The City of God by Augustine - 7 - God Is Not the World, He Created the World
Book Seven
Quote
📝 We, however, seek for a mind which, trusting to true religion, does not adore the world as its god, but for the sake of God praises the world as a work of God, and, purified from mundane defilements, comes pure to God Himself who founded the world.
Notes
🔥 There is a set of select gods, more important than the others, and Augustine wants to make the case against them, too, that they don't help anyone with eternal life.
🔥 The selection of these "select" gods is arbitrary. Felicitas is not one, nor Fortune. "Even Fortune herself has had an adverse fortune?"
🔥 Augustine says it's actually probably better not to be among the "select", since their crimes are more well known and infamous than the others.
🔥 Varro's (and the Romans') conception of God is that he is the world and the world's soul/mind, which is then divided and subdivided into many parts (the individual gods). For Augustine, God is the creator of the world, not the world itself.
🔥 He continues his mocking analysis at how the gods' dominions are divided up so much. Janus is the god of beginnings, but he isn't also the god of endings? Even though he has two, sometimes four, faces? It makes no sense. And Jupiter is the cause of all things. But how is the cause different from the first thing (ie Janus). There's a lot of other things that don't make much sense which Augustine goes through.
🔥 Jupiter has many names (instead of breaking him up into many gods...?). They call him Pecunia, which means money, because all things belong to him. But how is it that the king of gods is called money, and not wisdom or something to indicate true riches? Money doesn't have anything to do with real richness or virtue. The love of money is evil, even according to some Romans.
🔥 There are plenty more contradictions that Augustine dissects. He also speculates that "a far more credible account of these gods is that they were men," and that legends and myths were built up around them over time.
🔥 The Romans take the world and divide it up a million different ways in an inconsistent and arbitrary way to patch together their different gods. But again, says Augustine, God is not the world. He is the creator of the world. "Therefore He governs all things in such a manner as to allow them to perform and exercise their own proper movements. For although they can be nothing without Him, they are not what He is."
🔥 And he is able to see this clearly only because he is a Christian. Only the true Christian religion can shine the light of truth and expose the Roman gods as demons and lies.
Key Takeaways
💬 Again, we've seen a lot of this before in the previous sections. Rome's gods make no sense, and they're actually vile and evil influences. Augustine spends some time discussing how there's a god that governs seeds, and the way Romans worship this god is by worshiping men's private parts, even placing a wreath over them. I get the impression Augustine is having some fun taking apart Rome's gods like this, and maybe that's why he's spending so much time on it.