Using Augustine to Evaluate Religious Relationships
A Paper by M. Rinn
http://www.shoelesswander.net
Please do not redistribute without permission
Any given historical document
contains a treasure trove of information about the time it was written. It provides information about concerns of the
time, major events, what sort of people were around at that point in time and
even more. One only needs to take the
text beyond face value and probe at the text.
Saint Augustine’s magnum opus City of God is a prime example of how much a
single document can reveal so much about the world in which it was
written.
Saint Augustine
was a later church father, best remembered for works such as City of God
and the quotation, “Lord, make me chaste, but not yet.” The latter comes from his memoirs where he
detailed, often vividly, his constant struggle to be a good Christian man and
his various vices, the primary one being lust.
He eventually overcame his vices and through the immense amount of texts
that he left behind, became one of the most revered post-Nicene fathers. This was helped primarily by City of God, a theological treatise that still
carries authority to this day.
In book one of City of God,
Augustine spends a great amount of time examining the relationship between the
Romans and their gods. This very harsh
critique begins in chapter two when Augustine begins to question the worship of
the Roman pantheon. In particular his question of “For what earthly reason was
Minerva worshiped as the protector of the land and people, when she could not
even protect the guards of her temple?” comes off as incredibly offensive to any
believer in the traditional pantheon.
Other such statements reappear throughout the text, including, “Just
think of the kind of gods to whose protection the Romans were content to entrust
their city,” which
not only insults the gods, but the intelligence of the Romans for following
such gods. More biting is his assertion
that “It is much more sensible to believe, not so much that Rome would have
been saved from destruction had not the gods perished, but rather that the gods
would have perished long ago had not Rome made every effort to save them,”
when discussing the idea of vanquished gods.
The relationship between the Romans and their gods was one of
co-dependence where the Romans would offer sacrifices to honour the gods and to
gain their favour. In exchange the gods
would do as the person making the sacrifice asked. Ultimately sacrifices would be made on behalf
of the entire Roman Empire to ensure that the
gods protected the empire and helped it to prosper. Suffice to say, suggesting that the gods
needed to be maintained by the Romans would have sent a powerful message to the
few remaining pagans in the empire reading the document. Moreover all of these attacks and insults towards
the Roman gods indicate that there were still unsettled tensions between the
pagan world and the Christian world.
Augustine portrays the empire in a
somewhat more favourable manner, but attributes its positive traits to the
divine in an attempt to infuse Christianity into Roman history. He praises the empire for being “more than
ready to forgive than avenge a suffered wrong”
and details an incident in which Marcus Marcellus captured a city and refused
to harm any of the citizens and gave all those in its temples immunity. He
laments about how Roman historians could have “forgotten to mention the fact
that if those generals had spared anyone in honour of some god or other, by
forbidding slaughter or the taking of prisoners in temples?” The fact that Augustine manages to both
praise the empire and imply that the Christian god might have been responsible
for certain events in regards to mercy is impressive and demonstrates how
Christians would read their God into past events. Augustine continues this pattern of reading
the Christian God into the past when he examines the attack on Rome by the barbarians. He attributed the fact that there was no
slaughter or rape when this occurred to be not because of the barbarian’s
customs but rather it was done “in honour of the Name of Christ and to the
credit of Christian civilization is manifest to all.”
The fact that he feels the need to
mention the barbarian attack on Rome implies
that when this was being written many people were still trying to find some
sort of justification for what occurred, and some people blamed the empire wide
departure for traditional Roman religion in favour of Christianity as
justification for the sack of Rome. Much of the Augustine makes addresses these
accusations and attacks back with even greater force in an attempt to
demonstrate that the sack was the will of God and not the vengeance of Roman
deities.
Primary sources are always a
historian’s best way of deciphering the past.
Simply reading between the lines can reveal a plethora of information
about the conflicts, people and events of the time period the document came
from. Augustine’s City of God is not only a theological treatise, but is a product of
it’s time and also comments on the relationship between Christianity and the
Roman religion, as well as between Christianity and the Roman Empire
itself.