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.
Beyond the confines of the marriage bed, Augustine extends his critique to the gods of agriculture and childbirth, highlighting the specific rituals required to protect new mothers from the god of Silvanus. He explains that three minor deities are appointed as guardians to ward off Silvanus, who is depicted as a rough and uncultivated woodland deity prone to molesting women in childbirth. To signify the presence of these protectors, three men are required to circle the house during the night, performing symbolic actions with agricultural implements. First, they strike the threshold with a hatchet to represent the cutting of trees; second, they strike it with a pestle to represent the grinding of grain; and third, they sweep it with a broom to represent the heaping of corn. From these three actions, three specific gods are named: Intercidona, from the cutting made by the hatchet; Pilumnus, from the pestle; and Diverra, from the broom. Augustine mocks the notion that the guardianship of kindly-disposed gods would not suffice against the malice of a mischievous god unless they were three to one, fighting against him with opposing emblems of cultivation. He argues that this reveals a theology where the gods are as weak and quarrelsome as men, requiring numerical superiority and the use of axes, pestles, and brooms to defend against one another. This elaborate ritual, filled with petty deities like Silvanus, Intercidona, Pilumnus, and Diverra, portrays the divine realm as trivial and contentious, utterly incapable of granting eternal life. Augustine further points out the contradiction in Varro’s distinction between the religious man and the superstitious man; if the gods are truly benevolent and innocent, as Varro claims, why would they require such elaborate defenses against the malice of one of their own kind? The necessity of these rituals betrays the petty, quarrelsome, and ridiculous nature of these so-called deities, rather than their benevolence.
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