The City of God: Book 5

Since it is now established that true happiness consists in the full attainment of everything we desire, and that happiness is not a goddess but a gift of God, and that therefore the only god worth worshipping is the one who can actually make us happy (for if Felicity were herself a goddess, she alone would deserve our worship), let us move on to consider why God, who is capable of granting along with everything else those material goods that even wicked and therefore unhappy people can possess, chose to give the Roman Empire such vast reach and such extraordinary longevity. That this was not the work of the many false gods the Romans worshipped is something we have already argued at length, and will continue to demonstrate as the opportunity arises.

The greatness of the Roman empire, then, has neither a random nor a predetermined cause, at least according to those who define *fortuitous* events as things that either have no causes or whose causes follow no intelligible order, and *fatal* events as things that happen by the necessity of some fixed order, independent of both God's will and human choice. Simply put, human kingdoms are established by divine providence. If someone insists on attributing their existence to fate because he uses the word "fate" to mean God's will or power, he may keep his view, but he should clean up his language. Why not say from the start what he will eventually say when someone asks him what he actually means by *fate*? When ordinary people hear that word, they understand it to mean the influence of the stars at the moment of a person's birth or conception. Some thinkers separate this influence entirely from God's will, while others argue it depends on that will entirely. Those who believe the stars determine our actions, our blessings, and our sufferings apart from any divine will deserve no hearing at all, not only from those who hold the true religion, but from anyone who wishes to worship any god, even a false one. What does that position ultimately amount to, after all, except the conclusion that no god is worth worshipping or praying to? Our present argument, however, is not aimed at those people, but at those who defend their supposed gods while opposing the Christian religion. Now, those who do tie the position of the stars to God's will, and hold that the stars somehow decree each person's character and fate, face a serious problem if they believe God granted the stars this power so they could make such determinations on their own authority. In that case, they do a grave injustice to the heavens, imagining that wicked deeds are decreed in what they treat as a brilliant and splendid celestial senate. If any earthly government issued such decrees, the whole human race would demand its overthrow. What room, then, is left for God's own judgment over human conduct, since He is Lord of both the stars and humanity, if our deeds are governed by celestial necessity? Alternatively, if they say the stars don't act on their own discretion but simply carry out God's commands as instruments enforcing these necessities, are we then to think of God in terms we would have found unworthy even when applied to the stars themselves? On the other hand, if the stars are said to *signify* these things rather than *cause* them, so that the position of the stars functions as a kind of language predicting future events rather than producing them (a view held by scholars of no small learning), then the astrologers certainly don't speak that way in practice. They don't say, for example, that Mars in such-and-such a position *signifies* a murder; they say it *produces* one. Still, even if we grant that they speak imprecisely and that we should prefer the philosophers' more careful language when interpreting what the stars reveal, there remains a problem they have never been able to solve: why is it that twins, sharing the same moment of conception, born from the same act, and separated at birth by only the smallest interval of time, so often lead dramatically different lives? Their actions, the events that befall them, their professions, their achievements, their honors, and even their deaths can differ so widely that, in many of these respects, complete strangers resemble each twin more closely than the twins resemble each other.

Cicero tells us that the renowned physician Hippocrates once recorded his suspicion that two brothers were twins, based on the fact that they fell ill at the same time and their illness progressed and resolved at the same pace in each of them. Posidonius the Stoic, who was deeply devoted to astrology, explained this by arguing that the brothers had been born and conceived under the same constellation. On this question, the physician's explanation is far more convincing and far closer to the truth. The reasoning goes like this: the physical condition of the parents at the moment of conception may have shaped the earliest development of the fetuses, and since everything needed for their growth up to birth was supplied by the same mother's body, they would naturally be born with similar constitutions. After birth, they were raised in the same house, eating the same food, breathing the same air, living in the same place, and drinking the same water. Medical science confirms that all of these factors have a powerful influence, for better or worse, on a person's physical health. Add to that the same patterns of exercise and daily routine, and it's no surprise that their bodies would be so alike that the same causes would make them sick at the same time. To claim, however, that the specific position of the stars at the moment of their birth or conception caused their simultaneous illness is an extraordinary overreach, especially when we consider that countless beings of vastly different kinds, in vastly different circumstances, and subject to vastly different outcomes, may have been conceived and born at the same time and in the same region under the same sky. We also know that twins don't just behave differently and travel to very different places; they also suffer from different illnesses. For this, Hippocrates would offer what I consider the most straightforward explanation: through differences in diet and exercise, which arise not from physical constitution but from personal inclination, twins can diverge considerably in their health over time. Posidonius, or anyone else who insists on the determining power of the stars, will have a hard time responding to this without simply misleading people who don't know enough to push back. As for the argument they try to build from the tiny interval of time between the births of twins, based on that point in the sky they call the "horoscope," the position marking the birth hour, the problem is this: that interval is either far too small to account for the wide differences we actually see in twins' temperaments, choices, habits, and fortunes, or it is far too large when we consider that twins of the same social standing, whether humble or privileged, share that standing equally, even though astrologers claim the birth hour is the decisive factor in such differences. If the second twin is born so quickly after the first that the horoscope hasn't changed, then I would expect complete similarity in every aspect of their lives, which is never actually the case with any pair of twins. But if the second birth is slow enough that the horoscope does shift, then I would expect them to have different parents, which twins can never have.

The famous story about the potter's wheel is no help here. According to the tale, Nigidius was stumped by this very question and gave an answer that supposedly earned him the nickname *Figulus* (the potter). He spun a potter's wheel with all his strength, then struck it twice with ink in rapid succession, so quickly that both strokes appeared to land on the same spot. When the wheel stopped, however, the two marks were found on the rim at a considerable distance from each other. His point was this: given how fast the celestial sphere rotates, even the brief interval between the births of twins corresponds to a vast stretch of heavenly space, just as those two nearly simultaneous ink strokes ended up far apart on the rim. That gap, he argued, accounts for whatever differences we observe in the characters and fortunes of twins. But this argument is more fragile than the clay pots shaped on that very wheel. If the heavens contain so much that no observation of the constellations can capture, such that one twin might inherit a fortune while the other does not, then how can astrologers examine the constellations of non-twins and confidently pronounce on matters equally hidden, attributing specific outcomes to the precise moment of each person's birth? Consider the logic: if predictions about non-twins are defensible because they rest on observing larger spans of the heavens, while the tiny intervals separating twin births correspond to such minute portions of celestial space that they only govern trivial matters (the kind no one would ever consult an astrologer about, such as when to sit down, when to take a walk, or what to eat for dinner), then how can we justify that position at all, when we can point to such sweeping differences in the habits, actions, and destinies of twins?

Among the illustrious figures of the ancient patriarchal age, there were two twin brothers born so close together that the first came out grasping the heel of the second. Yet the difference between them was enormous: their characters diverged sharply, their actions were worlds apart, their parents loved them unequally, and the contrast between them eventually curdled into mutual hostility. When we say they were so unlike each other, do we mean something trivial, like one being awake while the other slept, or one sitting while the other walked? Those are precisely the kinds of minor variations that astrologers attribute to the tiny fractions of time they cannot even measure when charting a birth position for their calculations. No, the differences here were far more significant. One of these twins spent years as a hired servant; the other never served anyone. One was cherished by his mother; the other was not. One forfeited the birthright that his people held in such high esteem; the other secured it. And what about their wives, their children, their wealth? All of it was different. If, then, differences this profound are connected to those tiny intervals of time that separate the births of twins, they cannot reasonably be attributed to the stars at all. But if astrologers claim to predict such things on the grounds that they correspond not to imperceptibly small moments but to intervals large enough to observe and record, then what exactly is the purpose of that potter's wheel in all of this? It seems to serve no function except to spin around men with clay hearts, keeping them too dizzy to notice how hollow the astrologers' claims really are.

Consider the twins that Hippocrates, with his physician's insight, suspected to be twins precisely because he observed their illness developing to its crisis and subsiding again at exactly the same time in each of them. Don't these twins themselves serve as a sufficient refutation of those who want to attribute to the influence of the stars what was actually the result of a similar physical constitution? Why were they both sick with the same disease at the same time, rather than one after the other in the order of their birth? They certainly could not both have been born at the same moment. Or, if being born at different times did not necessarily mean they had to fall ill at different times, why do the astrologers insist that the difference in their birth times caused differences in everything else about their lives? Why could they travel abroad at different times, marry at different times, have children at different times, and do countless other things at different times because of their different birth times, and yet not fall ill at different times for the same reason? If a difference in the moment of birth shifts the horoscope and produces dissimilarity in everything else, why did the shared timing of their conception still show up in their shared attacks of illness? Or, if the destiny of one's health is tied to the moment of conception while everything else is tied to the moment of birth, then astrologers should not predict anything about health from the birth chart unless they also have the hour of conception, so that its constellations can be examined as well. But if they claim they can predict illness without examining the conception chart because illness is indicated by the birth moment, how could they tell either of these twins when he would fall sick based on his birth chart, given that the other twin, who did not share the same birth chart, was necessarily going to fall sick at the same time?

I want to press the point further. If the gap in time between the births of twins is large enough to produce a difference in their constellations because of the difference in their horoscopes, and therefore in all the cardinal points to which so much influence is attributed, such that even this shift produces a difference in destiny, how can that be, since they cannot have been conceived at different times? Or, if two people conceived at the same moment can have different destinies with respect to their births, why can't two people born at the same moment have different destinies with respect to their lives and deaths? If a single moment of conception does not prevent one twin from being born before the other, why should anything prevent two people born at the same moment from dying at the same moment? If a simultaneous conception allows twins to be affected differently in the womb, why should a simultaneous birth prevent any two individuals from having different fortunes in the *world*? On that logic, all the fictions of this art, or rather this delusion, would be swept away entirely.

Here is the strange contradiction at the heart of it all. Two children conceived at the same time, indeed at the same moment, under the same position of the stars, have different fates that bring them to different hours of birth. Yet two children born of different mothers at the same moment, under one and the same position of the stars, supposedly cannot have different fates that lead them by necessity to different ways of living and dying. Are children at the moment of conception simply without destiny, because destiny can only attach to them at birth? If so, what do the astrologers mean when they claim that if the hour of conception is known, many things can be predicted from it? This is the basis of the story that some people repeat, about a certain wise man who carefully chose the hour in which to sleep with his wife so that he might father a distinguished son. It is also the basis of the answer given by Posidonius, the renowned astrologer and philosopher, when asked about those twins who fell ill at the same time. He said this had happened to them because they were conceived at the same time and born at the same time. He deliberately added "conceived" to forestall the objection that they could not both have been born at the same moment, knowing that at least they must both have been conceived at the same moment. His aim was to show that he did not attribute their simultaneous illness to the similarity of their physical constitutions as the immediate cause, but rather held that even in matters of health they were bound together by a connection rooted in the stars.

If, then, the moment of conception has so much bearing on the similarity of destinies, those destinies should not be altered by the circumstances of birth. Or, if the destinies of twins are said to change because they are born at different times, why should we not rather conclude that those destinies had already changed in order that they might be born at different times? Does not the free will of people living in the world change the destinies assigned at birth, just as the order of birth can change the destinies assigned at conception?

Consider the very moment of conception for twins, which is identical for both children. Even then, it often happens that one is conceived male and the other female. I personally know a pair of opposite-sex twins who are both alive and in the prime of life. Though they resemble each other physically, as much as the difference in sex allows, their lives have taken remarkably different paths (accounting, of course, for the differences that naturally exist between men's and women's lives): the brother holds the office of a count and is almost constantly away from home on military service abroad, while the sister has never left her homeland or even her native region. More striking still, and more difficult to believe if you put your faith in the destiny of the stars (though not at all surprising when you consider human choices and the free gifts of God), he is married and has fathered many children, while she is a consecrated virgin who has never even taken a husband. But surely the power of the horoscope must count for something here? I think I've already said enough to expose the absurdity of that idea. The astrologers will reply that whatever the horoscope's significance in other areas, it certainly matters with respect to birth. But why not also with respect to conception, which takes place in a single act? Indeed, nature's force is such that once a woman has conceived, she cannot conceive again at that same moment. Or were these twins perhaps transformed at birth, one into a male and the other into a female, because their horoscopes differed? Now, it isn't entirely unreasonable to say that certain stellar influences have some effect on physical bodies alone. We can see, for instance, that the seasons change as the sun draws near or pulls away, and that certain creatures such as sea urchins and oysters grow larger or smaller with the waxing and waning of the moon, as do the remarkable tides of the ocean. But none of this means that human will should be subject to the position of the stars. When astrologers try to bind our actions to the constellations, they only invite us to ask whether even these physical changes might have some cause other than the stars. After all, what is more fundamental to a body than its sex? And yet, under the same stellar configuration, twins of opposite sexes can be conceived. What greater absurdity could be claimed or believed, then, than this: that the position of the stars, which was identical for both twins at the moment of conception, could not prevent a sister from being born a different sex from her brother despite their shared constellation, and yet the position of the stars at the hour of their birth could somehow determine that she would be separated from him by the vast difference between marriage and holy virginity?

Now, will anyone raise the objection that by choosing specific days for specific actions, people create new destinies for those actions? Consider the following example: a man, according to this theory, was not born to have a distinguished son but rather an unremarkable one, so being an educated man, he carefully selected an auspicious hour in which to sleep with his wife.

In doing so, he created a destiny he didn't previously have, and from that self-made destiny something became fated that was never contained in the destiny assigned at his birth. What remarkable foolishness. A day is chosen for a marriage, and the reason, I assume, is that without such a choice the wedding might fall on an unlucky day and turn out badly. But then what becomes of everything the stars already decreed at the hour of his birth? Can a man truly change by an act of deliberate choice what has already been determined for him, while what he himself determines by choosing a day cannot be changed by any other power? Furthermore, if only human beings, and not all things under heaven, are subject to stellar influence, why do people choose certain days as favorable for planting vines or trees, or for sowing grain, and other days as suitable for taming animals, or for putting males with females so that cows and mares may conceive, and for similar purposes? If it is argued that chosen days do influence these things because the constellations govern all earthly bodies, living and non-living, according to the precise moment in time, then consider the countless multitudes of beings that are born, arise, or come into existence at the very same instant, yet arrive at such vastly different ends. This alone should be enough to convince even a child that these observations about days are absurd. For who is so foolish as to claim that every tree, every plant, every animal, every serpent, bird, fish, and worm each has its own distinct moment of birth or beginning? And yet people routinely bring the birth charts of animals before astrologers to test their skill, carefully noting the exact moment of birth at home precisely for this purpose. They consider those astrologers superior to all others who can look at a constellation and declare that it points to the birth of a beast rather than a man. They even dare to specify what kind of beast it is: whether it is a wool-bearing animal, a beast of burden, one suited for the plow, or one fit for guarding a house. Astrologers are tested on the fates of dogs as well, and their answers on such matters are met with cries of admiration from those who consult them. They deceive people into thinking that during a human birth, all other births are somehow suspended, so that not even a fly comes into existence at the same moment, under the same region of the sky. But if that logic is accepted for a fly, it cannot stop there; it must work its way up from flies all the way to camels and elephants. Nor are these people willing to consider that when a day is chosen to sow a field, countless grains fall into the ground at the same moment, germinate at the same moment, sprout, mature, and ripen at the same moment. And yet among all those ears of grain that are born together and, so to speak, *congerminal* (sprouted from the same sowing), some are destroyed by mildew, some are eaten by birds, and some are harvested by human hands. How can anyone claim that all of these had distinct constellations, when we can plainly see them coming to such different ends? Will astrologers admit that it is foolish to choose days for such things, and that these things fall outside the reach of celestial decree, while they insist on subjecting human beings alone to the stars? And yet human beings are the only creatures on earth to whom God has granted free will. Taking all of this into account, we have good reason to conclude that when astrologers produce impressive and seemingly accurate answers, this should be credited not to their reading of horoscopes through some genuine art (which in reality does not exist), but to the hidden prompting of spirits of a very unwholesome kind, whose purpose is to plant in human minds, and firmly establish there, those false and harmful beliefs about the fated power of the stars.

As for those who use the word "fate" to mean not the position of the stars at the moment of a creature's conception, birth, or beginning, but rather the entire chain and sequence of causes that makes everything become what it becomes, I have no interest in quarreling with them over terminology. They attribute this so-called order and connection of causes to the will and power of God Most High, who is rightly and truly believed to know all things before they occur and to leave nothing unordained. All powers come from Him, though not all wills. That it is chiefly the will of God Most High, whose power reaches irresistibly through all things, that they are calling "fate" is demonstrated by the following verses, which I believe were written by Annaeus Seneca:

"Father supreme, ruler of the lofty heavens,

Lead me wherever you please; I will give

A prompt obedience, making no delay.

Here I am. Promptly I come to do your sovereign will;

If your command should thwart my inclination, I will still

Follow you groaning, and the work assigned,

With all the suffering of a mind repugnant,

Will perform, being evil; which, had I been good,

I should have undertaken and performed, though hard,

With virtuous cheerfulness.

The Fates lead the man who follows willing;

But the man who is unwilling, they drag him."

It is perfectly clear that in this final line, Seneca calls "fate" the very thing he had just called "the will of the Father supreme." He says he is ready to obey that will so that he may be led willingly rather than dragged against his will, since "the Fates do lead the man that follows willing, but the man that is unwilling, him they drag."

The following lines from Homer, which Cicero translated into Latin, also support this view:

"Such are the minds of men, as is the light

Which Father Jove himself pours

Gloriously over the fruitful earth."

Cicero does not intend for a poetic sentiment to carry weight in a philosophical debate like this one. When he notes that the Stoics, in arguing for fate, regularly cited these verses from Homer, he is not commenting on Homer's own views but on those of the Stoic philosophers themselves. The verses they quote in their arguments about fate reveal quite clearly what they mean by fate: they use the name Jupiter for what they consider the supreme god, from whom, they claim, the entire chain of fates hangs.

The way Cicero sets about refuting the Stoics makes clear that he believed he could make no headway against them unless he first dismantled the idea of divination. He pursues this goal by denying that knowledge of future events is possible at all, arguing forcefully that neither God nor any human being possesses such knowledge, and that genuine prediction of events simply does not exist. In doing so, he denies God's foreknowledge outright, and then attempts through weak arguments, and by setting up certain easily dismissed oracles as targets, to tear down all prophecy, even the kind that is clearer than daylight. Notably, he does not actually succeed in refuting even those oracles.

But when it comes to refuting the conjectures of astrologers, his argument is decisive, because those conjectures ultimately collapse under their own weight. Even so, the people who attribute fate to the stars are far more reasonable than those who deny that future events can be foreknown at all. To acknowledge that God exists while simultaneously denying that He has foreknowledge of future things is the most obvious kind of contradiction. Cicero himself recognized this, and so he effectively tried to argue the position captured in Scripture: "The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God" (Ps 14:1). He didn't do this openly in his own voice, however, because he understood how deeply offensive such a view would be. Instead, in his book on the nature of the gods, he has Cotta argue this position against the Stoics, while making clear that his own sympathies lay with Lucilius Balbus, who defends the Stoic view, rather than with Cotta, who denies the existence of any divinity. In his book on divination, though, Cicero does speak in his own voice, and there he argues most plainly against the idea that future things can be foreknown. His entire purpose seems to be avoiding the doctrine of fate, because he believes that conceding fate would destroy free will. In his view, once you grant that future events can be known in advance, fate follows as an unavoidable conclusion that simply cannot be argued away.

Let the philosophers continue their endless debates. For our part, in confessing the most high and true God, we confess His will, His supreme power, and His foreknowledge. We need not fear that our willing choices somehow cease to be willing simply because God, whose foreknowledge is infallible, knew in advance that we would make them. This was precisely Cicero's fear, and it drove him to reject foreknowledge altogether. The Stoics, for their part, maintained that not everything happens by necessity, even while insisting that everything happens according to destiny. So what exactly was Cicero afraid of when it came to God's foreknowledge of future events? His reasoning went like this: if all future things have been foreknown, they will unfold in the exact order in which they were foreknown; if they unfold in that order, then there is a fixed sequence of events known to God; and if there is a fixed sequence of events, there must be a fixed sequence of causes, since nothing can happen without some efficient cause preceding it. But if there is a fixed sequence of causes governing everything that happens, then everything happens by fate. And if that is true, then nothing lies within our own power, and free will simply does not exist. Grant that conclusion, Cicero argues, and the entire framework of human life collapses. Laws become pointless. Reproaches and praises, rebukes and encouragements, all become meaningless. And there can be no justice whatsoever in rewarding the good and punishing the wicked. To prevent consequences so shameful, so absurd, and so destructive to humanity, Cicero chooses to reject God's foreknowledge of future events entirely, forcing the religious mind to choose between only two options: either something lies within our own power, or foreknowledge exists. Both cannot be true; affirm one, and you deny the other. Cicero, as a genuinely great and wise man who cared deeply and skillfully for the good of humanity, chose free will, and denied foreknowledge in order to defend it. In his desire to make people free, he made them impious. The religious mind, however, embraces both, affirms both, and holds both together through faithful conviction. But how can that be, asks Cicero? Once you grant foreknowledge of future events, a chain of consequences follows that ends with the conclusion that nothing depends on our free will. And conversely, if anything does depend on our will, we can trace the same reasoning backward until we arrive at the conclusion that there is no foreknowledge of future events at all. The backward argument runs as follows: if there is free will, then not everything happens according to fate; if not everything happens according to fate, then there is no fixed sequence of causes; if there is no fixed sequence of causes, then there is no fixed sequence of events foreknown by God, since events cannot occur without efficient causes preceding them; and if God has no fixed and certain foreknowledge of causes, then we cannot say that all things happen exactly as He foreknew they would. And if it is not true that all things happen just as He foreknew, then God, Cicero concludes, has no foreknowledge of future events at all.

We assert, against the reckless and impious overreach of human reason, both that God knows all things before they occur and that we act freely, doing by our own will whatever we recognize as proceeding from our will alone. We do not say that everything happens by fate; on the contrary, we insist that nothing happens by fate. We demonstrate that the word "fate," as commonly used by those who mean the position of the stars at the moment of a person's conception or birth, is an empty term, because astrology itself is a delusion. We neither deny that there is an order of causes in which the highest power belongs to the will of God, nor do we call that order "fate," unless perhaps we take "fate" to mean something spoken, deriving it from the Latin *fari* (to speak). We cannot deny, after all, that Scripture says: "God hath spoken once; these two things have I heard, that power belongeth unto God. Also unto Thee, O God, belongeth mercy: for Thou wilt render unto every man according to his works" (Ps 62:11-12). The phrase "once hath He spoken" means "immovably," that is, He has spoken without change, since He knows without change all things that will be and all things He will do. We might, then, use the word "fate" in the sense derived from *fari* (to speak), were it not that the word has already drifted into another meaning, and I am unwilling to let people's minds slide unconsciously into that error. But it does not follow that, because God has a certain order of all causes, nothing can depend on the free exercise of our wills. Our wills themselves are included in that order of causes which God knows with certainty and holds within His foreknowledge. Human wills are causes of human actions, and He who foreknew all causes of all things could not have been ignorant of our wills among those causes. Even the concession Cicero himself makes is enough to refute his own argument. What does it gain him to say that nothing happens without a cause, while insisting that not every cause is a fated one, distinguishing instead between chance causes, natural causes, and voluntary causes? It is enough that he admits whatever happens must be preceded by a cause. We say that what people call chance causes are not simply the absence of causes; they are hidden causes, and we attribute them either to the will of the true God or to the will of spirits of one kind or another. As for natural causes, we do not separate them in any way from the will of Him who is the author and maker of all nature. And voluntary causes are traceable to God, to angels, to human beings, or to animals of any kind, if indeed the instinctive movements of creatures without reason, by which they seek or avoid various things according to their nature, can be called acts of will. When I speak of the wills of angels, I mean either the wills of the good angels, whom we call the angels of God, or the wills of the wicked angels, whom we call the angels of the devil, or demons. When I speak of the wills of human beings, I mean the wills of both the good and the wicked. From all this we conclude that the only efficient causes of everything that happens are voluntary causes, that is, causes belonging to the nature that is the spirit of life. Air or wind is also called "spirit," but since it is a physical substance, it is not the spirit of life. The spirit of life that animates all things, the creator of every body and every created spirit, is God Himself, the uncreated Spirit. In His supreme will resides the power that acts on the wills of all created spirits: helping the good, judging the evil, governing all, granting power to some and withholding it from others. As He is the creator of all natures, so He is the giver of all powers, though not of all wills, since wicked wills do not come from Him, being contrary to the nature that does come from Him. As for physical things, they are more subject to wills: some to our wills (by which I mean the wills of all living mortal creatures), though more to the wills of human beings than of animals. But all physical things are most fully subject to the will of God, to whom all wills are also subject, since they have no power except what He has granted them. The cause of things that creates without itself being created is God; all other causes both create and are created. This is true of all created spirits, and especially of rational ones. Material causes, which are better described as made rather than making, should not be counted among efficient causes, since they can only do what the wills of spirits accomplish through them. How, then, does an order of causes that is certain to God's foreknowledge require that nothing depend on our wills, when our wills themselves hold a very significant place in that order of causes? Cicero's quarrel is with those who call this order of causes "fate," or who give the order itself the name "fate." We share his distaste for that word, especially because people have grown accustomed to understanding it in a way that is simply not true. But where he denies that the order of all causes is perfectly certain and fully transparent to God's foreknowledge, we find his position even more objectionable than that of the Stoics. He either denies that God exists (which he worked hard to argue, in the voice of an assumed character, in his book *De Natura Deorum*), or, if he grants that God exists but denies that He foreknows future things, what is that but the fool saying in his heart that there is no God (Ps 14:1)? For one who does not foreknow all future things is not God. Our wills, therefore, have exactly as much power as God willed and foreknew they would have. Whatever power they possess, they possess within certain and fixed limits, and whatever they are going to do, they will most assuredly do it, because He whose foreknowledge cannot fail foreknew both that they would have the power to act and that they would act. So if I were to apply the word "fate" to anything at all, I would sooner say that fate belongs to the weaker of two parties and will to the stronger who holds the other in his power, rather than say that the freedom of our will is eliminated by that order of causes which the Stoics, with their own peculiar use of the term, call *Fatum* (fate).

We have no reason to fear the kind of necessity that so troubled the Stoics. Their anxiety about it drove them to draw elaborate distinctions among the causes of things, hoping to place some things outside necessity's reach while leaving others subject to it. Among the things they wanted to protect from necessity, they included human will, because they understood that a will subject to necessity could not be free. If we define "necessity" as something outside our control that produces its effects whether we want it to or not (death being the clearest example), then it's obvious that our wills, by which we live either rightly or wrongly, don't fall under that kind of necessity. We do many things that we simply would not do if we were unwilling. This is most obviously true of the act of willing itself: if we will something, it exists; if we don't will it, it doesn't. We cannot will something while simultaneously being unwilling to will it. But if we define necessity differently, as the principle by which we say that something must be a certain way or happen in a certain manner, I see no reason why that kind of necessity should threaten the freedom of the will. Consider God: when we say it is necessary that God live forever and know all things in advance, we are not placing His life or His foreknowledge under some external compulsion. Nor do we diminish His power when we say He cannot die or fall into error. In fact, if He could do those things, He would be less powerful, not more. He is rightly called omnipotent precisely because He does whatever He wills, not because He endures whatever He does not will. If the latter were true, He would not be omnipotent at all. So there are certain things He cannot do for the very reason that He is omnipotent. In the same way, when we say it is necessary that, when we will, we will by free choice, we are stating something undeniably true without subjecting our wills to any necessity that destroys freedom. Our wills exist as wills. They accomplish whatever we accomplish through willing, and nothing would be done if we were unwilling. Even when someone suffers something against their will through the agency of another, will itself still retains its essential validity. We don't mean the will of the one causing the suffering; we trace that back to the power of God. If a will exists but cannot accomplish what it wills, it has simply been overborne by a more powerful will. And this could only happen if there was a will to begin with, not the other party's will, but the will of the one who willed yet could not achieve what he willed. Therefore, whatever a person suffers against his own will, he should not attribute it to the will of other people, or of angels, or of any created spirit, but rather to the will of the One who grants power to all wills. The fact that God foreknew what would lie within the power of our wills does not mean that nothing lies within the power of our wills. The One who foreknew this did not foreknow nothing. And if He foreknew something real, something that would genuinely be in the power of our wills, then even with His foreknowledge fully in view, something truly does remain in the power of our wills. We are not forced, therefore, to choose between preserving God's foreknowledge and preserving the freedom of the will. To deny His foreknowledge in order to protect free will would be impious. We hold both truths together, confessing each faithfully and sincerely: the first, so that we may believe rightly; the second, so that we may live rightly. A person who does not believe rightly about God cannot live rightly. So let us never deny the foreknowledge of the One by whose help we are, or will be, free, simply in order to defend our freedom. It follows that laws are not enacted in vain, and that rebukes, encouragements, praises, and condemnations are not pointless. God foreknew these things too, and they carry exactly as much weight as He foreknew they would. Prayers are also genuinely effective in obtaining what God foreknew He would grant to those who asked. Rewards for good deeds and punishments for sins have been justly appointed. A person does not sin because God foreknew he would sin. On the contrary, there is no doubt that when a person sins, it is the person himself who sins, because the One whose foreknowledge never fails foreknew not that fate, or fortune, or some external force would sin, but that this particular person would sin. And if that person chooses not to sin, God foreknew that too.

God, the supreme and true God, together with His Word and Holy Spirit (three who are one), the one omnipotent God, creator and maker of every soul and every body: He is the one by whose gift all who are truly happy are happy, not through illusion but through truth. He made humanity as a rational creature composed of soul and body. When we sinned, He neither let us go unpunished nor abandoned us to His judgment without mercy. To all creatures He has given existence in common with stones, plant life in common with trees, and sensory life in common with animals; but to human beings alone among earthly creatures He has given intellectual life in common with the angels. From Him comes every form, every species, every order. From Him come measure, number, and weight. From Him comes everything that exists in nature, whatever its kind and whatever its worth. From Him come the seeds of living things and the forms those seeds produce, along with all the motion and development that follows. He gave to physical bodies their origin, beauty, health, reproductive power, the arrangement of their members, and the harmonious cooperation of their parts. To the irrational soul He gave memory, sensation, and appetite; to the rational soul He gave all of these, and added to them intelligence and will. He has left nothing without harmony and a kind of inner peace among its parts: not heaven and earth, not angels and humanity, not even the organs of the smallest and most insignificant animal, not a feather on a bird, not a flower on a plant, not a leaf on a tree. Given all of this, it is simply impossible to believe that this same God has left the kingdoms of humanity, with all their power and subjugation, outside the reach of His providence.

Let us now consider which Roman virtues the true God, who holds all earthly kingdoms in His power, chose to reward by helping Rome rise to greatness, and why He did so. To lay the groundwork for this discussion, we wrote the earlier books to demonstrate that the gods the Romans worshipped through such trivial and foolish rituals had nothing to do with Rome's success. We have also spent part of this present volume refuting the doctrine of fate, so that no one who has already been persuaded that Rome's empire was not built and sustained by the worship of those gods might then turn around and credit its rise and survival to some impersonal fate rather than to the sovereign will of Almighty God. The ancient Romans, then, though their history shows them worshipping false gods and offering sacrifices to demons rather than to God (just like every other nation, with the sole exception of the Hebrews), are nonetheless given this tribute by their own historian: they were "hungry for praise, generous with wealth, passionate for great glory, and satisfied with modest means." Glory was their deepest obsession. They lived for it; they were willing to die for it. Every other desire bent before that one consuming drive. In time, they came to see serving under others as shameful and ruling over others as honorable, and so they first burned to be free, then burned to be masters. This is why, when they could no longer stomach the rule of kings, they placed the government in the hands of two annually elected magistrates called consuls, not kings or lords. The title of king suggested the arrogance of a master (*dominantis*), not the steady hand of a ruler (*regentis*) or the public-minded care of one who consults the common good (*consulentis*). After King Tarquin was expelled and the consulship was established, the same historian already mentioned records in his praise of the Romans that "the state grew with astonishing speed once it had won its liberty, so powerful was the desire for glory that had taken hold of it." That hunger for praise and thirst for glory, then, was the engine behind all those remarkable achievements that human judgment rightly calls admirable and great. The same Sallust praises the great men of his own day, Marcus Cato and Gaius Caesar, noting that for a long time the republic had produced no one of outstanding virtue, but that within his own memory these two men had emerged, both of exceptional ability yet with very different aims. Among the qualities he celebrates in Caesar, he includes this: that Caesar longed for a great empire, a powerful army, and a fresh war, so that his talent and courage would have a stage on which to shine. This was always the prayer of heroic men, that Bellona would stir up wretched nations to war and drive them into chaos with her bloody whip, so that there would be room for valor to prove itself. Such was the fruit of that craving for praise and hunger for glory. Driven first by the love of liberty, and then by the desire for dominion, and throughout by the thirst for praise and renown, the Romans accomplished extraordinary things. Their greatest poet confirms that all these motives were at work in them:

"Porsenna there, with pride elate,

Bids Rome to Tarquin open her gate;

With arms he hems the city in,

Aeneas' sons stand firm to win."

At that time, their greatest ambition was either to die bravely or to live free. But once liberty was secured, an intense hunger for glory took hold of them, and liberty alone was no longer enough; they had to pursue dominance as well. This was the great ambition that Virgil places in the mouth of Jupiter:

"Nay, Juno's self, whose wild alarms

Set ocean, earth, and heaven in arms,

Shall change for smiles her moody frown,

And vie with me in zeal to crown

Rome's sons, the nation of the gown.

So stands my will. There comes a day,

While Rome's great ages hold their way,

When old Assaracus's sons

Shall quit them on the myrmidons,

Over Phthia and Mycenae reign,

And humble Argos to their chain."

Virgil presents Jupiter as predicting these things as future events, while in reality the poet was simply reviewing in his own mind what had already happened, surveying accomplished history as though it were unfolding before him. I mention this to show that, next to liberty, the Romans prized dominion so highly that it ranked among the things they praised most. This is also why the same poet, when comparing Rome's particular gifts to those of other nations, singles out the arts of ruling and commanding, of subjugating and defeating peoples, and sets them above all others:

"Others, perhaps, with happier grace,

From bronze or stone will call the face,

Plead doubtful causes, map the skies,

And tell when planets set or rise;

But you, Roman, control

The nations far and wide;

Let this be your genius, to impose

The rule of peace on vanquished foes,

Show pity to the humbled soul,

And crush the sons of pride."

These arts were practiced with greater skill the less their practitioners surrendered to pleasure, to the physical and mental softening that comes from craving and hoarding wealth, and to the moral corruption that followed: squeezing money from desperate citizens and pouring it into the pockets of worthless stage performers. So the men of low character who were everywhere when Sallust wrote and Virgil sang did not pursue honor and glory through those arts, but through treachery and deceit. On this point, Sallust writes: "But at first it was ambition rather than greed that stirred men's minds, which is a vice that at least comes closer to virtue. For glory, honor, and power are desired equally by the good man and the ignoble; but the former strives toward them by the true path, while the other, knowing nothing of the good arts, seeks them by fraud and deceit." What it means to pursue glory, honor, and power through good arts is simply to pursue them through virtue rather than through scheming. Both the good man and the ignoble man want these things, but the good man presses toward them by the true path. That path is virtue, and he travels it toward his destination: glory, honor, and power. That this conviction was deeply embedded in the Roman mind is reflected even in the arrangement of their temples, for they built the temples of Virtue and Honor side by side, worshipping as gods what are in fact gifts of God. From this we can understand what the good among them believed to be the purpose of virtue and its ultimate aim, namely honor. The bad, by contrast, had no virtue at all, though they desired honor and tried to seize it through fraud and deceit. Cato receives a higher kind of praise, as Sallust says of him: "The less he sought glory, the more it followed him." It is a higher kind of praise because the glory the Romans burned to possess is simply the favorable opinion of other people. Virtue is therefore superior, since it is content with no human verdict except the testimony of one's own conscience. This is why the apostle says, "For this is our glory, the testimony of our conscience" (2 Cor 1:12). And elsewhere: "But let every one prove his own work, and then he shall have glory in himself, and not in another" (Gal 6:4). The glory, honor, and power that the Romans desired for themselves, and that the good among them sought to reach through good arts, should not be the goal that virtue aims at. Rather, virtue should be the goal, and glory, honor, and power should follow from it. There is no true virtue except that which is directed toward the highest and ultimate good of humanity. For this reason, even the honors that Cato sought he should not have sought at all; the state should have pressed them on him unsolicited, in recognition of his virtues.

Of the two great Romans of that era, Cato was the one whose virtue came closest to the genuine article. So let us turn to Cato's own words to understand how he assessed the condition of Rome, both in his own time and in the past. "I don't believe," he says, "that our ancestors made Rome great through military force alone. If that were the case, our republic today would far surpass theirs, since we have more allies and citizens, and a far greater supply of weapons and horses. But what actually made them great are things we no longer have: discipline at home, just governance abroad, minds free to deliberate without being corrupted by crime or desire. In their place, we have luxury and greed, an impoverished state alongside wealthy private citizens. We praise riches and embrace idleness. No distinction is made between the good and the wicked; every reward that virtue should earn is seized through scheming and influence. And no wonder, when every individual thinks only of himself, when you are slaves to pleasure in private life and to money and favoritism in public affairs. Is it any surprise that an assault is made on a republic left defenseless by its own people?"

He who reads these words from Cato or Sallust might assume that such praise for the ancient Romans applied to all of them, or at least to a great many. But that assumption is wrong; if it were true, the things Cato himself writes, which I quoted in the second book of this work, could not be true. In that passage, he says that even from the very founding of the state, the powerful committed wrongs against the weak, which drove a wedge between the common people and the ruling fathers. Beyond that, there were other internal conflicts as well. The only period of genuinely just and moderate government came after the kings were expelled, and even that lasted only as long as the Romans had reason to fear Tarquin and were fighting the bitter war he had provoked with Etruria. After that, the fathers oppressed the people like slaves, flogged them as the kings had done, drove them off their land, and kept the reins of government entirely in their own hands. These conflicts between a ruling class that wanted to dominate and a people who refused to be dominated were finally brought to an end by the second Punic War, because a new and overwhelming fear pressed down on their restless minds, pulling them back from their quarrels through a greater anxiety and restoring a measure of civic harmony. The great achievements of that era were the work of a small number of genuinely good men. Through the wisdom and foresight of these few, the republic was able to endure and soften its troubles, and it grew stronger because of them. The same historian confirms this when he says that, after reading and hearing of the many remarkable things the Roman people accomplished in peace and war, on land and sea, he wanted to understand what it was that had sustained such greatness. He knew that the Romans had often fought large enemy forces with small companies of their own, and that they had waged wars against wealthy kings with very limited resources. After long reflection, he concluded that it was the exceptional virtue of a few citizens that had accomplished everything, and that this explained how poverty had overcome wealth and small numbers had overcome great ones. But, he adds, once the state had been corrupted by luxury and idleness, the republic was large enough to carry the weight of its own magistrates' and generals' vices. Even Cato's praise, then, applies only to a few, because only a few possessed the kind of virtue that drives men to pursue glory, honor, and power by the right means, which is to say, through virtue itself. The industry at home that Cato praises was rooted in a desire to enrich the public treasury, even at the cost of private poverty. That is why, when he describes what went wrong as morals decayed, he simply reverses the formula and says: "Poverty in the state, riches at home."

For a long time, the great kingdoms of the East had held the world's attention. Then it pleased God that a Western empire should rise as well, one that arrived later but surpassed the others in scope and greatness. To help it overcome the deep moral corruption found among other nations, God deliberately entrusted this empire to men who, driven by their hunger for honor, praise, and glory, governed their country well. They sought their own glory through their nation's glory, and they did not hesitate to place their country's survival above their own. For the sake of this one consuming passion, the love of praise, they suppressed their appetite for wealth and many other vices. Now, the person with the clearest moral vision is the one who recognizes that even the love of praise is itself a vice. The poet Horace saw this plainly, writing:

"You're bloated by ambition? take advice:

Yon book will ease you if you read it thrice."

And Horace, in a lyric song, expressed his desire to restrain the lust for power in these words:

"Rule an ambitious spirit, and you have

A wider kingdom than if you should join

Distant Gades to Libya, and thus

Hold in service either Carthaginian."

Nevertheless, those who restrain their baser impulses not through the power of the Holy Spirit, received by genuine faith and piety, nor through love of true beauty, but simply through a desire for human praise, are not yet holy. They are merely less corrupt than they might otherwise be. Even Cicero couldn't conceal this fact. In the same work where he wrote about the education of a head of state, *De Republica*, he argues that such a leader should be nourished on glory, and goes on to say that their ancestors accomplished many wonderful and illustrious things through their desire for it. Far from resisting this vice, the Romans actually thought it should be stirred up and inflamed, believing it would benefit the republic. Nor does Cicero hide this troubling view in his philosophical writings; if anything, he states it there more plainly than anywhere else. When discussing the kinds of studies that should be pursued for the sake of genuine good, rather than out of a vain craving for human praise, he makes the following sweeping claim: "Honor nourishes the arts, and all are driven to pursue their studies by glory; those pursuits are always neglected which are generally held in low regard."

It is, therefore, far better to resist this desire than to yield to it, for the purer a person is from this corruption, the more he resembles God. And even if this vice is never fully rooted out of the heart (since it never stops tempting even those who are making genuine progress in virtue), at least let the desire for glory be outweighed by the love of righteousness, so that when we encounter "things that are neglected because they are generally discredited," if those things are good and right, even the love of human praise may give way, blushing, before the love of truth. This vice is deeply hostile to genuine faith, because when the love of glory holds more weight in the heart than the fear or love of God, it becomes a spiritual trap. The Lord Himself said, "How can you believe, when you look for glory from one another and do not seek the glory that comes from God alone?" (John 5:44). And concerning those who had believed in Him but were afraid to confess Him openly, the evangelist says, "They loved the praise of men more than the praise of God" (John 12:43). The holy apostles were nothing like this. They proclaimed the name of Christ in places where it was not only discredited and therefore ignored (as Cicero put it, "Things that are generally discredited are always neglected") but was held in the deepest contempt. Holding fast to what they had heard from the Good Master, who was also the physician of souls, "If anyone denies me before men, I will also deny him before my Father who is in heaven and before the angels of God" (Matt 10:33), they were not deterred from preaching human salvation by curses, insults, brutal persecution, or cruel punishment. The noise of human outrage could not silence them. And when, through their divine words and deeds and their godly way of life, they broke through hardened hearts and brought the peace of righteousness into them, great glory followed them throughout the church of Christ. Yet they did not rest in that glory as though it were the goal of their virtue. Instead, they referred that glory back to God, by whose grace they were what they were, and they used that same flame to kindle in the hearts of those they served a love for the One who could make those people into what they themselves had become. Their Master had taught them not to pursue goodness for the sake of human recognition, saying, "Be careful not to practice your righteousness before men in order to be seen by them, for then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven" (Matt 6:1). But then, so they would not misread this and, out of fear of pleasing people, hide their goodness and become less useful, He showed them the right purpose for making it known: "Let your works shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father who is in heaven" (Matt 5:16). Notice the difference: not "that you may be seen by them," as though their eyes should rest on you (for in yourselves you are nothing), but "that they may glorify your Father who is in heaven," so that by turning their gaze toward Him, they may become what you are. The martyrs followed this same path, and they surpassed the Scaevolas, the Curtiuses, and the Deciuses, both in true virtue (because they possessed true piety) and in sheer number. But those Romans lived in an earthly city, and the ultimate goal of everything they undertook on its behalf was its safety and a kingdom, not in heaven but on earth, not in the realm of eternal life but in the realm of death and succession, where the dying replace the dead. What else could they have loved but glory? It was the only way they could hope to live on, after death, in the mouths of those who admired them.

Now, consider those to whom God did not intend to give eternal life alongside His holy angels in His celestial city, that community which true piety, the kind that offers the worship the Greeks call *latreia* (religious devotion), reserves for God alone. If He had also withheld from them the earthly glory of that magnificent empire, their good qualities would have gone unrewarded. Their virtues, by which they sought such great glory, would have earned them nothing. For those who appear to do good simply to win praise from other people, the Lord says plainly: "Truly I tell you, they have received their reward" (Matt 6:2). And so it was with the Romans. They set aside their private interests for the sake of the republic; they resisted greed in defense of the public treasury; they deliberated freely on behalf of their country; they were enslaved neither to the crimes their own laws condemned nor to personal desire. Through all of these qualities, as if traveling the right road, they pressed forward toward honor, power, and glory. They were celebrated among nearly every nation; they imposed the laws of their empire on countless peoples; and to this day, in both literature and history, they are renowned across the world. They have no grounds to complain against the justice of the supreme and true God. They have received their reward.

The reward awaiting the saints, however, is something altogether different. Even here on earth, they endure reproach for the sake of that city of God, which the lovers of this world despise. That city is eternal. No one is born there, because no one dies there. There, true and complete happiness exists, not as a goddess, but as a gift from God. From that city we receive the pledge of faith, and while we journey as pilgrims we long for its beauty. There, the sun does not rise on the good and the evil alike; instead, the Sun of Righteousness shelters the good alone. There, no one will labor under hardship at home to fill a public treasury, because the treasury of truth belongs to everyone. It was not only to reward the citizens of Rome, then, that her empire and glory were extended so remarkably. It was also so that the citizens of that eternal city, during their time as pilgrims here, might carefully and soberly reflect on these examples and understand how deeply they should love their heavenly homeland for the sake of eternal life, given how passionately the earthly city was loved by its own citizens for the sake of mere human glory.

For all that this brief mortal life amounts to, what does it really matter under whose government a dying man lives, as long as those who govern don't compel him to act wickedly or abandon his faith? Did Rome actually harm the nations it conquered and brought under its laws, except through the terrible slaughter that conquest required? If those nations had submitted willingly, the outcome might have been even better, though there would have been no glory of victory to speak of, since Rome would have had no one to defeat. And the Romans themselves, after all, were not exempt from the very laws they imposed on others. If the whole thing had happened without war, without Mars and Bellona, with no battles fought and no victories won, would the Romans and all the other peoples not have ended up in essentially the same position? This would have been especially true if what was later done with such wisdom and goodwill had been done from the beginning: extending Roman citizenship to everyone within the empire, making universal what had once been the privilege of a few. The only condition would have been that the poorer classes, those without land of their own, would be supported at public expense. That kind of contribution would have been paid far more willingly by free citizens who genuinely belonged to the republic than it ever could be wrung from a defeated and resentful people.

I honestly don't see what conquest does for the safety, the character, or certainly the dignity of human beings, except to feed that most senseless craving for glory, for which those who burned with excessive ambition "have received their reward" (Matt 6:2), having waged their desperate wars to get it. After all, don't the lands of the conquerors pay tribute just as the conquered do? Do the victors have access to some knowledge that others are denied? Are there not senators from the provinces who have never even laid eyes on Rome? Strip away the spectacle, and what are all people in the end but people? And even if the corruption of the age were somehow corrected, so that better men were genuinely honored above others, human honor would still not be worth much, for it is smoke without substance. But let us make use, even in these matters, of what God's generosity has given us. Let us consider what great things those men gave up, what hardships they endured, what desires they mastered, all for the sake of human glory, which came to them as a kind of reward for those virtues. Let this reflection serve to check our pride. The city that has been promised to us surpasses this earthly one as completely as heaven surpasses earth, as eternal life surpasses fleeting joy, as solid and lasting glory surpasses empty praise, as the company of angels surpasses the company of mortals, as the glory of the One who made the sun and moon surpasses the light of those very bodies. Given all of this, the citizens of so great a country should not think themselves to have done anything remarkable if, in order to obtain it, they have performed some good works or endured some hardships, when those men, for a merely earthly country, accomplished such extraordinary things and suffered so much. And there is one more thing especially worth noting: the forgiveness of sins, which gathers citizens into the heavenly city, has something in it that faintly resembles the asylum of Romulus, where fugitives from punishment for every kind of crime were gathered together to form the multitude from which that earthly state was built.

So what is it, really, for the eternal and heavenly city to turn away from all the pleasures this world has to offer? After all, Brutus did something far harder for the sake of a mere earthly city: he put his own son to death. The heavenly city demands nothing like that from anyone. And yet, what the heavenly country actually asks of us is far less severe than killing one's own child. It asks us to give our wealth to the poor rather than hoarding it for our children, or to let that wealth go when faith and righteousness demand it. Earthly riches don't make us or our children happy. They are either lost while we're still alive, or they pass after our death to people we may not even know, perhaps to people we would never have chosen. True happiness comes from God alone, who is the real wealth of the soul. Even Virgil, who sings Brutus's praises, acknowledges that executing his son brought him grief, writing:

"And call his own rebellious seed

For menaced liberty to bleed.

Unhappy father! however

The deed be judged by after days."

And yet in the very next line, the poet offers him some consolation in that grief: "His country's love shall all overbear."

Two things drove the Romans to their most admirable achievements: liberty and the desire for human praise. If a father could put his own son to death for the liberty of mortal men and for the approval of a mortal crowd, then what great sacrifice is it, really, for us to count Christ's poor among our own children? We do this not for human praise, but out of a genuine desire to free people, not from King Tarquin, but from demons and the prince of demons, and through the true liberty that has freed us from the dominion of sin, death, and the devil. Consider also the Roman commander surnamed Torquatus, who executed his own son, not because the young man had fought against his country, but because he had accepted an enemy's challenge and fought, even victoriously, in defiance of the orders his father had issued as general. Torquatus judged that the damage done by a contempt for authority was greater than any glory won by killing an enemy. If Torquatus could do that, why should anyone boast about despising earthly goods for the sake of a heavenly country, when those earthly goods are loved far less than sons? If Furius Camillus, condemned by his own envious countrymen despite having freed them from the bitter yoke of the Veientes, still went on to rescue that ungrateful country from the Gauls, it was because he had no other city in which he could live a life of glory. If Camillus did that, why should anyone be praised as having done something remarkable when, after suffering grievous and humiliating injury from carnal enemies within the church, he refuses to defect to heretics or stir up heresy himself, but instead defends the church against the most destructive perversions of heretical teaching? There is no other church, I say, not merely where one can live a life of glory, but where eternal life can be obtained at all. If Mucius, seeking peace with King Porsenna during a devastating war, failed to kill the king and slew another man by mistake, then thrust his right hand into a blazing altar and declared that many men like himself had conspired against Porsenna, so that the king, terrified by his boldness and the thought of such a conspiracy, immediately abandoned his military campaign and made peace, then who can speak of earning the kingdom of heaven as though it were a great thing, if for its sake he has given not one hand to the flames but his entire body, and not by his own choice but because he was persecuted by another? If Curtius spurred his horse and threw himself fully armed into a deep chasm, obeying the oracles of the gods, which had commanded that the Romans cast into it their greatest possession, and the Romans could only interpret this to mean that, since they excelled in men and arms, the gods required an armed man to be hurled into that destruction, then shall we call it a great thing when a man dies a similar death for the eternal city, not by throwing himself into a chasm of his own will, but at the hands of an enemy of his faith? Especially when his Lord, who is also the King of his country, has given him a far more certain word: "Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul" (Matt 10:28). If the Decii devoted themselves to death, consecrating themselves with ritual words so that, by falling and appeasing the wrath of the gods with their blood, they might deliver the Roman army, then the holy martyrs should not carry themselves with pride, as though they had done something especially meritorious to earn a place in that country where eternal life and true happiness dwell. They shed their blood loving not only the brothers for whom it was shed, but also, as they had been commanded, the very enemies by whom it was being shed, competing with one another in faithful love and loving faithfulness. If Marcus Pulvillus, while dedicating a temple to Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, received with complete indifference the false news of his son's death, news delivered with the deliberate intention of upsetting him so that he would leave and his colleague would claim the glory of the dedication, and if he received it so calmly that he even ordered his son's body to be thrown out unburied, because the love of glory had overwhelmed his grief, then how can anyone claim to have done something great by preaching the gospel, through which the citizens of the heavenly city are freed from countless errors and gathered in from their wanderings, when his Lord said to the man anxious about burying his father, "Follow me, and let the dead bury their dead" (Matt 8:22)? Regulus, rather than break his oath even to his most brutal enemies, returned to them from Rome itself, because, as he reportedly told the Romans when they tried to keep him, he could not hold the dignity of an honorable citizen in Rome after having been a slave to the Africans. The Carthaginians then tortured him to death because he had spoken against them in the senate. If Regulus did this, what tortures should not be endured for the sake of faithfulness to that country whose very blessedness faith itself leads us toward? And what will a person have given back to the Lord for all He has bestowed, if for the faithfulness owed to Him he suffers what Regulus suffered at the hands of his most ruthless enemies for the faithfulness he owed to them? And how should a Christian boast of his voluntary poverty, chosen so that during this life's pilgrimage he may travel more lightly on the road to that country where the true riches are, namely God Himself, when he hears or reads that Lucius Valerius, who died while serving as consul, was so poor that his funeral had to be paid for by a public collection? Or when he hears that Quintius Cincinnatus, who owned only four acres of land and worked them with his own hands, was taken from the plow to serve as dictator, an office even more honored than that of consul, and that after winning great glory by defeating the enemy he chose to remain in his poverty? Or how should anyone boast of having done something remarkable by refusing every worldly reward to maintain his connection with that heavenly and eternal country, when he hears that Fabricius could not be persuaded to abandon Rome even by the enormous gifts offered by Pyrrhus, king of the Epirots, who promised him a quarter of his kingdom, yet Fabricius preferred to stay in Rome as a poor private citizen? For when their republic, that is, the common interest of the people and the country, was at its most prosperous and wealthy, these men were so poor in their own homes that one of them, a man who had already served twice as consul, was expelled from that senate of poor men by the censor because he was found to own ten pounds of silver plate. Since the very men whose triumphs filled the public treasury were themselves so poor, should not all Christians, who hold their wealth in common for a far nobler purpose, namely, as it is written in Acts, to distribute to each according to his need, so that no one claims anything as his own but all things are held in common (Acts 4:35), should they not understand that they have no grounds for boasting? They do what they do to gain the fellowship of angels, while those Romans did very nearly the same thing simply to preserve the glory of Rome.

How could these stories, and others like them scattered throughout Roman history, have become so widely known and celebrated, if the Roman empire had not extended its reach so far and risen to such greatness through magnificent achievements? Through that empire, so vast in scope and so long in duration, so distinguished and glorious through the virtues of its great men, the reward these men sought was granted to their earnest ambitions. At the same time, their lives stand before us as necessary examples, meant to sting us with shame if we find that we have failed to hold fast to those virtues for the sake of the most glorious city of God, virtues that were, in their own way, mirrored by what those Romans held fast for the sake of the glory of an earthly city. And if we do find that we have held to those virtues, we must not grow proud because of it, since, as the apostle says, "the sufferings of the present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us" (Rom 8:18). In terms of human and temporal glory, however, the lives of those ancient Romans were considered more than worthy. Therefore, when we look at things in the light of that truth which was veiled in the Old Testament and revealed in the New, namely, that God is not to be worshipped for the sake of earthly and temporary benefits, which divine providence distributes freely to the good and evil alike, but for the sake of eternal life, everlasting gifts, and membership in the heavenly city itself, we see clearly that the Jews were most justly handed over as a trophy to Roman glory. For those Romans, who rested their hopes on earthly renown and pursued it through whatever virtues they possessed, conquered a people who, in their profound depravity, murdered and rejected the very one who gives true glory and the eternal city.

There is, of course, a real difference between the desire for human glory and the desire for power. A person consumed by an excessive craving for human glory will also tend to hunger after dominance, yet those who genuinely seek the praise of others at least try not to disappoint the people whose judgment they respect. After all, there are many admirable qualities that discerning observers can recognize, even if few people actually possess them. It is through these qualities that certain individuals press forward toward glory, honor, and authority, as Sallust describes when he writes that "they press on by the true way."

But whoever lacks that desire for glory which makes a person fear the disapproval of others, and instead craves domination and power for their own sake, will very often pursue what they want through outright crime. The person who does desire glory, by contrast, is at least driven to pursue it either through genuine virtue or through deception and pretense, wanting to appear good even when they are not. This is why, for someone who truly possesses virtues, despising glory is itself a great virtue. The contempt is visible to God, but it cannot be verified by human judgment. Whatever a person does in public to demonstrate that they don't care about praise, if observers suspect they're doing it precisely to earn greater admiration, that person has no way to prove to those suspicious minds that things are actually as they claim. But the one who genuinely despises the praise of others also dismisses the rashness of those who suspect them. Their salvation, however, is not something he dismisses, if he is truly good. The righteousness of a person who receives his virtues from the Spirit of God runs so deep that he loves even his enemies, and loves them in such a way that he wants his haters and detractors to turn toward righteousness and become his companions, not in any earthly country, but in a heavenly one. As for those who praise him, though he places little value on their praise itself, he does not place little value on their love. He doesn't dodge their praise out of a desire to escape their affection. Instead, he works earnestly to redirect their praise toward the One from whom everything genuinely praiseworthy in any person ultimately comes. But the person who despises glory while remaining hungry for domination surpasses even the beasts in cruelty and self-indulgence. This was true of certain Romans who, lacking any desire for esteem, were not lacking in their thirst for power, and history confirms there were many such men. Yet it was Nero Caesar who first reached the summit, and what we might call the citadel, of this particular vice. His self-indulgence was so extreme that one would have thought there was nothing fierce or dangerous in him, and his cruelty so severe that, had the opposite not been well established, no one would have suspected any softness in his character at all. Even so, power and domination are not granted to men like these except through the providence of the most high God, when He judges that the condition of human affairs deserves such rulers. Scripture is clear on this point, for the Wisdom of God declares: "By me kings reign, and tyrants possess the land" (Prov 8:15-16). Now, lest anyone think that "tyrants" here refers not to wicked and godless kings but to strong men in the older sense of the word, as Virgil says:

"For know that treaty may not stand

Where king greets king and joins not hand,"

In another place it is stated with complete clarity about God, that He "makes the man who is a hypocrite reign because of the perversity of the people." So while I have done my best to explain why God, who alone is true and just, helped the Romans, who were good by the standards of an earthly state, to acquire the glory of so great an empire, there may still be a more hidden cause, known better to God than to us, rooted in the varying merits of the human race. Among all who are genuinely devout, there is at least this point of agreement: no one without true piety, that is, the true worship of the true God, can possess true virtue, and any virtue that serves as a slave to human praise is not true virtue at all. Even so, those who are not citizens of the eternal city, which the sacred Scriptures call the city of God, are more useful to the earthly city when they possess even that lesser virtue than if they had none at all. Yet nothing could be more fortunate for human affairs than this: that by the mercy of God, those who are endowed with genuine piety of life, if they also have the skill to govern people, should likewise be given the power to do so. Such men, however great their virtues in this life, attribute those virtues entirely to the grace of God, who bestowed them on those who were willing, believing, and seeking. At the same time, they understand how far they fall short of that perfection of righteousness found in the company of the holy angels, the perfection they are striving to make themselves worthy of. And however much that other virtue may be praised and celebrated, the virtue that, without true piety, is enslaved to human glory, it cannot be compared even to the feeble beginnings of the virtue found in the saints, whose hope rests entirely in the grace and mercy of the true God.

Some philosophers place the highest human good in virtue itself. To shame those other philosophers who do approve of the virtues but measure them entirely against the standard of bodily pleasure, treating pleasure as something worth pursuing for its own sake while treating virtue as merely a means to that pleasure, these philosophers like to paint a vivid word-picture. In it, Pleasure sits like a pampered queen on her royal throne, while all the virtues are reduced to her servants, watching for her slightest signal so they can carry out her every command. She orders Prudence to stay constantly alert, always scheming to keep Pleasure safely in power. She directs Justice to dispense whatever favors are needed to secure the friendships that bodily pleasure requires, and to avoid wronging anyone, since lawbreaking might threaten the security in which Pleasure thrives. She instructs Fortitude to keep a firm grip on its mistress, Pleasure, whenever the body suffers some affliction short of death, so that by calling up memories of past delights, the sharpness of present pain can be softened. She commands Temperance to limit even the most beloved indulgences to a careful measure, since excess might damage the body's health, and with it Pleasure itself, which the Epicureans regard as consisting primarily in physical well-being. In this picture, the virtues, for all their dignity and glory, are nothing more than slaves to Pleasure, serving her like some overbearing and disreputable mistress.

These philosophers of ours say there is nothing more disgraceful and monstrous than this picture, nothing that good people can bear to look at. And they're right. But I don't think the picture would be any more fitting even if it were redrawn so that the virtues appeared as servants of human glory rather than of pleasure. Even if that glory isn't a sensual woman, it's still bloated with vanity. It's beneath the dignity and solidity of the virtues to portray them as serving such glory, so that Prudence plans nothing, Justice distributes nothing, and Temperance restrains nothing except to win human approval and feed vainglory. Nor can those who take this approach escape the charge of baseness by claiming to despise glory, dismissing others' opinions, thinking themselves wise, and congratulating themselves on it. Their virtue, if it deserves that name at all, is simply subjected to human praise by another route; because the person who seeks to please himself is still, at bottom, seeking to please a human being. But the person who, with genuine devotion to God, whom he loves, trusts, and hopes in, focuses more on the ways he falls short than on whatever he may get right, and who attributes any good in himself not to his own merit but to the mercy of the One he fears to disappoint, giving thanks for what has been healed in him and praying for the healing of what has not yet been healed: that person is on an entirely different footing.

These things being clear, we do not credit the power to grant kingdoms and empires to anyone except the true God. He gives happiness in the kingdom of heaven to the faithful alone, but He grants earthly power to both the faithful and the wicked, as it pleases Him, and His pleasure is always just. We have already said something about the principles that guide His governance, as far as He has seen fit to reveal them, but it is far beyond our capacity to probe the hidden depths of human hearts and determine, through careful examination, the merits of various kingdoms. The one true God, who never abandons the human race without just judgment and help, gave a kingdom to the Romans when He chose, and as great a kingdom as He chose, just as He did for the Assyrians and even the Persians. The Persians, as their own writings confirm, worshipped only two gods: one good and one evil. I will say nothing more here about the Hebrew people, whom I have already discussed as much as seemed necessary; they, for as long as they remained a kingdom, worshipped none but the true God. The same God who gave the Persians their harvests, though they did not worship the goddess Segetia; who gave them the other blessings of the earth, though they did not worship the many gods the Romans imagined to preside, each over some particular thing or several of them over each individual thing; this same God, I say, gave the Persians dominion, though they worshipped none of the gods to whom the Romans believed they owed their empire. And the same principle holds for individuals as much as for nations. The God who gave power to Marius gave it also to Caius Caesar; the God who gave it to Augustus gave it also to Nero; the God who gave it to the most gracious emperors, the Vespasians, father and son, gave it also to the cruel Domitian. And finally, to avoid the need to go through them all: the God who gave power to the Christian Constantine gave it also to the apostate Julian, whose gifted mind was corrupted by a sacrilegious and detestable curiosity, driven by his hunger for power. Because Julian was enslaved to that curiosity and trusted in worthless oracles, he burned the ships carrying the provisions his army needed, confident of victory. He then threw himself into recklessly bold enterprises with rash enthusiasm, and was soon killed, a fitting consequence of his own carelessness. He left his army without food in enemy territory, in a situation so desperate that it could never have escaped without pushing the boundaries of the Roman empire itself, in violation of that omen of the god Terminus I mentioned in the preceding book. Terminus yielded to necessity, though he had not yielded to Jupiter. All of this is plainly ruled and governed by the one God according to His will; and if His reasons are hidden from us, does that make them unjust?

In the same way, God determines how long wars last. He does so according to His righteous will and mercy, whether to afflict or to comfort humanity, which is why some wars are brief and others drag on for years. The war against the Pirates and the Third Punic War were both brought to a close with remarkable speed. The war of the fugitive gladiators, though it saw many Roman generals and consuls defeated and left Italy badly ravaged, was still finished within three years, even as it brought an end to so much else during that time. The Picentes, the Marsi, and the Peligni were not distant peoples but Italian nations who had served loyally under Roman rule for a long time. They attempted to assert their independence even after countless other nations had been brought under Roman power and Carthage itself had been destroyed. In this Italian war, the Romans suffered defeat after defeat, losing two consuls and many distinguished senators besides. Yet even this disaster did not drag on indefinitely; the fifth year brought it to a close. The Second Punic War, by contrast, lasted eighteen years and inflicted such devastating losses on the republic that it nearly broke Roman power entirely. In just two battles, roughly seventy thousand Romans fell. The First Punic War ran for twenty-three years before it ended. The Mithridatic War lasted forty years. And for anyone who imagines that Romans in their celebrated early days were far more capable of ending wars quickly, consider that the Samnite War dragged on for nearly fifty years, during which the Romans were so thoroughly beaten that they were forced to pass under the yoke. Yet because they valued glory more than justice, and seemed to pursue justice only as a means to glory, they ultimately broke the peace and the treaty they had agreed to. I raise all of this because many people, ignorant of history, and some who know it well but choose to ignore it, will see any war in the Christian era last a little longer than they anticipated and immediately launch a bitter and arrogant attack on our religion. They cry out that if Christianity had never come, the old gods would still be worshipped through the ancient rites, and that with the help of Mars and Bellona, Roman courage would have brought even this war to a swift conclusion. Let those who have actually read history recall the long, grinding wars with their shifting outcomes and terrible bloodshed that the ancient Romans endured. The earth, like a storm-tossed sea, is subject to upheaval from tempests of evil in varying degrees; this has always been true. Let such critics occasionally admit what they would rather not, and stop recklessly speaking against God, destroying themselves in the process and misleading those who don't know any better.

Yet they never give thanks for what God accomplished so recently, within living memory, in ways both wonderful and merciful. Instead, they do everything in their power to bury these events in collective forgetfulness. But if we were to stay silent about them, we would be just as guilty of ingratitude. When Radagaisus, king of the Goths, had positioned himself with a vast and savage army almost at the gates of Rome, he was defeated so swiftly and so completely in a single day that not one Roman soldier was wounded, let alone killed, while more than a hundred thousand of his men were cut down. He and his sons were captured and immediately executed, receiving exactly the punishment they deserved. Consider what would have happened if a man so utterly godless, leading a host equally godless, had actually entered the city. Who would he have spared? Which martyrs' tombs would he have left untouched? In his treatment of anyone, would he have shown the slightest fear of God? Whose blood would he have held back from spilling? Whose honor would he have cared to protect? And how loudly the pagans would have praised their gods for it. How arrogantly they would have boasted that Radagaisus had triumphed because he had won the gods' favor through his daily sacrifices, something the Christian religion had prevented the Romans from doing. In fact, as he was advancing toward the very place where he would be crushed at the command of the Supreme Majesty, his reputation was spreading everywhere, and word reached us in Carthage that the pagans were openly claiming and celebrating that he would never be defeated, because the gods who favored him were protecting him in return for the sacrifices he reportedly offered them each day. Those gods, they said, would never abandon a man who honored them, unlike the Romans, who not only refused to offer such sacrifices themselves but wouldn't even allow anyone else to do so. And now these same wretched people refuse to thank God for His extraordinary mercy. God had determined to punish human corruption, a corruption that deserved far harsher punishment than anything the barbarians had done, yet He restrained His anger with remarkable gentleness. First, He ensured that the Gothic king was defeated in a spectacular fashion, so that no glory would fall to the demons Radagaisus was known to be invoking, which might otherwise have shaken the faith of weaker souls. Then, when Rome itself was to be taken, He arranged that it would fall to barbarians who, in a complete departure from every custom of ancient warfare, protected those who sought refuge in the sacred places out of reverence for the Christian religion. These barbarians actively opposed the demons and their impious rites, so much so that they seemed to be waging a far more ferocious war against those spiritual powers than against any human enemy. In this way, the true Lord and Governor of all things both disciplined the Romans with mercy and, through the astonishing defeat of those who worshipped demons, demonstrated that such sacrifices are not even necessary for safety in this present life. The hope is that those who are willing to think clearly rather than cling stubbornly to their positions will not abandon true religion under the pressures of the moment, but will hold to it all the more firmly, in confident expectation of eternal life.

We do not say that certain Christian emperors were happy simply because they reigned for a long time, or because they died peacefully and passed the empire on to their sons, or because they defeated the republic's enemies, or because they successfully defended themselves against rebellious citizens. These and other gifts and comforts of this sorrowful life have been granted even to worshippers of demons who have no part in the kingdom of God. That fact traces back to the mercy of God, who does not want those who believe in Him to treat such things as the highest good. Rather, we say that emperors are truly happy if they rule justly; if they resist being swept up in the flattery of those who heap extravagant honors on them and the fawning of those who bow before them with excessive humility, and instead remember that they are only human; if they put their power in service of God's majesty by using it to extend His worship as widely as possible; if they fear, love, and worship God; if they love His kingdom more than their own, and are not troubled to share it with others; if they are slow to punish and quick to forgive; if they apply punishment only as necessary for good governance and the defense of the republic, never to satisfy personal grudges; if they grant pardon not to let wrongdoing go unchecked, but in the genuine hope that the offender will change; if they balance whatever severity they are compelled to exercise with gentleness and generosity; if they keep their appetites in check when they could easily indulge them without restraint; if they would rather govern their own corrupt desires than govern any nation; and if they do all of this not out of a burning hunger for empty glory, but out of love for eternal life, while never neglecting to offer to the true God, who is their God, the sacrifices of humility, contrition, and prayer for their sins. Christian emperors like these, we say, are happy even now by virtue of hope, and are destined to be happy in full reality when what we are waiting for finally arrives.

The good God, knowing that men who believe He should be worshipped with a view to eternal life might conclude that no one could attain such high standing and earthly dominion without worshipping demons (assuming those spirits held great power over such things), gave to the Emperor Constantine, who worshipped not demons but the true God Himself, an abundance of earthly blessings so complete that no one would even dare to wish for more. God also granted him the honor of founding a city to stand alongside the Roman empire, a daughter of Rome itself, yet built without a single temple or image of the demons. Constantine reigned for a long period as sole emperor, holding and defending the entire Roman world by his own hand. He was supremely victorious in his military campaigns and remarkably successful in overthrowing tyrants. He died at a great age, from illness and the natural decline of old age, and left his sons to inherit the empire after him. Yet, so that no emperor would convert to Christianity simply to earn the kind of prosperity Constantine enjoyed (since everyone should become a Christian for the sake of eternal life, not earthly reward), God took Jovian far sooner than He had taken Julian, and permitted Gratian to be killed by the sword of a tyrant. Even so, Gratian's fate was far less bitter than that of the great Pompey, for Pompey could not be avenged by Cato, the man he had effectively left as heir to the civil war. Gratian, by contrast, was avenged by Theodosius, whom he had made his co-emperor, even though he had a younger brother of his own. In doing so, Gratian showed that he valued a trustworthy partnership more than the reach of his own power. Pious minds, of course, have no real need of such consolations.

Theodosius not only remained loyal to Gratian throughout his lifetime, but after Gratian's death, he acted as a true Christian by taking Gratian's young brother Valentinian under his protection as co-emperor, after Valentinian had been driven out by Maximus, the murderer of his father. Theodosius shielded the boy with fatherly care, even though he could easily have disposed of him, since Valentinian was completely without resources. Had Theodosius been driven by a hunger for power rather than a desire to do good, he would have done exactly that. Instead, his far greater satisfaction came from adopting the boy, preserving his imperial dignity, and comforting him through genuine kindness and humanity. Later, when Maximus's growing success made him a serious threat, Theodosius found himself beset with anxiety but refused to turn toward superstitious or unlawful means of guidance. Instead, he sent word to John, a servant of God living in the Egyptian desert, whose reputation for prophetic gifts had spread widely. From John he received the assurance of victory. He then moved against the tyrant Maximus, defeated him, and with deep compassion and respect restored young Valentinian to the throne from which he had been expelled. When Valentinian was shortly afterward killed, whether by secret assassination or some other plot or accident, Theodosius again received a response from the prophet and placed his full confidence in it. He marched against the tyrant Eugenius, who had been unlawfully installed as Valentinian's successor, and crushed his formidable army more through prayer than through the sword. Some soldiers who were present at the battle told me personally that a powerful wind blew from Theodosius's side toward the enemy and tore the weapons right out of their hands. Not only did it drive the darts hurled against the enemy with greater force, but it also turned the enemy's own projectiles back against them. Even the poet Claudian, though he had no connection to the Christian faith, wrote in praise of Theodosius: "O prince, too much beloved by God, for you Aeolus pours armed tempests from their caves; for you the air fights, and the winds with one accord obey your bugles." As victor, and just as he had believed and predicted, he toppled the statues of Jupiter that had been consecrated through some kind of ritual against him and erected in the Alps. The golden thunderbolts from those statues he cheerfully and generously handed over to his couriers, who, in the spirit of the occasion, were joking that they would be delighted to be struck by thunderbolts of that quality. The sons of his enemies, whose fathers had been killed not so much by his direct orders as by the fury of war, took refuge in a church. Though they were not yet Christians, Theodosius seized the opportunity to draw them toward the faith and treated them with genuine Christian love. He did not strip them of their property; on the contrary, he allowed them to keep it and even added honors on top of it. He refused to let personal grievances shape how he treated anyone once the war was over. He was nothing like Cinna, Marius, Sulla, or men of that kind, who wanted to keep civil wars alive even after they had ended. Theodosius grieved that such wars had broken out at all, rather than wishing to use their conclusion as a pretext for further harm. Throughout all of this, from the very beginning of his reign, he never stopped defending a troubled church against the impious through laws that were both just and merciful, laws made necessary by the heretical emperor Valens, who had favored the Arians and inflicted severe suffering on the church. Theodosius rejoiced more in being a member of that church than in being a king on earth. He ordered the idols of the pagans to be destroyed everywhere, understanding clearly that even earthly blessings are not in the power of demons but in the hands of the true God. And what could be more admirable than the religious humility he showed when, pressed by certain close associates, he avenged the terrible crime committed against the Thessalonians, a crime he had promised the bishops he would pardon? Brought under the discipline of the church, he performed public penance in such a way that the sight of his imperial majesty prostrated before God moved the people interceding for him to weep more deeply than the anger of the offended had ever made them fear him. These deeds, and many others like them that would take too long to recount, he carried with him out of this world, where even the greatest human greatness is nothing but vapor. The reward for such works is eternal happiness, which God gives, but only to those who are genuinely and sincerely devoted to Him. All other blessings of this life, including the world itself, light, air, earth, water, food, the human soul, the body, the senses, the mind, and life itself, He distributes freely to the good and the wicked alike. Among these blessings must also be counted the possession of empire, whose extent He adjusts according to the needs of His providential governance at different times in history.

At this point, I see that we must address those who, having been refuted and exposed by the clearest possible evidence showing that the multitude of false gods is useless for obtaining the earthly things that foolish people crave, now try to argue that the gods should be worshipped not for the sake of this present life but for the life to come after death. As for those who, out of love for this world's approval, are willing to worship empty things and show no concern that they are left to their childish thinking, I believe the five books written so far have answered them sufficiently. After I published the first three and they began to circulate widely, I heard that certain people were preparing some kind of written response. I was then told that they had already written it but were waiting for a safe moment to release it. My advice to such people is this: don't wish for something that can do you no good. It is very easy for a person to convince himself that he has answered an argument when he has simply refused to stay quiet. What, after all, is more talkative than vanity? And though vanity can shout louder than the truth if it chooses, it is not, for all that, more powerful than the truth. Let these people think carefully about everything I have said, and if, setting aside partisan bias, they honestly see that my arguments are the kind that their most shameless bluster and satirical posturing might rattle but never uproot, then let them rein in their absurdities. Let them choose to be corrected by the wise rather than applauded by fools. If what they are waiting for is not the freedom to speak the truth but the license to mock, they may find themselves in the position Cicero described when speaking of someone: "Oh, wretched man, who was at liberty to sin." Whoever thinks himself fortunate because he is free to mock would in fact be far better off if that freedom were denied him entirely. He could then, setting aside empty boasting, engage honestly with those whose views he opposes, and listen, as is fitting, with honor, gravity, and candor to everything that can be offered by those he meets in genuine debate.