The City of God, Volume I

Augustine then addresses a more sophisticated philosophical strand of pagan theology—the Stoic view, endorsed by Varro, that Jupiter should be understood as the soul animating the corporeal world, with every creature and object constituting a portion of his being. Augustine concedes that this conception moves closer to monotheism than the crude polytheism of the popular cult, but he presses it to its logical conclusions and finds them intolerable. If God is the world-soul and all things are parts of God, then every stone trampled underfoot is a fragment of the divine, and every animal slaughtered is the killing of God. Worse still, if only rational creatures—human beings—are counted as divine portions, then every sinful man is a sinful part of God, and every whipping of a disobedient boy is a scourging of the divine substance. Such implications are blasphemous on their face and compel the honest inquirer to recognize that the true God cannot be conflated with the created order. He is the Maker of souls, not a soul Himself, and His creatures remain distinct from their Creator.

Having dismantled the pantheon’s structural incapacity, Augustine trains his attention on the worship of personified abstractions—Felicity, Fortune, Virtue, and Faith—showing that once these qualities are admitted as genuine divinities, they render every other deity superfluous. If Felicity is truly a goddess capable of bestowing every good, no additional temple, altar, or rite to any other power serves any purpose, for she alone can furnish whatever humanity might seek. The introduction of Fortune as a separate goddess only compounds the confusion. Fortune, by definition, arrives without regard to moral desert, visiting the wicked and the righteous indiscriminately; a power so capricious hardly deserves the reverence due to divinity. If Fortune operates at Jupiter’s command, then it is Jupiter who should alone receive prayer; if she acts independently, then she usurps the role of the supreme deity. The existence of distinct temples and ceremonies for Felicity and Fortune exposes a fundamental incoherence in the Roman religious imagination: the former rewards merit, the latter dispenses blind chance, yet both are accorded divine honors as though their natures were compatible.

Augustine extends the same logic to Virtue and Faith. The Romans erected temples to Virtue while leaving unacknowledged the manifold virtues that compose her—prudence, temperance, fortitude, and justice—and they honored Faith as a separate goddess despite her being a constituent element of justice. The paradox deepens when one notices that the goddess Quiet, whose blessings would seem essential to a harmonious commonwealth, was pointedly excluded from the city, her shrine placed beyond the Colline Gate as though to confess that the worship of Rome’s teeming pantheon produces inner turmoil rather than tranquility. These abstractions, Augustine insists, are not self-subsisting divinities but gracious endowments flowing from the one source of all good. To adore the gift while ignoring its giver is the height of irrationality, akin to pressing one’s lips to a painted loaf and refusing to approach the baker who holds real bread.

The historical record of Roman practice supplies Augustine with a particularly cutting piece of evidence. For centuries the republic expanded and flourished without any public cult of Felicity. Romulus, Numa, and the early kings established temples to Janus, Mars, Saturn, and a host of lesser powers, but never thought to accord Felicity supreme honors. It was not until the late republic that a general—Lucullus—finally dedicated a shrine to her. If she were truly the decisive bestower of national success, Rome’s earlier prosperity without her proves her unnecessary; if, on the other hand, she resented her belated reception, the civil wars that convulsed the state soon after her installation would confirm her displeasure. In either reading, the episode undermines the pagan claim. Moreover, even after her admission to the roster of the divine, Felicity was denied a seat among the Consentes, the select council of deities said to advise Jupiter himself, and she received no temple rivalling the Capitoline in grandeur. The very goddess who, by the Romans’ own logic, should have eclipsed all others was treated as a junior partner, sharing her worship with figures of manifest absurdity and immorality.

This pattern of misplaced reverence points Augustine toward the deeper moral corruption embedded in Roman religion. The gods of the state did not merely tolerate theatrical obscenity; they actively demanded it. He recounts the well-known story of Titus Latinius, a countryman who was warned in a dream to instruct the Senate to resume the public games after an execution had marred the festivities. Latinius’s initial reluctance cost him the life of a son and brought a terrible affliction upon his own body; only when he at last delivered the message and the Senate complied at quadruple expense did his health return. For Augustine the lesson is unmistakable: the spirits requiring such performances are malignant demons who feed on human degradation. The dramas they command celebrate precisely the crimes—adultery, rape, deceit, patricide—that the poets invented and the people came to accept as fitting tribute to heaven.

The learned among the pagans understood this difficulty well. Augustine invokes the pontiff Scaevola, who frankly acknowledged that the gods could be classified in three ways: the poetic, the philosophical, and the civic. The poetic divinities, with their scandalous myths, were unworthy of belief; the philosophical conceptions, while nearer the truth, were unfit for popular consumption because they denied the divinity of figures like Hercules and Aesculapius and taught that the supreme being possesses no bodily form. The civic gods, therefore, were retained by the state for reasons of political expediency, even though the ruling class recognized their falsity. Scaevola’s candor lays bare the cynicism at the heart of Roman religion: the educated elite deliberately perpetuated falsehood because they judged it useful for maintaining social order. Augustine condemns this calculation as a devilish mimicry of the demons themselves, who enslave both the deceivers and the deceived in a common web of illusion. A religion that admits its own mendacity cannot be the vehicle of genuine human flourishing.

Before reaching his conclusion, Augustine addresses the famous augury associated with the founding of the Capitoline temple. When King Tarquin consulted the auspices to determine whether the resident deities would yield their places to Jupiter, Mars, Terminus, and Juventas all refused. The priests interpreted this refusal as a pledge that the Roman people, their frontiers, and their youth would never submit to any foreign power. History, however, tells a different story. The Gauls sacked Rome and humiliated its citizens on their own soil, demonstrating that the nation dedicated to Mars could indeed be crushed. Hannibal pushed the republic’s borders back to a perilously narrow perimeter, belying the promise associated with Terminus. Centuries later the emperor Hadrian voluntarily surrendered three eastern provinces to the Persian Empire, and the emperor Julian’s rash campaign compelled a still further contraction of the frontier. The augury, so celebrated in the annals, proved empty: the deities in question could not protect what they had vowed to defend.