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.
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.
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