The City of God: Book 2

If the human mind were not so quick to resist clear evidence, but instead yielded its weakness to sound teaching the way a sick person yields to medicine, waiting on God in faith and piety until healing came, then those who think clearly and write well would have no need for lengthy arguments against the errors of empty speculation. But this stubbornness of mind is now more widespread and more damaging than ever. Even after the truth has been demonstrated as fully as one person can demonstrate it to another, people still cling to their own unreasonable notions, either because their blindness is so deep that they cannot see what is plainly in front of them, or because their pride is so entrenched that they refuse to acknowledge what they actually do see. This is why it so often becomes necessary to speak at greater length about things that are already clear, presenting them not merely to the eye but, so to speak, pressing them into the hand, so that even those who deliberately look away might still feel them. And yet, where would our discussions ever end, and what limits could we place on our writing, if we committed ourselves to answering every reply that came our way? Those who either cannot follow our arguments, or who are so hardened by the habit of contradiction that they refuse to yield even when they do understand, will keep pushing back. As it is written, they "speak hard things" and remain incurably stubborn. If we were to set out to refute their objections every time they brazenly ignored our reasoning, or found any new way to contradict what we had said, you can see what an endless, fruitless, and exhausting task we would be taking on. For this reason, I do not want my writings judged even by you, my son Marcellinus, nor by any of those others whom this work is freely and charitably meant to serve, if your intention is to demand a response to every objection you hear raised against what you read here. If that is your standard, you will end up resembling those foolish women the apostle describes as "always learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth."

In the previous book, having begun to speak of the city of God (to which I have resolved, with Heaven's help, to dedicate this entire work), my first task was to answer those who blame the wars devastating the world, and especially the recent sack of Rome by the barbarians, on the religion of Christ, which forbids the offering of vile sacrifices to demons. I showed that they should instead credit Christ with the fact that, for His name's sake, the barbarians broke with all custom and law of war by throwing open the largest churches as sanctuaries, and in many cases showed such reverence for Christ that not only His genuine servants, but even those who merely claimed to be so out of fear, were spared all the hardships that the customs of war would otherwise permit. From this arose the question of why wicked and ungrateful men were allowed to share in these benefits, and why the suffering and devastation of war fell on the godly just as much as on the ungodly. In giving a thorough answer to this substantial question, I spent considerable space, partly to ease the anxiety of those troubled by the fact that God's blessings, along with the ordinary misfortunes of human life, fall on bad and good people alike without distinction; but mainly to offer some consolation to those holy and chaste women who were violated by the enemy in ways that wounded their dignity, though not their purity, and to keep them from feeling ashamed to be alive when they have nothing to be ashamed of. I then spoke briefly against those who, with breathtaking shamelessness, mock the Christians who suffered these calamities, and especially those heartbroken and humiliated women who were nonetheless chaste and holy. These mockers are themselves deeply corrupt and cowardly, utterly unworthy of the Romans whose celebrated deeds fill the history books and are praised everywhere, yet who have found in their own descendants their greatest enemies. Rome, built up through the labors of those ancient heroes, was more shamefully ruined by their descendants while its walls still stood than it is now that those walls have been torn down. In that later ruin, only stones and timber fell; in the ruin those degenerates brought about, what collapsed was not the city's walls but its moral foundations and its honor, and their hearts burned with passions more destructive than any flame that consumed their houses. That is where I ended the first book. Now I turn to the calamities that Rome itself, and the provinces under its rule, suffered from its very founding onward, all of which those critics would have blamed equally on the Christian religion, had the gospel's message against their false and deceptive gods been proclaimed as widely and freely in those early days as it is now.

Keep in mind that, in recounting these things, I am still addressing ignorant people; so ignorant, in fact, as to give rise to the common saying, "Drought and Christianity go hand in hand." There are, of course, some among them who are thoroughly well-educated and have a genuine interest in history, where the events I am describing are plainly visible. But in order to stir up the uneducated masses against us, they pretend not to know about these events, and do everything they can to convince ordinary people that the disasters which regularly strike humanity in various places and at various times are the result of Christianity, which is spreading everywhere and enjoying a fame and brilliance that completely overshadows their own gods. Let them, then, join us in recalling the many repeated disasters that blighted Rome's prosperity before Christ ever came in the flesh, and before His name had been proclaimed among the nations with the glory they so pointlessly resent. Let them, if they can, defend their gods on this point, since they claim to worship those gods precisely to be protected from the kind of disasters they now blame on us whenever they suffer even slightly. After all, why did these gods allow the calamities I am about to describe to fall on their own worshippers, long before the preaching of Christ's name had offended them or brought their sacrifices to an end?

Let me begin by asking the most basic question: why did the pagan gods never take any steps to improve the moral character of their worshippers? It was perfectly just that the true God would withhold His help from those who never sought it, but why did those gods, whose worship people are now complaining they can no longer practice, never establish any laws to guide their followers toward a virtuous life? Surely there was a basic fairness at stake here: if people devoted themselves to honoring the gods, the gods in turn should have shown some concern for how those people actually lived. The standard reply is that a man goes astray by his own free choice, and no one disputes that. But it was still the responsibility of these gods, who were supposed to be humanity's guardians, to spell out clearly what a good life required and not to hide that knowledge from their own worshippers. It was their duty to send prophets who could teach and challenge those who broke the moral law, and to publicly declare both the punishments awaiting wrongdoers and the rewards awaiting those who lived rightly. Did the walls of any of their temples ever echo with a warning like that? When I was young, I sometimes attended those sacrilegious entertainments and spectacles myself. I watched priests working themselves into religious frenzies and listened to the choristers. I took pleasure in the shameful games held in honor of gods and goddesses, including the virgin Coelestis and Berecynthia, the so-called mother of all the gods. On the holy day set apart for her purification, compositions so obscene and filthy were sung before her ceremonial couch that I hesitate to say they were unfit for the ears of the mother of the gods; they were unfit for the ears of the mother of any senator or decent man. They were so impure, in fact, that not even the mothers of the foul-mouthed performers themselves could have sat in that audience, because even the most shameless people retain some natural reverence for their parents that they cannot entirely ignore. And so the lewd acts and filthy words with which these performers honored the mother of the gods, performed before a vast crowd of men and women alike, were things they could never have rehearsed at home in front of their own mothers without burning with shame. The crowds drawn from every direction by curiosity must, I would think, have been scattered by the sheer force of their own embarrassment. If these are sacred rites, what exactly would count as sacrilege? If this is purification, what would pollution look like? This festival was called the Tables, as though a banquet were being laid out at which unclean spirits could find fitting refreshment. It isn't hard to understand what kind of spirits must take delight in such obscenities, unless a man has been so thoroughly deceived by these evil spirits masquerading as gods that he either denies their existence altogether or lives in such a way that he finds it more natural to appease and fear them than to fear the true God.

On this matter, I would prefer to have as my fellow judges not those men who take pleasure in these shameful customs rather than working to abolish them, but that same Scipio Nasica who was chosen by the senate as the citizen most worthy to receive the image of that demon Cybele in his hands and carry it into the city. Let him tell us whether he would be proud to see his own mother so highly honored by the state as to be granted divine worship, in the way that Greeks, Romans, and other nations have decreed divine honors to men who rendered them great service, believing that their mortal benefactors were thereby made immortal and enrolled among the gods. Surely he would have wished such happiness for his mother, if it were possible. But if we then asked him whether, among the honors paid to her, he would want such shameful rites as these to be performed, would he not immediately cry out that he would rather his mother lie stone-dead than survive as a goddess lending her ear to such obscenities? Is it conceivable that a man of such strict moral character, who used his influence as a Roman senator to block the construction of a theater in a city dedicated to manly virtue, would wish his mother to be honored as a goddess with words that would have made her blush as a Roman matron? Could he possibly believe that the modesty of a respectable woman would be so transformed by her elevation to divinity that she would allow herself to be invoked and celebrated in terms so coarse and indecent that, had she heard anything like them while alive on earth and listened without covering her ears and fleeing the scene, her relatives, her husband, and her children would have been mortified on her behalf? The mother of the gods, then, was the kind of figure that even the most shameless man would be embarrassed to claim as his own mother; and as she set out to ensnare the minds of the Romans, she demanded their finest citizen for her service, not to deepen his virtue through wise guidance, but to trap him through deception, like the woman of whom it is written, "The adulteress will hunt for the precious soul" (Prov 6:26). Her aim was to inflate this high-minded man with what appeared to be a divine endorsement of his excellence, so that he would rest on his reputation for virtue and make no further effort toward true piety and religion. Without that foundation, even the most brilliant natural gifts dissolve into pride and come to nothing. For what other than a deceitful purpose could that goddess have in demanding the best man, when her own sacred festivals required the kind of obscenities that would have covered the best men with shame to hear at their own tables?

This is why those pagan deities paid no attention to the moral lives of the cities and nations that worshipped them. They issued no stern warnings, set up no barriers to prevent their worshippers from sinking into total corruption, and offered no protection against the terrible and degrading evils that threaten not crops and vineyards, not houses and property, not even the body, but the soul itself, the spirit that governs the whole person. If any such warnings ever existed, let them be produced and proven. We will be told that purity and integrity were taught to those initiated into religious mysteries, and that secret encouragements to virtue were quietly passed along to a select few. But this is an empty boast. Let them point us to a single place that was ever set apart for gatherings where, instead of obscene songs and the lewd performances of actors, instead of the celebration of those utterly shameless Fugalia (aptly named, since they drive out decency and moral feeling), the people were commanded in the name of the gods to curb their greed, restrain their lust, and check their ambition. Let them show us where people could learn what Persius so forcefully demands of them when he writes: "Be taught, ye abandoned creatures, and ascertain the causes of things: what we are, and for what end we are born; what is the law of our success in life, and by what art we may turn the goal without making shipwreck; what limit we should put to our wealth, what we may lawfully desire, and what uses filthy lucre serves; how much we should bestow upon our country and our family; learn, in short, what God meant you to be, and what place He has ordered you to fill." Let them name the places where such teaching was regularly delivered on behalf of the gods, and where the worshippers were in the habit of gathering to receive it, as we can point to our churches, built for exactly this purpose, in every land where the Christian faith has taken root.

But perhaps they will point us to the philosophical schools and their debates? To begin with, these belong not to Rome but to Greece; and even if we grant that they are now Roman, since Greece itself has become a Roman province, the teachings of the philosophers are still not the commandments of the gods. They are the discoveries of men who, driven by their own speculative ability, worked to uncover the hidden laws of nature, to determine right and wrong in ethics, and to identify in logic what follows from valid reasoning and what falls into error and contradiction. Some of them, with God's help, made remarkable discoveries; but when left to their own devices, human weakness betrayed them and they fell into serious mistakes. This was ordered by divine providence so that their pride might be held in check, and so that their example might make clear that humility, not brilliance, is what gains access to the highest regions of truth.

But we will address this more fully in its proper place, if the Lord God of truth permits. Consider this, though: if the philosophers have made discoveries sufficient to guide people toward virtue and genuine happiness, wouldn't it have been far more just to vote them divine honors? Wouldn't it be more consistent with every virtuous instinct to read Plato's writings in a Temple of Plato, rather than to attend the temples of demons and watch the priests of Cybele mutilating themselves, effeminate men being consecrated, raving fanatics cutting their own flesh, and whatever other cruel or shameful ceremonies the rituals of such gods demand? Wouldn't it be a better education, more likely to inspire young people toward virtue, if they heard public readings of the laws of the gods rather than empty praise of their ancestors' customs and traditions? The plain truth is that all worshippers of the Roman gods, once they are seized by what Persius calls "the burning poison of lust," would rather watch the deeds of Jupiter than hear what Plato taught or what Cato condemned. This is why the young profligate in Terence, upon seeing a fresco on the wall depicting the fabled story of Jupiter descending into the lap of Danaë as a golden shower, takes it as authoritative precedent for his own licentiousness and boasts that he is imitating God. "And what God?" he says. "He who with His thunder shakes the loftiest temples. And was I, a poor creature compared to Him, to make anything of it? No; I did it, and with all my heart."

But someone will object: these are the inventions of poets, not the actual pronouncements of the gods themselves. I have no interest in adjudicating between the indecency of theatrical performances and that of religious rites. What I will say, and history supports me here, is that those same entertainments, in which the fictions of poets are the central attraction, were not introduced into Roman religious festivals through the misguided devotion of ordinary citizens. Rather, the gods themselves issued the most urgent commands to this effect, and effectively forced these celebrations and solemnities upon the Romans as acts of worship. I touched on this in the preceding book, where I noted that dramatic entertainments were first established at Rome during a plague, and on the authority of the pontiff. And what person is more likely to shape their own life by the examples portrayed in plays that carry divine sanction, rather than by precepts written and published on merely human authority? If the poets misrepresented Jupiter by portraying him as an adulterer, one would expect the chaste gods to punish such a wicked fiction in righteous anger, rather than encouraging the very games that spread it. Among these plays, the least offensive are comedies and tragedies: that is, the dramas that poets compose for the stage. Though they frequently deal with impure subjects, they do so without the crude language that marks many other performances, and it is precisely these dramas that young men are required by their elders to read and study as part of what is called a liberal and gentlemanly education.

The ancient Romans' position on this matter is confirmed by Cicero in his work *De Republica*, where Scipio, one of the dialogue's participants, observes: "The obscenity of comedy could never have been tolerated by audiences, unless society had already embraced that same obscenity in its own customs." In earlier times, the Greeks at least maintained a degree of reasonableness within their permissiveness, enshrining in law that whenever comedy wished to attack someone, it had to name that person directly. So Scipio says, in the same work of Cicero's: "Who has it not smeared? Who has it not hounded? Who has it spared? Grant that it may go after demagogues and agitators, men who harm the republic, a Cleon, a Cleophon, a Hyperbolus. That is bearable, though it would have been more fitting for a public censor to brand such men than for a poet to mock them. But to drag Pericles through the mud with crude verse, after he had presided over their state with the utmost dignity in both war and peace, was as unworthy of a poet as it would be if our own Plautus or Naevius were to put Publius and Cneius Scipio on the comic stage, or if Caecilius were to caricature Cato." Then, a little further on, he continues: "Though our Twelve Tables attached the death penalty to only a very few offenses, this was among them: if any man sang a defamatory song or composed a satire designed to bring infamy or disgrace on another person. A wise decree. For our lives should be judged by the decisions of magistrates and by an informed justice, not by the whims of poets; nor should we be exposed to slander unless we have the right to reply and defend ourselves before a proper tribunal." I have judged it worthwhile to quote this passage from the fourth book of Cicero's *De Republica*, reproducing it word for word, except where I have omitted a few words or slightly rearranged others to make the meaning clearer. The extract is directly relevant to the point I am trying to make. Cicero adds a few further remarks and closes the passage by showing that the ancient Romans permitted no living person to be either praised or ridiculed on the stage. The Greeks, as I noted, were less moral but more consistent in allowing what the Romans forbade, because they recognized that their gods approved of and delighted in the crude language of low comedy when it was aimed not only at men but even at themselves, whether the shameful acts attributed to those gods were poetic invention or actual misdeeds being commemorated and performed in the theaters. One can only wish that the audiences had seen those portrayals as fit for laughter alone, and not for imitation. It would clearly have been a kind of arrogance to protect the reputations of leading men and ordinary citizens when the gods themselves did not object to having their own names dragged through the dirt.

Some have tried to excuse this practice by arguing that the stories told about the gods are not true but fictional, mere inventions. Yet this defense only makes things worse, at least when judged by the moral standards our religion teaches. And if we consider the malice of the devils, what more cunning and calculated scheme could they devise against humanity? When a slander is spread about a prominent statesman of upright and useful character, isn't it all the more reprehensible precisely because it's untrue and baseless? What punishment, then, could ever be sufficient when the gods themselves are the objects of such wicked and outrageous injustice? But the devils, whom these people regard as gods, are perfectly content to have even crimes they never committed attributed to them, so long as they can entangle human minds in the web of these beliefs and drag people along with them toward their destined punishment. This is true whether such things were actually done by the men whom these devils, delighting in human delusion, arrange to be worshipped as gods (substituting themselves in place of those men through a thousand malicious and deceptive schemes in order to receive worship), or whether, even when the crimes were genuinely committed by men, these wicked spirits were happy to see them attributed to higher beings. In the latter case, it would appear that heaven itself had given its blessing to the commission of shameful wickedness. The Greeks, therefore, looking at the character of the gods they served, concluded that poets should certainly not hold back from portraying human vices on the stage. They reasoned this way either because they wanted to resemble their gods in this regard, or because they feared that if they demanded a more spotless reputation for themselves than they claimed for the gods, they might provoke divine anger.

This same Greek reasonableness led them to grant actors in these plays no small measure of civic honor. In the book of *De Republica* mentioned above, we read that Aeschines, a highly eloquent Athenian who had worked as a tragic actor in his youth, went on to become a statesman, and that the Athenians repeatedly sent another tragedian, Aristodemus, as their official ambassador to Philip. In their view, it would have been wrong to condemn and disgrace the very men who performed the theatrical entertainments that the gods so clearly enjoyed. This was, without question, a moral failure on the part of the Greeks, but it was entirely consistent with the character of their gods. After all, how could they have presumed to shield their citizens from being torn apart by the tongues of poets and players, when those same gods not only permitted but actively encouraged the shredding of their own divine reputations on stage? And how could they look down on the men who performed those dramas in the theatre, when they had every reason to believe those performances delighted the very gods they worshipped? Of course they granted such men the highest civic honors. On what basis could they honor the priests who offered acceptable sacrifices to the gods, while branding with disgrace the actors who, on behalf of the people, gave the gods the pleasure and honor those gods demanded, and who (according to the priests themselves) provoked divine anger when that pleasure was withheld? Labeo, whose learning makes him a genuine authority on such matters, held that the distinction between good and evil deities should be reflected in their worship: the evil gods should be appeased with bloody sacrifices and grim rites, while the good gods should be honored with joyful and pleasant observances, such as (in his own words) plays, festivals, and banquets. All of this we will examine more fully later, with God's help. For now, staying with the matter at hand: whether all kinds of offerings are made indiscriminately to all the gods as though all were good (and it is a troubling thought to imagine that any gods could be evil, though in truth all the gods of the pagans are evil, because they are not gods at all but evil spirits), or whether, as Labeo believed, the offerings are differentiated according to the nature of each deity, the Greeks are equally justified in honoring both the priests who offer the sacrifices and the actors who perform the dramas. To do otherwise would leave them open to the charge of insulting all their gods, if the plays please all of them, or, worse still, of insulting their good gods specifically, if those good gods are the ones who take the greatest delight in such performances.

As Scipio boasts in that same discussion, the Romans refused to let poets attack and slander their conduct and reputations, going so far as to make it a capital offense for anyone who dared compose such verses. As far as their own honor was concerned, this was a perfectly admirable policy. But toward the gods, it was arrogant and irreverent. They knew perfectly well that the gods not only tolerated but actually enjoyed being lashed by the abusive language of poets, yet they refused to accept that same treatment for themselves. What their religious rites prescribed as pleasing to the gods, their civil law prohibited as harmful to themselves. So how exactly, Scipio, can you praise the Romans for denying poets this freedom, so that no citizen could be slandered, while you know the gods were given no such protection? Do you consider your senate house so much more worthy of respect than the Capitol? Is the city of Rome more valuable in your eyes than the entire company of the gods, that you forbid your poets from speaking injuriously against any citizen, while they may heap whatever accusations they like upon the gods without any senator, censor, prince, or pontiff lifting a finger to stop them? It was apparently intolerable for Plautus or Naevius to attack Publius and Cneius Scipio, unacceptable for Caecilius to lampoon Cato; but perfectly fine for your Terence to inflame the lusts of young men by holding up the wicked example of almighty Jove.

But Scipio, if he were alive, would perhaps reply: "How could we attach a penalty to what the gods themselves have consecrated? The theatrical entertainments in which such things are said, acted, and performed were introduced into Roman society by the gods, who ordered that they be dedicated and exhibited in their honor." Yet doesn't this prove, as plainly as anything could, that these were no true gods, and were in no way worthy of receiving divine honors from the republic? Suppose they had demanded that Roman citizens be held up to public ridicule in their honor; every Roman would have recoiled from such a hateful proposal. How, then, can these beings be considered worthy of worship when they insist that their own crimes serve as the material for celebrating their praises? Doesn't this very scheme expose them for what they are: detestable devils? And so the Romans, though superstitious enough to serve as gods those who made no secret of their desire to be worshipped through licentious plays, still had enough regard for their ancestral dignity and virtue to refuse actors the kind of social rewards that the Greeks freely gave them. On this point we have Scipio's testimony, recorded in Cicero: "They [the Romans] considered comedy and all theatrical performances disgraceful, and therefore not only barred actors from the offices and honors open to ordinary citizens, but also decreed that their names should be branded by the censor and erased from the roll of their tribe." An excellent decree, and yet another sign of Rome's good judgment; though I wish that prudence had been more thorough and consistent. When I consider that any Roman citizen who chose the stage as his profession not only closed off every honorable career to himself but became an outcast from his own tribe, I can't help but say: this is the true Roman spirit, this is worthy of a state that jealously guards its reputation. But then someone interrupts my admiration with an entirely reasonable question: how can actors be barred from all honors while theatrical performances are counted among the honors owed to the gods? For a long time Rome's virtue remained untouched by theatrical exhibitions, and if plays had been adopted simply to satisfy the tastes of citizens, they would have arrived alongside a general loosening of morals. But the truth is that it was the gods who demanded these performances for their own gratification. How, then, is it just to excommunicate the very actor through whom the god is worshipped? On what grounds can you simultaneously adore the one who demands these plays and brand the one who performs them? This is the heart of the dispute between the Greeks and the Romans. The Greeks believe they rightly honor actors, because they worship gods who demand plays. The Romans, on the other hand, will not allow an actor to disgrace even his own plebeian tribe with his name, let alone the senatorial order. The entire argument can be reduced to a single syllogism. The Greeks supply the major premise: if such gods are to be worshipped, then certainly such men may be honored. The Romans add the minor premise: but such men must by no means be honored. The Christians draw the conclusion: therefore such gods must by no means be worshipped.

We still need to ask why the poets who write plays, and who are prohibited by the law of the twelve tables from defaming citizens, are considered more respectable than the actors, even though they so shamelessly slander the gods. Is it right that the performers of these impious, God-dishonoring works should be stigmatized while their authors are celebrated? Surely we must give the credit here to a Greek: Plato, who, in designing his ideal republic, concluded that poets should be expelled from the city as enemies of the state. He refused to tolerate the gods being brought into disrepute, or the minds of citizens being corrupted and stupefied by poetic fictions. Consider the contrast: human nature, as we see it in Plato, banishes poets from the city to protect its citizens; divine nature, as we see it in these gods, demands theatrical performances in its own honor. Plato tried, though without success, to persuade the frivolous and pleasure-seeking Greeks to stop writing such plays altogether. The gods, meanwhile, used their authority to compel the dignified and sober-minded Romans to perform those very same plays. And not content with having them performed, they demanded that the plays be dedicated to them, consecrated to them, and solemnly celebrated in their honor. Which, then, would it be more fitting for a state to honor with divine recognition: Plato, who condemned these wicked and licentious spectacles, or the demons who took delight in blinding people to the very truths Plato had tried, and failed, to teach?

Plato was elevated by Labeo to the rank of a demigod, placing him on the same level as Hercules and Romulus. Labeo ranks demigods above heroes, yet counts both among the deities. Even so, it's clear that Labeo considers this man he calls a demigod worthy of greater respect not only than the heroes, but than the gods themselves. Roman law and Platonic philosophy share a notable resemblance on one point: Plato condemns poetic fictions wholesale, while Roman law restrains the license of satire, at least when living people are its targets. Plato won't allow poets to live in his ideal city at all; Roman law bars actors from citizenship. And had the Romans not feared offending the gods who had requested theatrical performances in their honor, they would most likely have banished actors entirely. It's obvious, then, that the Romans could neither receive nor reasonably expect to receive any moral guidance from their gods, since the laws they enacted on their own far surpassed and put to shame the morality those gods embodied. The gods demanded theatrical performances in their own honor, while the Romans excluded performers from all civic standing. The gods called for stage productions celebrating their own disgraceful behavior; the Romans decreed that no poet should dare tarnish the reputation of any citizen. But Plato, that so-called demigod, resisted the appetites of such gods and showed the Romans what their own instincts had left unfinished: he banned poets from his ideal state entirely, whether they invented fictions with no regard for truth or held up the worst possible examples to suffering humanity under the cover of divine conduct.

For our part, we consider Plato neither a god nor a demigod. We would not even compare him to any of God's holy angels, nor to the truth-speaking prophets, nor to any of the apostles or martyrs of Christ, nor indeed to any faithful Christian. We will explain our reasons for this view in the proper place, God willing. Nevertheless, since others wish him to be regarded as a demigod, we think he certainly deserves that rank more than most, and is superior in every way, if not to Hercules and Romulus (though no historian or poet has ever recorded that he killed his brother or committed any serious crime), then certainly to Priapus, or the dog-headed deity (Cynocephalus), or the goddess Fever, all of whom the Romans either imported from foreign peoples or consecrated through their own homegrown rituals. How could gods like these ever be expected to give sound and wholesome laws, either to prevent moral and social evils or to root them out once they had taken hold? These were gods who actively worked to sow and nurture depravity, by arranging for deeds truly or falsely attributed to them to be performed before the public in theatrical spectacles, and by fanning the flames of human desire with what amounted to a divine stamp of approval. Cicero himself, speaking of poets, cries out against this situation in words that cut to the heart of the matter: "When poets win the applause and acclaim of the people, who sit as infallible judges, what darkness clouds the mind, what fears take hold, what passions set it ablaze!"

Isn't it obvious that vanity, not reason, drove the selection of some of their false gods? Plato, whom they rank as a demigod and who devoted his considerable eloquence to protecting people from the most dangerous spiritual disasters, was never considered worthy of even a modest shrine. Romulus, on the other hand, simply because they can claim him as their own, they have honored above many gods, even though their inner doctrine can grant him only the rank of a demigod. They assigned him a flamen, that is, a priest belonging to a class held in the highest religious esteem (distinguished, among other things, by their conical headdresses). Only three gods in their entire religion were granted flamens: the Flamen Dialis for Jupiter, the Martialis for Mars, and the Quirinalis for Romulus (for when the enthusiasm of his fellow citizens elevated Romulus to divine status, they gave him the new name Quirinus). By this honor, Romulus was effectively ranked above Neptune and Pluto, who were Jupiter's brothers, and even above Saturn himself, their father. They assigned Romulus the same order of priesthood as Jupiter. And in granting the same honor to Mars, who was said to be Romulus's father, one has to ask: was this really done to honor Mars, or was it done for Romulus's sake?

Moreover, if the Romans had truly been able to receive a moral code from their gods, they would never have needed to borrow Solon's laws from the Athenians, which is exactly what they did in the years following Rome's founding. And even then, they didn't simply adopt those laws as written but worked to refine and improve them. Lycurgus claimed that Apollo had authorized him to give laws to the Spartans, but the practical-minded Romans weren't persuaded by this claim and felt no inclination to borrow from Sparta on that basis. Numa Pompilius, who succeeded Romulus as king, is said to have drafted some laws of his own, though these proved insufficient to govern civic life adequately. Many of his regulations concerned religious observances, yet even these are not reported to have come from the gods. When it comes to moral failures, then, the failures of character and conduct that are so destructive that even the wisest pagan thinkers believed they could bring down entire states while leaving the physical cities intact, the Roman gods made not the slightest effort to protect their worshippers from such evils. On the contrary, as we have already argued, those gods took deliberate pains to make things worse.

But perhaps we should look for an explanation of why Rome's gods neglected their people in Sallust's observation that "equity and virtue prevailed among the Romans not more by force of laws than of nature." I assume it is this innate sense of fairness and goodness that we are meant to credit for the rape of the Sabine women. What, after all, could be more equitable and virtuous than abducting by force, each man taking what suited him, girls who were strangers and guests, lured in under the pretense of a public spectacle, and taken without their parents' knowledge or consent? If the Sabines were wrong to refuse their daughters when the Romans first asked for them, wasn't it a far greater wrong for the Romans to seize those women after being refused? The Romans would have had more justification in going to war against their neighbors for the original refusal than for demanding the women back once they had been stolen. War should have been declared at the outset. That was the moment for Mars to aid his warlike son, so that through force of arms he might avenge the insult of a rejected marriage proposal and win the women he wanted. There would at least have been some semblance of a "right of war" if a victor had carried off, by virtue of that right, the very women who had been denied him without any legitimate reason. But there was no "right of peace" that entitled anyone to abduct women who had not been freely given, and then wage an unjust war against their justifiably outraged parents. One fortunate detail did emerge from this act of violence: although it was commemorated by the circus games, it never became a legal or social precedent within Rome or its territories. If one wishes to criticize the lasting consequences of this episode, the real complaint should be that the Romans deified Romulus despite his having committed this outrage, since one cannot fairly accuse them of treating the abduction itself as any kind of model for the treatment of women.

Again, I suspect it was this same sense of natural fairness and virtue that drove events after King Tarquin was expelled, following his son's violation of Lucretia. The consul Junius Brutus forced Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus, Lucretia's own husband and Brutus's fellow consul, a good and innocent man, to resign his office and go into exile. The sole charge against him was that he bore the name and blood of the Tarquins. This injustice was carried out with the approval, or at least the silent consent, of the very people who had themselves elected Collatinus and Brutus to the consulship. Another example of this so-called fairness and virtue can be seen in how Rome treated Marcus Camillus. This remarkable man had swiftly defeated the Veians, at that time Rome's most dangerous enemies, who had sustained a ten-year war during which the Roman army had suffered the predictable disasters that come from poor leadership. He had restored security to a Rome that was beginning to fear for its survival, and he had captured the wealthiest city of the enemy. Yet despite all this, he faced charges brought against him by those who envied his success and by the arrogance of the tribunes of the people. Seeing that the city felt no gratitude for the man who had saved it, and knowing he would certainly be convicted, he went into exile, and was even fined ten thousand asses in his absence. Not long afterward, however, his ungrateful country was forced to call on him again for protection against the Gauls. But I cannot begin to catalogue all the shameful and unjust acts that tore Rome apart as the aristocracy tried to dominate the people, the people pushed back against their overreach, and the champions of both sides were driven far more by the desire to win than by any genuine concern for fairness or virtue.

Let me pause here and call Sallust himself as a witness, since his own words in praise of the Romans, that "equity and virtue prevailed among them not more by force of laws than of nature," are what prompted this discussion in the first place. He was referring to the period immediately after the expulsion of the kings, when the city grew to greatness with remarkable speed. And yet this same writer admits, in the very opening of his history's first book, that even then, only a brief time after power had passed from kings to consuls, the more powerful men had already begun to act unjustly, driving a wedge between the people and the patricians and stirring up other disorders throughout the city. Sallust had noted that the Romans enjoyed greater harmony and a healthier society between the second and third Punic Wars than at any other time, and that the reason was not any love of good order on their part, but fear of breaking the peace with Carthage. This, as we mentioned, was precisely what Nasica had in mind when he opposed the destruction of Carthage: he believed that fear would keep wickedness in check and preserve sound ways of living. But then Sallust continues: "Yet, after the destruction of Carthage, discord, greed, ambition, and the other vices that prosperity typically breeds increased more than ever before." If they "increased," and "more than ever," then they had already taken root and been growing for some time. Sallust then explains why: "For the oppressive measures of the powerful, and the resulting withdrawals of the common people from the patricians, and other civil conflicts, had existed from the very beginning, and affairs were governed with fairness and sound judgment for no longer than the brief period after the expulsion of the kings, while the city was occupied with the serious Tuscan war and Tarquin's campaign of revenge." Notice that even during that short window after the kings were expelled, Sallust acknowledges that fear was the real cause of the relative peace and order. The Romans were afraid of the war that Tarquin had launched against them after being driven from the throne, having allied himself with the Tuscans. But consider what Sallust adds next: "After that, the patricians treated the people as their slaves, ordering them to be flogged or executed just as the kings had done, driving them from their land, and ruling harshly over those who had nothing to lose. The people, crushed by these abuses and above all by ruinous interest rates, and forced to contribute both money and military service to one war after another, eventually took up arms and withdrew to the Aventine and Sacred Hills, where they secured for themselves tribunes and protective laws. But it was only the second Punic War that finally brought discord and strife to an end on both sides." Consider, then, what kind of men the Romans actually were, even in those early years just after the kings were expelled. These are the very men of whom Sallust says that "equity and virtue prevailed among them not more by force of law than of nature."

Now, if these were the days when the Roman republic appeared at its finest and most virtuous, what are we to say about the age that followed? To borrow the words of the same historian, Rome "changed little by little from the fair and virtuous city it was" until it became utterly corrupt and dissolute. This decline, as he notes, came after the destruction of Carthage. Sallust's brief summary of this period can be read in his own history, where he shows how the reckless behavior that prosperity encouraged eventually led to civil war. He writes: "From this point on, the old ways were not gradually worn down as they had been before, but swept away entirely, as if by a flood. The young men were so corrupted by luxury and greed that it could fairly be said no father had a son capable of either protecting his own inheritance or keeping his hands off someone else's." Sallust goes on to catalogue the vices of Sulla and the general degradation of the republic, and other writers make similar observations, though in far less vivid terms.

However, I think you can see now, or at least anyone paying attention has the means to see, what a pit of corruption that city had sunk into before the arrival of our heavenly King. These things happened not only before Christ had begun to teach, but before He had even been born of the Virgin. If, then, they dare not blame their gods for the severe evils of those earlier times, which were more bearable before the destruction of Carthage but unbearable and horrifying after it, even though it was those very gods who, through their malicious influence, planted in human minds the ideas from which such terrible vices spread in every direction, why do they blame Christ for the present calamities? Christ teaches life-giving truth; He forbids us to worship false and deceptive gods; and with divine authority He condemns those wicked and destructive human passions, gradually drawing His own people away from a world rotting under these vices and collapsing into ruin, so that He might shape them into an eternal city whose glory rests not on the hollow praise of vanity, but on the verdict of truth.

Here, then, is this Roman republic, which "has changed little by little from the fair and virtuous city it once was, and has become utterly wicked and dissolute." I am not the first to say this. Their own writers said it long before me, and long before the coming of Christ. We learned it from them, at the cost of an education. You can see for yourself how, before Christ ever came, and after the destruction of Carthage, "the old ways, instead of fading gradually as they had before, were swept away as if by a flood; and how thoroughly luxury and greed had corrupted the youth." Let them now read us any laws their gods gave to the Roman people, laws directed against luxury and greed. And it would have been better if those gods had simply stayed silent on the subjects of chastity and modesty, rather than demanding indecent and shameful practices from the people, lending those practices a poisonous legitimacy through their so-called divinity. Let them instead read our commandments in the Prophets, the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, or the Epistles. Let them work through the countless precepts against greed and excess that are read aloud in every congregation that gathers for that purpose, precepts that strike the ear not with the tentative murmur of philosophical debate, but with the force of God's own word breaking through like thunder from the clouds. And yet they refuse to blame their gods for the luxury, the greed, the cruelty, and the moral collapse that had already made the republic thoroughly wicked and corrupt before Christ ever arrived. Whatever suffering their own arrogance and self-indulgence have brought down on them in recent times, they furiously lay at the feet of our religion. If the kings of the earth and all their subjects, if every prince and judge, if young men and women, the old and the young, every age and both sexes, if all those the Baptist addressed, the tax collectors and the soldiers, were together to hear and follow the precepts of the Christian faith concerning a just and virtuous life, then the republic would adorn the whole earth with its own flourishing, and attain in eternal life the very height of kingly glory. But because one person listens while another scoffs, and most people are far more drawn to the seductions of vice than to the demanding rigor of virtue, the people of Christ, whatever their station, whether they are kings, princes, judges, soldiers, or ordinary citizens, rich or poor, enslaved or free, men or women, are called to endure this earthly republic, wicked and dissolute as it is. In enduring it faithfully, they win for themselves an honored place in that most holy and exalted assembly of angels and the republic of heaven, where the will of God is the law.

But the worshippers and admirers of these gods take delight in imitating their shameful vices, and they couldn't care less whether the republic becomes corrupt and lawless. Just let it remain undefeated, they say; let it thrive and overflow with resources; let it be celebrated for its victories, or better yet, secure in peace. What does anything else matter to us? Our only concern is that every man be able to grow his wealth enough to fund his daily indulgences, and that the powerful be free to exploit the weak for their own ends. Let the poor flatter the rich in exchange for a living, and under their patronage enjoy a lazy, undisturbed peace. Let the rich treat the poor as their dependents, using them to feed their own pride. Let the people cheer not for those who defend their interests, but for those who keep them entertained. Let no demanding duty be required, and let no form of immorality be prohibited. Let kings measure their success not by the virtue of their subjects, but by their submissiveness. Let the provinces remain loyal to their kings not as moral leaders, but as masters of their property and suppliers of their pleasures; not out of genuine respect, but out of a cringing, servile fear. Let the law concern itself more with damage done to another man's property than with harm done to a person. If someone becomes a nuisance to his neighbor, or damages his property, his household, or his person, let him be taken to court; but in his own private affairs, let everyone do as he pleases without consequence, whether alone, with his family, or with willing companions. Let there be a generous supply of public prostitutes for anyone who wants them, especially for those too poor to keep one privately. Let the grandest and most lavishly decorated houses be built, furnished with the most extravagant banquets, where anyone who wishes may spend the day or night gambling, drinking, gorging, and wasting himself. Let the sound of dancers fill every corner, and the loud, shameless laughter of the theater ring out everywhere; let an endless rotation of brutal and sensual pleasures keep the excitement going without pause. If anyone finds this kind of happiness distasteful, let him be branded a public enemy; and if anyone tries to reform or abolish it, let him be silenced, exiled, or destroyed. Let those be honored as the true gods who bring the people this way of life and preserve it once it's been established. Let them be worshipped however they wish; let them demand whatever spectacles they like from their devotees; only let them guarantee that such happiness is never threatened by enemy, plague, or any other disaster. What reasonable person would compare a republic like this, I won't even say to the Roman Empire, but to the palace of Sardanapalus, that ancient king so utterly given over to pleasure that he had inscribed on his tomb that in death he possessed only what he had consumed and swallowed through his appetites while alive? If these men had a king like that, one who indulged himself freely while placing no burdensome demands on them, they would dedicate a temple and a priesthood to him with far more enthusiasm than the ancient Romans ever showed toward Romulus.

But if our adversaries don't care how shamefully and disgracefully corrupt practices stain the Roman republic, so long as it holds together and keeps functioning, and if they therefore dismiss Sallust's testimony about its "utterly wicked and profligate" condition, what will they make of Cicero's claim that even in his own time the republic had become entirely extinct, with nothing of it remaining at all? Cicero brings in Scipio (the same Scipio who destroyed Carthage) to discuss the republic at a moment when its imminent ruin, through the very corruption Sallust describes, was already being sensed. In fact, by the time this discussion takes place, one of the Gracchi, whom Sallust identifies as the first great instigator of civil unrest, had already been killed. His death is mentioned in that same book. Scipio, near the end of the second book, says this: "Just as the various sounds produced by lyres, flutes, and the human voice must maintain a certain harmony, which a trained ear cannot bear to hear disturbed or discordant, but which can be drawn out in full and perfect concord through the modulation of even very different voices, so too, where reason is allowed to bring the diverse elements of a state into balance, a perfect concord is achieved from the upper, lower, and middle classes, as from different musical tones. What musicians call harmony in singing is, in matters of state, called concord, and this is the strongest bond and surest guarantee of any republic. It cannot be preserved by any skill once justice has been extinguished." After he had expanded on this at some length, illustrating both the benefits of justice's presence and the ruinous effects of its absence on a state, one of the others present at the discussion, Pilus, broke in and demanded that the question be examined more thoroughly, and that justice be discussed openly, in order to get at the truth behind a maxim that was becoming increasingly common at the time: "the republic cannot be governed without injustice." Scipio expressed his willingness to have this maxim examined and tested, and gave his view that it was groundless, and that no real progress could be made in discussing the republic unless it was firmly established, not only that this maxim was false, but also that the truth is precisely the opposite: the republic cannot be governed without the most complete and absolute justice. The discussion of this question was postponed to the following day and then taken up with great energy in the third book. Pilus himself undertook to defend the position that the republic cannot be governed without injustice, while taking great care to make clear that he did not personally hold this view. He argued the case for injustice against justice with considerable force, drawing on plausible reasoning and examples to show that injustice is beneficial to the republic while justice is useless to it. Then, at the request of the group, Lælius took on the defense of justice and pressed with every argument at his disposal to demonstrate that nothing is more destructive to a state than injustice, and that without justice a republic can neither be governed nor even survive.

When this question has been addressed to everyone's satisfaction, Scipio returns to the original thread of the discussion and restates, with approval, his own concise definition of a republic: that it is the welfare of the people. He defines "the people" not as any random gathering or mob, but as an assembly united by a shared recognition of law and by common interests. He then demonstrates the value of precise definitions in debate, and from these definitions he concludes that a republic, or "welfare of the people," exists only when it is governed well and justly, whether by a monarch, an aristocracy, or the people as a whole. But when the monarch is unjust (or, as the Greeks would say, a tyrant), or when the aristocrats are unjust and form a faction, or when the people themselves are unjust and become, as Scipio calls them for lack of a better term, a tyrant in their own right, then the republic does not merely suffer damage (as had already been established the previous day) but, by logical necessity from those same definitions, ceases to exist entirely. For there can be no welfare of the people when a tyrant rules the state through faction and force; nor would the people remain a people if they acted unjustly, since they would no longer fit the definition of a people: an assembly united by a shared recognition of law and by common interests.

When the Roman republic had sunk to the state Sallust described, it was not merely "utterly wicked and profligate," as he puts it; it had, by that point, ceased to exist altogether, if we accept the reasoning put forward in that famous debate about the republic by its finest representatives. Cicero himself, speaking not through the voice of Scipio or anyone else but in his own person, uses the following language at the opening of the fifth book, after quoting a line from the poet Ennius, who wrote: "Rome's severe morality and her citizens are her safeguard." "This verse," says Cicero, "strikes me as having all the compressed truth of an oracle. For neither would the citizens have amounted to anything without the moral character of the community, nor would the moral character of the people, without outstanding men to lead them, have been enough either to establish or to sustain for so long a republic so grand in scale and so wide and just in its empire. Before our time, inherited customs shaped our greatest men, and those men in turn upheld the customs and institutions passed down from their fathers. But our generation received the republic as a masterpiece from an earlier age already beginning to decay, and we have not merely failed to restore its original colors; we have not even troubled ourselves to preserve its basic outline and most defining features. What remains of that ancient morality the poet called Rome's safeguard? It has grown so obsolete and forgotten that people not only fail to practice it, they no longer even know what it was. And what can I say of the citizens themselves? Morality has perished through a poverty of great men, a poverty for which we must not only give an account but answer as criminals charged with a capital offense. It is through our own vices, and not through any stroke of misfortune, that we retain nothing but the name of a republic, having long since lost the reality itself."

This is Cicero's own admission, written long after the death of Africanus (whom he used as a character in his work *De Republica*), but still before the coming of Christ. Yet if the disasters he mourns had instead been lamented after the Christian faith had spread and taken hold, would any of our opponents have hesitated to blame the Christians for them? Why, then, did Rome's gods do nothing to prevent the decay and collapse of that republic, over whose ruin Cicero was already singing such a mournful lament long before Christ ever came in the flesh? Those who admire Rome need to ask themselves honestly whether true justice ever actually flourished there, even in those early days of simpler men and stricter morals, or whether it was, to borrow Cicero's own passing phrase, more of a painted image than a living reality. God willing, we will take up that question in its proper place. I intend to show, at the right moment, that according to Cicero's own definitions (the ones he put briefly into Scipio's mouth, explaining what a republic is and what a people is) and according to the testimony of both Scipio and the others who took part in that debate, Rome was never truly a republic at all, because true justice never had a home there. Granting the more workable definitions of a republic, I will concede that something resembling one did exist, and that it was certainly governed far better by the Romans of earlier generations than by those who came after them. But the plain truth is this: true justice exists only in that republic whose founder and ruler is Christ, if one is willing to call it a republic at all. And we cannot honestly deny that it is the welfare of a people. If that word has become so associated with other contexts that it feels out of place here, we can at least say that true justice is found in this city, the city of which Holy Scripture declares, "Glorious things are said of thee, O city of God" (Ps 87:3).

What matters for the present question is this: however admirably our adversaries describe the republic, past or present, their own most learned writers confirm that long before Christ ever came, it had become utterly corrupt and dissolute. In fact, it had ceased to exist at all, having been destroyed from within by moral decay. To prevent this, surely the gods who were supposedly guarding Rome should have given its people some standard of morality, some rule for how to live. These were people who worshipped those gods in countless temples, served by a vast array of priests, offering endless sacrifices, observing an extraordinary variety of rites, celebrating festival after festival, and staging magnificent games. Yet through all of this, the demons served only their own interests. They cared nothing for how their worshippers actually lived; if anything, they actively encouraged an abandoned way of life, as long as the tributes kept coming and the fear remained. If anyone disputes this, let him produce, point to, and read the laws the gods gave against sedition, the laws the Gracchi violated when they threw everything into chaos, or those that Marius, Cinna, and Carbo broke when they plunged their country into civil wars, wars unjust in their causes, savage in their conduct, and even more savage in their conclusions, or those that Sulla simply ignored, whose life, character, and deeds, as recorded by Sallust and other historians, have earned the contempt of all humanity. Who can honestly deny that by that point the republic had already ceased to exist?

Perhaps our opponents will be bold enough to defend the gods by claiming they abandoned the city because of the citizens' own depravity, citing Virgil's lines:

"Gone from each fane, each sacred shrine,

Are those who made this realm divine."

But if that is true, then Romans have no grounds to blame Christianity for offending the gods and causing them to abandon Rome. Roman immorality had long since driven away its swarms of minor deities, scattering them from the city's altars like flies. And yet where was this whole host of divine beings when Rome was captured and burned by the Gauls, long before morality had even begun to decay? Perhaps they were present but asleep? After all, the entire city fell to the enemy, with the sole exception of the Capitoline Hill, and even that would have been taken had not the watchful geese roused the sleeping gods. This episode gave rise to a festival honoring the goose, in which Rome came dangerously close to the kind of superstition practiced by the Egyptians, who worship animals and birds. But I am not, for the moment, concerned with those external disasters inflicted by invading armies or sudden calamity, the kind that wound the body more than the soul. What I am addressing now is the collapse of morality itself: a collapse that began almost imperceptibly, fading by slow degrees before being swept away entirely as if by a flood, dragging the republic into a ruin so complete that, even though the buildings and walls still stood, the most respected writers do not hesitate to say that the republic had already been destroyed. Now, if the gods truly departed "from each shrine, each sacred place" and abandoned the city to its fate, that departure might at least be called just, if the city had treated their laws of justice and moral conduct with contempt. But what kind of gods were these, really, who refused to go on living among the very people who worshipped them, yet had done absolutely nothing to reform their corrupt way of life?

But consider what should be obvious: the gods actively encouraged the fulfillment of human desires rather than reining them in with any real authority. Take Marius, a man of low birth who clawed his way up from nothing, who recklessly provoked and waged civil wars. The gods aided him so effectively that he served as consul seven times and died peacefully in old age during his seventh consulship, slipping through the hands of Sulla, who rose to power immediately afterward. Why, then, did those same gods not also help him by restraining him from committing so many atrocities? If someone argues that the gods had no hand in his success, that is no small concession. It would mean that a man can achieve the deeply coveted happiness of this life even when his own gods are not on his side; that men can be heaped with fortune's gifts as Marius was, enjoying health, power, wealth, honors, dignity, and long life, even while the gods are hostile to him. And it would equally mean that men can be made to suffer as Regulus was, enduring captivity, slavery, poverty, sleepless nights, pain, and a brutal death, even while the gods are his friends.

To concede this point is to make a sweeping admission that the gods are useless and their worship pointless. If the gods have taught people things that run directly counter to virtue and the integrity of life that earns its reward after death; if even in matters of earthly and temporary blessing they neither harm those they hate nor help those they love, then why are they worshipped at all? Why are they invoked with such fervent devotion? Why do people grumble in times of hardship and grief, as though the gods had withdrawn in anger? And why, because of them, does the Christian faith suffer such undeserved slander? If the gods hold any power over earthly affairs, for good or ill, then why did they stand by Marius, the worst of Rome's citizens, while abandoning Regulus, one of the best? Does this not prove them to be profoundly unjust and corrupt? And if someone argues that this is precisely why they should be feared and worshipped, that argument fails on its own terms; we have no record that Regulus worshipped them any less devotedly than Marius did. Nor does it follow that a wicked life is worth choosing simply because the gods appear to have favored Marius over Regulus. Consider Metellus, the most highly regarded of all Romans, a man who saw five of his sons reach the consulship: he prospered even in this life. And Catiline, one of history's most contemptible figures, was driven into poverty, defeated in the very war his own crimes had ignited, and died in misery. True and lasting happiness belongs exclusively to those who worship the God from whom alone it can come.

It's clear, then, that when the Roman republic was being destroyed by corrupt behavior, its gods did nothing to stop that destruction by guiding or correcting public morals. On the contrary, they accelerated the collapse by deepening the moral rot that was already spreading. These gods cannot claim that the city's wickedness offended their virtue and drove them away in righteous anger. They were there, after all; they have been found out and exposed. They were equally incapable of speaking up to guide anyone and of staying silent to conceal themselves. I won't dwell on the fact that the people of Minturnae took pity on Marius and entrusted him to the goddess Marica in her sacred grove, asking her to grant him success in everything, and that from the depths of despair in which he then lay, he promptly returned to Rome unharmed and entered the city as the ruthless commander of a ruthless army. Those who want to know how bloody his victory was, how little it resembled the conduct of a citizen, and how far more savagely he acted than any foreign enemy, should read the histories. But as I said, I won't dwell on this, and I won't credit the blood-soaked triumph of Marius to some obscure Minturnian goddess named Marica. I attribute it instead to the hidden providence of God, so that the mouths of our opponents might be shut, and those who are guided not by passion but by careful reflection on events might be freed from their error. Even if demons do exercise some power in such matters, they exercise only the power that the secret decree of the Almighty assigns to them. This arrangement serves a purpose: it keeps us from placing too much value on earthly prosperity, since that prosperity is sometimes granted even to wicked men like Marius. It also keeps us from treating earthly success as something evil, since we can see that many good and devout worshippers of the one true God flourish remarkably well, despite whatever the demons might attempt. And finally, it prevents us from thinking that these unclean spirits need to be appeased or feared for the sake of worldly blessings or misfortunes. Just as wicked men on earth cannot do everything they want, neither can these demons. They can act only as far as the decree of God permits, and His judgments, though fully comprehensible to Him, are justly beyond anyone's reproach.

It is well established that Sylla, whose rule proved so brutal that people actually looked back with longing on the very conditions he claimed to be avenging, received remarkably favorable omens when he first marched on Rome to fight Marius. According to Livy, the augur Postumius declared himself willing to forfeit his own head if Sylla failed to accomplish his goals with the gods' assistance. Clearly, the gods had not abandoned "every fane and sacred shrine," since they were still predicting outcomes, yet they took no steps whatsoever to correct Sylla himself. Their signs promised him great prosperity, but no warning from them touched his violent passions or gave him pause. Then, while he was in Asia conducting the war against Mithridates, a man named Lucius Titius delivered him a message supposedly from Jupiter, promising that he would defeat Mithridates. And so it happened. Later, when Sylla was planning his return to Rome to take bloody revenge on behalf of himself and his allies, a soldier from the sixth legion delivered him another message, again claiming to be from Jupiter, saying that the same god who had foretold the victory over Mithridates now promised to give Sylla the power to reclaim the republic from his enemies, though at a terrible cost in blood. Sylla immediately asked the soldier to describe the form that had appeared to him, and when the soldier did so, Sylla recognized it as the same figure that had previously assured him of victory over Mithridates. How, then, can the gods be defended here? They took care to predict these hollow successes, yet showed no concern for correcting Sylla or holding him back from igniting a civil war so devastating and savage that it did not merely damage the republic but destroyed it entirely. The truth, as I have said many times, as Scripture confirms, and as the facts themselves make plain, is that the demons serve only their own interests: they want to be honored and worshipped as gods, and they want to draw people into a kind of worship that makes those people complicit in their crimes, binding them together in a shared guilt before the judgment of God.

Afterwards, when Sylla arrived at Tarentum and offered a sacrifice there, he noticed on the liver of the sacrificial victim the image of a golden crown. The soothsayer Postumius interpreted this as a sign of a great victory and ordered that Sylla alone should eat from the entrails. Shortly after, the slave of a certain Lucius Pontius cried out, "I am Bellona's messenger; the victory is yours, Sylla!" He then added that the Capitol would be burned. The moment he finished this prediction, he left the camp, but returned the following day in an even greater frenzy, shouting, "The Capitol is on fire!" And indeed it was. For a demon, foreseeing such an event and announcing it swiftly, would find this no great difficulty. But notice what this reveals about the nature of the gods under whom these people wish to live, the very people who slander the Savior who frees the wills of the faithful from the dominion of devils. The man cried out in prophetic ecstasy, "The victory is yours, Sylla!" And to confirm that he spoke by a divine spirit, he also predicted an event that was about to happen in a place far from where he stood. Yet he never once cried out, "Stop your crimes, Sylla!" The crimes committed at Rome by that same victor, to whom a golden crown on a calf's liver had been offered as divine proof of his coming triumph. If such signs were sent by just gods rather than wicked demons, then surely the entrails Sylla consulted should have warned him of the terrible disasters that were about to fall on the city and on himself. That victory did not so much raise him to power as it destroyed him through ambition; it made him so insatiable in his desires, and so arrogant and reckless in his prosperity, that one could say he inflicted a deeper ruin on himself than he ever inflicted on his enemies. Yet of these truly wretched and devastating consequences, the gods gave him no warning at all, whether through entrails, augury, dreams, or prophecy. They feared his repentance far more than his defeat. Indeed, they took great care to ensure that this celebrated conqueror of his own fellow citizens would be conquered and led captive by his own shameful vices, and would thus become all the more a willing slave to the demons themselves.

Who, unless he has chosen to imitate such gods rather than withdraw from their company through divine grace, can fail to see how eagerly these evil spirits use their own example to stamp a kind of divine approval on crime? Consider what happened in a broad plain in Campania, where these spirits were seen rehearsing among themselves the very battle that would soon be fought there with terrible bloodshed between Roman armies. First came loud, crashing noises; then, over the course of several days, many people reported seeing two armies locked in combat. When it was over, the ground was found covered with exactly the kind of footprints left by men and horses in a great battle. If the gods were genuinely fighting one another, then human civil wars are sufficiently justified by their example; though we should note, in passing, that gods who behave this way must be either deeply wicked or deeply miserable. If, on the other hand, it was only a staged performance, what could their purpose have been except to make Roman civil wars appear not as crimes, but as imitations of the divine? By this point, civil wars had already begun, and before this spectacle, there had been devastating battles and horrific massacres. Many had already been shaken by the story of the soldier who, stripping the armor from a fallen enemy, recognized his own brother in the corpse, and then, cursing civil war with his last breath, killed himself on the spot over his brother's body. To dull the horror of such tragedies and fan the flames of this monstrous conflict, these malicious demons, who were honored and worshipped as gods, devised a plan: they would reveal themselves engaged in civil war, so that no pity for fellow citizens would cause Romans to recoil from such fighting, and so that human criminality would find its justification in divine precedent. By the same strategy, these evil spirits also commanded that theatrical performances, which I have already discussed, be established and dedicated to them. In those performances, the poets and dramatists attributed such outrages to the gods that anyone could feel free to imitate them, whether he believed the gods had actually done these things or, not believing it, could still see that the gods were desperately eager to be portrayed as having done them. And so that no one might suspect the poets of slander, of inventing unworthy deeds and pinning them on the gods, the gods themselves completed the deception by staging their own battles before human eyes, not only through theatrical productions but in person, on an actual field of war.

We have been compelled to present these facts because certain writers have not hesitated to claim, both in speech and in writing, that the Roman republic had already been destroyed by the corrupt moral habits of its citizens and had ceased to exist before the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. Remarkably, they do not blame their own gods for this collapse, yet they blame our Christ for the hardships of this life, hardships that cannot truly ruin good people, whether living or dead. They do this even though our Christ has given so many commandments promoting virtue and restraining vice, while their gods did absolutely nothing to preserve the republic that served them, issuing no such precepts to hold back its decline, but instead accelerating its destruction by poisoning public morality through their own corrupt example. No one, I imagine, will now be bold enough to argue that the republic fell because the gods departed "from each fane, each sacred shrine," as though those gods were friends of virtue who were offended by human wickedness. That argument simply won't hold, given the sheer volume of omens from entrails, auguries, and soothsayings through which those gods boastfully claimed to foresee future events and control the fortunes of war: all of which proves they were present, not absent. And had they truly been absent, the Romans would never have been driven to such extremes during the civil wars, swept along not merely by their own passions but actively goaded by the provocations of these gods.

Given all of this, we must ask a serious question. The gods' filthy and cruel deeds, their disgraceful and criminal actions, whether real or invented, were published at their own request, consecrated in their honor, and enshrined as sacred, recurring celebrations. These same gods vowed vengeance on anyone who refused to perform these acts publicly, presenting them as worthy of imitation. So why are these same demons, who reveal themselves as unclean spirits by taking pleasure in such obscenities, who celebrate their own villainy and depravity (real or imagined), who coax the shameless and coerce the modest into performing these lewd rituals, why are they also said to offer sound moral instruction to a select few in the secrecy of their inner shrines? If this is actually the case, it only exposes more clearly the malicious cunning of these pestilent spirits. The influence of integrity and chastity is powerful: nearly all people respond to the praise of these virtues, and even the most corrupt person retains some residual sense of honor. This is why, as Scripture says, the devil sometimes transforms himself into an angel of light (2 Cor 11:14); without that disguise, he could never accomplish his deceptive purposes. And so the pattern becomes clear: in public, brazen impurity fills the ears of the crowd with noise and spectacle; in private, a counterfeit chastity whispers barely audible instructions to a privileged few. The stage is thrown wide open for shameful things, while a curtain falls over anything praiseworthy. Disgrace flaunts itself; virtue hides. A wicked spectacle draws a packed house, while a virtuous word finds almost no audience, as though purity were something to be ashamed of and impurity something to celebrate. Where else could such confusion reign but in the temples of demons? Where else but in the dwelling places of deceit? The secret moral teachings are offered as a concession to the virtuous, who are few; the wicked examples are put on full display to encourage the vicious, who are countless.

Where and when those initiated into the mysteries of Coelestis received any worthwhile instruction, we cannot say. What we do know is this: before her shrine, where her image stood, amid a vast crowd pressing in from every direction, we watched the games with intense interest. Wherever we turned our eyes, the scene was the same: on one side, a grand display of prostitutes; on the other, the virgin goddess herself. We saw this virgin worshipped with prayer and with obscene rites performed in her honor. There were no bashful mimes to be found there, no actress burdened with an excess of modesty. Whatever the obscene rites demanded was delivered in full. The spectacle made perfectly clear what pleased this virgin deity, and the married women who attended returned home from the temple considerably more educated in vice than when they arrived. Some of the more cautious women did turn their faces away from the players' indecent movements, though they still managed to absorb the art of wickedness through stolen glances. They were held back from staring openly at the immodest gestures by the sense of decorum they owed to the men around them, but they were held back far more powerfully from condemning with a pure heart the sacred rites of the goddess they worshipped. And yet this licentiousness, which if practiced at home could only be done in secret, was here performed as a public lesson inside the temple itself. If any sense of decency still survived in those present, it was consumed entirely by the bewildering spectacle: that wickedness men could not commit openly without shame was apparently part of the religious instruction of the gods, and that to leave it out of the ceremony would be to invite divine anger. What kind of spirit can this be, that through hidden influence stirs up human corruption, drives people toward adultery, and feeds on fully ripened wickedness? It can only be the same spirit that takes pleasure in such religious ceremonies, installs images of demons in temples, and delights in seeing the images of every vice performed on stage. It whispers a few righteous-sounding words in private to deceive the small number who are genuinely good, while broadcasting open invitations to depravity in public, so as to take possession of the vast multitudes who are already inclined toward evil.

Cicero, a man of considerable weight and a philosopher in his own right, was preparing to take office as aedile when he felt it necessary to inform the citizens that, among his other official duties, he would be required to honor Flora through the celebration of games. These games were considered more devout the more obscene they were. Later, when he was serving as consul during a period of grave national crisis, he noted that games had been celebrated for ten consecutive days, and that nothing had been left undone that might pacify the gods. It is as if it would have been worse to irritate the gods through temperance than to pacify them through debauchery, or to provoke their anger by honest living rather than soothe it with shameless excess. However cruel the ferocity of the men who threatened the state, and on whose account the gods were being appeased, that threat could not have been more damaging than an alliance with gods who were won over by the vilest vices. To ward off the danger threatening men's bodies, the gods were appeased in ways that drove virtue from men's souls; and those gods refused to take up the defense of the city's walls against its besiegers until they had first stormed and plundered the moral character of its citizens. This appeasement of such divinities, so wanton, so impure, so immodest, so wicked, so filthy, whose performers the Romans' own innate and praiseworthy virtue stripped of civic honors, removed from their tribal rolls, and branded as polluted and infamous: this appeasement, so foul, so detestable, and so utterly foreign to any genuine religious feeling, these invented and seductive accounts of the criminal acts of the gods, these scandalous deeds they either shamefully committed or more shamefully invented, all of this the entire city absorbed in public through the words and gestures of actors on a stage. The people saw that the gods delighted in such things, and naturally concluded that the gods wished these acts not only to be performed before them, but to be imitated by the people themselves. As for the good and honest moral instruction that some claim was also offered, it was delivered in such secrecy, and to so few people (if it was delivered at all), that it seemed less like something the authorities feared might go unpracticed, and more like something they feared might become widely known.

Those who complain and grumble that people are being rescued by the name of Christ from the hellish grip of these unclean spirits, and from sharing in their punishment, and are being brought out of the darkness of deadly ungodliness into the light of life-giving piety, are nothing but ungrateful wretches, bound fast in the service of that malign spirit. Only people like these could resent the sight of crowds flocking to the churches and their pure forms of worship, where men and women are properly separated; where people learn how to live this earthly life in a way that earns them a blessed eternity; where Holy Scripture and instruction in righteousness are proclaimed from a raised platform before everyone, so that those who obey the word may hear it to their salvation, and those who don't may hear it to their judgment. Even those who enter mocking such teaching find their contempt either suddenly extinguished by a change of heart, or held in check by fear and shame. No filthy or wicked act is put on display there for people to gawk at or imitate; instead, the precepts of the true God are commended, His miracles recounted, His gifts celebrated, and His blessings sought.

This is the religion truly worthy of your aspirations, O admirable Roman people, you who are the heirs of your Scaevolas and Scipios, of Regulus and Fabricius. Pursue this instead. Distinguish it from the foul vanity and crafty malice of the devils. If your nature holds any genuine virtue, only true piety can purify and perfect it; impiety will wreck and punish it. Choose now what you will pursue, so that your praise may rest not in yourselves but in the true God, in whom there is no error. You have already had your share of popular glory, but by the secret providence of God, the true religion was not offered to you in time to choose it. Wake up now, for the day has come. You have already seen this awakening in certain individuals whose perfect virtue and suffering for the true faith we celebrate with pride. These men and women contended on every side with hostile powers, conquered them all by dying with courage, and purchased this country of ours with their blood. It is to this country that we invite you, urging you to join the ranks of citizens in this city, which has its own sanctuary in the true forgiveness of sins. Do not listen to those degenerate sons of yours who slander Christ and Christians, blaming them for these disastrous times, when what they really want is not a peaceful life but the freedom to pursue their wickedness without consequence. That has never been Rome's ambition, even for her earthly country. Lay hold now of the heavenly country, which is easily won and in which you will reign truly and forever. There you will find no vestal fire, no Capitoline stone, but the one true God:

"No date, no goal will here ordain:

But grant an endless, boundless reign."

Stop chasing false and deceptive gods. Reject them. Despise them. Break free into genuine liberty. They are not gods at all, but malignant spirits, to whom your eternal happiness will be a source of torment. Juno, from whom you trace your physical ancestry, did not begrudge Rome's citadels to the Trojans as bitterly as these devils you still call gods begrudge an everlasting home to the human race. And you yourself have already passed judgment on them, without hesitation, when you appeased them with theatrical games while simultaneously branding the actors who performed in those games as disreputable. Let us help you assert your freedom against the unclean spirits who fastened around your neck the yoke of celebrating their own shame and filth. You have already removed the performers of these so-called divine dramas from positions of honor; now pray to the true God, that He may remove from you those gods who delight in their crimes. This is deeply shameful if the crimes are genuinely theirs, and deeply malicious if the crimes are merely invented for them. It was right of you to banish actors and players from the ranks of your citizens. Now go further. The majesty of God cannot be honored by what degrades the dignity of man. How, then, can you believe that gods who take pleasure in obscene performances belong among the holy powers of heaven, when the very men who stage those performances are denied admission into Roman citizenship, even at its lowest rank? The heavenly city is incomparably more glorious than Rome: where Rome offers victory, that city offers truth; where Rome offers rank, it offers holiness; where Rome offers peace, it offers joy; where Rome offers life, it offers eternity. That city admits such gods into its company even less readily than you would blush to admit such men into yours. If you want to reach the blessed city, then, keep away from the company of devils. Those who must be appeased through acts of shame are unworthy of the worship of honorable people. Let them be purged from your worship through the cleansing power of the Christian faith, just as those men were struck from your citizenship by the censor's mark.

When it comes to earthly benefits, which are the only blessings the wicked actually want, and earthly sufferings, which are the only hardships they truly dread, the following book will show that the demons don't hold the power commonly attributed to them. And even if they did hold such power, that would be all the more reason to despise those blessings rather than worship such gods to obtain them, especially when those gods begrudge us the very blessings we seek. But they don't even possess this power that their worshippers credit them with, the power supposedly granted in exchange for devotion aimed at worldly gain. This I will demonstrate in the book that follows. Let us close the present argument here.