The City of God, Volume I

Augustine recognizes that certain thoughtful pagans came close to grasping the truth. Varro, the most erudite antiquarian of Roman religion, confessed that he would have arranged the pantheon very differently had he been founding a city from scratch, but felt bound by ancestral custom. He lamented the introduction of divine images, observing that the early Romans had worshiped for more than a century and a half without them, and he acknowledged the Jewish nation as a witness to the possibility of imageless piety. He even expressed the conviction that those who conceive of a single divine mind governing the cosmos by reason have come closest to understanding the nature of God. Yet Varro stopped short, unwilling or unable to break with the prevailing cult. Augustine views this near-miss as providential: God permitted the learned to perceive the insufficiency of polytheism so that their own testimony might later serve the cause of truth.

The book culminates in a positive theological affirmation. The One True God, who alone possesses the power to confer felicity, distributes earthly sovereignty to the virtuous and the wicked alike, not arbitrarily but in accordance with an order of times and seasons that is hidden from human understanding yet perfectly ordered by divine wisdom. Worldly dominion is bestowed even upon the unjust in order that believers, still immature in faith, might not mistake political power for the highest good. Felicity in the fullest sense—genuine, enduring blessedness—is reserved for the life to come, where the distinction between ruler and subject will dissolve. As proof that the true God governs the rise and fall of nations, Augustine points to the history of the Jewish people. They multiplied in Egypt without invoking birth-goddesses, crossed the sea without praying to Neptune, received sustenance in the wilderness without appealing to agricultural spirits, and prevailed in battle without offering tribute to Mars. Every benefit for which the Romans multiplied their pantheon was granted to Israel directly by the one God. Their kingdom endured as long as they remained faithful; when they turned to idols, they were scattered among the nations—a dispersion that itself serves providence, for the Jewish scriptures, read in synagogues across the world, now testify to truths that the pagans can no longer dismiss as a Christian invention. Thus the grandeur and longevity of Rome are not trophies of Jupiter’s favor but instruments of the true God’s hidden design, and the entire apparatus of pagan worship stands exposed as a vast and tragic deception, dispelled only by the grace that flows through Christ.

Augustine initiates this fifth book by turning to a question that naturally follows from his previous refutation of the pagan gods: if the Roman Empire did not rise to greatness through the worship of false deities, then what account can be given for its extraordinary extent and duration? Some might be tempted to attribute such worldly success to the influence of the stars—to what is commonly called Fate. Augustine therefore undertakes a thorough demolition of astrological determinism before proceeding to his positive account of divine providence and the true sources of Roman greatness.

The bishop of Hippo begins by establishing a fundamental principle: the rise and fall of kingdoms belongs to the governance of divine providence, not to the random configurations of celestial bodies. When people speak of “fate,” they typically mean the power attributed to the particular arrangement of stars at the moment of conception or birth. Those who claim that the stars determine human destiny apart from God’s will effectively deny any role for genuine divinity in human affairs. If the stars alone decree what each person shall do, possess, or suffer, then prayer and worship become meaningless. Such a view cannot be held by anyone who wishes to worship any god at all, whether true or false.

Augustine acknowledges that some thinkers attempt to preserve a role for the divine by suggesting that God created the stars and granted them power to shape human destinies. But this position, upon examination, proves even more objectionable. If the stars possess discretionary power to assign character and fortune, then the heavens become a kind of senate where wicked decrees are issued—deeds that would be condemned if any earthly government enacted them. Alternatively, if the stars merely execute God’s commands by imposing necessities upon human life, then the blame for evil decrees shifts back to God Himself. A third position holds that the stars signify rather than cause future events, serving as a kind of celestial language that predicts what will occur. But this view contradicts how astrologers actually speak: they say that Mars in a certain position makes a murderer, not merely signifies one. More importantly, this position cannot explain why twins—born under virtually identical stellar configurations—often experience such radically different lives.

The phenomenon of twins provides Augustine with his most powerful argument against astrological determinism. Twins are conceived in the same act of copulation and born within moments of each other, yet their professions, honors, circumstances, and even their deaths frequently diverge dramatically. The famous physician Hippocrates once observed two brothers who fell ill simultaneously and recovered at the same time, leading him to suspect they were twins. Posidonius, a Stoic philosopher devoted to astrology, explained this coincidence by appealing to their shared constellation. But Augustine finds the physician’s explanation far more credible: similarities in health arise from shared bodily constitution, common nourishment, identical environment, and similar habits of life. The differences in their fortunes, however, cannot be attributed to the stars, for the stars were nearly identical for both.

The astrologers attempt to rescue their system by appealing to the small interval of time between twin births. Nigidius Figulus, a Roman scholar, devised an analogy using a potter’s wheel. Spinning the wheel rapidly, he marked it twice with ink in what appeared to be a single motion; when the wheel stopped, the marks were found far apart. Similarly, he argued, even a brief interval between births corresponds to a significant distance in the heavens, accounting for the differences in twins’ lives. Augustine finds this argument utterly unconvincing. If such minute, unobservable moments of time produce such vast celestial differences, then astrologers cannot claim to predict anything from the observable positions of stars. But if they rely on observable positions for their predictions, then the tiny differences between twins should correspond to trivial variations, not the profound divergences actually found. Moreover, if twins are born so close together that no change occurs in the horoscope, astrologers must predict identical lives—which never happens. If enough time elapses to change the horoscope, they must predict different parents—which is impossible.

The biblical story of Esau and Jacob furnishes Augustine with a compelling illustration. These twins emerged from the womb in such quick succession that the first grasped the heel of the second. Yet their lives unfolded in utterly different directions. One became a servant; the other never served. One was beloved by his mother; the other was not. One lost the honored birthright; the other gained it. Their wives, children, and possessions were entirely different. If such profound differences can arise from virtually identical stellar positions, then the whole edifice of astrological prediction collapses.