The City of God, Volume I

The social wars, the servile wars, and the pirate conflicts that followed the Gracchan crisis devastated Italy and the provinces. Augustine notes the strange portent that preceded the social war: domestic animals throughout Italy suddenly turned wild and attacked their masters, as if nature itself were rebelling against human order. The civil wars that followed exceeded these horrors. Marius and Sulla transformed Roman politics into a charnel house. When Marius returned from exile with Cinna, they slaughtered their political enemies in the streets, in the temples, in their very homes. The heads of consuls were displayed on the rostra; senators were dragged from the curia to their deaths; the pontifex maximus was cut down at the altar of Vesta, his blood nearly extinguishing the sacred flame. Sulla’s victory brought no relief but rather a more systematic terror. He massacred thousands of prisoners in cold blood and posted proscription lists that condemned citizens to death and confiscation. The number of victims exceeded computation until the victors realized they needed survivors to govern. Peace proved as bloody as war, for the condemned were tortured before execution, their bodies torn apart while they still lived. Cities were sold at auction; entire populations were condemned to death collectively. The cruelty of citizens toward citizens exceeded anything foreign enemies had ever inflicted. The Gauls had spared the Capitol; the Goths in Augustine’s own day had spared many senators. But Sulla issued death warrants from that very sanctuary, and his partisans killed more Roman nobles than any barbarian invasion.

The chain of civil wars extended from Marius and Sulla through Sertorius and Catiline, through Lepidus and Catulus, and finally to the great conflict between Pompey and Caesar. Pompey, who had once been a partisan of Sulla, now found his power challenged by Julius Caesar, a man of transcendent ability whose ambition knew no bounds. Caesar crossed the Rubicon, plunging the state into war once more, and eventually defeated Pompey at Pharsalus. Though Caesar treated his vanquished foes with clemency, sparing the lives of many who had opposed him, he was suspected of aiming at monarchy. This suspicion led to his assassination in the senate house by a group of nobles who claimed to be defending the liberty of the republic. The gods, who were worshipped in the temples where Caesar often walked, did nothing to warn him of the daggers or to preserve the life of the man who had subjugated the world for Rome. In the chaos that followed, the republic’s greatest orator, Cicero, who had defended the state against Catiline and eloquently championed the cause of freedom, found himself targeted. The young Octavian, later known as Augustus and the adopted son of Caesar, formed an alliance with Mark Antony to consolidate power. In the political maneuvering that ensued, Cicero was proscribed and killed, his head and hands displayed on the rostra he had once adorned with his eloquence. The death of Cicero, a man who had served the republic with unparalleled devotion, marked the final extinguishing of liberty. The gods remained silent throughout this transition, offering no defense to the orator who had praised them so often, and no resistance to the rise of the young man who would soon become sole master of the world. Augustus eventually defeated Antony and Cleopatra, bringing an end to the civil wars but also to the republic itself. Throughout this long agony, the gods offered no intervention, no guidance, no comfort. Their temples stood open, their altars smoked with sacrifices, their priests performed the ancient rites—but the blood of citizens flowed in the streets around them, and sometimes within their very precincts.

Augustine concludes his argument by turning the pagans’ accusation back upon themselves. With what audacity, he demands, do they blame Christianity for the disasters of the present when their own history records calamities far worse occurring under the full observance of their religion? If the civil wars, the proscriptions, the plagues, and the famines of the republican era had taken place after Christ’s advent, every pagan apologist would have attributed them to the abandonment of the old gods. Yet these catastrophes occurred while the temples flourished, while the sacrifices continued, while the priests held honor and the sacred rites were celebrated with splendor. The gods either could not prevent these disasters or would not—neither alternative supports the claim that they deserve worship.

Augustine catalogs the prodigies and natural disasters recorded in Roman history: rains of earth, chalk, and stones that damaged property and threatened lives; the fires of Mount Etna pouring down to the sea with such intensity that the water boiled and the pitch in ships’ hulls began to melt; volcanic eruptions that buried cities under ash; plagues of locusts that consumed all vegetation and then, when driven into the sea, bred pestilence from their rotting corpses, killing hundreds of thousands; strange portents like oxen speaking, infants crying words from the womb, and transformations of sex. If any of these events occurred in the Christian era, the pagans would immediately blame the new faith for provoking divine anger. Yet they refuse to hold their own gods accountable for the same phenomena in the past. This double standard exposes the bad faith of their accusations.

The conclusion is inescapable: the gods of Rome are either weak demons who deceive rather than protect, or they are entirely fictional. Their worship brought no security, no moral improvement, no genuine peace. The prosperity that Rome occasionally enjoyed came from the true God, who distributes temporal blessings to the just and unjust alike. The disasters she suffered came from the same source, as corrections or as the natural consequences of human sin. But the gods of the pagans contributed nothing—neither benefit nor protection nor wisdom. To blame Christianity for modern calamities while excusing the gods for ancient ones is not merely illogical; it is an act of desperate bad faith, an attempt to preserve a bankrupt religious system by shifting responsibility for its manifest failures onto innocent shoulders. The true peace and security that humanity seeks can never come from the weak and deceptive spirits honored in Roman temples, but only from the one true God, whose power is genuine and whose promises are sure.

Augustine opens the fourth book by taking stock of the ground already covered. In the first book he answered those who blamed the Christian faith for the sorrows befalling Rome, showing that such afflictions are common to every age and that the pagan deities are in fact corrupt spirits who revel in the vices staged at their own festivals. The second and third books extended this refutation by cataloguing the moral degradation and physical catastrophes that afflicted the republic long before Christ was proclaimed—disasters that the enemies of the Church would surely have laid at Christianity’s door had the new religion then existed. Having cleared that charge, Augustine announces the task of the present book: to demonstrate that neither the vast territorial reach nor the centuries-long endurance of Roman dominion can be credited to the Capitoline gods, but must instead be traced to the providence of the One True God, who dispenses earthly kingdoms according to purposes hidden from human sight.