City of God (Penguin Classics) (55 page)
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Authors: Saint Augustine
30.
The true religion which distinguishes Creator from creature, to avoid worshipping many gods representing the many works of the one source of all
And now to make a start at running over the works of the one true God. It is those works that have given occasion for the pagans to fashion a multitude of false gods, in attempting to give an ostensibly honourable explanation for their obscene and abominable ceremonies. The God of our worship is he who has created all beings, and ordered the beginning and the end of their existence and their motion. He has in his hands the causes of all that exists; and all those causes are within his knowledge and at his disposition. From him comes the vital force of seeds; he has bestowed the rational soul (or mind) on such living beings as he pleased, and he has given to mankind the faculty and the use of speech. He has imparted the gift of foretelling the future to certain spirits of his choice, and he himself prophesies the future through those whom he chooses; and he uses men at his pleasure to drive away sickness. He also controls the beginning, the progress, and the end even of wars, when mankind needs to be corrected and chastized by such means.
He has created, and he directs, the universal fire, so fierce and violent, to ensure the equilibrium of the natural order in all its vastness. He is creator and regulator of all the waters; he made the sun, the brightest of all material means of light, and gave to it the requisite
force and movement. He does not withhold his lordship and power even from the underworld itself. He supplies seed and nourishment, whether dry or liquid, to all living creatures, distributing what is appropriate to the needs of each. He gives to the earth its stability and fertility; he lavishes its fruits upon animals and men. He knows and orders all causes, primary and secondary alike. He determines for the moon the order of its course, and provides the paths, in the sky and on the earth, for changes of position. He has granted to human intelligences, created by himself, the knowledge of the various arts designed to help man to live and to develop his possibilities. He instituted the union of male and female to ensure the propagation of children; he has conferred on human societies the blessing of terrestrial fire, to make life easier for man, giving him the advantages of heat and light.
These are without doubt the works which Varro, shrewdest of scholars, has endeavoured to parcel out among his select gods, by some kind of ‘natural’ interpretation, whether he took over the principle from elsewhere, or conjured it up from his own imagination. But it is the one true God who is active and operative in all those things, but always acting as God, that is, present everywhere in his totality, free from all spatial confinement, completely untrammelled, absolutely indivisible, utterly unchangeable, and filling heaven and earth with his ubiquitous power which is independent of anything in the natural order. He directs the whole of his creation, while allowing to his creatures the freedom to initiate and accomplish activities which are their own; for although their being completely depends on him, they have a certain independence. He often acts through the medium of his angels, but he is himself the sole source of the angels’blessedness. And so, although he sends angels to men for various purposes, it is from him, not from the angels, that blessings come to men, as they come also to the angels. It is from this one true God that we hope for eternal life.
31.
The special blessings, apart from God’s general bounty, enjoyed by the followers of the truth
Besides the benefits which God lavishes on good and bad alike in accordance with his government of the natural order, about which I have already said something, he has given us a striking proof of his great love, a proof which is the special privilege of the good. We can, to be sure, never give him adequate thanks for our existence, our life,
our sight of sky and earth, or our possession of intelligence and reason, which enable us to search for him who created all these things. But there is more than this. When we were overwhelmed by the load of our sins, when we had turned away from the contemplation of his light and been blinded by our love of darkness, that is, of wickedness, even then he did not abandon us. He sent to us his Word, who is his only Son, who was born and who suffered in the flesh which he assumed for our sake – so that we might know the value God placed on mankind, and might be purified from all our sins by that unique sacrifice, and so that, when love has been diffused in our hearts by his Spirit, and when all difficulties have been surmounted, we may come to eternal rest and to the ineffable sweetness of the contemplation of God. In view of all that, what heart or what tongue would claim to be competent to give him thanks?
32.
The mystery of Christ’s redemption was not absent in any previous era, but it was made known under different symbols
This mystery of eternal life has been made known by the ministry of angels from the very beginning of the human race. It was revealed to those who were fit to receive the knowledge by means of signs and symbols appropriate to the times. Later, the Hebrew people was gathered and united in a kind of community designed to perform this sacred function of revelation. In that people the future course of events, from the coming of Christ to the present day, and even beyond, was prophesied through the agency of some who realized, and some who did not realize, what they were doing. In the course of time, this people was scattered among the nations to bear witness to the Scriptures, which foretold the coming salvation in Christ. For not only all the prophesies contained in words, not only all the precepts for the conduct of life which shape men’s character and their piety and are contained in the Scriptures, but also the ceremonies, the priesthoods, the tabernacle or the temple, the altars, the sacrifices, the sacred rites, the festal days, and everything which is concerned with the homage due to God (the Greeks call it
lateria
)
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– all these were symbols and predictions that find their fulfilment in Christ, so as to give eternal life to those who believe. We believe that they have been fulfilled; we observe that they are being fulfilled; we are convinced that they will go on being fulfilled.
33. Only the Christian religion could have exposed the deceit of the malignant spirits
This religion, the one true religion, had the power to prove that the gods of the nations are unclean demons. Those demons seized the chance offered by the souls of the dead, or disguised themselves as creatures of this world, in their desire to be reputed gods; in their arrogance and impurity they took delight in supposed divine honours, a medley of infamy and obscenity, and were full of resentment when human souls were converted to the true God. Man is set free from their monstrous and blasphemous domination when he believes in him who achieved his resurrection by the example of a humility as great as the pride which brought about the fall of the demons.
In this category are found not only those gods about whom we have already said a great deal, and many other similar deities of other nations and other lands, but also those of whom we have been treating recently, the ‘select’ divinities, chosen to form a kind of senate of the gods. In sober truth they are selected rather for the notoriety of their scandals than for the eminence of their virtues! Varro does his best to explain their ceremonies by supposing a reference to the system of nature, in an effort to lend respectability to obscene activities. But he fails to find a way to square his theory with the facts and give it any consistency. The truth is that the actual motives for these ceremonies are not what he thinks them to be – or rather what he would like them to be thought to be. If there had been motives of this kind, or any similar reasons, then in spite of their having no connection with the true God or with eternal life (which is the essential aim in religion), they might have allowed some kind of explanation relating to the natural order, which would have mitigated the offensiveness of obscenities and absurdities in religious rites whose meaning was misunderstood. Varro has made a similar attempt in the case of some of the fables performed in the theatre, and some of the mysteries enacted in the temples. But the result has been not to justify the theatre by showing its resemblance to the temple, but to condemn the temple by comparing it with the theatre. All the same, he has tried his hardest to offer a supposed explanation from the natural order and so to soothe feelings which had been scandalized by those abominations.
34.
The burning of Numa’s books, at the senate’s order, toprevent the divulging of the reasons for pagan rites
In contrast we find (as the learned Varro himself revealed) that the
reason for the ceremonies advanced in the books of Numa Pompilius proved quite intolerable. Not merely were they considered unfit to be divulged by being read to the devout; it was even thought improper to preserve them in the obscurity of a written text. I am now going to reveal what I promised, in the third volume of this work,
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to mention in the appropriate place. Here is a passage, again from Varro, in his book On the Worship of the
Gods:
A man named Terentius had a farm near the Janiculum. His ploughman was driving his plough near the tomb of Numa Pompilius when he turned up the books of that author which dealt with the reasons for the established ceremonies of religion. He took them to the city and handed them to the praetor. The praetor took a look at the opening passages, and then reported the find to the senate, as a matter of great importance. When the leading senators had read some of the reasons given by Numa for various religious practices, the senate approved the action of the deceased king, and, as pious conscript fathers, decreed that the praetor should burn those books.
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Anyone is entitled to his own opinion; equally, any distinguished defender of such terrible impiety is entitled to say whatever a wrongheaded love of argument may put into his head. For my part, I am content to point out that explanations of the religious ceremonies offered by King Pompilius, the founder of the Roman rites, were not fit to be divulged to the Roman people, or the senate, or even to the priests, and that Numa Pompilius himself, led on by an unlawful curiosity, had discovered certain secrets of the demons which he himself committed to writing to assist his memory. But, although he was king and had no reason to fear any man, he did not venture to pass on the information to anyone; and yet he could not bring himself to suppress it by erasing or destroying the manuscript in some way. He did not want anyone to know, for he shrank from passing on a lesson in corruption; yet he dreaded laying violent hands upon the document for fear of incurring the demons’wrath. And so he buried the books in what he thought would be a safe spot, never imagining that a plough could come so near his tomb. The senate, for its part, recoiled from the prospect of condemning their ancestral religion, and therefore felt obliged to approve of Numa’s action; but the fathers decided that the books were so dangerous that they could not order them to be reinterred; for they feared that human curiosity would be all the more keen to search for something of which a glimpse had now been afforded. And so they ordered the outrageous documents to be consigned to the flames, for they believed it essential that those ceremonies
should continue, and they deemed it more tolerable that the community should remain deluded, in ignorance of the reasons for those ceremonies, than that it should be distressed by learning the truth about them.
35. How Numa
was fooled
by
hydromancy and a vision of demons
None of God’s prophets, or of his holy angels, was ever sent to Numa. But he was constrained to indulge in hydromancy, in order to see reflected in water the forms of the gods, or rather the conjuring tricks of demons, and to learn from them what he ought to establish and observe in the way of religious ceremonies. Our friend Varro alleges that this type of divination was imported from Persia and he mentions that Numa himself employed it, as the philosopher Pythagoras also did at a later date. Varro also tells us that if blood is used one may also consult the dwellers in the underworld, and that the Greek term for this is
necromancy
. Whether it be called hydromancy or necromancy, the practice has the same object: to obtain a supposed divination from the dead; and by what arts this end is achieved is their own affair. I am not concerned to assert that even before the coming of our Saviour those practices were generally forbidden by law even in pagan communities and were punished with the greatest severity. I am not concerned to assert this; it may well be that such practices were permitted at that time.
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However that may be, it was by these arts that Numa learnt about those ceremonies, the practices of which he divulged while burying the theory, being himself so afraid of what he had discovered. And when the books giving the theoretical explanations came to light the senate had them burnt. Why then does Varro offer us other explanations of some sort or other, supposedly taken from nature? If it had been explanations of this kind that were contained in those books, they certainly would not have put them to the flames. Otherwise the conscript fathers would have burned the books which Varro published and dedicated to Caesar, the pontiff.
It was the fact that Numa had to draw off (
egerere
), or convey some water for the conduct of his hydromantic operations, that led to the story of his marriage to the nymph
Egeria
, as Varro explains in the afore-mentioned book. This is the way that facts are turned into fables
by the addition of a sprinkling of untruth. Thus it was by means of hydromancy that this king of Rome, with his insatiable curiosity, received the information both about the rites, which is contained in the books of the pontiffs, and about their causes; but this latter he wished to keep to himself. And so he wrote about the causes separately, and in a way put them to death when he died, taking care that they should be withdrawn from men’s knowledge and buried.
Therefore it must have been either that the passions of demons described in the book were so bestial and degraded that their revelation would make the whole of ‘civil’ theology abominable in the eyes of such men as had undertaken so many shameful practices in the conduct of religious rites, or else that those ‘gods’ were shown up as being merely dead men, and that in the course of ages a belief had grown up among almost all people that they were immortal gods. For the demons delighted in such ceremonies and, by supplying the evidence of illusory miracles, they ensured belief in the ‘divinity’ of the dead men and then substituted themselves as the objects of worship. But the inscrutable providence of the true God ensured that the demons should be won over by those hydromantic arts and should be allowed to reveal those secrets to their friend Pompilius, and yet that they should not be allowed to warn him to burn the evidence – and not to bury it – when at the point of death. They were not able to prevent the knowledge coming to light either by stopping the plough, which turned up the books, or by stopping Varro’s pen, the instrument by which the whole story has been transmitted to this present age. For they can only act within the limits allowed them; and they are given liberty of action by the profound and just judgement of God most high, in accordance with the deserts of men, some of whom rightly endure affliction, but no more, at the hands of those demons, while others are, with justice, deluded by them, and brought under their sway. How dangerous those writings were judged to be, and how remote from the worship of genuine divinity, can be realized from the fact that the senate chose to burn what Pompilius had hidden rather than to be prompted by the fear which prevented him from daring to take this step.
Anyone may seek life eternal by means of such rites if he has no desire for a life of true religion even in this present world. But if a man spurns any association with malignant demons, he must not let himself be frightened by the superstitions with which they are worshipped; let him acknowledge the true religion, by which the demons are unmasked and overcome.
