The City of God

In Book 2, Augustine claims that far from protecting Rome, the practice of worshiping pagan gods led Rome to suffer the worst of all evils—that of moral degradation. He begins by noting that Rome and its colonies suffered many calamities as a regular feature of their history long before the Christian era began, which is not what one would expect were Christianity to blame for its downfall. Further, if pagan religion were superior to Christianity, one should find that it assisted its practitioners in their moral development, but instead the opposite happened. Augustine points out that many pagan rites frequently featured moral obscenities, and that these depraved features of pagan religion were celebrated in theatrical dramas and poetry. If the gods permitted the depictions of their own moral depravity in these ways, then such gods would be manifestly unworthy of worship.

Instead of establishing morality from the first principles of their religious faith, then, ancient Romans were forced to develop social morality from other sources, such as the teachings of philosophers and the laws of other societies. Such moral principles, however, stemming from human origins, exercise less of a mandate upon human behavior than do principles that come from divine origins, and so Roman society saw itself perpetually having to fight a slow slide toward the moral depravities exhibited by its gods. Augustine therefore asserts, “Rome had sunk into a morass of moral degradation before the coming of our Heavenly King” (69). Augustine attributes the decline of Roman morality to the effects of its pagan religion, which he assigns to the influence of demonic powers. Against the depravity of pagan practice, he sets Christianity’s much-admired moral values: The difference between the two systems showed Rome as valuing material and temporal gains, while Christianity prized moral and eternal values.

Augustine now expands on an argument already mentioned, namely that the pagan gods failed to save Rome from many previous calamities, some of which were just as devastating as Alaric’s sack. Rome’s own founding mythology, which traced its beginnings back to the Trojan hero Aeneas, taught that the pagan gods had failed to save Troy from ruin, even though that city contained many faithful worshipers. Augustine traces his way through the history of Rome, pointing out the many times when the gods did not intervene as one might have expected them to. He puts significant emphasis on the overwhelming Roman losses in the Second Punic War, in which Carthaginian armies under Hannibal laid waste to much of Rome’s Italian dominions, including the complete destruction of their allied city Saguntum, in spite of Roman fidelity to the pagan gods.

As Augustine recounts the violent upheavals that shaped Rome’s history, including the civil wars of the second and first centuries BCE, he pokes fun at the pagans’ erection of a temple to the goddess Concord, saying that it would have been more appropriate, and perhaps more efficacious, to build a shrine to Discord, since that appears to have been the goddess actually leading them. He concludes that the history of Rome’s turbulence shows no evidence of having been less devastating under pagan gods than under Christ.