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.
Saturn, governing sowings, and Genius, governing begetting, are both absorbed into Jupiter, for the world emits and receives all seeds. Mercury and Mars, not easily referred to parts of the world, are assigned to human acts—speech and war. If Mercury is speech, he is not a god; if Mars is war, he is not a god. Regarding the stars, some gods are identified with planets, yet Jupiter’s star is dimmer than Venus’s—a strange condition for the king of gods. Janus has no star, though he is the world. The constellations of the Zodiac, each containing many stars, are not worshipped as gods.
Apollo and Diana are identified with the sun and moon; Vulcan with fire; Neptune with the waters; Father Dis with the lower earth; Liber and Ceres with seeds; Minerva with the ether or moon. The result is chaos: one god is many things, and one thing is many gods. Even Varro expressed doubt, admitting he stated opinions rather than certainties. Augustine suggests a more credible origin: these were men, deified and adorned by poets, their rites exploited by demons.
Augustine examines the specific interpretations of Saturn’s myths. Saturn devouring his children is interpreted as seeds returning to earth; the stone given him instead of Jupiter as seeds buried before ploughing. Augustine finds this unconvincing—if Saturn is seed, he cannot be the cause of seed; covering seed with soil does not save it from being devoured but ensures it will be. The pruning-knife given Saturn is anachronistic, for agriculture did not exist in his reign. Human sacrifices to him are a cruel vanity. These interpretations never reach the true God, who is a living, incorporeal, and unchangeable nature, but end in things corporeal, temporal, mutable, and mortal.
The rites of Ceres are interpreted as referring to corn and the loss and return of Proserpine (fecundity). But the rites of Liber are abominable: in Italy, the male member was worshipped on a car at crossroads, and at Lavinium, an honorable matron was compelled to crown it publicly. Such turpitude cannot lead to eternal life. Neptune’s wives Salacia and Venilia, interpreted as receding and incoming waves, represent one wave, not two—the multiplication of goddesses serves only to multiply demons for the soul’s prostitution.
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