The City of God: Book 4

When I first set out to write about the city of God, I found it necessary to begin by answering its enemies: those who chase after earthly pleasures and grasp at passing things, then blame all their resulting misery on the Christian religion, which is the one true and saving faith. That misery, I would argue, comes more from God's compassion in warning them than from any severity in punishing them. Among these enemies there is also an uneducated crowd, stirred up by the apparent authority of their more learned peers to hate us with greater intensity. In their inexperience, they assume that the calamities of their own era were unheard of in earlier times. What makes this worse is that even those who know this assumption to be false deliberately conceal that knowledge, so they can appear to have legitimate grounds for blaming us. It was therefore necessary to draw on the very books their own authors wrote and published as historical records, in order to demonstrate how far from the truth their position actually is. At the same time, I needed to show that the false gods they once worshipped openly, or still worship in secret, are nothing but corrupt spirits: malicious and deceitful demons who actually delight in crimes, whether those crimes were real or merely invented, so long as those crimes are celebrated in their honor at their festivals. The result is that human weakness can never be pulled back from committing terrible acts as long as there seems to be something almost divine authorizing people to imitate them. I established all of this not from my own speculation, but partly from living memory, since I myself witnessed such things being performed and offered to such deities, and partly from the writings of those who recorded these practices for posterity, not as criticism, but as genuine tribute to their gods. Consider Varro, the most learned and respected scholar among them: when he composed his separate volumes on human affairs and divine affairs, distributing each topic according to its proper dignity, he placed theatrical performances not among human things at all, but among divine things. And yet, if a society were made up of genuinely good and honorable people, theatrical performances of that kind shouldn't even be permitted among human affairs, let alone divine ones. Varro didn't do this on his own initiative; he did it because he was born and raised in Rome, and found these performances already classified among the divine. Now, at the close of the first book I briefly outlined what I intended to address in the pages that followed, and I have worked through part of that outline in the two books since. It should be clear, then, what my readers will expect me to take up next.

We had promised to address those who blame the calamities of the Roman republic on our religion, and to recount as many of the great evils as we could recall or thought sufficient to make the point: evils that the city itself, or the provinces under its rule, had suffered before their sacrifices were ever prohibited. All of these, without question, would have been blamed on us if our religion had already been present among them, or had already forbidden their sacrilegious practices. We believe we have dealt with this thoroughly in the second and third books: the second addresses moral evils, which are the only evils that truly deserve the name, or at least the chief ones; and the third addresses those evils that only fools dread, namely physical suffering and the loss of outward things, which good people also endure for the most part. But those evils that corrupt a person from within, they bear not merely with patience, I would say, but with actual pleasure. And even then, how few of the evils I described concern that one city and its empire, and not even all of them up to the time of Caesar Augustus. What if I had chosen to recount and expand on those evils that don't come from human hands, such as the devastation and destruction of war, but rather from the natural forces of the world itself? Apuleius touches on this briefly in his book *De Mundo* (On the World), noting that all earthly things are subject to change, ruin, and destruction. To use his own words: violent earthquakes have split the ground open and swallowed entire cities along with their inhabitants; sudden floods have washed whole regions away; lands that were once part of the mainland have been cut off by strange new waves, while other areas, left dry by a retreating sea, have become passable on foot; storms and winds have leveled cities; fire has flashed from the clouds and burned entire regions of the East to ash; and along the western coasts, floods and surging waters have caused equal destruction. In earlier times, rivers of fire, kindled by God, poured like torrents down the slopes of Mount Etna from its high craters. If I had wanted to gather every such instance from history, where would I have stopped, even limiting myself to the period before the name of Christ had displaced those vain and spiritually harmful idols? I also promised to identify which Roman customs the true God, in whose hands all kingdoms rest, chose to favor and why, allowing their empire to expand; and to show how the gods they worshipped did them no good at all, but instead caused great harm by deceiving and misleading them. It seems to me the time has come to address these matters, and especially the growth of the Roman empire. I have already said a great deal, particularly in the second book, about the many corruptions introduced into Roman morals by the harmful deceptions of the demons they worshipped as gods. Throughout all three completed books, wherever it seemed fitting, I have also shown how much help God has given, through the name of Christ (to whom even the barbarians showed a reverence far beyond the usual customs of war), to both the good and the wicked alike, as it is written: "He makes His sun rise on the good and the evil, and sends rain on the just and the unjust" (Matt 5:45).

Let us now examine how Rome's defenders dare to credit their gods with the empire's remarkable size and longevity, gods they claim to honor through the spectacle of degrading games and the service of degraded men. But first, I want to pause and ask: what reason, what wisdom, is there in boasting about the greatness and reach of an empire when you cannot point to the happiness of its people? These are people who roll endlessly through the slaughters of war, driven by dark fear and cruel desire, soaked in blood that remains human blood whether it flows in civil conflict or foreign conquest. Their joy is like the brittle gleam of glass, beautiful for a moment and terrifying in its fragility. To see this more clearly, let us not lose ourselves in empty boasting or let our thinking grow dull under the weight of grand-sounding words like "peoples," "kingdoms," and "provinces." Instead, consider two individual men, since every person is, like a single letter in a word, the basic unit of a city or kingdom, however vast its territory. One of these men is poor, or at least of modest means; the other is very rich. But the rich man is consumed by anxiety, hollowed out by dissatisfaction, burning with greed, never secure, always restless, constantly worn down by conflict with his enemies. He adds enormously to his wealth through all this misery, and with every addition he piles on fresh and bitter worries. The man of modest means, by contrast, is content with a small, well-ordered estate. His family loves him dearly; he enjoys genuine peace with his neighbors and friends; he is devout in his faith, generous in spirit, healthy in body, simple in his habits, pure in his conduct, and at peace in his conscience. I cannot imagine anyone foolish enough to hesitate over which life to prefer. What holds true for these two men holds equally true for two families, two nations, two kingdoms. Apply this test honestly and without bias, and you will see quite easily where happiness is merely performed and where it is actually lived. Therefore, if the true God is worshipped and served with sincere devotion and genuine virtue, it is a great benefit for good rulers to reign widely and for a long time. And this benefit belongs less to the rulers themselves than to those they govern. As for the rulers, their piety and integrity, which are great gifts from God, are sufficient to give them true happiness: enabling them to live well in this life and to receive eternal life afterward. In this world, then, the rule of good people benefits not so much themselves as it does humanity at large. The rule of bad people, on the other hand, harms the rulers above all, since they destroy their own souls by indulging their wickedness with ever greater freedom. Those who live under such rulers are harmed only by their own moral failures, not by the rulers themselves. For the just person, every hardship imposed by an unjust ruler is not a punishment for wrongdoing but a test of character. The good person, even in slavery, is free; the bad person, even on a throne, is a slave, and not to one master but, far worse, to as many masters as he has vices. Scripture speaks directly to this when it says, "a man is a slave to whatever has mastered him" (2 Pet 2:19).

Strip away justice, and what are kingdoms but large-scale criminal enterprises? And what are criminal enterprises but small kingdoms? A criminal band is made up of people; it's governed by the authority of a leader, held together by a shared pact among its members, and its plunder is divided according to agreed-upon rules. If, through the recruitment of desperate men, this criminal enterprise grows large enough to seize territory, establish settlements, take over cities, and conquer peoples, it begins to look unmistakably like a kingdom. The difference isn't that greed has been removed; it's simply that the criminals now enjoy impunity. There's a story that captures this perfectly: a pirate who had been captured gave Alexander the Great a remarkably sharp answer. When the king asked him what he thought he was doing by terrorizing the seas, the pirate replied with defiant pride: "The same thing you think you're doing by seizing the whole earth. The only difference is that because I do it with a small ship, I'm called a criminal, while you do it with a great fleet and get called an emperor."

I won't pause here to examine what kind of men Romulus assembled, though he thought carefully about this: how men drawn from the life they had been living could be brought into his city's fellowship and persuaded to stop dwelling on the punishment they deserved, the fear of which had only driven them to worse crimes, so that they might eventually become more peaceable members of society. What I will say is this: the Roman empire, which had already grown vast and fearsome through the conquest of many nations, was itself thrown into a state of serious alarm and only narrowly escaped catastrophic defeat, because a mere handful of gladiators in Campania had broken free from the arena, recruited a massive army, appointed three generals, and proceeded to ravage Italy with breathtaking cruelty and reach. Let Rome's defenders tell us which god came to the aid of these men, lifting them from a small and contemptible band of fugitives to a force that even Rome, with all its armies and fortifications, had reason to fear. Or will they argue that no divine assistance was involved, simply because it didn't last? As if any man's life lasts long. By that logic, the gods help no one to reign, since every individual dies quickly enough; and sovereign power can hardly be counted a blessing if, in a short time, it slips away from each person in turn, dissolving like vapor. What does it matter to those who worshipped the gods under Romulus and have long since died, that after their deaths the Roman empire grew so great, while they themselves now plead their cases before the powers of the underworld? Whether those cases are good or bad is beside the point. The same applies to all who carry the full weight of their deeds with them, having rushed through the brief span of their lives and the fleeting stage of imperial office, even if the office itself endured across long stretches of time, kept alive by a continuous succession of dying men. If, however, even the shortest-lived benefits are to be credited to divine assistance, then those gladiators received no small share of it: they broke the chains of their servitude, fled, escaped, built a great and formidable army that obeyed its commanders with discipline and struck fear into the Roman state, withstood several Roman generals in the field, seized many towns, won victory after victory, enjoyed whatever pleasures they desired, acted on every impulse, and until they were finally defeated (which took enormous effort) lived in a kind of rough magnificence, dominant and unbroken. But let us move on to greater matters.

Justinus, who summarized Greek and foreign history in Latin, following the work of Trogus Pompeius, opens his account this way: "In the earliest days of peoples and nations, kings held power, and they rose to that high position not by courting popular favor, but because good men recognized their restraint. The people were bound by no written laws; the rulings of their princes served in place of laws. It was the custom to guard the borders of an empire rather than push them outward, and each kingdom stayed within the boundaries of its ruler's homeland. Ninus, king of the Assyrians, was the first to break with this old and, in a sense, inherited tradition of nations, driven by a new hunger for power. He was the first to make war on his neighbors, and he pushed his conquests all the way to the frontiers of Libya, subjugating peoples who had no experience of resistance." A little later, Justinus adds: "Ninus secured the authority he had won through continuous possession of it. Having conquered those closest to him, he moved on to others, growing stronger with each addition to his forces, and using every fresh victory as a stepping stone to the next, until he had subdued the nations of the entire East." Now, whatever degree of accuracy either Justinus or Trogus may have achieved in their writing (other, more reliable authors have shown that they sometimes departed from the truth), there is broad agreement among ancient writers that King Ninus extended the Assyrian kingdom far and wide. It endured for an extraordinarily long time, so long that the Roman Empire had not yet reached the same age; according to historians who have studied chronology, this kingdom lasted twelve hundred and forty years from the first year of Ninus's reign until it was transferred to the Medes. But what else can we call the practice of making war on your neighbors, then pressing on to others, and crushing and subjugating peoples who have done you no harm, driven by nothing more than a lust for dominion? What else is it but robbery on a grand scale?

If the Assyrian kingdom grew so vast and endured so long without divine assistance, then why should we credit the Roman gods with the Roman Empire's broad reach and lasting power? Whatever explanation applies to one case must apply to the other. But if someone insists that the Assyrian empire's prosperity should also be attributed to divine help, then I have to ask: which gods? The nations that Ninus conquered were not worshipping different gods at the time. Or if the Assyrians had gods of their own who were, so to speak, more skilled craftsmen in building and maintaining an empire, are those gods now dead, since the Assyrians themselves eventually lost their empire? Or were those gods cheated of their wages, or lured by a better offer, and so chose to defect to the Medes, and then from the Medes to the Persians, because Cyrus came along with an even more attractive proposition? The Persian nation, for its part, has held its own empire since the time of Alexander the Macedonian (whose kingdom was as brief as it was vast) and to this day controls no small portion of the East. If that is the case, then either the gods are faithless, deserting their own people and going over to their enemies (something that even a mere man like Camillus refused to do: though he had conquered Rome's most bitter enemy and felt the sting of Rome's ingratitude, he set aside the injury, remembered his homeland, and came back to free her from the Gauls), or the gods are simply not as powerful as gods ought to be, since they can apparently be overcome by human skill or force. Or perhaps, when the gods wage war among themselves, it is not men who defeat them but rather the patron gods of one city who overcome the patron gods of another. In that case, the gods are locked in their own quarrels, each fighting for his own side. A city, then, would be foolish to worship its own gods and would do better to worship the gods who actually help their devotees. In any case, whether we are talking about divine defections, flights, migrations, or battlefield defeats, the name of Christ had not yet been proclaimed in those regions when these kingdoms were lost and transferred through devastating wars. Consider: if, after more than twelve hundred years, when the Assyrian kingdom was finally stripped away, the Christian faith had already been preaching another and eternal kingdom in those lands and putting an end to the worship of false gods, what would the foolish people of that nation have said? Nothing other than that a kingdom preserved for so long could only have fallen because its people abandoned their ancestral religion and embraced Christianity. Let those we are now addressing recognize themselves in that hypothetical foolishness, and blush, if they have any capacity for shame, because they have made exactly the same complaint. The truth is that the Roman Empire has been afflicted rather than destroyed, and this is not the first time it has suffered such affliction. It endured similar trials long before the name of Christ was ever heard, and it recovered. There is no reason to despair even now. For who can claim to know the will of God in this matter?

Let us ask, if they're willing, which god or gods among Rome's vast pantheon they believed actually built and sustained that empire. Surely they wouldn't dare credit any part of so magnificent and dignified an achievement to the goddess Cloacina (patroness of sewers), or to Volupia, whose very name derives from pleasure, or to Libentina, named after lust, or to Vaticanus, who presides over the cries of newborns, or to Cunina, who watches over their cradles. But how could anyone recount in a single section of this book all the names of gods and goddesses that the Romans could barely fit into entire volumes, each deity assigned a specific duty over some narrow slice of life? They didn't even think one god sufficient to oversee their farmland as a whole. Instead, they entrusted their fields to Rusina, the mountain ridges to Jugatinus, the open downs to the goddess Collatina, and the valleys to Vallonia. Nor could they find one goddess Segetia capable enough to watch over all their grain crops at once. While the seed was still underground, they placed the goddess Seia over it; once it had sprouted above ground and formed stalks, they handed it to the goddess Segetia; and once the grain was harvested and stored, they placed it under the goddess Tutilina to keep it safe. Who wouldn't have thought Segetia alone sufficient to guard the standing corn from its first green shoots to its dry ears? Yet she wasn't enough for people who craved a multitude of gods, people whose wretched souls, turning away from the faithful embrace of the one true God, had given themselves over to a crowd of demons. So they placed Proserpina over germinating seeds; over the joints and knots of the stalks, the god Nodotus; over the husks that wrap the ears, the goddess Volutina; when the husks opened to let the grain spike emerge, that moment was given to the goddess Patelana; when the stalks stood level with their new ears (since the ancients used the word *hostire* to describe this leveling), that was ascribed to the goddess Hostilina; when the grain flowered, it was dedicated to the goddess Flora; when it filled with milk, to the god Lacturnus; when it ripened, to the goddess Matuta; and when the crop was cleared from the soil, to the goddess Runcina. I won't list them all, because I find the whole thing exhausting, even if they feel no shame about it. I've mentioned these few examples only to make clear that the Romans cannot possibly claim their empire was built, expanded, and preserved by gods who had their duties carved up so narrowly that not one of them was trusted with any general oversight. When could Segetia have cared for an empire, when she wasn't even allowed to oversee both grain and trees? When could Cunina have given any thought to war, when her authority didn't extend beyond the cradles of infants? When could Nodotus have helped in battle, when he had nothing to do even with the husk of the ear, only with the knots of the stalks? Any homeowner places a single doorkeeper at his gate, and because that person is a human being, he's perfectly adequate for the job. But the Romans stationed three gods at the door: Forculus for the door itself, Cardea for the hinge, and Limentinus for the threshold. The result is that Forculus couldn't simultaneously look after the hinge or the threshold.

Setting aside that crowd of minor gods for the moment, we should ask what role the major gods actually played in making Rome so great and so enduring a power over so many nations. The obvious answer, for Rome's believers, is Jove. They hold him to be the king of all gods and goddesses, as symbolized by his scepter and by the Capitol standing high on its hill. About this god they repeat a saying, drawn from a poet yet remarkably fitting: "All things are full of Jove." Varro even believed that Jove is the god worshipped, under a different name, by those who honor one God alone and use no images. But if that is true, why has Jove been treated so poorly at Rome, and among other nations as well, that statues of him were made at all? This practice deeply troubled Varro himself. Though he was overborne by the entrenched customs of so great a city, he did not hesitate for a moment to say and write that those who introduced images for the people had both stripped away reverence and introduced error.

Why, too, is Juno joined to him as his wife, described as both "sister and yokefellow"? Because, they say, Jove rules the ether and Juno rules the air, and these two elements are bound together, one above the other. But if that's the case, then Jove cannot be the one of whom it is said, "All things are full of Jove," since Juno fills part of the picture as well. Do both of them fill both elements simultaneously, each present in both at the same time? If so, why assign the ether specifically to Jove and the air specifically to Juno? Beyond that, two elements should have been sufficient. Why, then, is the sea given to Neptune and the earth to Pluto? And so that these gods wouldn't be left without partners, Salacia is paired with Neptune and Proserpine with Pluto. Just as Juno governs the lower region of the heavens (that is, the air), so Salacia governs the lower depths of the sea, and Proserpine the lower regions of the earth. They keep trying to patch these myths together, but they can't find a way to make them hold. If the system were truly coherent, the ancient thinkers would have argued for three primary elements, not four, so that each element could be neatly paired with two deities. But they have firmly insisted that ether and air are distinct things. Water, however, whether upper or lower, is still water. No matter how different one portion may seem from another, can it ever be so unlike itself that it ceases to be water? And the lower earth, whatever divine figure may be assigned to it, what can it be other than earth? So then, since the entire physical world is accounted for by these three or four elements, where does Minerva fit? What does she govern, what does she fill? She is placed in the Capitol alongside Jove and Juno, yet she is not their child. If they argue that she governs the uppermost region of the ether (which is why the poets imagined her springing from the head of Jove), then why is she not considered queen of the gods, given that she ranks above Jove himself? Is it because it would be wrong to place a daughter above her father? Then why is that same principle of justice not applied to Jove in relation to Saturn? Is it because Saturn was defeated? Did they actually fight, then? Not at all, they say; that's just an old wives' tale. Very well, so we are not to believe myths, and we are supposed to hold more dignified views about the gods. Why, then, don't they give Saturn a seat of honor equal to Jove's, if not higher? Because Saturn, they tell us, represents the passage of time. So those who worship Saturn are worshipping Time itself, which means that Jupiter, king of the gods, was born from Time. And is it really so outrageous to say that Jupiter and Juno were both born from Time, if he is the sky and she is the earth? After all, both sky and earth were made, and are therefore not eternal. Their own learned scholars have written as much. That famous line in Virgil was drawn not from poetic invention but from the writings of philosophers.

"Then Ether, the Father Almighty, in copious showers descended

Into his spouse's glad bosom, making it fertile,"

That is, into the bosom of Tellus, or the earth. Even here, though, they insist on drawing distinctions, arguing that within the earth herself, Terra is one thing, Tellus another, and Tellumo yet another. They treat all of these as separate gods, each with its own name, its own function, and its own altars and rituals. They also call this same earth the mother of the gods, which means that even the poets' inventions are more forgivable by comparison; for according to their sacred books, not merely their poetry, Juno is not only the sister and wife of Jove but his mother as well. They worship this same earth as Ceres and also as Vesta, though they more often insist that Vesta is nothing other than fire, the fire of the hearth without which the city cannot survive. This is why virgins traditionally serve her: just as nothing is born of a virgin, so nothing is born of fire. But all this nonsense should be completely swept away and extinguished by Him who was born of a virgin. Who can tolerate the fact that, while they heap such honor and, in a sense, such chastity on fire, they don't even blush when they sometimes call Vesta by the name of Venus, thereby dissolving the honored virginity of her attendants? If Vesta is Venus, how can virgins rightly serve her by abstaining from the very thing Venus represents? Are there two Venuses, one a virgin and the other not? Or perhaps three: one the goddess of virgins, also called Vesta; another the goddess of wives; and another the goddess of prostitutes? To this last one the Phoenicians even offered a gift by having their daughters work as prostitutes before giving them in marriage. So which of these is the wife of Vulcan? Certainly not the virgin, since she has a husband. And we would never say it is the prostitute, for fear of seeming to dishonor the son of Juno and fellow craftsman of Minerva. It must follow, then, that she belongs among the married goddesses; though we would not want wives to imitate what she did with Mars. "There you go again," they say, "back to fables." But what kind of justice is it to be angry with us for saying such things about their gods, while feeling no anger toward themselves, who flock eagerly to the theatre to watch the crimes of those same gods performed on stage? And here is something that would be unbelievable if it were not so thoroughly established: those very theatrical performances depicting the crimes of their gods were instituted in honor of those gods.

Let them assert whatever they like through their physical theories and debates. At one moment, let Jupiter be the soul of the material world, filling and animating that entire mass constructed from four elements, or however many elements they prefer. At another moment, let him yield portions of that world to his sister and brothers. Now let him be the upper air, reaching down to embrace Juno, the lower air spread out beneath him. Then let him be the whole sky together with the air, impregnating the earth with fertilizing rains and seeds, treating her as both wife and mother at once (for apparently such things are not shameful among divine beings). And yet again, so that we need not work through every variation, let him be the one god of whom the celebrated poet Virgil is thought to have written:

"For God pervades all things,

All lands, and the tracts of the sea, and the depth of the heavens,"

let it be this one god who is Jupiter in the heavens; Juno in the air; Neptune in the sea; Salacia in the sea's depths; Pluto in the earth; Proserpine beneath it; Vesta at the household hearth; Vulcan in the craftsman's forge; Sol, Luna, and the Stars among the constellations; Apollo in prophecy; Mercury in trade; Janus at every beginning; Terminus at every end; Saturn in time itself; Mars and Bellona in war; Liber in the vineyards; Ceres in the grain fields; Diana in the forests; Minerva in learning. And let this same god extend even into that crowded assembly of lesser deities: presiding over male seed under the name Liber, and over female seed as Libera; bringing newborns into the light of day as Diespiter; governing women's menstruation as the goddess Mena; answering the prayers of women in labor as Lucina; lifting the infant from the earth's embrace and being called Opis; opening the crying child's mouth and being called the god Vaticanus; raising it from the ground as the goddess Levana; watching over cradles as the goddess Cunina. Let this same god be those goddesses who sing the fates of the newborn and are called Carmentes; let him preside over chance events as Fortuna; let him nurse the infant at the breast as the goddess Rumina, since the ancients called the breast *ruma*; let him give drink as the goddess Potina; let him provide food as the goddess Educa; let him be called Paventia from the terror that grips infants, Venilia from the hope that comes, Volupia from pleasure, and Agenor from action itself. From the impulses that drive men to great exertion, let him be named the goddess Stimula; let him be the goddess Strenia for giving strength, Numeria for teaching numbers, and Camoena for teaching song. Let him be both the god Consus for granting counsel and the goddess Sentia for inspiring thought; let him be the goddess Juventas, who takes charge of young men once they have set aside the robe of boyhood; let him be Fortuna Barbata, who grants adults their beards, though the Romans have not thought to honor this function with a male deity. Surely whatever divinity oversees the beard ought at least to be male, named either Barbatus from *barba* (beard), as Nodotus takes his name from *nodus* (knot), or at the very least Fortunius rather than Fortuna, since the beard belongs to men. Let him, as the god Jugatinus, join couples in marriage; and when the virgin bride's girdle is loosened, let him be invoked as the goddess Virginiensis; let him be Mutunus or Tuternus, known among the Greeks as Priapus. If they feel no shame about it, let all these I have named, and all those I have not thought fit to name, be that one Jupiter, whether, as some insist, they are all parts of him, or expressions of his power, as those believe who prefer to think of him as the soul of the world. This is, in fact, the view of most of their leading thinkers.

If all of this is true (I will set aside for now the question of how troubling it is), what would they actually lose by taking the more sensible approach of worshipping one god? What part of him could be neglected if he himself were worshipped? But if they fear that parts of him might grow angry at being overlooked, then their claim falls apart: this whole cannot be, as they insist, like the life of a single living being that contains all the gods as its virtues, members, or parts. If one part can be angered, appeased, or stirred up more than another, then each part must have its own separate life, independent of the rest. On the other hand, if someone argues that all of Jupiter together, meaning the whole of him, would be offended if his individual parts were not also worshipped one by one, that is simply absurd. None of his parts could possibly be overlooked if the one who contains them all were worshipped as a whole. Consider just one example from the countless that could be raised: they say that all the stars are parts of Jupiter, that each is alive and possesses a rational soul, and that all are therefore gods without question. Can they not see how many of these stars they never worship, how many receive no temple and no altar, and how very few have ever been thought worthy of a shrine or a sacrifice? If those who are not individually worshipped are displeased, how can anyone live without fear, having appeased only a handful while all of heaven remains offended? But if worshipping Jupiter means they worship all the stars as parts of him, then by that same efficient logic they could address all of them through him alone. In that way, no one would be displeased, since all would be included in the one act of worship. No one would be slighted, rather than giving the far greater number of overlooked deities every reason for grievance. This is especially troubling when Priapus, sprawling in obscene nakedness, is given preference over those who shine from their celestial heights.

Shouldn't thoughtful people, and really people of every kind, be moved to examine this idea more carefully? You don't need exceptional intelligence for this task; you only need to set aside the urge to argue and pay attention. If God is the soul of the world, and the world is His body as the soul's counterpart, then He must be a single living being composed of soul and body. That would make God a kind of womb of nature, containing everything within Himself, so that the lives and souls of all living creatures are drawn from His soul, which animates the whole mass, each according to the manner of its birth. If that's the case, then nothing whatsoever exists that is not a part of God. And if that is true, who can fail to see the impious and irreligious conclusions that follow? Every time someone tramples the ground, they trample a part of God. Every time a living creature is killed, a part of God is slaughtered. I won't go further and spell out everything that comes to mind when one thinks this through, because to do so would require saying things that cannot be said without irreverence.

But if they insist that only rational animals, such as men, are parts of God, I genuinely cannot see how, if the whole world is God, they can exclude beasts from being parts of Him as well. But why labor the point? Consider the rational animal himself, that is, man. What belief could be more miserable than the idea that a part of God is being flogged whenever a boy is flogged? And who, unless he has lost his mind entirely, could tolerate the thought that parts of God can become lustful, wicked, impious, and utterly damnable? Consider also this: why would God be angry at those who refuse to worship Him, if those very offenders are parts of Himself? The only remaining option, then, is for them to say that all the gods have their own distinct lives; that each one lives for himself, that none of them is a part of any other, but that all are to be worshipped, or at least as many as can be known and worshipped, since there are so many that it is impossible to worship all of them. Among all these gods, I believe they suppose Jupiter, as their reigning king, to be the one who both established and expanded the Roman empire. For if he did not do it, what other god could they believe was capable of attempting so great a work? Each god must be occupied with his own domain and responsibilities, and none can intrude on another's. Could the kingdom of men really have been built and extended by the king of the gods?

Here, first of all, I want to ask: why isn't the kingdom itself considered a god? If Victory can be a goddess, why not the kingdom as well? And what need is there for Jupiter at all, if Victory is the one who grants favor and always sides with whoever she wants to win? If she is on your side, what nation could resist conquest, what kingdom could refuse to yield, even if Jupiter sat idle and did nothing? But perhaps good men find it repugnant to wage unjust wars against peaceful neighbors who have done nothing wrong, simply to expand their territory. If that is how they feel, I fully approve and commend them.

Let them ask, then, whether it is truly fitting for good men to take pleasure in an expanding empire. The very injustice of those against whom just wars are fought is what allows a kingdom to grow. If neighboring peoples had never committed wrongs that provoked war, any such kingdom would have remained small. In a world of greater justice and peace, human affairs would have been far happier: all kingdoms would have stayed modest, living in friendly harmony with one another, much as a city contains many households existing side by side. So, to wage war and extend dominion over conquered nations may look like good fortune to wicked men, but to good men it is simply a necessity. Yet because it would be worse still for the unjust to rule over the more righteous, even this kind of expansion is not unreasonably called a blessing. Still, there is no question that it is a greater blessing to have a peaceful, good-natured neighbor than to defeat a hostile one in war. Your desires are corrupt when you wish for an enemy, someone you hate or fear, to fall into circumstances where you can overpower him. If, then, the Romans built so vast an empire through wars that were just rather than wicked or dishonest, should they not worship the injustice of foreigners as a goddess in her own right? We can see clearly that this foreign injustice did a great deal to expand the empire, by making other peoples so unjust that just wars could be waged against them and Roman territory could grow. And why should foreign injustice not be counted a goddess, if Fear, Dread, and Fever were all deemed worthy of being Roman gods? By these two forces, then: foreign injustice, which stirs up the causes of war, and Victoria, the goddess of victory, who brings those wars to a successful conclusion, the empire grew and flourished, even while Jupiter sat idle. What role could Jupiter have played, after all, when the very benefits that might have been credited to him were instead broken off into separate deities, each named, worshipped, and invoked for its own particular function? He might have had some share in it, if he himself had been called Empire, just as she is called Victory. Or if empire is Jupiter's gift, why should victory not also be considered his gift? It certainly would have been, had he been recognized and worshipped not as a stone idol on the Capitoline Hill, but as the true King of kings and Lord of lords.

I find it deeply puzzling that the Romans, who assigned individual gods to virtually every human activity and every movement of the mind, refused to give public honor to the goddess they called Quies, the deity of quiet and rest. Consider what they did honor: they invoked Agenoria to stir people to action, Stimula to drive them toward extraordinary effort, Murcia to restrain excess and prevent men from overreaching (Pomponius tells us her name gave rise to the word *murcidus*, meaning sluggish and idle), and Strenua to inspire vigor and energy. All of these gods and goddesses received solemn, official worship. Yet Quies, whose very name means the peace she was thought to bring, was denied a place within the city. Her temple was built outside the Colline Gate. Was this a sign of a restless, disordered mind? Or did it perhaps signal something deeper: that anyone who persisted in worshipping that crowd, not of gods, but of demons, could never truly find rest? It is precisely this rest to which the true Physician calls us, saying, "Learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls" (Matt 11:29).

Or perhaps they argue that Jupiter sends the goddess Victory, and that she, acting in obedience to the king of the gods, comes to those he has dispatched her to and takes up their cause. This is truly said, not of Jove (whom they, following their own imagination, pretend is king of the gods), but of Him who is the true and eternal King. He sends not Victory, who is no real person, but His angel, and causes whomever He pleases to conquer. His purposes may be hidden, but they cannot be unjust. For if Victory is a goddess, why is Triumph not also a god, joined to Victory as husband, brother, or son? They have invented such things about their gods that if the poets had fabricated anything similar, and we had brought it up for discussion, they would have dismissed it as laughable fiction unworthy of true deities. And yet they themselves did not laugh when they encountered these same absurdities, not in the pages of poets, but in the rituals of their own temples. They should therefore petition Jove alone for everything and appeal to him exclusively. For if Victory is a goddess and subject to him as her king, she would not dare to resist him wherever he sent her, or act on her own will rather than his.

What should we make of the idea that Felicity herself is a goddess? She has her own temple, her own altar, and her own proper rites of worship. If that's the case, then she alone should be worshipped, because wherever she is present, what good thing could possibly be missing? But then why does a man also think Fortune is a goddess and worship her as well? Are Felicity and Fortune really two different things? Fortune, after all, can be either good or bad, but if Felicity could be bad, it wouldn't be Felicity at all. Surely we should assume that all the gods of either sex (if they even have a sex) are good by nature. Plato says this; other philosophers say it; every respected ruler of republics and nations says it. So how is it that the goddess Fortune is sometimes good and sometimes bad? Could it be that when she turns bad, she stops being a goddess and suddenly becomes a malignant demon? And if so, how many Fortunes are there? As many as there are fortunate men, presumably. But since there must also be a great many men suffering bad fortune at the very same moment, can one and the same Fortune be simultaneously good to some and bad to others? If she is truly a goddess, is she always good? Then she is simply Felicity by another name. Why, then, give her two names? That much, at least, is tolerable, since it's common enough for one thing to carry two names. But why different temples, different altars, different rituals? There is a reason, they say: Felicity is what the virtuous earn through prior merit, while Fortune, called "good" without any test of merit, falls on both the good and the wicked by pure chance, which is precisely why she is named Fortune. But then how can she be called good if she comes to the virtuous and the wicked alike without any discernment? Why worship a goddess who is blind, running at random toward whoever happens to be nearby, so that she most often passes right by those who worship her and attaches herself to those who despise her? If her worshippers do gain some advantage, so that she notices and favors them, then she is following merit after all, and she doesn't come by chance. What, then, becomes of the very definition of fortune? What becomes of the idea that she takes her name from fortuitous events? It profits a person nothing to worship her if she is truly fortune in the proper sense. But if she distinguishes her worshippers in order to benefit them, then she isn't fortune at all. Or perhaps Jupiter sends her wherever he pleases? In that case, let him alone be worshipped, since Fortune cannot resist his commands and goes only where he directs her. Or at the very least, let the wicked worship her, since they refuse to cultivate the kind of merit that might attract the goddess Felicity instead.

The Romans attributed so much power to this supposed goddess they called Fortuna that they preserved a tradition claiming her image, dedicated by Roman matrons and known as Fortuna Muliebris, had actually spoken, declaring more than once that the women who honored her had pleased her. If this is true, it shouldn't surprise us. Malicious demons are perfectly capable of deception, and they would naturally be more inclined to use their tricks and schemes on behalf of a goddess who operates by chance rather than one who rewards genuine merit. Fortuna was apparently quite talkative, while Felicitas remained silent; and why? So that people would feel no need to live virtuously, since they had made friends with Fortuna, who could make them prosperous without any moral effort on their part. And really, if Fortuna was going to speak at all, she should at least have spoken in a man's voice rather than a woman's, so that the very matrons who dedicated her image wouldn't have to wonder whether so great a miracle had been produced by nothing more than feminine chatter.

They made Virtue a goddess as well, which, if it could actually be a goddess, would have been preferable to many of the others. But because Virtue is not a goddess but a gift of God, it should be sought through prayer from Him, the only one who can grant it, and the entire crowd of false gods simply disappears. Why, then, is Faith considered a goddess with her own temple and altar? Anyone who genuinely embraces her makes himself her dwelling place. And how would these pagans even understand what faith is, given that its primary and greatest function is to believe in the true God? Why wasn't Virtue alone sufficient? Doesn't it already include faith? After all, they saw fit to divide virtue into four parts: prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance. Each of these has its own subordinate virtues, and faith belongs among the components of justice, holding the highest place for all who understand the meaning of the words, "The just shall live by faith" (Hab 2:4). But if Faith is a goddess, I find myself wondering why these enthusiastic devotees of a crowded pantheon have slighted so many other potential goddesses by overlooking them, when they could just as easily have built temples and altars in their honor. Why hasn't temperance earned the rank of goddess, when certain Roman rulers won considerable glory precisely because of it? Why isn't fortitude a goddess, given that she supposedly aided Mucius when he thrust his hand into the flames, aided Curtius when he threw himself headlong into the gaping earth for the sake of his country, and aided both Decius the father and Decius the son when they sacrificed themselves for their armies? (Though we might well question whether these men possessed *true* fortitude, if that were relevant to our present discussion.) Why have prudence and wisdom earned no place among the gods? Perhaps because they are all worshipped under the single general name of Virtue itself? If so, then by that same logic they could worship the true God under one name, since all their other gods are thought to be aspects of Him. But the problem is that the single name of Virtue already encompasses both faith and chastity, and yet those two have been given separate altars in temples of their own.

It was vanity, not truth, that elevated these two as goddesses. Virtue and felicity are gifts of the true God; they are not gods themselves.

But if a person truly has virtue and felicity, what more could they possibly need? What could satisfy someone whom virtue and felicity cannot satisfy? Virtue covers everything we need to do; felicity covers everything we could wish for. If Jupiter was worshipped in order to obtain these two things (since even a vast and lasting empire is simply one expression of felicity), why couldn't people see that these are not goddesses at all, but gifts from God? And if they were going to treat them as goddesses anyway, they should at least have abandoned the enormous crowd of other gods. Consider all the functions that Roman imagination distributed among its various deities, and then ask: what could any of those gods possibly give to a person who already possessed virtue and felicity? What guidance would anyone need from Mercury or Minerva, when Virtue already contained everything within herself? The ancients defined virtue as the art of living well and rightly. In fact, because virtue is called *ἀρετὴ* in Greek, some have thought the Latin word *art* was derived from it. But if virtue only comes to those who are sharp-minded, why was the god Father Catius needed to make people clever and perceptive? Felicity could have provided that on her own, since being born with a keen mind is itself a matter of good fortune. True, the goddess Felicity couldn't be worshipped by someone not yet born, so that she might befriend them before birth; but she could have granted this favor to parents who worshipped her, ensuring that clever children were born to them. Why would women in labor need to call on Lucina, when Felicity's presence would have guaranteed not only a safe delivery but healthy children as well? Why was it necessary to entrust newborns to the goddess Ops at birth, to the god Vaticanus for their first cry, to the goddess Cunina while they lay in the cradle, to the goddess Rumina while they nursed, to the god Statilinus when they first stood, to the goddess Adeona when they came, to Abeona when they went, to the goddess Mens for a sound mind, to the god Volumnus and the goddess Volumna that they might desire good things, to the marriage gods for good matches, to the rural gods and especially to the goddess Fructesca herself for abundant harvests, to Mars and Bellona for success in war, to the goddess Victoria for victory, to the god Honor for recognition, to the goddess Pecunia for wealth, and to the god Aesculanus and his son Argentinus for bronze and silver coin? They made Aesculanus the father of Argentinus because bronze coinage came into use before silver. What puzzles me is why Argentinus never fathered a god named Aurinus, since gold coinage followed in turn. Had they invented him, they would surely have ranked Aurinus above his father Argentinus and his grandfather Aesculanus, just as they placed Jupiter above Saturn. So why was it necessary, for all these gifts of mind, body, and material fortune, to worship and invoke such an enormous crowd of gods? I haven't even named all of them, and they themselves couldn't keep up with every human need by assigning a separate minor deity to each minor concern, when the single goddess Felicity could have provided all of it effortlessly and at once. No other deity should have been needed, either to bestow blessings or to ward off harm. Why invoke the goddess Fessonia for the exhausted, the goddess Pellonia to drive away enemies, or Apollo or Aesculapius (or both together in serious cases) as divine physicians for the sick? There would be no need to petition the god Spiniensis to clear thorns from the fields, or the goddess Rubigo to keep mildew from the crops. With Felicity present and watching over everything, either no evils would have arisen at all, or they would have been easily turned aside. Finally, to return to these two so-called goddesses: if felicity is the reward of virtue, then she is not a goddess but a gift of God. And if she is a goddess, why couldn't she be said to bestow virtue itself? After all, attaining virtue is itself one of the greatest forms of felicity.

So what exactly is Varro claiming to have given his fellow citizens as such a great gift? He says he has not only identified which gods the Romans should worship, but also explained what each god is responsible for. He puts it this way: "Just as it does you no good to know the name and face of a man who is a physician without knowing that he is a physician, so it does you no good to know that Aesculapius is a god if you don't know that he can grant you health, and therefore have no idea why you should pray to him." He reinforces this with another comparison: "No one can live well, or even survive at all, without knowing who is a blacksmith, who is a baker, who is a weaver, from whom to seek a particular tool, whom to take as a helper, a guide, or a teacher." From this he concludes that knowledge of the gods is equally useful, provided one knows what power, function, or domain any given god holds. "This way," he says, "no one need be in doubt about which god to call on for any particular need, and we can avoid the mistake that so many people make: asking Liber for water, or asking the Lymphs for wine." Very useful indeed! Who wouldn't be grateful to this man, if only he could demonstrate true things? If only he could teach that the one true God, from whom all good things come, is the one humanity should worship.

But if their books and rituals are to be believed, and Felicity is truly a goddess, why wasn't she appointed as the only deity worth worshipping? She could, after all, grant everything at once and make people happy. Since happiness is the ultimate goal behind every human desire, why would anyone need to worship anyone else? Why was it left to Lucullus, so late in Roman history and after so many rulers had come and gone, to finally dedicate a temple to so great a goddess? Why didn't Romulus himself, ambitious as he was about founding a prosperous city, build her a temple before all others? Why did he petition any other gods at all, when having Felicity on his side would have meant lacking nothing? He wouldn't have become a king in the first place, let alone a god afterward as they believe, without her favor. So why did he establish Janus, Jove, Mars, Picus, Faunus, Tiberinus, Hercules, and whatever others there may have been as gods for the Romans? Why did Titus Tatius add Saturn, Ops, the Sun, the Moon, Vulcan, Light, and the rest, including even the goddess Cloacina, while Felicity was left out entirely? Why did Numa appoint so many gods and goddesses without including this one? Perhaps he simply couldn't spot her in such a crowded pantheon. Certainly, King Hostilius would never have introduced the new gods Fear and Dread to be appeased if he had known about this goddess or had the chance to worship her. In the presence of Felicity, Fear and Dread wouldn't merely have been appeased; they would have been driven away entirely.

Then consider this: the Roman empire had already grown to enormous size before anyone worshipped Felicity. Was the empire, then, greater than it was happy? How could genuine happiness exist where there was no genuine piety? True piety means worshipping the one true God, not offering devotion to as many demons as there are false gods. And yet even after Felicity had been admitted into the company of the gods, the catastrophic misery of the civil wars followed. Perhaps Felicity was justly offended, both because she had been invited so late and because the invitation was less an honor than an insult, given that she was made to share worship with Priapus, Cloacina, Fear, Dread, Ague, and others who were not gods deserving worship but rather reflections of their worshippers' own moral failures. And if it seemed right to worship so great a goddess alongside such an unworthy crowd, why wasn't she at least honored more highly than the rest? It is simply intolerable that Felicity was placed neither among the *Consentes* gods, who are said to be admitted into Jupiter's council, nor among those they call the *Select* gods. Surely a temple could have been built for her that surpassed all others in height of location and grandeur of design. Why not something finer, in fact, than Jupiter's own temple? Who gave Jupiter his kingdom in the first place, if not Felicity? I am assuming, of course, that he was happy while he reigned. But Felicity is certainly more valuable than a kingdom, since no one doubts that a man might be found who fears becoming a king, yet no one can be found who is unwilling to be happy.

If the gods can be consulted through augury or any other means, they should be asked directly whether they would be willing to yield their place to Felicity. If the spot where a greater and more magnificent temple might be built to her happened to be occupied by the temples and altars of others, even Jupiter himself should step aside so that Felicity might claim the very summit of the Capitoline hill. No one would resist Felicity except, impossibly, someone who actually wished to be unhappy. And if consulted, Jupiter would certainly not do what those three gods, Mars, Terminus, and Juventas, once did when they flatly refused to yield to their own superior and king. As the Roman records tell it, when King Tarquin wanted to build the Capitol and found that the most worthy and suitable site was already occupied by other gods, he didn't dare act against their wishes. Believing they would willingly defer to so great a god who was also their master, he consulted the auguries to ask whether they were willing to make way for Jupiter. All of them agreed to move except those three: Mars, Terminus, and Juventas. The Capitol was therefore built in a way that incorporated all three within it, though with such subtle signs that even the most learned scholars could barely detect it. Surely, then, Jupiter himself would not treat Felicity with the same contempt that Terminus, Mars, and Juventas showed him. And even those three, who had refused to yield to Jupiter, would certainly yield to Felicity, who had made Jupiter their king. Or if they refused to move, it would not be out of any disrespect toward her, but because they would rather dwell in obscurity within the house of Felicity than stand prominent in their own places without her.

Thus, if the goddess Felicity were given the largest and most prominent temple in the city, citizens would naturally learn where to direct every good desire. Through the persuasion of nature itself, they would abandon the unnecessary crowd of other gods and worship Felicity alone, pray to her alone, and frequent her temple alone, since every citizen wishes to be happy. In this way, the happiness they had sought from all the gods would be sought from her directly. After all, what does anyone hope to receive from any god, if not happiness, or at least something they believe will lead to it? So if Felicity has the power to dwell with whomever she chooses (and she does, if she is truly a goddess), then what madness is it to seek from some other god the very thing you could simply ask of her? They should therefore honor this goddess above all others, beginning with the dignity of her location. As we read in their own writers, the ancient Romans once paid greater honors to a certain Summanus, to whom they attributed lightning at night, than to Jupiter, who was associated with lightning by day. But once a grand and celebrated temple was built to Jupiter, the magnificence of the structure drew such enormous crowds to him that today you can barely find anyone who even remembers reading the name of Summanus, let alone hearing it spoken aloud. But if Felicity is not a goddess, because she is, in truth, a gift of God, then the God who has the power to give her must be sought, and that harmful crowd of false gods must be abandoned, the crowd that foolish people follow when they turn God's gifts into gods of their own, offending the very One whose gifts they are through the stubbornness of pride. For no one can escape misery who worships Felicity as a goddess while forsaking the God who gives felicity, just as no one can escape hunger by licking a painting of bread instead of buying a real loaf from the man who has one.

We should, however, consider their reasoning. Did our ancestors really believe, they ask, that these things were gods rather than divine gifts? Surely not. They knew that such blessings come only from some god who freely bestows them, and so they gave names to gods whose actual names they didn't know by naming them after the gifts those gods were thought to provide. Sometimes they altered the name slightly for this purpose: from *bellum* (war) they derived Bellona; from *cunae* (cradles), Cunina; from *seges* (standing grain), Segetia; from *pomum* (fruit), Pomona; from *bos* (ox), Bubona. Other times they used the word without any change at all, so that the goddess who gives money is called Pecunia, without anyone actually thinking that money itself is a goddess. The same logic applies to Virtus, who gives virtue; Honor, who gives honor; Concordia, who gives concord; and Victoria, who gives victory. So when Felicitas is called a goddess, they argue, the name refers not to the gift itself but to the deity who bestows happiness.

Having established that reasoning, we can perhaps more easily persuade those whose hearts have not grown too hardened. Consider this: human weakness has recognized that happiness can only be given by some god. Even those who worshipped countless gods, with Jupiter at their head, recognized this. And when they didn't know the name of the one who actually gives happiness, they agreed to call Him by the name of the very thing they believed He gave. It follows, then, that they didn't think Jupiter himself could give happiness, even though they already worshipped him. Instead, they believed happiness came from someone they thought worthy of being worshipped under the name of Happiness itself. I will state this plainly: they believed happiness was given by a certain God they did not know. Let that God, then, be sought. Let Him be worshipped. That is enough. Let the endless procession of demons be rejected, and let this one God be sufficient for every person to whom His gift is sufficient. The God who gives happiness will not be enough for the person who finds happiness itself insufficient. But for the one who is satisfied with it, and humanity has nothing more it should wish for, let that person serve the one God, the giver of happiness. This God is not the one they call Jupiter. For if they had truly believed Jupiter to be the giver of happiness, they would not have gone looking for another god or goddess under the name of Happiness itself, as if someone else needed to provide what Jupiter could not. Nor could they have tolerated Jupiter being worshipped with such disgraceful attributes. He is said to be an adulterer who seduced other men's wives, a shameless lover and ravisher of a beautiful boy.

"But," says Cicero, "Homer invented these things and transferred human qualities to the gods. I would rather transfer divine qualities to us." The poet's habit of ascribing crimes to the gods rightly offended this serious thinker. Why, then, do the most learned men count theatrical performances among sacred things, when those very performances routinely depict, enact, and display these same crimes in honor of the gods? Cicero should have directed his complaints not against the poets' inventions, but against the customs of the ancients themselves. And would those ancients not have fired back: What have we done? The gods themselves loudly demanded these performances in their honor, insisted on them with fury, threatened destruction if they were withheld, punished any neglect with harsh severity, and showed open pleasure when that neglect was remedied. Among the many remarkable deeds attributed to the gods, the following story is told. A Roman peasant named Titus Latinius received a dream in which he was told to go before the senate and order the Roman games to be restarted. On the first day of the original celebration, a condemned criminal had been led to execution in full view of the crowd, and this grim spectacle had disturbed the gods who were looking to the games for entertainment. When the peasant, frightened by what he had seen, failed to deliver this message the next day, the dream returned that night in a harsher form, and he lost his son as a consequence of his silence. On the third night he was warned that an even worse punishment awaited him if he continued to refuse. Even then he hesitated, and he was struck down by a violent and terrible illness. At that point, on the advice of his friends, he reported everything to the magistrates, was carried into the senate on a stretcher, and the moment he finished describing his dream, his strength returned and he walked out on his own feet, completely restored. The senate, shaken by so remarkable a miracle, decreed that the games be renewed at four times the original expense. What clear-thinking person cannot see that men, trapped under the power of malicious demons (from whose grip nothing but the grace of God through Jesus Christ our Lord can free us), were driven by force to stage performances for such gods, performances that any person of sound judgment would rightly condemn as shameful? The fact is plain: these theatrical shows celebrated the criminal exploits of the gods in verse, and yet they were formally reinstated by a decree of the senate under direct pressure from those same gods. In these performances, the most shameless actors portrayed Jupiter as a destroyer of chastity and gave him pleasure by doing so. If that portrayal had been false, he would have responded with anger. But if he took delight in seeing his crimes depicted, even in fictional form, then whoever was actually being worshipped in those moments could only have been the devil. How could a being more morally degraded than any Roman citizen, a being who took pleasure in what decent Romans found repulsive, have founded, expanded, and preserved the Roman empire? How could one who was worshipped in such a disgraceful manner have given happiness to anyone, when the only alternative to that disgraceful worship was provoking him to an even more disgraceful rage?

It is recorded that the highly learned pontiff Scævola distinguished three kinds of gods: one introduced by the poets, another by the philosophers, and another by the statesmen. The first kind he dismisses as trivial, because the poets invented so many unworthy stories about the gods. The second kind doesn't suit civil life, because it contains some things that are superfluous and others that would be harmful for ordinary people to know. The superfluous elements aren't much of a problem, since skilled lawyers have long said that what is superfluous does no damage. But what are the things that actually cause harm when brought before the public? "These," he says: "that Hercules, Æsculapius, Castor, and Pollux are not gods, for learned men have established that these were merely human beings who died like everyone else." What else? "That states do not possess true images of the gods, because the true God has neither sex, nor age, nor any definite bodily form." The pontiff doesn't want the people to know these things, not because he thinks they are false. He thinks it is useful, therefore, for states to be deceived in matters of religion, which Varro himself doesn't hesitate to say openly in his books on divine things. What a remarkable religion this is: one to which the weak person, desperate for deliverance, is supposed to flee for help, and yet when that person searches for the truth that might actually deliver him, it is considered useful that he be deceived instead. And in those same books, Scævola is equally clear about why he rejects the poets' gods: because they portray the gods in ways so degrading that even decent human beings would compare favorably to them. In these stories, one god commits theft, another adultery; they say and do things that are shameful and foolish. Three goddesses compete for a beauty prize, and the two Venus defeats bring about the destruction of Troy. Jupiter transforms himself into a bull or a swan to sleep with someone. A goddess marries a mortal man. Saturn devours his own children. There is, in short, no act of wonder or wickedness that cannot be found in these stories, and yet all of it is utterly foreign to the true nature of the gods.

O chief pontiff Scævola, abolish the theatrical games if you can. Teach the people not to offer such honors to the immortal gods, honors in which they are invited to admire the crimes of the gods and, as far as possible, imitate them. But if the people answer you by saying, "You, O pontiff, are the one who brought these things among us," then go and ask the gods themselves, at whose prompting you ordered these things, that they stop demanding such offerings. For if these stories are wicked, and therefore unworthy of belief regarding most of the gods, then the wrong done to those gods who are falsely portrayed is all the greater. But the gods don't hear you. They are demons. They teach wickedness and take pleasure in filth. Far from counting it an injury when such things are invented about them, they cannot bear it when these things are not performed at their appointed festivals. And now, if you were to appeal to Jupiter against them, chiefly because more of his crimes tend to be acted out in the theatrical plays, consider this: even though you call him the god Jupiter, ruler and governor of the entire world, isn't he the one you have wronged most of all? You have placed him among these demons as a fellow deity and crowned him their king.

Gods who are honored through such rituals are not truly honored at all; they are indicted by them. After all, it is a greater offense to delight in having shameful things said about you falsely than it would be even if those things were true. Gods of this kind could never have been responsible for building or sustaining the Roman empire. If they had possessed that kind of power, they would surely have bestowed such a magnificent gift on the Greeks instead, since the Greeks worshipped them more lavishly and devotedly in the very arena these gods supposedly favored: theatrical performance. The Greeks did not shield the gods from the poets' mockery, allowing those poets to tear the gods apart and ridicule anyone they pleased, yet they never considered actors to be disreputable; on the contrary, they regarded them as worthy of genuine distinction. But just as the Romans were able to use gold coins without worshipping a god called Aurinus, they could equally possess silver and bronze currency without venerating Argentinus or his supposed father Aesculanus, and the same logic applies to everything else I could list, though doing so at length would only grow tedious. The conclusion, then, is twofold: the Romans could not have achieved such dominion if the true God had been unwilling to grant it, and if those false and numerous gods had remained unknown or been dismissed, while God alone was known and worshipped with genuine faith and integrity, the Romans would have enjoyed a better kingdom in this life, whatever its size, and afterward, whether or not they had one here, they would have received an eternal one.

What kind of omen is this that they declared to be the most beautiful, the one I mentioned a little earlier: that Mars, Terminus, and Juventas refused to yield their places even to Jupiter, king of the gods? The meaning, they say, was this: that the nation dedicated to Mars (that is, Rome) would yield its ground to no one; that because of the god Terminus, no one would ever be able to push back Rome's borders; and that because of the goddess Juventas, Roman youth would bow to no one. Let them explain, then, how they can regard Jupiter as the king of their gods and the source of their empire, when these omens cast him as an adversary whom it was considered honorable to resist. If these things are true, however, they have nothing to fear. They certainly won't admit that the gods who refused to yield to Jupiter have since yielded to Christ. Yet without shifting the empire's borders by a single mile, Jesus Christ has proven Himself capable of driving them not only from their temples but from the hearts of their own worshippers. And consider this: before Christ came in the flesh, and indeed before the writings we have quoted could even have been composed, though well after that omen was taken under King Tarquin, the Roman army was scattered and routed on numerous occasions, exposing the falseness of the sign supposedly drawn from Juventas's refusal to yield. The nation dedicated to Mars was trampled in its own city by the invading Gauls. The empire's borders, as city after city defected to Hannibal, were squeezed into a fraction of their former extent. The beauty of those omens was thus reduced to nothing, and what remained was only stubbornness toward Jupiter, not from gods, but from demons. There is, after all, a difference between never yielding and returning to a place you once abandoned. Furthermore, in later times the eastern boundaries of the Roman Empire were redrawn by the decision of Hadrian, who surrendered three distinguished provinces to the Persian Empire: Armenia, Mesopotamia, and Assyria. The god Terminus, who according to these writings was the guardian of Rome's frontiers and who by that celebrated omen had refused to yield even to Jupiter, apparently stood in greater fear of Hadrian, a mortal king, than of the king of the gods. Those same provinces were eventually recovered, but within living memory the frontier collapsed again when Julian, placing his trust in the oracles of these gods, recklessly ordered the supply ships to be burned. The army was left without provisions, Julian himself was soon killed by the enemy, and the legions, shaken by the loss of their commander, were pressed to such desperate straits that no one would have escaped at all had peace terms not been negotiated that fixed the empire's boundaries where they still stand today. The loss was not as severe as what Hadrian had conceded, but it was still a significant sacrifice. The omen of Terminus refusing to yield to Jupiter was empty, then, since he yielded to Hadrian's will, to Julian's recklessness, and to Jovinian's necessity. Rome's more thoughtful and serious-minded citizens saw all of this clearly, but they had little power to act against the customs of the state, which was bound to maintain the rites of demons. Even they, though they recognized the emptiness of it all, still believed that the religious worship owed to God should be directed toward the natural order, which operates under the rule and governance of the one true God. They were, as the apostle says, "serving the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for evermore" (Rom 1:25). The help of this true God was needed to send holy and genuinely devout men who would die for the true religion, so that by their deaths they might drive the false one from among the living.

Cicero the augur mocks augury and criticizes those who let the cries of crows and jackdaws determine the course of their lives. Someone might object that an Academic philosopher, who argues that nothing can be known with certainty, has no real authority on these matters. Yet in the second book of his *De Natura Deorum*, he introduces Lucilius Balbus, who first traces the origins of superstition back to genuine physical and philosophical insights, then turns on the practice of setting up images and spinning mythological fictions, saying this: "Do you not see, then, that sound and useful discoveries about the natural world can be twisted into stories about imaginary gods? This is where false beliefs are born, where confusion takes root, and where superstitions worthy of old wives' tales flourish. The gods are given physical forms, assigned ages, dressed in particular clothing and adorned with ornaments; they are given family trees, marriages, blood relations, and every other feature that belongs to human frailty. They are even portrayed as emotionally disturbed, driven by lust, consumed by worry, and burning with anger. And the myths don't stop there: the gods have fought wars and waged battles, not only as in Homer, where different gods take sides in a human conflict, but wars entirely of their own making, like the wars against the Titans or the Giants. All of this is absurd to say or believe; it is completely empty and without foundation." There you have it, straight from the mouths of those who actually defended the gods of the nations. He then goes on to distinguish between superstition and religion, following the Stoic tradition. "Not only the philosophers," he says, "but our ancestors as well, drew a line between superstition and religion. Those who spent entire days in prayer and sacrifice, hoping their children would outlive them, were called superstitious." Anyone can see what he's doing here: he's trying, out of fear of public opinion, to rescue the religion of the ancients by separating it from superstition, but he can't figure out how to make that separation work. If the ancients called people superstitious for praying and sacrificing all day, what did they call those who invented the very things he criticizes: gods depicted at various ages, dressed in distinctive clothing, complete with genealogies, marriages, and family connections? When he condemns these things as superstitious, he inevitably implicates the very ancestors who created and worshipped such images. He even implicates himself, since despite all his eloquence and his efforts to distance himself from the practice, he was still required to venerate those same images, and he never dared breathe a word to the public of what he stated so plainly in this philosophical debate. Let us Christians, then, give thanks to the Lord our God, not to heaven and earth as that author suggests, but to the One who made heaven and earth. For these superstitions, which Balbus could barely bring himself to criticize even in his most verbose moments, God has overthrown through the profound humility of Christ, through the preaching of the apostles, and through the witness of martyrs who died for the truth and lived by it. He has overthrown them not only in the hearts of the faithful, but even in the very temples of the superstitious, through their own willing abandonment of those practices.

What does Varro himself say, the man we regret to find (though not by his own choice) placing theatrical performances among sacred things? When he urges his readers, with apparent piety, to worship the gods, doesn't he effectively admit that he personally doesn't believe the very things he describes as Roman state tradition? He goes so far as to say that if he were founding a new state from scratch, he could assign the gods their names and attributes far more accurately according to the principles of nature. But since he was born into an already ancient civilization, he says he feels obligated to accept the traditional names, titles, and stories of the gods as he found them, and that his reason for researching and publishing all of this is to draw the people toward worship rather than contempt. In saying this, the man's sharp intellect reveals something telling: he doesn't publish everything, because certain things would not only have struck him as absurd, but would have seemed contemptible even to ordinary people if they hadn't been quietly passed over. One might think this is mere speculation on my part, except that Varro himself, in another passage, states plainly while discussing religious rites that many things are true which it is not only unhelpful for common people to know, but actually beneficial for them to believe otherwise, even if what they believe is false. This, he says, is precisely why the Greeks enclosed their religious ceremonies and mysteries in silence and behind closed walls. In this, he is clearly articulating the governing philosophy of those so-called wise men who rule states and peoples. Yet this cynical arrangement delights the malicious demons enormously, for they hold both the deceivers and the deceived in their grip alike, and nothing breaks their tyranny except the grace of God through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Varro, that most sharp and learned of authors, says that in his view only those have truly grasped what God is who have believed Him to be the soul of the world, governing it by design and reason. From this, it's clear that although Varro himself didn't reach the full truth (since the true God is not a soul but the maker and author of the soul), he could, had he been free from the weight of custom and tradition, have confessed and urged others that the one God deserving worship is the one who governs the world by design and reason. On that point, the only remaining debate would have been his choice of words: calling God a soul rather than the creator of the soul. Varro also notes that the ancient Romans, for more than a hundred and seventy years, worshipped their gods without images. "And if this custom," he writes, "had survived to the present day, the gods would have been worshipped more purely." In support of this view, he cites the Jewish nation as one of his witnesses, and he doesn't hesitate to conclude that passage with a pointed judgment against those who first introduced images for the people: they had, he says, both stripped their fellow citizens of religious reverence and multiplied error. He understood well that gods are easily held in contempt when they are presented through the dull, lifeless medium of statues. Notice, too, that he doesn't say these innovators introduced error but that they increased it, which implies he believed error was already present even before images appeared. So when Varro argues that only those who believe God to be the governing soul of the world have truly understood what God is, and when he insists that religious practice would have been purer without images, who could fail to see just how close he came to the truth?

For if he had been capable of acting against such a deeply entrenched error, he would certainly have argued both that the one God should be worshipped, and that He should be worshipped without images. Having come so close to the truth, he might easily have been led to reflect on the mutability of the soul, and from there to recognize that the true God is that unchanging nature which created the soul itself. Given all this, whatever mockery such men poured into their writings against the plurality of gods, they did so less as an attempt to persuade others and more as men compelled by the secret will of God to acknowledge the truth against their own inclinations. When we cite testimonies from these writings, therefore, we do so to refute those who are unwilling to consider from how great and malicious a power of the demons the singular sacrifice of the shedding of the most holy blood, and the gift of the imparted Spirit, can set us free.

Varro also notes that, when it comes to the genealogies of the gods, the people have always preferred the poets over the natural philosophers. As a result, their ancestors, the ancient Romans, believed in the gods' genders and family lines and arranged marriages among them. This seems to have happened for one reason above all others: it was the business of prudent and powerful men to deceive the people in matters of religion, and in doing so they were not merely worshipping the demons but actively imitating them, since deception is the demons' deepest craving. Just as demons can only take hold of those they have first misled with cunning, so too the men who held political power, being not just rulers but mirrors of the demonic, persuaded the people in the name of religion to accept as true what those rulers themselves knew to be false. In this way, they bound the people more tightly within civil society, the better to hold them as subjects under their control. And who among the weak and uneducated could possibly have escaped the combined deceptions of both the rulers of the state and the demons themselves?

God is the author and giver of true happiness, and because He alone is the true God, He grants earthly kingdoms to both the good and the wicked alike. He does not do this randomly or by chance, since He is God, not fortune. Rather, He acts according to an ordering of things and times that remains hidden from us but is fully known to Him. He does not serve that order as though subject to it; He rules it as its lord and governs it as its master. Happiness, however, He gives only to the good. Whether a person is a king or a subject makes no difference: either may possess it or lack it equally. And it will be complete only in that life where neither kings nor subjects exist any longer. Earthly kingdoms, then, are given by Him to both the good and the wicked, so that His worshippers, still guided by weak and immature minds, will not mistake these gifts for something truly great. This is the mystery of the Old Testament, within which the New was concealed: even there, earthly blessings were promised, while those who were spiritually perceptive understood, even then, though without yet stating it openly, both the eternal reality that those earthly things symbolized and the kind of gifts in which true happiness is actually found.

Therefore, so that people might understand that earthly blessings, the things so desperately craved by those who can't imagine anything better, remain under the control of the one true God rather than the many false gods the Romans once considered worthy of worship, He multiplied His people in Egypt from a tiny remnant into a great nation and brought them out through extraordinary signs. Their women did not call on Lucina when their children were born in astonishing numbers; and when that nation had grown beyond all expectation, He Himself delivered them, He Himself rescued them from the hands of the Egyptians, who hunted them and sought to kill all their infants. Their babies nursed without the goddess Rumina, were cradled without Cunina, ate and drank without Educa and Potina, and grew up without any of those gods assigned to childhood. They married without the gods of weddings, came together as husband and wife without the worship of Priapus, and when the sea divided before them, they crossed on dry ground without invoking Neptune, while the returning waters swallowed up the enemies who pursued them. When manna fell from heaven, they consecrated no goddess Mannia to receive it; when the struck rock poured out water for their thirst, they offered no worship to Nymphs or water spirits. They fought their wars without the frenzied rites of Mars and Bellona; and though they certainly did not conquer without victory, they did not treat victory as a goddess but as a gift from their God. They had harvests without Segetia, oxen without Bubona, honey without Mellona, fruit without Pomona; in short, everything for which the Romans felt compelled to petition an enormous crowd of false gods, Israel received far more abundantly from the one true God. Had they not sinned against Him through a reckless curiosity that drew them, like people seduced by magic, toward foreign gods and idols, and that finally led them to kill Christ, their kingdom would have endured, and would have been, if not larger than Rome's, then certainly more blessed. As for their present condition, scattered as they now are across nearly every land and nation, this too is the work of that one true God's providence. The images, altars, sacred groves, and temples of the false gods have been overthrown everywhere, their sacrifices forbidden, and it can now be shown from the Jews' own scriptures how all of this was foretold by their prophets long in advance. This matters because, had these prophecies appeared only in Christian writings, they might easily have been dismissed as our own invention. But here we must bring this book to a close and leave what remains for the one that follows.