The City of God, Volume I

Before weighing the merits of the pagan pantheon, however, Augustine pauses to question a deeper assumption—whether the possession of a sprawling empire is, in itself, something worth boasting about. He invites the reader to imagine two lives. One man commands vast wealth yet is consumed by gnawing anxiety, perpetual rivalry, and an appetite for acquisition that only deepens his misery. The other, possessed of modest resources, enjoys the affection of his family, the friendship of his neighbors, and the quiet integrity of a clear conscience. No reasonable person, Augustine observes, would hesitate to pronounce the second life happier. What holds for individuals holds equally for cities and nations: a compact, peaceable commonwealth is superior to an agitated dominion that extends its frontiers through unending bloodshed. The rule of a good sovereign benefits chiefly those who are governed, whereas the tyranny of the wicked harms principally the tyrant, who becomes a bondsman to his own passions. True freedom, then, belongs to the just man even in chains, while the unjust ruler, enthroned in purple, remains the slave of as many vices as hold sway over his soul.

From this moral vantage Augustine advances one of his most celebrated contentions: stripped of justice, a kingdom differs from a robber band only in scale. A gang of thieves possesses its own command structure, mutual agreements, and rules for dividing plunder; should that gang grow formidable enough to seize cities and subjugate peoples, it earns the title of empire not by putting greed aside but by adding impunity to its violence. The point is crystallized in the celebrated exchange between Alexander the Great and a captured pirate. Asked by what right he terrorized the seas, the pirate retorted that he and the emperor were engaged in the same enterprise—the difference being merely one of fleet size, which determined whether one was branded a criminal or hailed as a sovereign.

Having framed empire as morally ambiguous at best, Augustine seeks to sever the connection between Roman power and divine favor by producing historical instances of mighty dominions that arose without any assistance from the gods of the Capitoline. He turns first to the famous slave insurrection led by Spartacus. A handful of gladiators who broke free from their training school in Campania managed to attract a large following, appoint generals, and inflict devastating losses on Roman forces throughout Italy. The episode demonstrates that formidable political-military capacity can emerge from the humblest origins without the blessing of any deity, and that even the greatest empires can be shaken by sudden, unexpected threats. If the pagan divinities were truly the guarantors of Roman supremacy, why did they permit such a alarming challenge from men who never invoked them?

Augustine then reaches further back into antiquity, drawing on the account of Justinus and his source Trogus Pompeius to describe the Assyrian realm forged by Ninus. According to the historians, Ninus was the first monarch to break with the ancestral custom of contented frontiers, launching aggressive campaigns against his neighbors purely from a desire for wider dominion. Subduing the peoples of the East and consolidating his conquests through continued occupation, he established an imperial system that endured for roughly twelve hundred years—a span exceeding the age of Rome itself at Augustine’s time of writing. The lesson is plain: a colossal and durable empire was built and maintained for over a millennium without the slightest reference to Jupiter, Mars, or any member of the Roman pantheon. If Assyria’s longevity did not require those gods, there is no logical grounds for crediting Rome’s similar achievements to them either.

This observation opens a still more damaging line of reasoning. If divine patrons truly determined the fortunes of nations, then the gods who sustained Assyria for so many centuries must have either perished when the empire fell, transferred their services to the rival Medes and Persians in pursuit of better terms, or proved too weak to defend their clients against human adversaries. Each alternative is equally damning: the first makes the gods mortal, the second reduces them to mercenaries, and the third denies them omnipotence. Augustine notes the irony that when these ancient kingdoms collapsed, the name of Christ was wholly unknown in those regions; had the Christian faith already been preached, the pagans of Assyria would no doubt have leveled the same accusation that Augustine’s contemporaries now voice—namely, that abandoning the old rites brought about the loss of national greatness. The parallel strips the present-day complaint of any novelty or force.

With the historical argument secured, Augustine turns to a systematic demolition of the Roman pantheon, beginning with its most conspicuous weakness: the absurdly narrow scope of its minor deities. Roman piety had fractured divine responsibility into a bewildering array of specialized powers, each entrusted with a single, often trivial, function. One spirit watched over sown grain while it lay beneath the soil; a second took charge of the growing stalk; a third guarded the harvested grain in the granary. Still others presided over the knots on the stem, the opening of the sheath, the flowering of the ear, and the ripening of the kernel. Doors, hinges, and thresholds each received their own separate guardian. The cares of infancy were distributed among powers overseeing the birth-cry, the cradle, suckling, and the child’s first steps. Augustine argues that beings so confined to minute, isolated tasks could not possibly exercise the comprehensive vision required to found, expand, or safeguard a vast imperial state. A deity restricted to watching cradles cannot be expected to deliberate on matters of war and diplomacy, just as a spirit confined to the doorpost cannot manage the threshold and hinge simultaneously.

Passing from the minor to the major gods, Augustine interrogates the contradictions that plague the ruling figures of the pantheon. Jupiter is proclaimed king of heaven and father of the gods, yet the poets and mythographers burden him with tales of adultery, seduction in animal disguise, and divine treachery. Juno, simultaneously his sister and consort, is assigned the lower air as her domain, while Minerva—who sprang from Jupiter’s head and therefore occupies the highest ether—is somehow ranked beneath her father. Saturn, identified with Time itself, is relegated to inferior status because he was defeated by his own son. Neptune and Pluto divide the sea and the underworld between them, each provided with a consort who governs merely the “lower” portion of an already unified element. The resulting theological architecture is riddled with incoherence: the same natural substance receives multiple divinities depending on whether one considers its upper or lower reaches, and the familial relationships among the gods replicate the messy entanglements of mortal households rather than reflecting a rational cosmic order.