Book IV
BOOK IV Chapter I IIN THE FIRST PAGES of this work on the City of God, I saw fit to give an answer to its enemies. Running mad after the pleasures of earth and eagerly grasping at fleeting goods, they denounce the Christian religion, the only salutary and true one, for any hardship they suffer rather through God's merciful admonition than through the severity of His punishment. Among our accusers there is an ignorant rabble, incited by the authority of the learned to cast greater odium upon us. These simple souls imagine that the abnormal calamities that have occurred in our own day were entirely unknown in the past. This foolish opinion is encouraged even by those who know it to be false, but who pretend ignorance in order to give an air of truth to their grumblings. Hence, I have gone to the books in which their own historians have recorded, for men's information, the things that happened in the past, and from these I have proved two important facts: first, that the actual events were far different from what these people imagined; second, that the false gods which pagans then worshiped in the open, and now worship under cover, were unclean spirits, malignant and lying demons. The truth of this is clear from the fact that these demons go so far as to take delight in their own villainies, to the extent of wanting them exhibited, either as facts or as fictions, in the festivals celebrated in their honor. I have also pointed out that, as 189 190 SAINT AUGUSTINE long as these villainies are exhibited for imitation under divine sanction, so to speak, it is impossible to restrain weak humans from actually reproducing in their own lives the abominable acts committed by the gods. My proofs were not guesses. I have drawn them partly from my own recent recollection, for I have seen with my own eyes those indecent dramas, performed in homage to such divinities. I have drawn them also from the writings of those who left accounts of these mythological exploits, not with the intention of casting disgrace upon the gods, but of doing them honor. Thus, Varro, one of their most learned and authoritative scholars, wrote various books on human and divine institutions. But, when he arranged his topics in the order of their importance, grouping human affairs in one book, and divine in another, he by no means classed stage plays under human, but under divine institutions. He was certain that, if none but good and decent men lived in Rome, stage plays would have found no place among human institutions . Nor did Varro so classify things on his own authority. Since he was born and educated in Rome, he simply found stage plays a part of the pagan religious rites. At the end of Book I, I briefly sketched what I had in mind to say in the sequel. Part of that I have told in the two books that followed, but I realize what I still owe to my expectant readers. Chapter 2 I promised to advance some facts that would show the error of those who blame our religion for the woes of the Roman state, and to recall, as they occurred to me according to their gravity and in sufficient number, the calamities which Rome and the provinces of the Empire had to endure in times THE CITY OF GOD: BOOK IV 191 before their sacrifices were forbidden. All these calamities they would certainly have blamed on us, if our faith had by then shed its light on them or banned their sacrifices. These matters I have sufficiently described, I think, in Books II and III. In the second, I dealt with the moral evils which must be regarded as the only real and serious calamities. In Book III, I treated of those calamities which alone foolish people dread to face, those evils which affect the body and material goods, and which ordinarily even the good have to suffer. As for their own moral evils, our pagan accusers accept them not only patiently, but gladly. I have spoken only of the city of Rome and its imperial possessions, and have not even extended my discussion to Caesar Augustus, and I covered very few evils. What if I had 'Chosen to review and to emphasize, not the kind of evils which men inflict on one another, such as the ravages and devastations brought on by wars, but those...
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