The City of God, Volume I

With this foundation firmly laid, Augustine proposes the central thesis of the present book: to examine the calamities which Rome suffered before the time of Christ, and while the worship of the false gods was universally practiced. He aims to demonstrate that far from being preserved from misfortune by these gods, the Romans were overwhelmed by the greatest of all calamities—the corruption of manners and the vices of the soul, which are far more destructive than any physical disaster. He challenges his pagan opponents to call to mind the various and repeated disasters that blighted Roman prosperity before Christ’s name was blazoned among the nations. If the gods were truly powerful and benevolent guardians, why did they permit these disasters to befall their worshippers before the Christian religion had supposedly offended them? The silence of the gods in the face of historical suffering serves as the starting point for Augustine’s indictment of their moral impotence. He will show that the gods not only failed to prevent moral decay but actively promoted it through their own example and the institutions they demanded.

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.

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?