The most glorious City of God — whether in this passing course of time, as it lives by faith while sojourning among the impious, or in that stability of the eternal seat which it now awaits through patience, until 'righteousness shall be turned into judgment,' but which it shall thereafter attain by pre-eminence in final victory and perfect peace — I have undertaken to defend, in this work now begun and owed to you by my promise, against those who prefer their own gods to its Founder, dearest son Marcellinus: a great and arduous task, but God is our helper.
For I know what strength is needed to persuade the proud how great is the virtue of humility, by which it comes to pass that a loftiness surpassing all earthly summits — which totter in their temporal instability — is attained not through human pride usurped, but by divine grace bestowed. For the King and Founder of this City, of which we have set out to speak, has in the Scripture of His people revealed the sentence of the divine law, by which it is said: 'God resisteth the proud, but giveth grace to the humble.' Yet this, which belongs to God, the inflated spirit of the proud soul also affects, and loves to have said in its praises: 'To spare the subjected and to war down the proud.'
Hence, concerning the earthly city as well — which, though it strives to dominate, and though peoples serve it, is itself dominated by its own lust for domination — nothing that the plan of this undertaken work demands to be said is to be passed over in silence, if opportunity is given. For from this city arise the enemies against whom the City of God must be defended; yet many of them, having corrected the error of their impiety, become in it citizens quite fit; but many blaze against it with such fires of hatred, and are so ungrateful for the manifest benefits of its Redeemer, that today they would not move their tongues against it, had they not — while fleeing the enemy's sword — found in its sacred places the very life of which they boast.
Are not even those very Romans hostile to the name of Christ, whom for Christ's sake the barbarians spared? To this the shrines of the martyrs and the basilicas of the apostles bear witness, which in that devastation of the City received, as they fled to them, both their own and strangers. Up to those places the bloody foe raged; there the fury of the slayer received its limit; thither the pitying enemies led those whom, even outside those places, they had spared, lest they fall into the hands of others who had no such mercy. Even these same men, who elsewhere raged fierce and in hostile fashion, after they came to those places where what elsewhere the law of war would have permitted had been forbidden, then all their savagery of striking was reined in, and their greed for taking captives was broken.
Thus many escaped who now disparage these Christian times, and impute to Christ the evils that city endured; but the goods that were done to them, that they might live, for the honor of Christ, they impute not to our Christ but to their own fate — whereas rather, if they had any taste for what is right, they ought to attribute those harsh and hard things which they suffered at the enemy's hands to divine providence, which is wont to reform and grind down men's corrupted morals by wars, and likewise to exercise a just and praiseworthy human life by such afflictions, and, having proved it, either to transfer it to better things or to keep it still on this earth for other uses;
but as for the fact that the ferocious barbarians spared them — whether anywhere for the name of Christ, or in places most dedicated and most spacious to the name of Christ and, out of a more generous mercy, chosen for the capacity of a multitude — contrary to the custom of wars: this they ought to attribute to Christian times, hence to give thanks to God, hence truly to run to His name, that they may escape the punishments of eternal fire — that name which many of them falsely usurped, that they might escape the punishments of present destruction. For among those whom you see wantonly and impudently insulting the servants of Christ, there are very many who would not have escaped that ruin and slaughter, had they not feigned to be servants of Christ.
And now with ungrateful pride and most impious madness they resist His name with a perverse heart, so as to be punished with everlasting darkness — that name to which they fled, even with a deceitful mouth, that they might enjoy the temporal light. So many wars have been recorded, waged either before Rome was founded or from its rise and dominion: let them read and produce a case where a city was so taken by foreigners that the enemies who had taken it spared those whom they found to have fled to the temples of their gods, or where some barbarian leader commanded that, when the town was stormed, no one should be struck who was found in this or that temple. Did not Aeneas see Priam at the altars 'defiling with blood the fires which he himself had hallowed'?
Did not Diomedes and Ulysses, 'having slain the guards of the citadel's height, seize the sacred image and, with bloody hands, dare to touch the maiden fillets of the goddess'? Nor yet is what follows true: 'From that time the hope of the Greeks began to ebb and, gliding backward, to be carried away.' For afterward they conquered, afterward they destroyed Troy with sword and fire, afterward they cut down Priam as he fled to the altars. Nor did Troy perish because it lost Minerva. For what had Minerva herself first lost, that she should perish? Her guardians, perhaps? This indeed is true; for once they were slain, she could be carried off. For the men were not preserved by the image, but the image by the men.
How, then, was she worshipped to guard the fatherland and the citizens, she who was not able to guard her own guardians? Behold, to gods of what sort the Romans rejoiced to have entrusted the City to be preserved! O error too pitiable! And they are angry with us when we say such things of their gods; yet they are not angry with their own authors, whom they paid a fee to learn, and whose very teachers, besides, they held most worthy of public salary and honors. For instance, in Virgil — whom for this reason little children read, so that, of course, the great poet, of all the most illustrious and the best, drunk in by tender minds, cannot easily be effaced by forgetting, according to that saying of Horace:
'The jar, once it has fresh been steeped, will long keep the scent' — in this Virgil, then, Juno is brought in, hostile to the Trojans, saying to Aeolus, king of the winds, as she incites him against them: 'A race hateful to me sails the Tyrrhenian sea, carrying Ilium into Italy and its conquered household gods.' Was it then to these conquered household gods that they ought prudently to have entrusted Rome, lest she be conquered? But Juno said these things like an angry woman, not knowing what she was saying. What of Aeneas himself, so often called 'pious'? Does he not thus relate: 'Panthus, son of Othrys, priest of the citadel and of Phoebus, himself drags in his hand the sacred things and the conquered gods and his little grandson, and, frantic, rushes at a run toward the threshold'?
Does he not represent the gods themselves — whom he does not hesitate to call conquered — as entrusted to him rather than himself to them, when it is said to him: 'Troy commends to thee her sacred things and her household gods'? If, therefore, Virgil calls such gods both conquered and, so that even conquered they might in some way escape, entrusted to a man: what madness is it to think that Rome was wisely committed to these guardians, and that, unless it had lost them, it could not have been laid waste? Nay rather, to worship conquered gods as protectors and defenders — what is it but to hold not good divinities, but bad names? For how much more wisely is it believed, not that Rome would not have come to that ruin unless they had first perished, but rather that they would have perished long ago, unless Rome had preserved them as far as it could!
For who, when he considers, would not see with how much vanity it was presumed that the city could not be conquered under vanquished defenders, and that it therefore perished because it lost its guardian gods, when in fact the very having of guardians doomed to perish could have been the sole cause of its perishing? It was not, therefore, that when those things about the vanquished gods were written and sung the poets took pleasure in lying, but rather that truth compelled men of sense to confess. Yet these matters must be more opportunely and diligently and fully treated in another place. For now, let me briefly unfold as I can what I had set out to say concerning ungrateful men, who blasphemously impute to Christ those evils which they deservedly suffer for the perversity of their own ways;
but that even such men are spared for Christ's sake they do not deign to heed, and with sacrilegious madness of perversity they wield against His name those very tongues by which they lyingly usurped that same name in order to live, or those tongues which, in the places consecrated to Him, they held silent out of fear, so that where for His sake they had been kept unharmed by the enemy, thence they might leap forth against Him with hostile curses. Troy itself, as I said, the mother of the Roman people, could not, in the consecrated places of its own gods, protect its citizens from the fire and sword of the Greeks, who worshipped those very same gods; nay more, in the asylum of Juno chosen guards, Phoenix and dread Ulysses, kept watch over the plunder;
hither from every side is heaped the treasure of Troy, snatched from the burning shrines, the tables of the gods and bowls of solid gold, and captured raiment. Boys and trembling matrons in a long line stand round about. Doubtless a place consecrated to so great a goddess was chosen — not one from which it was unlawful to lead captives out, but one where it was permitted to shut captives in. Compare now that asylum of no common god of the rabble or of the crowd of the plebs, but of Jupiter's own sister and consort and queen of all the gods, with the memorial shrines of our apostles. Thither were carried the spoils torn from the burned temples and their gods, not to be given back to the vanquished, but to be divided among the victors; but hither was brought back, with honour and most religious devotion, even whatever elsewhere was found to belong to those holy places.
There liberty was lost, here it was preserved; there captivity was shut in, here it was forbidden; there men were held down to be possessed by their lording enemies, hither they were led to be set free by pitying foes: in short, that temple of Juno the avarice and pride of frivolous little Greeks had chosen for themselves, but these basilicas of Christ the mercy and humility of even savage barbarians. Unless perhaps the Greeks in that victory of theirs spared the temples of the common gods, and dared not to strike or capture the wretched and vanquished Trojans who fled thither, and Virgil in the manner of poets lied about these things. Nay rather, he described the custom of enemies overturning cities.
This custom Cato too, as Sallust writes — that historian of renowned truthfulness — does not omit to recall in his opinion, which he delivered in the senate concerning the conspirators: 'Virgins and boys are ravished, children are torn from the embrace of their parents, matrons suffer whatever has pleased the victors, shrines and homes are plundered, slaughter and burnings take place: in short, all things are filled with arms, corpses, blood, and mourning.' Here, had he been silent about the shrines, we might have supposed that enemies were wont to spare the seats of the gods. And it was not from foreign enemies, but from Catiline and his allies — the noblest senators and Roman citizens — that the Roman temples had this to fear. But these, no doubt, were desperate men and parricides of their fatherland.
Why then should our discourse range through many nations which have waged wars among themselves and nowhere spared the vanquished in the seats of their gods? Let us look at the Romans themselves; the very same, I say, let us call to mind and consider the Romans, of whose especial praise it was said: 'To spare the subjected and to war down the proud,' and that, when injury was received, they preferred to pardon rather than to pursue vengeance: when they stormed, captured, and overthrew so many and so great cities in order to rule far and wide, let it be read to us what temples they were accustomed to except, so that whoever fled to them should be set free. Or did they do this, and did the writers of these very deeds pass over it in silence?
Would those who especially sought out the things they might praise pass over these most illustrious tokens of piety according to their own judgement? The distinguished ornament of the Roman name, Marcus Marcellus, who took Syracuse, that most richly adorned city, is reported first to have wept over it as it was about to fall, and before shedding its blood to have poured out his own tears for it. He also took care that chastity should be preserved even in the enemy. For before he, as victor, had ordered the town to be assaulted, he established by edict that no one should violate a free person. Yet the city was overthrown after the manner of wars, and nowhere is it read that any command was given by so chaste and merciful a commander that whoever had fled to this or that temple should be held unharmed.
This assuredly would in no way have been passed over, since neither his weeping nor what he had decreed for the safeguarding of chastity could be kept silent. Fabius, the overthrower of the city of Tarentum, is praised for having abstained from the plundering of images. For when his secretary suggested to him what he would order to be done about the statues of the gods, many of which had been captured, he seasoned his self-restraint even with jesting. For he asked of what sort they were, and when it was reported to him that not only were many of them large, but even armed, he said: 'Let us leave the Tarentines their angry gods.' Since, therefore, the writers of Roman history could keep silent neither about the weeping of the one nor the laughter of the other, neither about the chaste mercy of the one nor the witty restraint of the other:
how could it have been passed over, if they had spared any men in honour of any of their gods in such a way as to forbid slaughter or captivity from taking place in any temple? Whatever devastation, slaughter, plundering, burning, and affliction therefore was committed in that most recent Roman calamity, this was done by the custom of wars; but what was done in a new manner — that with an unwonted appearance of things the barbarian ferocity appeared so mild that the most spacious basilicas were chosen and decreed to be filled with the people that were to be spared, where no one should be struck, whence no one should be carried off, whither many were led by pitying enemies to be set free, whence none were led away to be enslaved even by cruel foes:
whoever does not see that this is to be attributed to the name of Christ, to the Christian age, is blind; whoever sees it and does not praise it is ungrateful; whoever resists the one who praises it is mad. Far be it that any prudent man should impute this to the ferocity of the barbarians. He terrified, He bridled, He marvellously tempered those most truculent and savage minds, who through the prophet said so long before: 'I will visit their iniquities with the rod and their sins with scourges; but my mercy I will not scatter away from them.' Someone will say: 'Why then did this divine mercy reach even to the impious and the ungrateful?' Why do we think, except because He bestowed it who daily makes His sun to rise upon the good and the evil, and sends rain upon the just and the unjust?
For although some of them, pondering these things, correct themselves from impiety by repentance, while others, as the Apostle says, despising the riches of God's goodness and long-suffering, according to the hardness of their heart and an impenitent heart, treasure up unto themselves wrath in the day of wrath and of the revelation of the just judgement of God, who will render to every man according to his works: yet the patience of God invites the evil to repentance, just as the scourge of God trains the good in patience; and likewise the mercy of God embraces the good to cherish them, just as the severity of God lays hold of the evil to punish them. For it pleased the divine providence to prepare for the future good things for the just, which the unjust shall not enjoy, and evil things for the impious, with which the good shall not be tormented;
but these temporal goods and evils He willed to be common to both, that the good might neither be too greedily sought after, since the evil also are seen to possess them, nor the evil basely shunned, since the good also are for the most part afflicted by them. It makes a very great difference, however, of what sort is the use either of those things which are called prosperous, or of those which are called adverse. For the good man is neither exalted by temporal goods nor broken by temporal evils; but the evil man is for this reason punished by such misfortune, because he is corrupted by prosperity. Yet God often shows His working more evidently even in the distributing of these things. For if every sin were now visited with manifest punishment, it would be thought that nothing was reserved for the last judgement;
and again, if the deity now punished no sin openly, it would be believed that there was no divine providence. Likewise in prosperous things, if God did not with most evident bounty grant them to certain persons who ask, we should say that these things did not pertain to Him; and again, if He gave them to all who ask, we should think that He was to be served only for the sake of such rewards, nor would such service make us pious, but rather covetous and avaricious. Since these things are so, whoever, good and evil alike, have been afflicted together, are not on that account themselves undistinguished, because that which both have suffered is undistinguished. For the unlikeness of the sufferers remains even in the likeness of the sufferings, and though under the same torment, virtue and vice are not the same.
For just as under one and the same fire gold gleams red and chaff smokes, and under the same flail the straw is crushed and the grain is cleansed, nor is the lees confounded with the oil because it is pressed out by the same weight of the press: so one and the same force rushing in tests, purifies, and refines the good, but condemns, lays waste, and exterminates the evil. Hence in the same affliction the evil detest and blaspheme God, while the good pray and praise. So great a difference does it make, not what things a man suffers, but what sort of man suffers them. For stirred by the same motion, the mire exhales horribly and the ointment gives forth a sweet fragrance. What then did the Christians suffer in that devastation of things, which would not rather have availed for their advancement, if they faithfully considered these matters?
First, that pondering humbly those very sins by which God, being angered, filled the world with such great calamities — although they are far removed from wicked, shameful, and impious deeds — nevertheless they do not reckon themselves so wholly free from faults that they should judge themselves unworthy to suffer even temporal evils on their account.
For, setting aside the fact that each one, however praiseworthily he lives, yields in certain matters to carnal concupiscence — even if not to the enormity of crimes and the abyss of shameful deeds and the abomination of impiety, yet to some sins, whether rare or the more frequent the smaller they are — setting this aside, then, who is at last easily found who so regards those very men, on account of whose horrible pride and luxury and avarice and execrable iniquities and impieties God, as He foretold in threatening, crushes the earth, as they ought to be regarded? who so lives with them as one ought to live with such people?
For the most part, from the teaching and admonishing of such men, sometimes even from rebuking and correcting them, there is a wrong dissembling — whether because the labour is irksome, or because we are ashamed to offend their face, or because we shun enmities, lest they hinder and harm us in these temporal things, whether such as our cupidity still craves to acquire, or such as our weakness dreads to lose — so that although the life of the evil displeases the good, and therefore they do not fall with them into that damnation which after this life is prepared for such men, nevertheless, because they spare their damnable sins while they fear them in their own, though slight and venial matters, they are justly scourged together with them in time, though by no means punished for eternity; justly, when they are afflicted by God together with them, do they feel this life bitter, whose sweetness, in loving it, they were unwilling to be bitter toward those who sinned.
For if anyone refrains from rebuking and correcting those who act wickedly because he seeks a more opportune time, or fears for those very men lest they be made worse by it, or lest they hinder others, weak persons who are to be trained to a good and pious life, and oppress and turn them away from the faith: this does not seem to be an occasion of cupidity, but a counsel of charity. That is blameworthy, when those who live differently and shrink from the deeds of the wicked nevertheless spare the sins of others, which they ought to unteach or rebuke, while they beware of offending them, lest they harm them in those things which the good use lawfully and innocently, but more greedily than became those who are pilgrims in this world and carry before them the hope of the heavenly fatherland.
For not only do the weaker sort — leading a married life, having children or seeking to have them, possessing houses and households (whom the Apostle addresses in the churches, teaching and admonishing in what manner they ought to live, both wives with husbands and husbands with wives, children with parents and parents with children, servants with masters and masters with servants) — gladly acquire many temporal, many earthly things, and grieve to lose them, on account of which they dare not offend men whose most contaminated and most criminal life displeases them;
but even those who hold a higher grade of life, and are not entangled in the bonds of marriage, and use scanty food and clothing, for the most part, while they fear the plots and assaults of the wicked against their own reputation and safety, abstain from reproving them; and although they do not so fear them as to yield to any of their terrors and wickednesses so as to perpetrate like deeds, yet those very things which they do not perpetrate with them they are for the most part unwilling to rebuke, when perhaps they might by rebuking correct some of them — lest, if they should not succeed, their own safety and reputation come into danger and destruction; and not from that consideration by which they see their reputation and safety to be necessary for the profit of instructing men, but rather from that weakness by which the flattering tongue and man's day delights, and the judgement of the crowd is dreaded, and the torturing or destruction of the flesh; that is, on account of certain bonds of cupidity, not on account of the duties of charity.
It does not therefore seem to me a small cause why the good also are scourged together with the evil, when it pleases God to punish corrupt morals even with the affliction of temporal penalties. For they are scourged together, not because they lead an evil life together, but because they love the temporal life together — not indeed equally, yet together — which the good ought to despise, so that the others, being reproved and corrected, might attain the eternal life; and if they were unwilling to be their companions in attaining it, they should be borne with and loved as enemies, because so long as they live it is always uncertain whether they are going to change their will for the better. In which matter indeed those to whom it is said through the prophet have a cause not equal but far graver:
'He indeed shall die in his own sin, but his blood will I require at the watchman's hand.' For to this end are watchmen, that is, the overseers of the peoples, appointed in the churches, that they should not spare in rebuking sins. Nor yet on this account is he wholly free from a fault of this kind who, although he is not an overseer, yet in those persons with whom he is joined by the necessity of this life knows many things to be admonished or reproved and neglects them, avoiding their offence on account of those things which he uses in this life not undue, but in which he takes more delight than he ought. Then the good have another cause why they are afflicted with temporal evils, such as Job had:
that the human soul itself might be proved and known to itself, with how great a virtue of piety it loves God freely. These things being rightly considered and clearly perceived, mark whether any evil has befallen the faithful and the pious which was not turned to good for them — unless perhaps that apostolic sentence is to be thought void, where he says: 'We know that to those who love God all things work together for good.' They lost all that they had. Their faith? their piety? the goods of the inner man, who is rich before God? These are the riches of Christians, with which the Apostle, being wealthy, said: 'But godliness with contentment is great gain. For we brought nothing into this world, and neither can we carry anything out.'
'But having food and covering, with these let us be content. For those who wish to become rich fall into temptation and a snare and many foolish and hurtful desires, which drown men in destruction and perdition. For the root of all evils is avarice, which some coveting have strayed from the faith and entangled themselves in many sorrows.' To those, therefore, whose earthly riches perished in that devastation, if they held them in the manner in which they had heard from that man, poor without but rich within — that is, if they used the world as though not using it — it was possible to say what he, being grievously tried and by no means overcome, said: 'Naked came I out of my mother's womb, naked shall I return into the earth.'
'The Lord gave, the Lord hath taken away; as it hath pleased the Lord, so is it done; blessed be the name of the Lord' — so that the good servant might hold as his great substance his very Lord's will, following whom in mind he might grow rich, and not be saddened, living, by those things which, dying, he was soon to leave behind. But those weaker ones, who, though they did not prefer these earthly goods to Christ, yet clung to them with some little cupidity, felt by losing them how much they had sinned in loving them. For they grieved just so much as they had entangled themselves in griefs, as I recalled above that the Apostle said. For it was needful that there should be added to them the discipline of experiences also, by which the discipline of words had so long been neglected. For when the Apostle said:
'Those who wish to become rich fall into temptation' and the rest, he assuredly reproves cupidity in riches, not the possession, since he elsewhere commands, saying: 'Charge the rich of this world not to be high-minded, nor to hope in the uncertainty of riches, but in the living God, who giveth us all things abundantly to enjoy: let them do good, be rich in good works, give readily, communicate, treasure up for themselves a good foundation for the time to come, that they may lay hold on the true life.' Those who did these things with their riches have been consoled for light losses by great gains, and have rejoiced more over those things which by giving readily they more safely kept, than they have been saddened over those which by timidly retaining they more easily lost.