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 asserts that this neglect of moral instruction was total and deliberate. The gods did nothing to hinder the cities and nations that worshipped them from becoming utterly corrupt, nor did they throw any dreadful prohibition in the way of the vices of the soul—evils far greater than physical disasters. When pagans protest that secret incitements to virtue were whispered to the elite in the mysteries, Augustine dismisses this as an idle boast and a deceitful tactic. He challenges them to name the places where, instead of obscene songs and licentious acting, the people were commanded in the name of the gods to restrain avarice, bridle impurity, and conquer ambition. He contrasts this silence with the Christian churches, built in every land for the specific purpose of teaching the true law of God, where Holy Scripture and instruction in righteousness are proclaimed from a raised platform in presence of all. The secret precepts, if they exist, are but a sop to the virtuous few, while the public spectacles corrupt the countless many. This dichotomy exposes the malicious craft of the demons: they offer a veneer of morality to snare the conscientious, while flooding the public square with license to ensnare the masses.
Augustine then turns to the corrupting influence of theatrical exhibitions, which he argues were not merely human inventions but were commanded and extorted by the gods themselves. He refutes the excuse that the immoral actions of the gods depicted in plays are merely the fictions of poets, noting that history attests that the gods gave urgent commands for the institution of games in their honor. He points out the psychological power of example: men are far more likely to adopt for the regulation of their own lives the examples represented in plays which have a divine sanction than the abstract precepts written by mere men. If the poets falsely represented Jupiter as an adulterer, the chaste gods should have been angered; instead, they encouraged the games that circulated these fictions. Augustine notes that even boys were obliged to read and learn these dramas as part of a liberal education, thereby ingesting moral poison from a young age. The young profligate in Terence, seeing the fabled descent of Jupiter into Danaë’s lap, boasts that he is an imitator of God; what more effective justification for licentiousness could there be than divine precedent?
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