The City of God by Augustine - 6 - Rome's Gods Don't Offer Eternal Life
Book Six
Quote
📝 We ask if any one is really content to seek a hope for eternal life from poetical, theatrical, scenic gods? Perish the thought! The true God avert so wild and sacrilegious a madness!
Notes
🔥 Having discussed in the first five books how the gods contribute nothing to life here and now, Augustine moves on to show they don't contribute anything to one's afterlife either.
🔥 He already discussed how each god was in charge of such small, trivial things (a god for the ear of the corn, another god for the husk). Which one could offer eternal life?
🔥 He references Marcus Varro, who seems to be a renowned scholar on the subject of the gods: "Who has investigated these things more carefully than Varro?" Varro is loved and respected by many people.
🔥 Augustine infers from the order of Varro's series of books — Varro wrote about divine things after first covering human things — that Varro held the gods to be human creations. Or else why would he deal with humans first?
🔥 Varro describes three categories of gods: mythical, physical, and civil. The mythical are dealt with by the poets, physical the philosophers, and civil the people. The mythical gods, Varro says, are "many fictions." The physical gods are discussed, analyzed, and questioned by philosophers. The people don't have much time for this and they prefer to hear about the gods in the theatre.
🔥 Varro, in Augustine's telling, sees a distinction between the gods as displayed in theatres and those in the natural world. And as we've seen already, Augustine does not think highly of what gets shown of the gods in the theatre: "What, is eternal life to be asked from those gods whom these [sacrilegious] things pleased, and whom these things propitiate, in which their own crimes are represented?" The plays are written for amusement, not instruction, and he basically sees the gods portrayed there as demons who would pollute and corrupt our lives.
🔥 And what happens in the theatres concerning the gods is really no different from what the priests perform in the temples. Both commemorate the lewd and crude behaviour of the gods. In the theatre or in the temple, these gods are both "equally disgraceful, absurd, shameful, false" — and none are the source of eternal life.
🔥 Augustine references the Roman senator, Seneca, who also criticized the gods, calling them monsters who commit incest with each other. They castrate themselves and cut their own arms. Are we really to fear or revere these gods? But their behaviour is so widespread it's made to seem normal. "The multitude of the insane is the defense of their sanity."
🔥 Seneca advised to feign respect for the gods, "but to have no real regard for them in heart." Augustine cites him as still more proof that the Roman gods are not worth anything, and are, if anything, mostly a corrupt and evil influence on society.
Key Takeaways
💬 Augustine is pretty thorough and long-winded in his criticisms of Rome's gods. Even when he sets out on a new area of criticism, he seems to keep going back to points he's made already. He was no fan of the Roman theatre, that's for sure.