By Rev. Matt Marino
In the year 410, Alaric and his army of Goths sacked Rome. Though not the final blow, this event marked the end of the Pax Romana, and in many ways, it signaled the beginning of the end of old paganism. During this time, Emperor Honorius appointed one of Augustine’s friends, Marcellinus, to oversee the continuing Catholic-Donatist dispute in North Africa where Augustine had now been bishop for over a decade.
As the perception spread that Christianity was responsible for the sack of Rome, Augustine wrote a letter to Marcellinus that became the seminal text of the Christian worldview throughout the Middle Ages. Augustine began The City of God in 412 and completed it in 426.
The first ten books deal with the important question, “What was the real cause of the end of the classical pagan civilization?”
We can summarize Augustine’s argument against the declining pagan worldview in this threefold manner: (i.) “gods at odds,” or incoherent ultimate reference points; (ii.) “vicious virtues,” or incoherent ethical norms; and (iii.) incoherence proven by history and testified to by their own authors. The true God is contrasted with the false. The Christian revelation and virtues are the light; the best of Greek reflection is merely the shadow.
“Gods at Odds” (Incoherent Ultimate Reference Points)
In the context of answering the charge that Christianity is to blame for Rome’s fall, Augustine makes three historical points. First, the reader is reminded of the humane treatment offered by the barbarians to those conquered Romans, who sought refuge either explicitly in the name of Christ or else in one of the Christian churches. Second, the pagan gods could not protect their cities in part because they needed men to protect them! Third, the fall of Rome came from within and much earlier, as expressed by Rome’s own thinkers, including Cicero.
Augustine further attacks pagan religion’s incoherence. He frequently cites Marcus Varro: there is the knowledge of one God, called Jupiter (from Jove), quickly paired with a sister-spouse, Juno, then just as quickly divided into a seeming infinity of friends and foes based upon the diverse things in nature. Augustine’s two-fold question is: What does Rome gain by worshiping parts of an ultimate thing, and what would she lose if she worshiped the one true whole God?
In summary, the pagan gods were what Francis Schaeffer called “amplified humanity.”1 This is one problem that results from having many ultimate reference points: “Like the Greeks, the Romans had no infinite god. This being so, they had no sufficient reference point intellectually; that is, they did not have anything big enough or permanent enough to which to relate either their thinking or their living.”2
“Vicious Virtues” (Incoherent Ethical Norms)
“First of all, we would ask why their gods took no steps to improve the morals of their worshipers.”3 – Augustine
Augustine noticed that two things are needed for moral progress to occur among a people: a “warner” and a warning of something of ultimate consequence. Where are the pagan prophets? Where is a linear eschatology?
One could object that Cato and Cicero were their prophets; however, they had an eternal Law of which they were uncertain and eternal realities that they lamented could not be proven. To them, Hell was the loss of the republic.
To illustrate the moral deficiency in their deities, Augustine offers Jove, who is depicted as adulterous. Now, if he is the father of all the greatest beings, what may we expect of the children and lesser neighbors? The decadent plays were supposedly commanded by the gods. Regarding the perverted purification ceremonies Augustine retorted, “They could not for the very shame have rehearsed at home in the presence of their own mothers.”4 But the more indecent the ceremonial act, the more it propitiated the deities.
We can see how this reflects poorly on the playwrights, but why did Augustine lay any of this at the foot of Rome’s philosophers? More broadly, how does this really sentence a society to death? If the philosophers paid closer attention to their craft, they would have recognized that ultimate reference points in nature forces one to worship the most ultimate person, or thing: the state. “Thou desirest to worship the natural gods; thou art compelled to worship the civil.”5 What is it that all earthly citizens desire of their civil sphere? One word we can offer is permanence. We can say peace too, but so long as there is a tolerable level of stability that will do.
The chief Roman virtue was glory. But, Augustine notes, this meant nothing other than global dominion over others, and he argues that such a kingdom is nothing but a large robbery: “At that time it was their greatest ambition either to die bravely or to live free; but when liberty was obtained, so great a desire for glory took possession of them, that liberty alone was not enough unless domination also should be sought.”6 In other words, glory-seeking itself is not the problem. However, it is false worship that is made by the false glory-seeker, just as the Romans worshiped the gifts of virtue rather than their Giver. For “the glory with the desire of which the Romans burned is the judgment of men thinking well of men.”7 Certain words of Jesus and Paul come to mind here:
“How can you believe, when you receive glory from one another and do not seek the glory that comes from the only God?” (Jn. 5:44).
And, “to those who by patience in well-doing seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life” (Rom. 2:7).
Incoherence Proven by Their Own Authors and by History
In some ways Rome suffered the fate of every secular organism: cultural entropy, that loss of available intellectual grasping and guarding of truth. Augustine argued, “Opulence gave birth to envy,” and “the vice of restless ambition.” Yes, these were the political parents of Rome: restless ambition bored with affluence, too lazy to consider those objective elements of law that restrain tyranny.
Augustine’s own command of Roman history is displayed in reinterpreting the mythical Romulus as having founded a city in bloodshed, and thus his successors as moving to one false peace after another to appease their guilt. The climax of Roman glory must have been the victory against Carthage in the Punic Wars, and yet where were the gods in protecting the Republic at that very moment?
The enormity and suddenness of the expansion of the Empire resulted in mass absorption of citizens who were not versed in those norms prerequisite for its continued existence. And the bloody civil wars culminated in the death of what remained of the Republic, consequently sentencing Roman civilization to its inevitable demise.
The Roman philosophers and civic commentators support Augustine’s critical thesis, namely, that as Rome’s religion was a disintegrating thing, so its morality was already functionally doomed. According to Cicero, “The lewdness of comedy could never have been suffered by audiences, unless the customs of society had previously sanctioned the same lewdness.”8 Moreover, Cicero explained the origin of this incoherence: “…Homer invented these things, and transferred things human to the gods; I would rather transfer things divine to us.”9
There is a Gospel Call Throughout
Throughout the first ten books, Augustine exalts the sovereignty of God. He sets suffering in its place and engenders despair on all traitors, and he pleads with the Roman reader to “come, join with us.” At the very beginning, he succinctly defines what he means by the City of God:
“A city surpassingly glorious, whether we view it as it still lives by faith in this fleeting course of time, as sojourns as a stranger in the midst of the ungodly, or as it shall dwell in the fixed stability of its eternal seat, which it now with patience waits for, expecting until ‘righteousness shall return unto judgment,’ and obtain, by virtue of its excellence, final victory and perfect peace.”10
“In truth, these two cities are entangled together in this world, and intermixed until the last judgment effect their separation.”11
The Christian does not claim, nor rests his hope in, a temporal changing of the guard. For the same God who gave us Constantine, also ordained Julian the Apostate not long after. The shame that the Romans ought to feel for their disgusting religion also forms a backdrop of repentance:
“This, rather, is a religion worthy of your desires, O admirable Roman race…This rather covet, this distinguish from that foul vanity and crafty malice of the devils…For of popular glory you have had your share; but by the secret providence of God, the true religion was not offered to your choice. Awake, it is now day…[to] this country of ours…which country we invite you, and exhort you to add yourselves to the number of the citizens of this city, which also has a sanctuary of its own for the true remission of sins.”12
Augustine’s doctrine of God is foreshadowed as he makes Providence the backdrop to settle any question people may have about why such horrors are happening to Christians as well as pagans, or why the irrational social order lasted so much longer than the so-called “Christian order.”
Were he here today, Augustine would surely say to us: Yes, God is ordering all of the events going on right now, for a multiplicity of reasons: judgment against sin; mercy in extending the time to repent; purification of his church; and display of his glory through his church.
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1. Francis Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live? (Westchester, IL: Crossway, 1976), 21.
2. Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live? 21.
3. Augustine, City of God, II.4
4. City of God, II.4
5. City of God, VI.6
6. City of God, V.12
7. City of God, V.12
8. Cicero, quoted in City of God, II.9
9. Cicero, quoted in City of God, IV.26
10. City of God, I.1
11. City of God, I.1
12. City of God, II.29
13. City of God, I.10