The City of God stands as Augustine's masterwork of theological defense and construction, written over thirteen years in response to accusations that Christianity brought ruin upon Rome. This first volume contains the first ten books of sustained refutation—demolishing pagan claims that traditional worship secured either temporal prosperity or eternal happiness—followed by the beginning of his positive vision in Books Eleven through Thirteen, where he traces the origin of two societal orders to the primordial division among the angels. What emerges is not merely an apology for Christianity but a philosophy of history that subordinate the fate of empires to the hidden providence of the one true God, whose sovereignty extends from creation through the fall to the final judgment.
Augustine proceeds to attack the character of the pagan gods by highlighting their failure to provide any healthy moral precepts to their worshippers. He argues that if these gods were truly guardians of the Roman people, it was incumbent upon them to publish in plain terms the laws of a good life and to send prophets to convict transgressors and proclaim punishments and rewards. Instead, the walls of their temples echoed with no such warning voices. On the contrary, the worship of these gods was characterized by the most obscene and filthy practices, which Augustine describes with unflinching detail. He recounts the sacrilegious entertainments and spectacles he witnessed in his youth, particularly the rites celebrated in honor of the mother of the gods, Cybele. He describes how on her holy day, productions so obscene were sung before her couch that they would offend the modesty of any honest woman, yet were performed before a vast audience of both sexes. He asks pointedly: if these are sacred rites, what is sacrilege? If this is purification, what is pollution? He argues that such “festivities” were merely banquets at which unclean devils found suitable refreshment, and that only those blinded by evil spirits could mistake such obscenity for true religion. The very nature of these rites reveals the character of the deities they propitiate: they delight in shame, not in virtue.
To deepen the argument, Augustine invokes the testimony of Scipio Nasica, the revered Roman senator chosen to convey the image of Cybele into the city. He suggests that Scipio, a man of severe morality who opposed the building of a theater in Rome because he valued manly virtues, would never have wished his own mother to be honored with such shameful rites. Surely, Augustine argues, Scipio would have preferred his mother to be dead rather than surviving as a goddess to lend her ear to such obscenities. This highlights the profound contradiction between the traditional virtue of the Romans and the demands of their deities. Augustine contends that the mother of the gods, being a character that the most profligate man would be ashamed to claim as his mother, sought to entrap the best Roman citizens in a net of deceit, puff them up with pride by an apparently divine testimony to their excellence, and turn them away from true piety. 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? The demonic strategy is to corrupt the elite by flattery and the masses by example.
The original text of this work is in the public domain. This page focuses on a guided summary article, reading notes, selected quotes, and visual learning materials for educational purposes.