The City of God: Book 6

In the five preceding books, I believe I have made a sufficient case against those who hold that the many false gods, which Christian truth exposes as worthless idols, unclean spirits, dangerous demons, or at best created things rather than the Creator, deserve to be worshipped for the benefit of this mortal life and earthly affairs, with that form of devotion the Greeks call *latreia* (the worship owed to the one true God alone). And who could deny that, when faced with extreme stupidity and stubbornness, neither these five books nor any number of books could ever be enough? When someone counts it a point of pride to resist the force of truth no matter how compelling, that person is heading toward his own ruin, tyrannized by a vice as serious as any. No matter how diligently a physician works to heal a patient, the disease remains unconquered, not through any failure on the doctor's part, but because the patient himself is beyond cure. Those who read carefully, however, weighing what they encounter with genuine thought and without the excessive stubbornness that comes from clinging too long to a cherished error, will more likely conclude that the five completed books have given the subject more attention than it strictly required, rather than less. Nor could they have doubted that all the hatred which ignorant people try to direct at the Christian religion, blaming it for the disasters of this life and the ruin and upheaval of earthly things, while the educated not only look the other way but actively encourage that hatred against their own better judgment, driven by a reckless impiety: that hatred, I say, is utterly devoid of sound reasoning and is filled with the most careless recklessness and the most destructive hostility.

Next in the order I promised, I need to address and refute those who argue that the gods of the nations, which Christian truth has dismantled, deserve worship not for the sake of this present life, but for the sake of the life to come. The best place to begin is with the truthful words of the holy psalm: "Blessed is the man whose hope is the Lord God, and who does not look to vanities and lying follies" (Ps 40:4). That said, among all those who have trafficked in vanities and lying follies, the philosophers deserve far more patience than the common people. The philosophers, after all, rejected the popular opinions and errors outright, while the people erected images to their deities and either invented countless false and degrading stories about those they called immortal gods, or accepted stories that others had already invented, and then wove those fictions directly into their worship and sacred rites.

With those men who, though they won't openly admit their convictions, still signal their disapproval through muttered objections during debates on the subject, it may be worth raising the following question: For the sake of the life that comes after death, should we worship not the one God who made all spiritual and physical creation, but rather the many gods who, as some of these philosophers maintain, were themselves made by that one God and placed by Him in their respective exalted spheres, and are therefore considered more excellent and more noble than everything else? But who would seriously argue that those gods, some of whom I mentioned in the fourth book, each assigned to oversight of some minor domain, are capable of granting eternal life? Surely the most learned and sharp-minded men, who pride themselves on writing for the great benefit of humanity by explaining which god should be worshipped for which purpose and what should be requested from each, so as to avoid the kind of ridiculous confusion a stage comedian might play for laughs, such as asking Liber for water or the Lymphs for wine, surely those men would never tell someone praying to the immortal gods that if he asks the Lymphs for wine and they reply, "We have water; go ask Liber for wine," he could reasonably respond, "If you have no wine, at least give me eternal life." What could be more absurd than that? Would not the Lymphs, who are known to be easily moved to laughter, burst out laughing (assuming they don't try to deceive like demons) and answer the petitioner: "Do you really think, O man, that we have life (*vitam*) in our power, when you've just heard that we don't even have the vine (*vitem*)?" It is therefore the height of foolish presumption to seek and hope for eternal life from gods who are said to preside over the separate minor concerns of this brief and sorrowful life, and over whatever is useful for sustaining and supporting it, in such a rigidly divided way that asking one god for what belongs to another's domain looks exactly like a comedian's routine. When comedians do this on stage, knowing full well what they're doing, audiences rightly laugh. When foolish people do it in real life, not knowing any better, the world rightly mocks them. As for the gods that various states have established, learned men have cleverly worked out and passed down a system specifying which god or goddess should be petitioned for each particular need: what to seek from Liber, what from the Lymphs, what from Vulcan, and so on through the rest, some of whom I mentioned in the fourth book while others I chose to leave out. Now, if it is already a mistake to ask Ceres for wine, Liber for bread, Vulcan for water, or the Lymphs for fire, how much greater an absurdity should it be considered to petition any one of these for eternal life?

So, if our entire inquiry into which gods or goddesses might grant earthly kingdoms to human beings has led us to one clear conclusion, namely that even temporal kingdoms are not established by any of those many false deities, then how much more insane is it to believe that eternal life, which is beyond all comparison more valuable than any earthly kingdom, could be given by any of these gods? The reason we concluded that such gods cannot even grant an earthly kingdom was not because they are so great and exalted that something so small and lowly falls beneath their notice. Rather, it was because, however reasonably a person might, given the fragility of human life, look down on the crumbling heights of earthly power, these gods have shown themselves to be utterly unworthy of being trusted with even that. They have proven themselves unfit to grant or preserve even mortal kingdoms. And so, as we demonstrated in the last two books of this work, where this question is treated at length, not one god from that entire crowd, whether from the common ranks or the noble ones, is capable of giving mortal kingdoms to mortal men. How much less, then, is any such god capable of making mortals immortal?

Beyond this, if we accept the position of those we're now arguing against, that the gods should be worshipped not for the sake of this present life but for the life to come, then they certainly shouldn't be worshipped on account of those particular functions parceled out among them, not by any rational principle, but by pure guesswork. I'm referring to the gods whose worshippers insist they must be honored for all the desirable things of this mortal life, a claim I've argued against at sufficient length in the five preceding books. With that established, consider the following scenario: suppose the goddess Juventas actually caused those who worshipped her to enjoy remarkable physical vigor in their youth, while those who scorned her either died young or grew prematurely cold and sluggish like old men; and suppose bearded Fortuna actually graced her worshippers' cheeks with fuller, more handsome beards than anyone else, while those who ignored her were left either beardless or poorly bearded. Even then, we would be entirely right to say that these gods had power, but power narrowly confined to their specific domains, and that therefore eternal life should no more be sought from Juventas, who couldn't even grant a beard, than any good thing beyond this life should be expected from Fortuna Barbata, who has no power even in this life to grant the very age at which a beard grows. But as things actually stand, their worship doesn't even deliver on those limited things supposedly under their control. Many devotees of Juventas have been anything but vigorous in their youth, while many who never worshipped her have thrived with youthful strength. Many suppliants of Fortuna Barbata have failed to grow any beard at all, not even an unimpressive one, leaving those who prayed to her for a beard to be mocked by her bearded despisers. Given all this, can the human heart really be so foolish as to believe that a form of worship it already recognizes as empty and absurd with respect to the very temporal, fleeting gifts each god supposedly oversees, somehow becomes fruitful when it comes to eternal life? And it's worth noting that not even those who invented this elaborate division of labor among the gods, parceling out these petty temporal functions among them so that none would sit idle, ever actually claimed these gods could grant eternal life. They had simply assumed there must be an enormous number of gods, and they needed to keep them all occupied.

Who has investigated these matters more carefully than Marcus Varro? Who has uncovered them with greater learning? Who has considered them more attentively, distinguished them more sharply, or written about them more thoroughly and completely? He may not be the most captivating writer, but he is so rich in knowledge and wisdom that in all the learning we call secular, and they call liberal, he teaches the student of ideas as much as Cicero delights the student of words. Even Cicero himself pays him this tribute, saying in his Academic books that he had held the disputation recorded there with Marcus Varro, "a man," he adds, "unquestionably the most acute of all men, and without any doubt the most learned." He does not call him the most eloquent or the most fluent, since Varro was genuinely weak in that regard; he calls him "the most acute of all men." And in those same books, the Academica, where Cicero argues that everything should be held in doubt, he still describes Varro as "without any doubt the most learned." He was so certain of this that he set aside the skepticism he typically applies to everything, as though, on the very eve of arguing for Academic doubt, he had forgotten, in this one instance, that he was an Academic. In the first book, when he praises Varro's literary works, he writes: "Us straying and wandering in our own city like strangers, your books, as it were, brought home, so that at last we might know who we were and where we were. You opened up to us the age of our country, the sequence of seasons, the laws of sacred things and of the priests. You revealed to us the customs of private and public life. You pointed out the proper places for religious ceremonies and informed us about sacred sites. You showed us the names, kinds, offices, and causes of all things divine and human."

This man, then, with his extraordinary range of knowledge and accomplishments, described so aptly by Terentian in one elegant verse as "Varro, a man universally informed," read so much that we marvel he found time to write, and wrote so much that we can scarcely believe anyone could have read it all. This man, so remarkable in both talent and learning, might perhaps have avoided writing so many ridiculous, contemptible, and detestable things, even if he had been an opponent and destroyer of the so-called divine traditions he documented, and had dismissed them as superstition rather than genuine religion. But instead, he both worshipped these gods and defended their worship. In that same literary work, he admitted he feared they would perish, not through any enemy assault, but through the sheer indifference of Roman citizens. He claimed to be rescuing them from this disgrace, preserving them in the memory of future generations through his books, with a devotion far more valuable than that of Metellus, who reportedly saved the sacred objects of Vesta from the flames, or Aeneas, who rescued the Penates from the burning of Troy. And yet, despite all this, he produced writings that both the wise and the unwise rightly judge to be unfit for reading and deeply hostile to genuine religious truth. What are we to conclude from this? Surely that a man of the sharpest intellect and the deepest learning, not yet set free by the Holy Spirit, was simply overwhelmed by the customs and laws of his own state. Unable to remain silent about the things that held such power over him, he spoke of them under the guise of defending religion.

He wrote forty-one books on antiquities, which he divided into human affairs and divine affairs. Twenty-five books were devoted to human things and sixteen to divine things. Within the human section, he organized his material around four categories, giving six books to each: who performs, where they perform, when they perform, and what they perform. So the first six books covered people; the second six, places; the third six, times; and the final six, actions. Four times six gives only twenty-four, of course, but he placed a single introductory work at the front that addressed all these categories together, bringing the total to twenty-five.

In divine matters, he maintained the same organizational structure throughout, at least as far as it concerned the rituals performed for the gods. Sacred rites involve men, places, times, and the rites themselves. These four categories he covered across twelve books, devoting three books to each. The first three dealt with men, the next three with places, the third set with times, and the fourth with sacred rites, laying out with remarkable precision who should perform them, where, when, and what exactly should be done. But since it was also necessary to address the most obvious question of all, namely to whom these rites should be performed, he added a final three books on the gods themselves. Those five groups of three made fifteen books in total. The complete work, however, runs to sixteen, as we have noted, because he placed a single introductory book at the very beginning, covering in broad strokes everything that follows. Once that introduction was complete, he returned to subdivide the first three books according to his fivefold scheme as it pertained to men: the first covering high priests, the second augurs, and the third the fifteen men who presided over the sacred ceremonies. The second group of three addressed places, with one book on chapels, another on temples, and a third on religious sites more generally. The following three, which covered times and festival days, were divided into one book on holidays, one on the circus games, and one on theatrical performances. Of the fourth group, dealing with sacred things, one book was devoted to consecrations, another to private rites, and the last to public ones. In the three remaining books, the gods themselves finally appear, as though arriving at the end of a grand procession for whose sake all this elaborate preparation was made. The first of these books covers the certain gods, the second the uncertain ones, and the third and final book treats the chief and select gods.

Looking across this entire series of elegant and carefully reasoned distinctions, anyone who is not, through sheer stubbornness, an enemy to himself will easily see, from what has already been said and from what will be said later, that it is futile to seek or hope for eternal life through these institutions, and even presumptuous to desire it. These institutions are either the work of human beings or of demons: not those they call good demons, but, to speak plainly, unclean and undeniably malicious spirits, who with remarkable cunning and stealth plant harmful ideas in the minds of the ungodly, and sometimes present those ideas openly to their understanding. Through these corrupting influences, the human mind grows progressively more foolish and loses its capacity to align itself with and rest in the unchanging, eternal truth. These spirits then work to reinforce such ideas through every form of deceptive testimony available to them. Varro himself acknowledges that he wrote about human affairs first and divine affairs second, because states came into existence first, and these religious institutions were established by them afterward. But the true religion was not established by any earthly state. On the contrary, it is the true religion that established the heavenly city. That religion is inspired and taught by the true God, who gives eternal life to those who genuinely worship Him.

Here is Varro's explanation for why he wrote about human affairs first and divine affairs second: since religious institutions were created by human beings, human beings must logically come first. He puts it this way: "As the painter comes before the painted canvas, and the mason before the building, so states come before the institutions those states create." However, he adds that if he had been writing about the complete nature of the gods, he would have addressed divine things first and human things second, as though he were actually writing about only a portion of the divine nature rather than all of it. But this raises an obvious problem: even a portion of the divine nature, one would think, should take precedence over human nature. So why, in those final three books where he carefully examines the certain gods, the uncertain gods, and the select gods, does he appear to leave out no part of the divine nature at all? Why does he say, "If we had been writing on the whole nature of the gods, we would have completed the divine things before touching the human?" The logic here forces us into one of three positions: either he writes about the whole nature of the gods, or about some part of it, or about none of it at all. If he covers all of it, then it should certainly come before human affairs. If he covers only part of it, why shouldn't even that part, by its very nature, precede human affairs? Surely even a portion of the divine deserves to rank above the whole of humanity. And if it seems too much to place even a fragment of the divine above all human things, that fragment is still surely worthy of precedence over Rome specifically, since his books on human affairs concern not the whole world but only Rome. He openly compares himself to a painter before a canvas or a mason before a building, and in doing so he openly admits that even these divine institutions were, in the end, constructed by human hands.

That leaves only the third option: he wrote about no divine nature at all. He simply didn't want to say so directly, and instead left it for perceptive readers to work out for themselves. When someone says "not all," we normally take that to mean "some," but it can also mean "none," since what is none is neither all nor some. As Varro himself says, if he had been writing about the complete nature of the gods, that subject would have deserved first place in the order of writing. But as the truth makes plain, even if Varro won't say so, the divine nature should have taken precedence over Roman affairs whether it covered all of divinity or only some of it. Since it is placed after, the conclusion is that it covers none. His ordering, then, was not driven by a desire to elevate human things above divine things; it was driven by his unwillingness to place falsehoods above truths. In what he wrote about human affairs, he followed the actual record of events. But in what he wrote about so-called divine affairs, what was he following if not idle speculation about empty fictions? This, one suspects, is precisely what he wanted to signal in a subtle way, not only by writing about divine things after human things, but by explaining why he did so. Had he offered no explanation, readers might have supplied their own interpretations. But the reason he gave closes off that possibility and makes it sufficiently clear that he was giving priority to human beings over human institutions, not to human nature over divine nature. In writing those books on divine affairs, he was not writing about the truth that belongs to nature but about the falsehood that belongs to error. He said as much more directly elsewhere (as I noted in Book 4), stating that if he had been founding a new city himself, he would have written according to the order of nature; but since he had only inherited an old one, he had no choice but to follow its established customs.

What are we to make of Varro's claim that there are three kinds of theology, meaning three distinct accounts of the gods? He calls the first mythical, the second physical, and the third civil. If Latin usage allowed it, we might render the first kind as "fabular," but "fabulous" will serve just as well, since "mythical" derives from the Greek *μῦθος*, meaning fable. The second kind, "natural," is already acceptable in common speech. The third Varro himself named in Latin, calling it "civil." He then explains: "The kind called *mythical* is used chiefly by the poets; *physical*, by the philosophers; *civil*, by the people." Of the first kind, he says, "it contains many fictions that contradict the dignity and nature of the immortal gods. Here we find one god born from a head, another from a thigh, another from drops of blood. Here we find gods who have stolen, committed adultery, and served as slaves to men. In short, every manner of thing is attributed to the gods in this account, things that would be shameful not merely for any man, but even for the most contemptible." Wherever he could, wherever he dared, wherever he judged it safe to do so, Varro made clear without any ambiguity how deeply the lying fables had wronged the nature of the gods. He was speaking, after all, not about natural theology, not about civil theology, but about fabulous theology, which he felt free to criticize openly.

Let us now consider what he says about the second category. "The second kind, which I have described," he writes, "is the one philosophers have addressed in their many books, where they take up questions such as these: which gods exist, where they dwell, what their nature and character are, when they came into being, or whether they have existed from eternity; whether they are made of fire, as Heraclitus believed; or of number, as Pythagoras held; or of atoms, as Epicurus claimed; and other such matters, which people's ears can more easily tolerate inside the walls of a lecture hall than out in the Forum." He finds nothing objectionable in this category of theology, which they call *physical* (natural theology) and which belongs to the philosophers, except that he has noted their endless disputes with one another, out of which a multitude of competing sects has grown. He has, however, kept this kind of theology away from the Forum, that is, from the general public, and confined it to the schools. But that first kind, the most false and the most degrading, he has not kept from the citizens at all. How remarkable that the religious sensibilities of the people, including the Romans themselves, apparently cannot bear what philosophers say about the gods in reasoned debate. Yet when poets write and actors perform things that demean the dignity and nature of the immortals, things that would shame not merely an ordinary man but the most contemptible one, the people not only tolerate it but listen with genuine pleasure. And it goes further than that: they actually believe such performances please the gods and win their favor.

But someone might object: let us separate these two kinds of theology, the mythical and the physical (that is, the fabulous and the natural) from the civil kind we are now discussing. Varro himself anticipated this objection and drew those distinctions. Now let us see how he actually explains civil theology. I can understand why the fabulous kind should be set apart, since it is false, degrading, and unworthy. But to want to separate the natural from the civil, what is that but an admission that the civil itself is false? If the natural theology is sound, what fault does it carry that it should be excluded? And if this so-called civil theology is not natural, what merit does it have that it should be accepted? This, in truth, is the real reason Varro wrote about human things first and divine things second: because in treating divine things, he followed not nature but human convention. Let us look more closely at his civil theology. "The third kind," he says, "is what citizens in cities, and especially the priests, should know and administer. From it one learns which god each person may fittingly worship, and which sacred rites and sacrifices each person may fittingly perform." Let us continue with what follows. "The first theology," he says, "is best suited to the theatre, the second to the world, the third to the city." Who cannot see which one he considers superior? Clearly the second, which he earlier identified as the theology of the philosophers. He testifies that this kind belongs to the world, and in his view nothing is greater than the world. But those other two theologies, the first and the third (those of the theatre and of the city), has he actually distinguished them, or has he simply joined them together? We can see that the city exists within the world, but that does not mean that everything belonging to the city has any connection to the world. It is entirely possible that things are worshipped and believed in the city, on the basis of false opinions, that have no existence anywhere in the world or beyond it. But where is the theatre, if not in the city? Who established the theatre, if not the state? For what purpose did the state create it, if not for theatrical performances? And to what category do theatrical performances belong, if not to those divine matters about which Varro's books were written with such considerable skill?

O Marcus Varro! You are the most perceptive and, without question, the most learned of men, yet you are still a man and not God. You are not lifted up by the Spirit of God to see and proclaim divine things. You do see that divine things must be separated from human nonsense and lies, yet you fear offending the deeply corrupt opinions of the common people and their customs in public religious practice, which you yourself, when you examine them carefully, recognize as repugnant to the nature of the gods, even to such gods as the frail human mind imagines to exist within the elements of this world, and which all your literature loudly confirms to be so. What can even the finest human intellect accomplish here? What good is your vast and varied learning when you find yourself in this bind? You want to worship the natural gods, yet you are forced to worship the civil ones. You have identified some gods as fabulous, and against them you pour out your real opinions quite freely; but whether you intend it or not, you end up splashing those same opinions onto the civil gods as well. You claim, of course, that the fabulous gods belong to the theatre, the natural gods to the world, and the civil gods to the city. Yet the world is the work of God, while cities and theatres are the works of men, and the gods who are mocked on stage are none other than those who are worshipped in the temples. You do not hold games in honor of different gods than those to whom you offer sacrifices. How much more freely and more sharply you might have resolved all of this, had you simply said that some gods are natural and others are human inventions, and that concerning those invented ones, the poets tell one story while the priests tell another, though both accounts are so friendly toward each other through their shared commitment to falsehood that both are pleasing to the demons, to whom the truth is nothing but an enemy.

Setting aside for now what they call natural theology (which we'll examine later), let me ask a pointed question: is anyone truly content to seek hope for eternal life from the gods of poetry, theater, and spectacle? God forbid. May the true God turn us away from such reckless and sacrilegious madness. Are we really supposed to ask for eternal life from gods who are pleased and appeased by performances that dramatize their own crimes? I don't think anyone has actually sunk to that level of headlong, furious impiety. So then, neither fabulous theology nor civil theology can offer anyone eternal life. The first spreads shameful stories about the gods by inventing them; the second profits by celebrating them. The first scatters lies; the second gathers them up. The first attacks divine things with fabricated crimes; the second weaves those crime-filled performances into the fabric of divine worship. The first broadcasts impious fictions about the gods through human song; the second consecrates those fictions as part of the gods' own festivals. The first sings of the gods' misdeeds and crimes; the second loves them. The first invents or fabricates; the second either vouches for what is true or takes pleasure in what is false. Both are corrupt; both deserve condemnation. The theatrical variety teaches public abomination openly, while the civic variety adorns itself with that same abomination. Are we supposed to hope for eternal life from these, when they defile even this brief, temporal life? If the company of wicked people corrupts our lives when they work their way into our affections and win our agreement, how much more does the company of demons corrupt the life of those who worship them with reenactments of their own crimes? If those crimes are real, how wicked the demons must be. If they are invented, how wicked the worship.

When we say these things, it may seem to someone who knows very little about these matters that only the stories about the gods sung by poets and acted out on stage are unworthy of divine majesty, ridiculous, and too offensive to be celebrated, while the sacred rites performed not by actors but by priests are pure and free from any indecency. If that were actually the case, no one would ever have thought to celebrate these theatrical obscenities in honor of the gods, and the gods themselves would never have ordered such performances in their name. But people feel no shame performing these things in the theaters, precisely because similar things are carried on in the temples. In short, when the author mentioned earlier tried to distinguish civil theology from the mythological and the philosophical as a kind of third, separate category, he intended it to be understood as something tempered by both rather than separated from either. He says that what the poets write falls short of what the people should follow, while what the philosophers say goes further than it is wise for ordinary people to probe. "These two," he says, "differ in such a way that, even so, quite a few elements from both have been absorbed into civil theology; we will therefore point out what civil theology shares with the poets' theology, though it ought to be more closely connected with that of the philosophers." Civil theology, then, is not entirely disconnected from the poets' theology. Yet in another passage, on the subject of the genealogies of the gods, he observes that the people are drawn more toward the poets than toward the philosophical theologians. In that first passage he described what should be done; in the second, what was actually done. He said the philosophers wrote for the sake of usefulness, while the poets wrote for the sake of entertainment. And so the things drawn from the poets' writings that the people should not follow are the crimes of the gods, which nonetheless delight both the people and the gods themselves. For the poets write, he says, for entertainment rather than for any practical benefit; and yet they write precisely the kinds of things the gods will desire and the people will enact.

The theology of myth, theater, and spectacle, with all its indecency and moral corruption, has been absorbed into civil theology. Part of what, taken as a whole, deserves to be condemned and discarded has instead been declared worthy of reverence and practice. And this is not, as I intend to demonstrate, some incongruous element awkwardly grafted onto a body to which it doesn't belong. It is, in fact, a perfectly fitting part, harmoniously integrated with the rest, like a limb belonging to the same body. Consider what the images, forms, ages, sexes, and attributes of the gods actually reveal. If the poets depict Jupiter with a beard and Mercury without one, don't the priests do exactly the same? Is the Priapus of the priests any less obscene than the Priapus of the stage performers? Does he receive the worship of devotees in a form any different from the one in which he parades across the stage for the entertainment of audiences? Is Saturn not old and Apollo young in the shrines where their statues stand, just as they appear behind actors' masks? Why are Forculus, who presides over doors, and Limentinus, who presides over thresholds and lintels, male gods, while Cardea, who presides over hinges and stands between them, is female? Aren't these very details found in books on sacred matters, details that serious poets considered too undignified for their verses? Does the Diana of the theater carry weapons, while the Diana of the city is simply a virgin? Is the Apollo of the stage a lyre player, while the Apollo of Delphi knows nothing of the art? But even these things seem decent compared to what is more shameful. What did those who placed Jupiter's wet nurse on the Capitoline Hill actually think of Jupiter himself? Didn't they effectively confirm the account of Euhemerus, who wrote, not with the loose chatter of a storyteller but with the careful seriousness of a historian who had thoroughly investigated the matter, that all such gods had once been ordinary mortal men? And those who appointed the Epulones as parasites at Jupiter's table: what were they after, if not a kind of theatrical sacred rite? If any comedian had claimed that parasites of Jupiter were kept at his table, he would surely have been seen as fishing for laughs. Yet it was Varro who said it, and he said it not in mockery but in praise of the gods. His books on divine matters, not human ones, record this claim, and he placed it not in his discussion of theatrical games but in his explanation of the Capitoline laws. In the end, he is caught, and he admits that, just as the gods were given human form, so too were they believed to take pleasure in human entertainments.

Evil spirits were never so negligent of their own interests that they failed to reinforce harmful beliefs in the minds of men, often doing so through entertainment and spectacle. This brings us to the story about the temple attendant of Hercules, who, finding himself with nothing to do, decided to pass the time by playing dice. He threw alternately with one hand on behalf of Hercules and with the other on his own behalf, under the following agreement: if he won, he would use the temple's funds to prepare himself a feast and hire a prostitute; but if Hercules won, he would cover those same expenses out of his own pocket for the god's pleasure. When he lost, as though Hercules himself had beaten him, he honored the debt by providing the god with a supper and also with the celebrated prostitute Larentina. She fell asleep in the temple and dreamed that Hercules had slept with her, telling her that she would receive her payment from the first young man she encountered upon leaving the temple, and that she should understand this gift as coming from Hercules himself. As it turned out, the first person she met outside was the wealthy Tarutius, who kept her as his companion for a long time and, when he died, named her his heir. Having come into a considerable fortune, and not wishing to appear ungrateful for what she regarded as a divine reward, she in turn made the Roman people her heir, believing this to be the offering most pleasing to the gods. She then disappeared, and her will was discovered. For this act of piety, they say, she was granted divine honors.

Now, if these things had been invented by poets and performed by mimes, they would undoubtedly have been classified as fabulous theology and judged unworthy of civil theology's dignity. But when such shameful things are reported by so great an author, not as the inventions of poets but as the practices of the people, not as the content of mimes but as the content of sacred rites, not as the stuff of theaters but as the stuff of temples, belonging not to fabulous but to civil theology, then the actors who portray the gods' depravity on stage with theatrical skill are doing so with good reason. The priests, by contrast, are wasting their efforts when they try to represent through so-called sacred rites a nobility of character that simply doesn't exist. There are sacred rites of Juno, celebrated on her beloved island of Samos, where she was given in marriage to Jupiter. There are sacred rites of Ceres, in which the search is made for Proserpine after she was carried off by Pluto. There are sacred rites of Venus, in which the beautiful youth Adonis, her beloved, is mourned after being killed by a boar's tusk. There are sacred rites of the mother of the gods, in which the handsome youth Atys, whom she loved and then castrated out of a woman's jealousy, is lamented by men who have suffered the same fate, men they call Galli. Given that all of this is more indecent than anything found on the stage, why do they insist on separating the poets' fabulous fictions about the gods, which they assign to the theater, from the civil theology they want to belong to the city, as though they were setting apart something base and unworthy from something noble and respectable? There is, in fact, more reason to be grateful to the stage actors, who have spared people's eyes and have not put on public display everything that is hidden behind temple walls. What are we to think of sacred rites that are concealed in darkness, when the ones brought out into the light are already so detestable? And those who perform these rites have certainly seen for themselves what is transacted in secret through the agency of mutilated and effeminate men, though they have not managed to conceal the wretched and degraded condition of those same men. Let them persuade whoever they can that anything holy is accomplished through such men, whose presence among their sacred things they cannot deny. We don't know what is transacted there, but we know through whom it is transacted, because we do know what happens on the stage, where not even a chorus of prostitutes has ever included a castrated or effeminate man. And yet even those stage performances are carried out by vile and disreputable characters, since they obviously should not be performed by people of good character. What, then, are we to make of sacred rites for which holiness has chosen men that even the obscenity of the stage would not admit?

But all these things, they say, have certain physical, that is, natural explanations that reveal their deeper meaning. This is as though the question before us were one of physics rather than theology, which concerns not nature but God. For although the true God is God by nature and not merely by opinion, not everything that exists by nature is God. There is certainly a nature belonging to man, to beast, to tree, to stone, and none of these is God. Consider the question of the mother of the gods: the entire system of interpretation begins from the premise that the mother of the gods is the earth. If that is so, why do we need to investigate further? Why must we trace the argument through everything else that follows? Nothing could more obviously support those who argue that all these gods were simply human beings, since they are earth-born in the sense that the earth is their mother. In true theology, however, the earth is the work of God, not His mother. But whatever interpretation one places on these sacred rites, and whatever connection they may have to the nature of things, it remains contrary to nature, not in accordance with it, for men to be made effeminate. This disease, this crime, this abomination holds a recognized place among those sacred practices, even though depraved men would scarcely confess to it under torture. Furthermore, if these rites, which are demonstrably more obscene than anything found on the theatrical stage, are excused and justified on the grounds that they symbolize the nature of things, why are the poets not granted the same excuse? Many interpreters have applied exactly this kind of allegorical reading to poetry as well. Even the most monstrous and horrifying of all mythological claims, that Saturn devoured his own children, has been explained by some to mean that time (signified by the name of Saturn) consumes whatever it produces, or, as Varro himself suggests, that Saturn belongs to seeds that fall back into the earth from which they sprang. One interpreter reads it one way, another reads it differently, and the same holds true for everything else in this entire body of theology.

And yet this so-called fabulous theology is censured, cast off, and rejected, along with all the interpretations that belong to it. What is striking is that it is condemned not only by natural theology (the theology of the philosophers) but also by the civil theology we are currently discussing, which is said to belong to cities and peoples. Civil theology judges fabulous theology worthy of rejection because it invented shameful stories about the gods. The real secret here, I believe, is this: those most sharp and learned men who wrote on these matters understood that both theologies deserved to be rejected, the fabulous and the civil alike. But while they dared to reject the fabulous, they did not dare to reject the civil. Instead, they held the fabulous up for criticism while quietly showing how closely the civil resembled it, not to suggest that the civil should be preferred, but to imply that it deserved to be discarded along with the other. In this way, without putting themselves in danger by openly attacking civil theology, they brought both into disrepute, clearing the ground so that what they call natural theology might take root in more receptive minds. For the civil and the fabulous are, in truth, both fabulous and both civil. Anyone who looks carefully at the absurdities and obscenities of both will see that they are equally fabulous; and anyone who turns their attention to the theatrical performances tied to fabulous theology in the festivals of the civic gods and in the religious rites of the cities will see that they are equally civil. How, then, can any of these gods be credited with the power to grant eternal life, when their own images and sacred rites expose them as virtually identical to the fabulous gods who are so openly condemned? In their physical forms, their ages, their sexes, their personalities, their marriages, their genealogies, and their rituals, they are understood to have been human beings whose ceremonies and observances were established in their honor according to the circumstances of each one's life or death. Behind all of this, demons or certainly the most corrupt of spirits have been at work, seizing every available opportunity to slip into the minds of men and lead them into error.

Consider the specific roles assigned to the gods, parceled out so narrowly and so pettily, each one to be invoked only for his particular function. We have already said a great deal about this, though not everything that could be said. Don't these arrangements belong more to comic theater than to divine majesty? If someone were to hire two nurses for his infant, one responsible only for food and the other only for drink, just as the Romans assigned two goddesses to these tasks (Educa and Potina), everyone would rightly consider him foolish and think his household was running some kind of farce. Then there is Liber, whose name they derive from "liberation," on the grounds that men are "liberated" through the emission of seed during intercourse. They claim that Libera (whom they identify with Venus) performs the same function for women, since women, they say, also emit seed. For this reason, they placed the sexual organs of both sexes in the temple: the male organ dedicated to Liber, the female to Libera. To all of this they added women assigned to Liber's service and wine to inflame desire. The Bacchanalia were celebrated with extraordinary frenzy, and Varro himself admits that the Bacchanals would never have behaved as they did unless their minds had been thoroughly unhinged. Eventually, a more clear-headed senate grew disgusted with these practices and ordered them stopped. At that point, the Romans perhaps began to grasp just how much power unclean spirits, when worshipped as gods, can exercise over the human mind. These things, at least, were not performed in the theaters, where people play-act rather than descend into madness, though worshipping gods who take pleasure in such performances is itself very close to madness.

But what kind of distinction is this, really? He separates the religious man from the superstitious one by saying that the superstitious man fears the gods, while the religious man reveres them as parents rather than dreading them as enemies. He insists, furthermore, that all the gods are so benevolent that they would sooner spare the impious than harm the innocent. And yet, in the very same breath, he tells us that three gods must be assigned as guardians to a woman after childbirth, specifically to keep the god Silvanus from breaking in and tormenting her. To signal the presence of these protectors, three men walk around the house during the night and strike the threshold in sequence: first with a hatchet, then with a pestle, and finally sweep it with a broom. The logic here is that by displaying these symbols of agriculture, they can bar Silvanus from entering, since trees are neither felled nor pruned without a hatchet, grain is not ground without a pestle, and corn is not gathered without a broom. From these three implements, three gods take their names: Intercidona, from the cut of the hatchet; Pilumnus, from the pestle; and Diverra, from the broom. These three serve as the woman's divine shield against the power of Silvanus. So the protection of well-meaning gods is apparently not enough to hold back one malicious god unless they outnumber him three to one and drive him off with the symbolic tools of cultivation, since Silvanus, as a creature of the wild, is rough, terrifying, and untamed. Is this what divine innocence looks like? Is this the harmony of the gods? Are these the life-giving deities of the cities? They are more absurd than anything mocked on the stage.

When a man and woman are united in marriage, the god Jugatinus presides over the union. Very well, one can accept that. But then the bride must be escorted to her new home, so the god Domiducus is invoked. To ensure she settles into the house, the god Domitius is brought in. To ensure she stays with her husband, the goddess Manturnae is called upon. What more could possibly be needed? Let us at least spare some human decency. Let the desires of flesh and blood proceed as they will, with the privacy of the marriage bed respected. Why, then, is the bedchamber packed with a crowd of deities even after the groomsmen have left? And what's more, they are not there to encourage chastity through their presence; they are there to help the woman, naturally the more vulnerable of the two and trembling at the novelty of her situation, surrender her virginity more readily. For present in that room are the goddess Virginiensis, the god-father Subigus, the goddess-mother Prema, the goddess Pertunda, and then Venus and Priapus as well. What is all this? If a man laboring at this task truly needed divine assistance, could not one god or goddess have been enough? Was Venus alone not sufficient? She is, after all, said to derive her very name from the power by which a woman ceases to be a virgin. If men possess any sense of shame that the gods apparently lack, surely the married couple, believing themselves surrounded by so many deities of both sexes all busily engaged in this work, would be so overcome with embarrassment that the man would find himself less aroused and the woman far more reluctant. And consider this: if the goddess Virginiensis is present to untie the virgin's girdle, if the god Subigus is present to bring the virgin under the man, if the goddess Prema is present to hold her down once she is there so that she does not stir, then what exactly is the goddess Pertunda doing in that room? Let her blush. Let her leave. Let the husband handle that particular task himself. It is shameful that anyone other than he should perform the act from which she takes her name. Perhaps she is tolerated only because she is said to be a goddess rather than a god. For if she were believed to be male and were called Pertundus, the husband would demand far more protection against him for his wife's honor than any newly delivered mother would demand against Silvanus. But why am I even making this point, when Priapus is also present there, a male figure of excess, on whose enormous and grotesque member the newly married bride is, according to the most honored and supposedly sacred custom of the matrons, commanded to sit?

Let them press on, then, and let them use every bit of cleverness they can muster to draw distinctions between civil theology and fabulous theology, between cities and theatres, between temples and stages, between priestly rites and the songs of poets, between what is honorable and what is base, between truth and deception, between the grave and the trivial, between the serious and the ridiculous, between what deserves to be embraced and what deserves to be rejected. We see exactly what they are doing. They know perfectly well that theatrical and fabulous theology is attached to civil theology, reflected back onto it from the poets' songs as from a mirror. And so, having exposed to view a theology they dare not openly condemn, they attack and criticize its image all the more freely, hoping that those who grasp their meaning will come to despise the very face of which that image is a portrait. The gods themselves, however, as though gazing at their own reflection in that same mirror, love that portrait so dearly that both the original and the reflection together make it far clearer who and what these gods truly are. This is also why they have used terrifying commands to compel their worshippers to dedicate the filth of fabulous theology to them, to incorporate it into their solemn rites, and to count it among sacred things. In doing so, they have revealed themselves more plainly than ever to be utterly corrupt spirits, and they have made that rejected and discredited theatrical theology a full member and component of what passes for the chosen and approved theology of the city. The result is that the whole edifice is shameful and false, populated with invented gods, with one portion residing in the writings of the priests and another in the songs of the poets. Whether it has still other portions is a separate question. For now, I believe I have shown clearly enough, on the basis of Varro's own division, that the theology of the city and the theology of the theatre belong together within a single civil theology. Because both are equally disgraceful, absurd, shameful, and false, no person of genuine faith should look to either one for any hope of eternal life.

In the end, even Varro himself, when cataloguing the gods, begins from the moment of a man's conception. He opens his account of the gods who watch over human life with Janus, traces the series through to extreme old age, and closes it with the goddess Nænia, sung at the funerals of the elderly. After that, he turns to the other gods, whose concern is not the person himself but the things a person needs: food, clothing, and everything else required for daily life. For each of these, he explains the specific function and the purpose for which each god should be petitioned. Yet for all this careful and thorough diligence, he has neither proven the existence of, nor even mentioned the name of, any god from whom eternal life might be sought. And that, of course, is the one thing for which we are Christians. Who, then, is too dim to see what this man was actually doing? By laying out civil theology so methodically, by showing how closely it resembles that shameful and disgraceful mythological theology, and by demonstrating that mythology is in fact a branch of civil religion, Varro was quietly working to secure a place in people's minds for nothing other than the natural theology he attributes to philosophers. He did this with considerable subtlety: he openly criticized the mythological, and while he didn't dare criticize the civil religion directly, he exposed its flaws simply by putting it on display. The effect was that both stand condemned in the judgment of any clear-thinking person, leaving only the natural theology as the reasonable choice. But we will examine that subject more carefully in its proper place, with the help of the true God.

That freedom which Varro lacked, which prevented him from criticizing the theology of the city as openly as he criticized the theatrical, was possessed at least in part by Annaeus Seneca, whom we have good evidence to place as a contemporary of our apostles. I say he possessed it only in part, because he possessed it in his writing but not in his life. In the book he wrote against superstition, he censured civil and urban theology far more thoroughly and forcefully than Varro ever censured the theatrical and mythological kind. Speaking about images, he says: "They dedicate images of the sacred and inviolable immortals in the most worthless and lifeless materials. They give them the forms of men, beasts, and fish, and some make them of mixed sex with bodies assembled from incompatible parts. They call these things deities, when in fact, if such figures were to come to life and suddenly appear before them, they would be regarded as monsters." Then, a little later, after praising natural theology and laying out the views of certain philosophers, he raises an objection against himself: "Here someone will say, Am I to believe that the heavens and the earth are gods, and that some exist above the moon and some below it? Am I to appeal to Plato or to the Peripatetic Strato, one of whom made God to be without a body, the other without a mind?" To this he replies: "And really, how much truer do the dreams of Titus Tatius, or Romulus, or Tullus Hostilius appear to you? Tatius declared the divinity of the goddess Cloacina; Romulus that of Picus and Tiberinus; Tullus Hostilius that of Pavor and Pallor, the most unpleasant of human conditions, one being the agitation of the mind under fright, the other a change of color in the body, not a disease exactly, but a physical reaction." Will you really choose to believe that these are deities and receive them into heaven? And consider the freedom with which he writes about the rites themselves, which are both cruel and shameful: "One man castrates himself, another cuts his arms. Where will they find room for the fear of these gods when angry, when they use such means of winning their favor when pleased? But gods who wish to be worshipped in this way should not be worshipped at all. So great is the frenzy of a mind disturbed and driven from its proper seat, that the gods are appeased by men in ways that not even the most savage and legendarily cruel tyrants have vented their rage on others. Tyrants have torn apart the limbs of some; they never ordered anyone to tear apart his own. For the satisfaction of royal lust, some have been castrated; but no one was ever commanded by his master to lay violent hands on himself in that way. They kill themselves in the temples. They make their prayers with their wounds and their blood. If anyone takes the time to observe what these people do and what they suffer, he will find so much that is unworthy of respectable people, so degrading to free persons, so unlike the behavior of sane minds, that no one would doubt they were mad, if only they were a minority. But as things stand, the sheer number of the insane is taken as proof of their sanity."

He then turns to the rituals performed on the Capitoline Hill, describing them with unflinching boldness as the kind of thing one could only believe if one imagined the participants were either joking or had lost their minds. He first mocks the Egyptian sacred rites, in which the loss of Osiris is mourned and his recovery celebrated with great joy, even though both the loss and the finding are entirely fictional. The grief and the joy they produce in people who have neither lost nor found anything, however, are entirely real. Having made that point, he continues: "At least that madness has a fixed season. It is bearable to lose one's mind once a year. But go up to the Capitol. One man is whispering divine commands into a god's ear; another is telling Jupiter what time it is; one plays the role of a lictor; another acts as an attendant, mimicking the motions of anointing with nothing but the movement of his arms. There are women arranging the hair of Juno and Minerva, standing at a distance not only from the statues themselves but from the temples entirely, moving their fingers as if they were hairdressers. Some women hold up mirrors. Others are calling on the gods to support them in legal disputes. Some are presenting documents and explaining their cases in full. A once-celebrated comedian, now old and feeble, performed his pantomime daily on the Capitol, as though the gods would eagerly watch what human audiences had long since stopped caring about. Every kind of craftsman working in service of the immortal gods lives there in complete idleness." A little further on he adds: "Still, these people, however pointless their devotion to the gods may be, are at least not engaged in anything shameful or degrading. But there are certain women who sit on the Capitol convinced that Jupiter is in love with them, and they are not even intimidated by the gaze of Juno, who, if you believe the poets, is the most jealous of all the gods."

Varro did not enjoy this kind of freedom. He was willing to criticize only the poetical theology. The civil theology, which this other man tears apart, Varro lacked the courage to challenge. But if we're honest, the temples where these rites are performed are far worse than the theaters where they are merely depicted. On the subject of these sacred rites of civil theology, Seneca concluded that the wisest course for a thoughtful person was to go through the motions outwardly while holding no genuine belief inwardly. "All which things," he says, "a wise man will observe as being commanded by the laws, but not as being pleasing to the gods." A little further on he adds, "And what of this, that we pair the gods in marriage, and not even in natural pairings, since we join brothers and sisters? We marry Bellona to Mars, Venus to Vulcan, Salacia to Neptune. Some we leave unmarried, as though no suitable match existed, which is surely unnecessary, especially when certain unmarried goddesses remain unclaimed, such as Populonia, Fulgora, and the goddess Rumina. I'm not surprised no suitors have come forward for them. All this undistinguished crowd of gods, which centuries of superstition have accumulated, we ought," he says, "to worship in such a way that we remember throughout that such worship belongs to custom rather than to any genuine reality." Neither the laws nor the customs established within civil theology produced anything that was truly pleasing to the gods, or that corresponded to reality. Yet this man, whom philosophy had in some sense liberated, was still a distinguished senator of the Roman people. So he worshipped what he criticized, performed what he condemned, and paid reverence to what he openly mocked, because philosophy had taught him something grand: not to be superstitious in private, but to play a role for the sake of civic law and social convention, not on the stage but in the temples. His conduct was all the more deserving of condemnation because he performed these hollow acts so convincingly that the people believed he was sincere. A stage actor, at least, aims to delight his audience with a performance rather than deceive them with a lie.

Seneca, among his many criticisms of civil theology's superstitions, also took issue with Jewish religious practices, particularly the Sabbath. He argued that the Jews were wasting their time by observing every seventh day, throwing away roughly a seventh of their lives in idleness and allowing urgent matters to go unattended. As for the Christians, who were by that point already deeply at odds with the Jews, Seneca didn't dare mention them at all, whether to praise or condemn them. To praise them would have put him at odds with the ancient traditions of his country; to condemn them might have forced him to say things he didn't actually believe.

When speaking about the Jews specifically, he wrote: "Meanwhile, the customs of that most accursed nation have grown so powerful that they have now been received in every land; the conquered have given laws to the conquerors." The astonishment behind those words is plain. And then, without realizing where God's providence was leading his pen, he added a candid observation that revealed exactly what he thought of those sacred practices: "For those people at least know the reason for their rites, while the greater part of other nations perform theirs without knowing why." As for the Jewish observances themselves, why they were instituted by divine authority and how, in due time, that same authority withdrew them from the people of God once the mystery of eternal life had been revealed, we have addressed this elsewhere, particularly in our work against the Manicheans, and we intend to return to it at a more fitting point in this work as well.

Now, since there are three types of theology (which the Greeks call mythical, physical, and political, and which can be rendered in Latin as fabulous, natural, and civil), and since eternal life cannot be hoped for from any of them, the reasoning is clear. It cannot come from the fabulous theology, which even the worshippers of many false gods have freely condemned on their own terms. Nor can it come from the civil theology, which has been shown to be either a branch of the fabulous or something even worse. If anyone feels that what has been said in this book is not sufficient, let them also consult the many varied discussions about God as the giver of true happiness found in the earlier books, especially the fourth.

What should people dedicate themselves to, if not happiness? And if happiness were a goddess, dedicating themselves to her would make sense. But happiness is not a goddess; it is a gift from God. So the only God we should consecrate ourselves to is the one who gives happiness, the God whom those who love eternal life worship with devotion, since eternal life is where true and complete happiness is found. Yet based on everything said so far, no one should doubt that none of the gods worshipped with such shameful rites can give this happiness. These gods, when denied their degrading worship, respond with even more shameful rage, thereby revealing themselves to be thoroughly corrupt spirits. And how could any of them grant eternal life when they cannot even grant happiness? By "eternal life" we mean a life of unending happiness. If a soul exists forever in torment, as those unclean spirits themselves will be tormented, that is not eternal life but eternal death. There is no greater or more terrible death than one that never ends. Yet because the soul is by its very nature immortal and cannot exist without some form of life, its deepest possible death is separation from the life of God, endured in endless punishment. It follows, then, that only the one who gives true happiness can give eternal life, that is, a life of happiness without end. Since the gods of civil theology have been shown to be incapable of giving this happiness, they should not be worshipped for the sake of earthly and temporal benefits, as we demonstrated in the five preceding books, and still less for the sake of eternal life after death, which is what this present book has set out to show, with the support of the others. But since the grip of long-established habit runs very deep, if anyone feels my argument against civil theology has not yet been sufficient to justify rejecting and abandoning it, let them turn to the next book, which, God willing, follows directly from this one.