more hurtful than the
alliance of gods who were won with the foulest vices. To avert the
danger which threatened men's bodies, the gods were conciliated in a
fashion that drove virtue from their spirits; and the gods did not
enrol themselves as defenders of the battlements against the
besiegers, until they had first stormed and sacked the morality of the
citizens. This propitiation of such divinities,--a propitiation so
wanton, so impure, so immodest, so wicked, so filthy, whose actors the
innate and praiseworthy virtue of the Romans disabled from civic
honors, erased from their tribe, recognized as polluted and made
infamous;--this propitiation, I say, so foul, so detestable, and alien
from every religious feeling, these fabulous and ensnaring accounts of
the criminal actions of the gods, these scandalous actions which they
either shamefully and wickedly committed, or more shamefully and
wickedly feigned, all this the whole city learned in public both by
the words and gestures of the actors. They saw that the gods
delighted in the commission of these things, and therefore believed
that they wished them not only to be exhibited to them, but to be
imitated by themselves. But as for that good and honest instruction
which they speak of, it was given in such secrecy, and to so few (if
indeed given at all), that they seemed rather to fear it might be
divulged, than that it might not be practised.
Footnotes
[116] Cicero, C. Verrem, vi. 8.
[117] Cicero, C. Catilinam, iii. 8.
Chapter 28.--That the Christian Religion is Health-Giving.
They, then, are but abandoned and ungrateful wretches, in deep and
fast bondage to that malign spirit, who complain and murmur that men
are rescued by the name of Christ from the hellish thraldom of these
unclean spirits, and from a participation in their punishment, and are
brought out of the night of pestilential ungodliness into the light of
most healthful piety. Only such men could murmur that the masses
flock to the churches and their chaste acts of worship, where a seemly
separation of the sexes is observed; where they learn how they may so
spend this earthly life, as to merit a blessed eternity hereafter;
where Holy Scripture and instruction in righteousness are proclaimed
from a raised platform in presence of all, that both they who do the
word may hear to their salvation, and they who do it not may hear to
judgment. And though some enter who scoff at such precepts, all their
petulance is either quenched by a sudden change, or is restrained
through fear or shame. For no filthy and wicked action is there set
forth to be gazed at or to be imitated; but either the precepts of the
true God are recommended, His miracles narrated, His gifts praised, or
His benefits implored.
Chapter 29.--An Exhortation to the Romans to Renounce Paganism.
This, rather, is the religion worthy of your desires, O admirable
Roman race,--the progeny of your Scævolas and Scipios, of Regulus, and
of Fabricius. This rather covet, this distinguish from that foul
vanity and crafty malice of the devils. If there is in your nature
any eminent virtue, only by true piety is it purged and perfected,
while by impiety it is wrecked and punished. Choose now what you will
pursue, that your praise may be not in yourself, but in the true God,
in whom is no error. For of popular glory you have had your share;
but by the secret providence of God, the true religion was not offered
to your choice. Awake, it is now day; as you have already awaked in
the persons of some in whose perfect virtue and sufferings for the
true faith we glory: for they, contending on all sides with hostile
powers, and conquering them all by bravely dying, have purchased for
us this country of ours with their blood; to which country we invite
you, and exhort you to add yourselves to the number of the citizens of
this city, which also has a sanctuary [118] of its own in the true
remission of sins. Do not listen to those degenerate sons of thine who
slander Christ and Christians, and impute to them these disastrous
times, though they desire times in which they may enjoy rather
impunity for their wickedness than a peaceful life. Such has never
been Rome's ambition even in regard to her earthly country. Lay hold
now on the celestial country, which is easily won, and in which you
will reign truly and for ever. For there shall thou find no vestal
fire, no Capitoline stone, but the one true God.
"No date, no goal will here ordain:
But grant an endless, boundless reign." [119]
No longer, then, follow after false and deceitful gods; abjure them
rather, and despise them, bursting forth into true liberty. Gods they
are not, but malignant spirits, to whom your eternal happiness will be
a sore punishment. Juno, from whom you deduce your origin according
to the flesh, did not so bitterly grudge Rome's citadels to the
Trojans, as these devils whom yet ye repute gods, grudge an
everlasting seat to the race of mankind. And thou thyself hast in no
wavering voice passed judgment on them, when thou didst pacify them
with games, and yet didst account as infamous the men by whom the
plays were acted. Suffer us, then, to assert thy freedom against the
unclean spirits who had imposed on thy neck the yoke of celebrating
their own shame and filthiness. The actors of these divine crimes
thou hast removed from offices of honor; supplicate the true God, that
He may remove from thee those gods who delight in their crimes,--a
most disgraceful thing if the crimes are really theirs, and a most
malicious invention if the crimes are feigned. Well done, in that
thou hast spontaneously banished from the number of your citizens all
actors and players. Awake more fully: the majesty of God cannot be
propitiated by that which defiles the dignity of man. How, then, can
you believe that gods who take pleasure in such lewd plays, belong to
the number of the holy powers of heaven, when the men by whom these
plays are acted are by yourselves refused admission into the number of
Roman citizens even of the lowest grade? Incomparably more glorious
than Rome, is that heavenly city in which for victory you have truth;
for dignity, holiness; for peace, felicity; for life, eternity. Much
less does it admit into its society such gods, if thou dost blush to
admit into thine such men. Wherefore, if thou wouldst attain to the
blessed city, shun the society of devils. They who are propitiated by
deeds of shame, are unworthy of the worship of right-hearted men. Let
these, then, be obliterated from your worship by the cleansing of the
Christian religion, as those men were blotted from your citizenship by
the censor's mark.
But, so far as regards carnal benefits, which are the only blessings
the wicked desire to enjoy, and carnal miseries, which alone they
shrink from enduring, we will show in the following book that the
demons have not the power they are supposed to have; and although they
had it, we ought rather on that account to despise these blessings,
than for the sake of them to worship those gods, and by worshipping
them to miss the attainment of these blessings they grudge us. But
that they have not even this power which is ascribed to them by those
who worship them for the sake of temporal advantages, this, I say, I
will prove in the following book; so let us here close the present
argument.
Footnotes
[118] Alluding to the sanctuary given to all who fled to Rome in its
early days.
[119] Virgil, Æneid, i. 278.
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