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But such men attribute their virtues, however great they can have in this life, to nothing but the grace of God, because He has given them to those who will, who believe, who ask; and at the same time they understand how much is lacking to them for the perfection of righteousness, such as is in the fellowship of those holy angels to which they strive to fit themselves. But however much that virtue may be praised and proclaimed, which without true godliness serves the glory of men, it is by no means to be compared to the small beginnings of the saints, whose hope is placed in the grace and in the mercy of the true God. CHAPTER XX. That it is as base for the virtues to serve human glory as bodily pleasure.
The philosophers who place the end of human good in virtue itself are wont, in order to bring shame upon certain philosophers who indeed approve the virtues but measure them by the end of bodily pleasure, and think that pleasure is to be sought for its own sake but these virtues for the sake of pleasure, to paint a certain picture in words, where Pleasure sits like some dainty queen upon a royal throne, and the virtues are made subject to her as her handmaids, watching her nod, that they may do whatever she shall command: who commands Prudence to inquire vigilantly in what way Pleasure may reign and be safe;
she commands Justice to bestow what benefits she can for the procuring of the friendships necessary for bodily comforts, to do injury to no one, lest, the laws being offended, Pleasure cannot live secure; she commands Fortitude, that if any pain befall the body which does not drive on to death, it may hold its mistress, that is, Pleasure, bravely in the thought of the mind, so that through the recollection of its former delights it may soften the stings of the present pain; she commands Temperance to take only so much of foods, even if they delight, as not to disturb the health by some harmful immoderation, and that Pleasure—which the Epicureans place as greatest even in the health of the body—be not gravely offended.
Thus the virtues, with all the dignity of their glory, would serve Pleasure as some imperious and dishonorable little woman. They say there is nothing more ignominious and deformed than this picture, and nothing which the gaze of good men could less endure; and they say truly. But I do not think that the picture would be of sufficient due seemliness, if it were so fashioned that the virtues serve human glory. For although that glory herself is not a dainty woman, yet she is puffed up and has much emptiness. Whence it is not worthy that a certain solidity and firmness of the virtues should serve her, so that Prudence foresee nothing, Justice distribute nothing, Fortitude endure nothing, Temperance moderate nothing, except for the end that men may be pleased and the windy glory be served.
Nor let those defend themselves from this foulness who, while they scorn the judgments of others as despisers of glory, seem wise to themselves and please themselves. For their virtue, if indeed there is any at all, is subjected in some other fashion to human praise; for the very man who pleases himself is not no man. But he who by true piety believes in and hopes in the God whom he loves looks more upon those things in which he is displeasing to himself than upon those things, if any such are in him, which please not so much himself as the truth; nor does he ascribe that which can now please to any source but the mercy of Him whom he fears to displease — giving thanks for the things already healed, and pouring out prayers for those yet to be healed. CHAPTER XXI.
That the Roman kingdom was ordained by the true God, from whom is all power and by whose providence all things are governed. Since these things are so, let us not attribute the power of bestowing kingdom and empire to any but the true God, who grants felicity in the kingdom of heaven to the pious alone, but grants an earthly kingdom both to the pious and to the impious, as it pleases Him to whom nothing pleases unjustly. For although we have said something which He willed to be made plain to us, nevertheless it is too much for us and far exceeds our human powers to scrutinize the hidden things and by clear examination to judge the merits of kingdoms. That one true God, therefore, who deserts not the human race either in judgment or in aid, gave the kingdom to the Romans when He willed and as much as He willed;
who gave it also to the Assyrians, or even to the Persians, who (as their own writings hold) worship only two gods, one good and one evil — to say nothing of the Hebrew people, of whom I have already said as much as seemed sufficient, who worshipped none but the one God even when they reigned. He, then, who gave grain crops to the Persians without the worship of the goddess Segetia, who gave them the other gifts of the earth without the worship of so many gods, whom these people set, one over each single thing, or even several over single things — He likewise gave them a kingdom without the worship of those by whose worship these men believed themselves to have reigned. So too with individual men: He who gave to Marius gave also to Gaius Caesar; He who gave to Augustus gave also to Nero; He who gave to the Vespasians, whether father or son, the most agreeable of emperors, gave also to the most cruel Domitian;
and — that there be no need to go through them one by one — He who gave to the Christian Constantine gave also to the apostate Julian, whose remarkable natural gifts a sacrilegious and detestable curiosity deceived through the love of domination, a curiosity to which he was given over in his devotion to vain oracles; when, relying on the security of victory, he burned the ships that carried the supplies he needed, and then, hotly pressing on with immoderate boldness, was soon slain as the price of his rashness in enemy territory, and left the army destitute, so that there was no escape from there but for the boundaries of the Roman empire to be moved contrary to that omen of the god Terminus, of whom we spoke in the previous book. For the god Terminus yielded to necessity, who had not yielded to Jupiter. These things plainly the one true God rules and governs as it pleases Him;
and if for hidden causes, are they therefore unjust? CHAPTER XXII. That the times and outcomes of wars depend upon the judgment of God. So too the very times of wars: just as it lies within His arbitration and His just judgment and mercy either to grind down or to comfort the human race, so He brings it about that some are ended more swiftly, others more slowly. The war against the pirates was completed by Pompey, the Third Punic War by Scipio, with incredible swiftness and brevity of time. The war of the runaway gladiators too, although many Roman commanders and two consuls were defeated and Italy was horribly crushed and laid waste, was nevertheless brought to an end in the third year, after much had been consumed.
The Picentes, Marsi, and Peligni — peoples not foreign but Italian — after long and most devoted servitude under the Roman yoke, attempted to lift up their head into liberty, when already many nations had been subdued to the Roman empire and Carthage had been destroyed; in which Italian War, though the Romans were very often defeated, where two consuls perished and other most noble senators as well, this evil was nonetheless not protracted over a long time, for the fifth year put an end to it. But the Second Punic War wore down and almost consumed the Roman strength, with the greatest losses and calamity to the commonwealth, over eighteen years; in two battles nearly seventy thousand Romans fell. The First Punic War was carried through over twenty-three years;
the Mithridatic War, forty. And lest anyone suppose that the early efforts of the Romans were stronger for carrying through wars more swiftly, in earlier times much praised in every virtue, the Samnite War was protracted nearly fifty years; in which war the Romans were so defeated that they were even sent under the yoke. But because they loved not glory for the sake of justice, but seemed to love justice for the sake of glory, they broke the peace and treaty that had been made.
I recall these things for this reason: because many who are ignorant of past events — and some too who dissemble their own knowledge — if they see in Christian times any war dragging on a little longer, at once most insolently leap upon our religion, exclaiming that, were it not for it, and were the divinities worshipped by the old rite, then by that Roman virtue which, with Mars and Bellona to aid, completed such great wars so swiftly, this war too would be most speedily ended.
Let those, then, who have read recall how long-drawn-out were the wars, with how varied outcomes, with how grievous disasters, that were waged by the ancient Romans — even as the whole world, like a most stormy sea, is wont to be tossed by the varied tempest of such evils — and let them at last confess what they are unwilling to confess, and not destroy themselves with their mad tongues against God, nor deceive the unlearned. CHAPTER XXIII. Of the war in which Radagaisus, king of the Goths, a worshipper of demons, was conquered in a single day with his immense forces. Yet this thing, which God did marvelously and mercifully in our memory in most recent times, they do not commemorate with thanksgiving, but, so far as in them lies, they strive to bury in the oblivion of all men, if it can be done;
and if this be passed over in silence by us, we shall be ingrate in like manner. When Radagaisus, king of the Goths, with an immense and monstrous host already stationed in the vicinity of the City, was threatening the necks of the Romans, he was in a single day so swiftly conquered that, with not even one Roman — I will not say killed, but even wounded — far more than a hundred thousand of his army were laid low, and he himself, soon captured, was put to death by the punishment he deserved. For if that man, so impious, with forces so great and so impious, had entered Rome, whom would he have spared? To what places would he have shown the honor due to the martyrs? In whose person would he have feared God? Whose blood would he not have wished poured out, whose chastity untouched?
And what cries would these men raise on behalf of their gods? With what mockery would they boast that he had conquered, that he had been able to do such great things, because by daily sacrifices he was appeasing and inviting the gods — which the Christian religion would not allow the Romans to do? For when he was already drawing near to these regions, where he was crushed by the nod of the supreme Majesty, while his fame was everywhere increasing, it was said to us at Carthage that the pagans believed, scattered abroad, and boastfully proclaimed this: that, with his friendly gods protecting and aiding him — to whom he was reported to sacrifice daily — he could not possibly be conquered by those who performed no such rites to the Roman gods nor permitted them to be performed by anyone. And the wretched ones give no thanks for so great a mercy of God, who,
when He had determined to chastise by barbarian incursion the morals of men who deserved to suffer graver things, tempered His indignation with such great gentleness that He first caused that man to be marvelously conquered, lest glory be given to the demons (whom it was agreed he was supplicating) for the overturning of weak minds; and then He brought it about that Rome should be taken by those barbarians who, contrary to all the custom of wars waged before, defended out of reverence for the Christian religion those fleeing to the holy places, and so set themselves against the very demons and the rites of impious sacrifices, on which that man had presumed, in the name of Christ, that they seemed to wage a far more atrocious war against them than against men;
thus the true Lord and Governor of affairs both scourged the Romans with mercy, and, by the supplicators of demons being so incredibly conquered, showed that those sacrifices were not even necessary for the safety of present things — so that by those who contend not obstinately but attend prudently, true religion might not be forsaken on account of present needs, but might rather be held by the most faithful expectation of eternal life. CHAPTER XXIV. What is, and how true is, the felicity of Christian emperors.
For we do not call certain Christian emperors happy because they reigned a longer time, or because, while reigning, they left their sons to succeed them by a peaceful death, or because they subdued the enemies of the commonwealth, or because they were able to guard against and crush hostile citizens rising up against them. These and other rewards or solaces of this toilsome life even certain worshippers of demons have merited to receive, who do not belong to the kingdom of God to which these belong; and this too came about by His mercy, lest those who believe in Him should desire these things from Him as though they were the highest goods. But we call them happy if they rule justly, if amid the tongues of those who exalt them on high and the obsequiousness of those who salute them too humbly they are not lifted up, and remember that they are men;
if they make their power a handmaid to His majesty for the widest possible spreading of the worship of God; if they fear, love, and worship God; if they love more that kingdom where they fear not to have fellow-sharers; if they are slower to avenge, readier to pardon; if they exact that same vengeance for the necessity of governing and protecting the commonwealth, not for sating the hatreds of enmity; if they grant that same indulgence not for the impunity of iniquity, but for the hope of correction; if that which they are for the most part constrained to decree harshly, they compensate by the gentleness of mercy and the bountifulness of benefits; if luxury is the more restrained in them, the more free it might have been;
if they had rather rule over their own depraved desires than over any nations whatever; and if they do all these things not for the ardor of empty glory, but for the love of eternal felicity; if for their own sins they do not neglect to offer to their true God the sacrifice of humility, of compassion, and of prayer. Such Christian emperors we say are happy: for the present in hope, hereafter in the very reality, when that which we await shall have come. CHAPTER XXV. Of the prosperities that God conferred upon the Christian emperor Constantine.
For the good God, lest men who believed He was to be worshipped for the sake of eternal life should suppose that no one could attain these high places and earthly kingdoms unless he supplicated demons — because these spirits had much power in such matters — filled the emperor Constantine, who supplicated not demons but worshipped the true God Himself, with such great earthly gifts as no one would dare even to wish for; to whom He even granted to found a city, an ally to the Roman empire, as it were a daughter of Rome herself, yet without any temple or image of demons. He reigned long, alone as Augustus he held and defended the whole Roman world; in administering and waging wars he was most victorious, in suppressing tyrants he was prospered in all things;
in advanced old age he died of sickness and senility, and left his sons reigning. But again, lest any emperor should become a Christian in order to merit the felicity of Constantine — whereas everyone ought to be a Christian for the sake of eternal life — He took away Jovian much sooner than Julian; He permitted Gratian to be slain by a tyrant's sword, far more gently indeed than the great Pompey, a worshipper as it were of the Roman gods. For that man could not be avenged by Cato, whom he had left, in a manner, heir of the civil war; but this man — although pious souls do not require such consolations — was avenged by Theodosius, whom he had made a partner of his rule when he had a little son and a brother, being more eager for faithful fellowship than for excessive power. CHAPTER XXVI.
Of the faith and piety of Theodosius Augustus. Hence he not only kept toward the living the faith which he owed, but also, after his death, when the little brother Valentinian had been driven out by his murderer Maximus, he received the boy as a Christian into the territories of his own empire, guarded him as a ward with fatherly affection — one whom, stripped of all resources, he could have removed without any trouble, had he blazed more with greed of wider ruling than with charity of doing good; whereupon rather, having taken him up with his imperial dignity preserved, he consoled him by his very humanity and grace.
Then, when that success made Maximus formidable, he did not in the straits of his cares slip into sacrilegious and unlawful curiosities, but sent to John, who dwelt in the Egyptian desert — whom by spreading report he had learned to be a servant of God endowed with the spirit of prophecy — and received from him a most certain message of victory.
Soon the destroyer of the tyrant Maximus restored the boy Valentinian with most merciful reverence to those parts of his empire from which he had been driven; and when that boy was shortly after slain, whether by treachery or by some other compact or chance, he, having again received a prophetic answer, sure in faith, crushed another tyrant, Eugenius, who had been illegitimately substituted into that emperor's place — fighting against his most robust army more by praying than by striking.
The soldiers who were with us reported that whatever they hurled was wrested from their hands, when a violent wind went from the side of Theodosius against the adversaries, and not only snatched away most furiously whatever was cast at them, but even turned their own weapons back upon their bodies. Whence the poet Claudian too, though a stranger to the name of Christ, said nonetheless in his praises: 'O thou too greatly beloved of God, for whom the heaven does battle, and the confederate winds come to the war-trumpets!'
As victor, moreover, just as he had believed and foretold, he took down the images of Jupiter which had been set up in the Alps, consecrated against him by I know not what rites; and their thunderbolts, because they were of gold, he cheerfully and kindly bestowed upon the couriers who were jesting (as that gladness permitted) and saying that they wished to be struck by them. The sons of his enemies, whom the onrush of war — not by his own command — had carried off, even while not yet Christians, fleeing to the church, he willed on this occasion to become Christians and loved with Christian charity, nor deprived them of their goods, but increased them with honors. He permitted private enmities to prevail against no one after the victory.
Civil wars he did not, like Cinna and Marius and Sulla and others of that kind, wish to end even when ended, but rather grieved that they had arisen than wished to harm anyone once they were terminated. Amid all these things, from the very beginning of his empire, he did not cease to come to the aid of the Church laboring under impious men by most just and most merciful laws — the Church which the heretic Valens, favoring the Arians, had vehemently afflicted; and he rejoiced to be a member of that Church more than to reign on earth. He ordered the images of the heathen to be everywhere overthrown, understanding well enough that not even earthly gifts are placed in the power of demons, but in that of the true God.
And what was more marvelous than his religious humility, when, in the matter of the most grievous crime of the Thessalonians — for which, at the intercession of bishops, he had already promised pardon — he was compelled by the tumult of certain men who clung to him to take vengeance, and, being restrained by ecclesiastical discipline, so did penance that the people, praying for him, wept more at seeing the imperial majesty prostrate than they had feared it angered when sinning? These good works, and any like them which it would be long to commemorate, that man bore away with him from this temporal vapor of whatever human height and eminence; of which works the reward is eternal felicity, whose giver is God to the truly pious alone.
But the rest of the heights or supports of this life — like the world itself, light, breezes, lands, waters, fruits, and man's own soul and body, senses, mind, and life — He bestows upon the good and the evil alike; among which is also any greatness of empire whatever, which He dispenses according to the governance of the times. Accordingly, I now see that an answer must be given also to those who, refuted and convicted by the most manifest proofs by which it is shown that for these temporal things — which alone the foolish covet to possess — the multitude of false gods avails nothing, attempt to assert that the gods are to be worshipped not for the usefulness of the present life, but for the sake of that which is to come after death.
For to those who, on account of the friendships of this world, wish to worship vain things and complain that they are not allowed their childish notions, I think enough has been answered in these five books. When I had published the first three of them and they had begun to be in the hands of many, I heard that certain men were preparing, by writing, some reply against them. Then it was brought to me that they had already written, but were seeking a time when they could publish without danger. These I admonish not to wish for what is not expedient for them. For it is easy for anyone to seem to have answered, who has been unwilling to be silent. Or what is more loquacious than vanity? — which cannot do what truth can, because, if it wills, it can even shout more than truth.
But let them consider all things diligently, and if perchance, judging without partisanship, they perceive such things to be such as can rather be stirred up than overthrown by most shameless garrulity and by a levity as it were satirical or mimic, let them restrain their trifles and choose rather to be corrected by the prudent than praised by the shameless. For if they await a time not for the liberty of speaking truth, but for the license of speaking ill, far be it that there befall them what Tully says of a certain man who was called happy through the license of sinning: 'O wretched man, to whom it was permitted to sin!'
Whence whoever he is that thinks himself happy through the license of speaking ill will be far happier if this is not permitted to him at all, since, laying aside the emptiness of boasting, he could even at this time, as though out of zeal for consultation, contradict whatever he wished and, as far as they are able, hear from those whom he consults, by friendly disputation, honorably, gravely, and freely, what he ought to hear. PREFACE. In the five preceding books I seem to myself to have disputed sufficiently against those who hold that the many false gods — which the Christian truth proves to be useless images, or unclean spirits and pernicious demons, or at any rate creatures, not the Creator —
are to be venerated and worshipped, for the usefulness of this mortal life and of earthly things, with that rite and service which in Greek is called latreia and is owed to the one true God. And indeed, who does not know that against such excessive folly or obstinacy neither these five nor any other books, of however great a number, can suffice? — when that is reckoned the glory of vanity, to yield to no powers of truth, to the ruin assuredly of him over whom so monstrous a vice holds dominion. For even against all the industry of the one tending him, it is not by the fault of the physician but of the incurable patient that the disease is unconquered.
But those who weigh the things they read with no obstinacy of their old error, or not with great and excessive obstinacy, having understood and considered them, will more easily judge that we have, within this number of five completed volumes, discussed rather more than the necessity of the question itself demanded than less; and they will not be able to doubt that all the odium which the unlearned attempt to cast upon the Christian religion concerning the disasters of this life and the wearing down and changing of earthly things — with the learned not only dissembling but even favoring it against their own conscience, men whom mad impiety has possessed — is altogether empty of right thinking and reasoning, and full of the most trivial rashness and most pernicious animosity. CHAPTER I.
Concerning those who say that the gods are worshipped by them not for the present life, but for the eternal one. Now therefore, since henceforth, as the promised order requires, those too must be refuted and instructed who contend that the gods of the nations — which the Christian religion destroys — are to be worshipped not for the sake of this life, but for the sake of that which is to be after death: it pleases me to take the beginning of my disputation from the truthful oracle of the holy psalm: 'Blessed is the man whose hope is the Lord his God, and who has not regarded vanities and lying follies.' Nevertheless, in all vanities and lying follies, the philosophers are far more tolerably to be heard, to whom these opinions and errors of the peoples were displeasing,
those peoples who set up images to the divinities, and either fabricated, or believed when fabricated, many false and unworthy things about those whom they call immortal gods, and mingled the things believed with the worship and rites of their sacred things. With these men — who, even if not by freely proclaiming, yet somehow by muttering in disputations, have testified that they disapprove such things — this question is not so unfittingly treated: whether the one God, who made every spiritual and corporeal creature, ought not to be worshipped for the sake of the life that is to be after death, but rather many gods, whom certain of those same philosophers, more excellent and noble than the rest, held to have been made by that one God and sublimely placed on high.
But who would bear it to be said and contended that those gods — some of whom I mentioned in the fourth book, to each of whom single offices over trifling things are distributed — bestow eternal life upon anyone? Or shall those most skilled and most acute men, who glory in having taught in their writings as a great benefit, so that it might be known why each god should be supplicated, what should be sought from each — lest, by a most base absurdity such as is wont to be done jestingly in a mime, water should be sought from Liber and wine from the Lymphs — shall they be authors to any man, supplicating the immortal gods, so that, when he has sought wine from the Lymphs and they have answered him: 'We have water; seek this from Liber,' he may rightly say:
'If you have no wine, at least give me eternal life'? What is more monstrous than this absurdity? Would not those goddesses, cackling (for they are wont to be easily moved to laughter), if they do not aspire to deceive like demons, answer the supplicant: 'O man, do you think we have life in our power, we who you hear have not even a vine?' It is therefore of the most shameless folly to seek or hope for eternal life from such gods, who are asserted to guard the single particles of this most toilsome and most brief life — and of anything that pertains to propping and supporting it — in such a way that, if what is under another's guardianship and power be sought from another, it is so unfitting and absurd as to seem most like the buffoonery of a mime.
And when this is done by mimes who know what they do, they are rightly laughed at in the theater; but when it is done by fools who do not know, they are more worthily mocked in the world. To which god or goddess, and for what, supplication was to be made — as far as concerns those gods whom the cities instituted — was skillfully discovered by the learned and committed to memory: what was to be sought from Liber, for example, what from the Lymphs, what from Vulcan, and so from the rest, whom I have partly mentioned in the fourth book, partly thought should be passed over. Furthermore, if to seek wine from Ceres, bread from Liber, water from Vulcan, fire from the Lymphs is an error, how much greater a madness must it be understood to be, if supplication be made to any one of these for eternal life!