City of God (Penguin Classics) (10 page)
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Authors: Saint Augustine
Bafileæ ex officina nof
̑
tra, pridie Calendas
Septembreis, An M. D. XXII.
THE PENGUIN CLASSICS
AUGUSTINE: CITY OF GOD
Preface. The Purpose and Argument of this work
H
ERE,
my dear Marcellinus,
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is the fulfilment of my promise, a book in which I have taken upon myself the task of defending the glorious City of God against those who prefer their own gods to the Founder of that City. I treat of it both as it exists in this world of time, a stranger among the ungodly, living by faith,
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and as it stands in the security of its everlasting seat. This security it now awaits in steadfast patience, until ‘justice returns to judgement’;
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but it is to attain it hereafter in virtue of its ascendancy over its enemies, when the final victory is won and peace established. The task is long and arduous; but God is our helper.
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I know how great is the effort needed to convince the proud of the power and excellence of humility, an excellence which makes it soar above all the summits of this world, which sway in their temporal instability, overtopping them all with an eminence not arrogated by human pride, but granted by divine grace. For the King and Founder of this City which is our subject has revealed in the Scripture of his people this statement of the divine Law, ‘God resists the proud, but he gives grace to the humble.’
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This is God’s prerogative; but man’s arrogant spirit in its swelling pride has claimed it as its own, and delights to hear this verse quoted in its own praise: ‘To spare the conquered, and beat down the proud.’
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Therefore I cannot refrain from speaking about the city of this world, a city which aims at dominion, which holds nations in enslavement, but is itself dominated by that very lust of domination. I
must consider this city as far as the scheme of this work demands and as occasion serves.
l.
The enemies of Christianity were spared by the barbarians at the sack of Rome, out of respect for Christ
From this world’s city there arise enemies against whom the City of God has to be defended, though many of these correct their godless errors and become useful citizens of that City. But many are inflamed with hate against it and feel no gratitude for the benefits offered by its Redeemer. The benefits are unmistakable; those enemies would not today be able to utter a word against the City if, when fleeing from the sword of their enemy, they had not found, in the City’s holy places, the safety on which they now congratulate themselves.
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The barbarians spared them for Christ’s sake; and now these Romans assail Christ’s name. The sacred places of the martyrs and the basilicas of the apostles bear witness to this, for in the sack of Rome they afforded shelter to fugitives, both Christian and pagan. The bloodthirsty enemy raged thus far, but here the frenzy of butchery was checked; to these refuges the merciful among the enemy conveyed those whom they had spared outside, to save them from encountering foes who had no such pity. Even men who elsewhere raged with all the savagery an enemy can show, arrived at places where practices generally allowed by laws of war were forbidden and their monstrous passion for violence was brought to a sudden halt; their lust for taking captives was subdued.
In this way many escaped who now complain of this Christian era, and hold Christ responsible for the disasters which their city endured. But they do not make Christ responsible for the benefits they received out of respect for Christ, to which they owed their lives. They attribute their deliverance to their own destiny; whereas if they had any right judgement they ought rather to attribute the harsh cruelty they suffered at the hands of their enemies to the providence of God. For God’s providence constantly uses war to correct and chasten the corrupt morals of mankind, as it also uses such afflictions to train men in a righteous and laudable way of life, removing to a better state those whose life is approved, or else keeping them in this world for further service.
Moreover, they should give credit to this Christian era for the fact that these savage barbarians showed mercy beyond the custom of war – whether they so acted in general in honour of the name of Christ, or in places specially dedicated to Christ’s name, buildings of such size and capacity as to give mercy a wider range. For this clemency our detractors ought rather to give thanks to God; they should have recourse to his name in all sincerity, so as to escape the penalty of everlasting fire, seeing that so many of them assumed his name dishonestly, to escape the penalty of immediate destruction. Among those whom you see insulting Christ’s servants with such wanton insolence there are very many who came unscathed through that terrible time of massacre only by passing themselves off as Christ’s servants. And now with ungrateful pride and impious madness they oppose his name in the perversity of their hearts, so that they may incur the punishment of eternal darkness; but then they took refuge in that name, though with deceitful lips, so that they might continue to enjoy this transitory light.
2.
That victors should spare the vanquished out of respect for their gods, is something unexampled in history
We have the records of many wars, both before the foundation of Rome and after its rise to power. Let our enemies read their history, and then produce instances of the capture of any city by foreign enemies when those enemies spared any whom they found taking refuge in the temples of their gods.
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Let them quote any barbarian general who gave instructions, at the storming of a town, that no one should be treated with violence who was discovered in this temple or that Aeneas saw Priam at the altar,
polluting with his blood
The fire which he had consecrated.
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And Diomedes and Ulysses
Slew all the warders of the citadel
And snatched with bloody hands the sacred image;
Nor shrank to touch the chaplets virginal
Of the dread goddess.
And there is no truth in the statement that comes after,
The Grecian hopes then failed, and ebbed away.
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For what in fact followed was the Greek victory, the destruction of Troy by fire and sword, the slaughter of Priam at the altar.
And it was not because Troy lost Minerva that Troy perished. What loss did Minerva herself first incur, that led to her own disappearance? Was it, perhaps, the loss of her guards? There can be no doubt that their death made her removal possible – the image did not preserve the men; the men were preserving the image. Why then did they worship her, to secure her protection for their country and its citizens? She could not guard her own keepers.
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The folly of the Romans in confiding their safety to the household gods who had failed to protect Troy
There you see the sort of gods to whom the Romans gladly entrusted the preservation of their city. Pitiable folly! Yet the Romans are enraged by such criticisms from us, while they are not incensed at the authors of such quotations; in fact they pay money to become acquainted with their works, and they consider that those who merely instruct them in these works merit an official salary and an honoured position in the community. Virgil certainly is held to be a great poet; in fact he is regarded as the best and the most renowned of all poets, and for that reason he is read by children at an early age – they take great draughts of his poetry into their unformed minds, so that they may not easily forget him, for, as Horace remarks,
New vessels will for long retain the taste
Of what is first poured into them.
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Now in Virgil Juno is introduced as hostile to the Trojans, and when she urges Aeolus, king of the winds, against them, she says,
A race I hate sails the Etruscan sea
Bringing to Italy Troy’s vanquished gods,
And Troy itself.
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Ought the Romans, as prudent men, to have entrusted the defence of Rome to gods unable to defend themselves? Juno no doubt spoke like a woman in anger, heedless of what she was saying. But consider what is said by Aeneas himself, who is so often called ‘the pious’.
Panthus, the priest of Phoebus and the citadel,
Snatching his conquered gods and his young grandson
Rushes in frenzy to the door.
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He does not shrink from calling the gods ‘conquered’, and he speaks of them as being entrusted to him, rather than the other way round, when he is told, ‘To thee, Troy now entrusts her native gods.’
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If Virgil speaks of such gods as ‘vanquished’, and tells how, after their overthrow, they only succeeded in escaping because they were committed to the care of a man, what folly it is to see any wisdom in committing Rome to such guardians, and in supposing that it could not be sacked while it retained possession of them. To worship ‘vanquished’ gods as protectors and defenders is to rely not on divinities but on defaulters. It is not sensible to assume that Rome would have escaped this disaster had these gods not first perished; the sensible belief is that those gods would have perished long before, had not Rome made every effort to preserve them. Anyone who gives his mind to it can see that it is utter folly to count on invincibility by virtue of the possession of defenders who have been conquered and to attribute destruction to the loss of such guardian deities as these. In fact, the only possible cause of destruction was the choice of such perishable defenders. When the poets wrote and sang of ‘vanquished gods’, it was not because it suited their whim to lie – they were men of sense, and truth compelled them to admit the facts.
But I must deal with this subject in fuller detail in a more convenient place. For the present I will return to the ingratitude of those who blasphemously blame Christ for the disasters which their moral perversity deservedly brought upon them, and I will deal with the subject as briefly as I can. ‘They were spared for Christ’s sake, pagans though they were; yet they scorn to acknowledge this. With the madness of sacrilegious perversity they use their tongues against the name of Christ: yet with those same tongues they dishonestly claimed that name in order to save their lives, or else, in places sacred to him, they held their tongues through fear. They were kept safe and protected there where his name stood between then and the enemy’s violence. And so they issue from that shelter to assail him with curses of hate.
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Juno’s sanctuary in Troy gave no security from the Greeks; whereas the apostolic basilicas at Rome gave protection from the barbarians
As I said before, Troy itself, the mother of the Roman people, could not, by means of the consecrated buildings of its gods, save its citizens from the fire and sword of the Greeks, although they worshipped the same gods.
In Juno’s sanctuary
The chosen warders, Phoenix and dread Ulysses,
Keep safe the spoils; and there is heaped Troy’s wealth:
Plunder from burning shrines, the golden bowls,
The tables of the gods, the captured vestments.
And near them stand the boys and trembling matrons
Rank upon rank.
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That is to say, a place consecrated to so great a goddess was chosen, not as a place from which prisoners might not lawfully be taken out, but as a place where the victors might at pleasure shut up their captives. This sanctuary was not the temple of any common god of the lower orders of deities, but that of the sister and wife of Jove himself, the queen of all the gods. Now contrast it with the memorial shrines of our apostles. To the former were taken the spoils from the burning temples and gods, not to be given to the vanquished, but to be divided among the victors; to the latter was carried, with honour and most scrupulous reverence, all that belonged to those places which was found elsewhere. There, freedom was lost; here, it was preserved. There, captives were confined; here, enslavement was forbidden. There, men were herded by foes who exercised their power by sending them into slavery; here, they were conducted by foes who showed their pity by setting them free. In short, the greedy arrogance of the contemptible Greeks chose that temple of Juno for its display; the humble clemency of the barbarians, uncouth as they were, chose those basilicas of Christ. It may be that the Greeks in their victory spared the temples of the common gods and refrained from hurting or enslaving the poor conquered Trojans who took refuge there. If so, Virgil, in the manner of poets, did not tell the truth about it. In fact he gives the familiar picture of the sack of a city by its enemies.
5.
Cato’s description of the sack of a city, according to the custom of war
According to Sallust, a historian renowned for his veracity, Cato,
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in making his proposal about the conspirators, was careful to remind the senate of the usual consequences when cities are sacked.