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.
This fame, Augustine observes, has brought injury rather than honor upon the select gods. The obscure gods have been protected by their very obscurity from being overwhelmed with infamy. We may laugh, Augustine says, at the distribution of minute functions among many gods, like workmen in a silversmiths’ street passing one vessel through many hands when a single perfect craftsman could finish it. Yet scarcely any obscure god has brought infamy upon himself through crime, while scarcely any select god has escaped the brand of notorious infamy. The select gods have descended to the humble works of the obscure ones, while the obscure ones have not ascended to the select gods’ sublime crimes. Janus alone appears relatively innocent—he hospitably received the fleeing Saturn and shared his kingdom with him. Yet those who seek unseemliness in worship have disgraced him with monstrously deformed images, giving him two faces or even four, as though his greater innocence required a greater number of faces.
Augustine now turns to the physical interpretations by which pagan theologians attempt to dignify their myths with the appearance of profound doctrine. Varro commends these interpretations strongly, claiming that the ancients invented divine images so that worshippers seeing them with bodily eyes might perceive with their mind’s eye the soul of the world and its parts—the true gods. The human form signifies the rational soul, just as a wine-vessel in Liber’s temple signifies wine. Augustine acknowledges Varro’s learning but grieves that his soul, so acute and learned, could never through these mysteries reach its God—the God by whom, not with whom, it was made, of whom it is not a part but a work, who is not the soul of all things but the Maker of every soul, and in whose light alone every soul finds blessedness.
Varro’s natural theology posits that God is the soul of the world, and the world itself is God. As a wise man is called wise from his mind though he consists of body and mind, so the world is called God from its soul though it consists of soul and body. The world divides into heaven and earth, each subdivided: heaven into ether and air, earth into water and land. All four parts are filled with souls—ethereal and aerial souls immortal, those in water and on earth mortal. From the highest heavens to the moon’s orbit are the stars and planets, visible gods; between the moon and the clouds are aerial souls, perceived by the mind, called Heroes, Lares, and Genii. This natural theology has satisfied not only Varro but many philosophers.
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