The City of God by Augustine - 3 - Rome's Pride Brought Their Defeat
Book Three
Quote
📝 This lust of sovereignty disturbs and consumes the human race with frightful ills. By this lust Rome was overcome ..., praising her own crime, calling it glory.
Notes
🔥 Moral decay is one thing, but there is also physical suffering — war, pestilence, pillage, captivity, massacres. All of these things happened in Rome before Jesus was around.
🔥 Rome was constantly fighting wars and driven to doing horrific acts. Early in their history they claimed their wives by killing their fathers-in-law, and civil and family violence has been a consistent presence through Rome's history.
🔥 It was their lust for power. And the more people they conquered, the more gods they adopted, too. "The greater she became," Augustine says, "the more gods she thought she should have." But the gods drove them only to more wars and violence, both against others and themselves, Roman against Roman.
🔥 Augustine says we all need to be clear-eyed about what really happened. "For, as our Scriptures say, 'the wicked boasteth of his heart's desire, and blesseth the covetous, whom the Lord abhorreth.' Away, then, with these deceitful masks, these deluding whitewashes, that things may be truthfully seen and scrutinized."
🔥 Early kings were killed by their sons. And the gods were okay with it. Maybe the gods remained with the Romans to punish them, "seducing them by empty victories, and wearing them out by severe wars."
🔥 Augustine is only quoting Rome's historians back to themselves. He isn't saying anything they haven't already said about themselves. So how can they be mad at him for saying it? For example, he quotes the historian, Sallust, "Frequent mobs, seditions, and at last civil wars, became common, while a few leading men on whom the masses were dependent, affected supreme power under the seemly pretense of seeking the good of senate and people; citizens were judged good or bad, without reference to their loyalty to the republic (for all were equally corrupt); but the wealthy and dangerously powerful were esteemed good citizens because they maintained the existing state of things."
🔥 Rome experienced a lot of suffering before Jesus was born. Plagues, military defeats, moral plagues. Where were their gods then? These gods offered them no protection. If Christianity happened to be around then, they would have been blamed for those disasters, too.
🔥 Even a Roman hero like Scipio, who defeated Hannibal and won the Punic Wars for Rome, he died in exile. What kind of a reward is that for a hero?
🔥 And when they had victories and power it only led to corruption and greed. Prosperity and security only brought them moral calamity. He mentions the stories of the Gracchi, Marius and Sulla. The civil war was a travesty, so many civilians killed during and after the war. So what was worse? These bloody civil wars, or the more recent barbarian invasion? How come they don't blame their own gods for those calamities back then? But now they blame Christianity for the current ones.
Key Takeaways
💬 At one point in this section Augustine says, "Were we to attempt to recount or mention these calamities we should become writers of history," which seems to suggest that this book isn't history..? He's at least drawing on history to make an argument about an historical (though for him very recent) event. If it isn't history, then what genre is this?
💬 Augustine's worldview of history included the existence of giants in our ancient past. In discussing the subject of the Roman gods allegedly being fathers and mothers to actual human beings, he says, "Our own Scriptures suggest the very similar question, whether the fallen angels had sexual intercourse with the daughters of men, by which the earth was at that time filled with giants, that is, with enormously large and strong men."
This is a reference to Genesis 6:4 which talks about giants that slept with the daughters of men and bore children to them.