City of God 1.1–1.11

Chapter 1. On the enemies of the name of Christ, whom the barbarians spared for Christ's sake when the City was laid waste.

From this world, then, come the enemies against whom the city of God must be defended. Many of them, however, once they have corrected the error of their ungodliness, become quite worthy citizens in it; but many burn against it with such fires of hatred, and are so ungrateful for the plain benefits of its Redeemer, that today they would not be moving their tongues against it had they not found in its sacred places, as they fled the enemy's sword, the very life they are so proud of. Are not even those Romans hostile to the name of Christ whom the barbarians spared for Christ's sake? The shrines of the martyrs and the basilicas of the apostles bear witness to it: in that devastation of the City they received those who fled to them, their own people and strangers alike. Up to that point the bloodthirsty enemy raged; there the butcher's fury met its limit; to those places the enemies who had mercy led those whom they had spared even outside those places, so that they would not fall in with others who had no such mercy. Even those who elsewhere were savage and raged in the manner of an enemy, once they came to those places, where what the law of war would have allowed elsewhere was forbidden, found all their brutality in striking restrained and their greed for taking captives broken. So many escaped who now disparage these Christian times and blame Christ for the evils that the City suffered; but the good that was done them for the honor of Christ, so that they might live, they do not credit to our Christ but to their own fate. Yet if they had any right judgment, they ought rather to ascribe the harsh and bitter things they suffered from their enemies to that divine providence which is accustomed to correct and crush the corrupt morals of men by wars, and likewise to exercise the just and praiseworthy life of mortals by such afflictions, and, once it is proved, either to transfer it to better things or to keep it still on this earth for other purposes. And the fact that the savage barbarians, contrary to the custom of war, spared them, whether anywhere for the name of Christ or in the places dedicated to the name of Christ, places very large and chosen, in more generous mercy, to hold a multitude, this they ought to ascribe to the Christian times; for this they ought to give thanks to God; for this they ought to run truly to his name, so as to escape the punishment of eternal fire, the name that many of them usurped falsely so as to escape the punishment of present destruction. For among those whom you see insulting the servants of Christ with such insolence and impudence there are very many who would not have escaped that slaughter and disaster had they not pretended to be servants of Christ. And now, with ungrateful pride and most ungodly madness, they resist his name with a perverse heart, so as to be punished with eternal darkness, the name to which they fled with a mouth that was at least deceitful, so as to enjoy the light of this passing life.

Chapter 2. That no war was ever waged in which the victors spared the vanquished for the sake of the gods of those they had conquered.

So many wars are on record, whether before Rome was founded or since its rise and rule: let them read and produce a case in which a city was taken by foreigners and the enemies who took it spared those they found had fled to the temples of their gods, or in which some barbarian commander ordered that, once the town was stormed, no one found in this or that temple should be struck down. Did not Aeneas see Priam “at the altars, defiling with his blood the fires he himself had hallowed”? Did not Diomedes and Ulysses, “having slain the guards of the citadel's height, seize the sacred image, and with bloody hands dare to touch the virgin goddess's fillets”? And yet what follows is not true: “From that time the hopes of the Greeks ebbed and slipped back.” For afterwards they conquered; afterwards they destroyed Troy with sword and fire; afterwards they cut down Priam as he fled to the altar. Nor did Troy perish because it lost Minerva. For what had Minerva herself lost first, that she should perish? Her guards, perhaps? That is certainly true: once they were slain she could be carried off. For the men were not protected by the image; the image was protected by the men. How then was she worshipped so that she might guard the country and its citizens, when she could not guard her own guards?

Chapter 3. How imprudently the Romans believed that the household gods, who had not been able to guard Troy, would benefit them.

See to what kind of gods the Romans rejoiced to have entrusted the City for safekeeping! O most pitiable error! And they are angry with us when we say such things about their gods; yet they are not angry with their own authors, whom they paid money to learn by heart, and whose teachers they even held most worthy of a public salary and honors. Indeed, in Virgil, whom small boys read precisely so that this great poet, the most famous and the best of all, drunk in by tender minds, may not easily be blotted out by forgetfulness, according to that saying of Horace: “The jar will long keep the scent with which it was once steeped when new”, in this Virgil, I say, Juno is brought on, hostile to the Trojans, saying to Aeolus, king of the winds, as she stirs him up against them: “A race hateful to me sails the Tyrrhenian sea, carrying Ilium and its conquered household gods into Italy.” Ought prudent men to have entrusted Rome to these conquered household gods, so that it might not be conquered? But, they say, Juno said this like an angry woman, not knowing what she was saying. What of Aeneas himself, so often called “dutiful”: does he not tell it thus: “Panthus, son of Othrys, priest of the citadel and of Phoebus, himself drags along in his hand the sacred things, the conquered gods, and his little grandson, and runs frantic to the threshold”? Does he not declare that these very gods, whom he does not hesitate to call conquered, were entrusted to him rather than he to them, when it is said to him: “To you Troy commends its sacred things and its household gods”? If, then, Virgil says that such gods were both conquered and, so that even when conquered they might somehow escape, entrusted to a man, what madness it is to think that Rome was wisely committed to these guardians and could not have been laid waste unless it had lost them! Indeed, what else is it to worship conquered gods as protectors and defenders than to hold not good deities but bad omens? How much wiser to believe, not that Rome would not have come to this disaster unless they had perished first, but rather that they would have perished long ago had Rome not preserved them as far as it could! For who, if he pays attention, does not see how empty the presumption is that Rome could not be conquered under conquered defenders, and that it perished because it lost its guardian gods, when the only cause of its perishing could well have been its willingness to have guardians who were bound to perish? So when these things were written and sung about the conquered gods, it was not that poets liked to lie, but that truth compelled men of sense to confess it. But these matters will be treated carefully and at length more fittingly in another place. Now I shall briefly, as best I can, finish what I had begun to say about ungrateful men, who blasphemously blame Christ for the evils they suffer deservedly for the perversity of their morals. That they are spared for Christ's sake, even such as they are, they do not deign to notice; and in the madness of sacrilegious perversity they use against his name the very tongues with which they falsely usurped that name so as to live, or the tongues they held in check out of fear in the places consecrated to him, so that, safe and protected there, where for his sake they were unharmed by the enemy, they might leap out from there against him with hostile curses.

Chapter 4. On the sanctuary of Juno at Troy, which freed no one from the Greeks, and the basilicas of the apostles, which protected from the barbarians all who fled to them.

Troy itself, as I said, the mother of the Roman people, could not protect its citizens by the consecrated places of its gods from the fire and sword of the Greeks, who worshipped those same gods. On the contrary, “in Juno's sanctuary chosen guards, Phoenix and dread Ulysses, kept watch over the booty. Here from every side the treasure of Troy, torn from the burning shrines, the tables of the gods, bowls of solid gold, and captured garments are heaped together. Boys and trembling mothers stand around in a long line.” Evidently a place consecrated to so great a goddess was chosen, not as a place from which it was unlawful to lead captives away, but as a place in which it pleased them to shut captives up. Compare now that sanctuary, not of some common god or one of the rank and file, but of the sister and wife of Jupiter himself and queen of all the gods, with the memorial shrines of our apostles. To the one the spoils snatched from the burnt temples and from the gods were carried, not to be given back to the vanquished but to be divided among the victors; to the other, even what was found elsewhere to belong to those places was carried back with honor and the most reverent respect. There liberty was lost, here preserved; there captivity was confined, here forbidden; there people were herded to be possessed by enemies who were their masters, here they were led to be set free by enemies who had pity on them. In short, the avarice and pride of the fickle Greeks had chosen that temple of Juno for themselves; the mercy and humility of even savage barbarians chose these basilicas of Christ. Unless perhaps the Greeks in their victory did spare the temples of the gods they shared, and did not dare to strike down or take captive the wretched and conquered Trojans who fled there, and Virgil lied in the manner of poets! No, he described the custom of enemies who overthrow cities.

Chapter 5. What Cato thought of the general custom of enemies who overthrow conquered cities.

This custom Cato too, as Sallust, a historian of celebrated truthfulness, writes, does not fail to mention in the speech he gave in the senate about the conspirators: “maidens and boys are carried off, children torn from their parents' embrace, mothers of families suffer whatever the victors please, shrines and houses are plundered, slaughter and burning are done; in short, everything is filled with weapons, corpses, blood, and mourning.” Had he said nothing about shrines here, we might suppose that enemies usually spare the dwellings of the gods. And the Roman temples feared these things, not from foreign enemies, but from Catiline and his associates, senators of the highest nobility and Roman citizens. But these, no doubt, were abandoned men and parricides of their country.

Chapter 6. That not even the Romans took any cities in such a way as to spare the vanquished in their temples.

Why then should our discourse run through the many nations that have waged war on one another and nowhere spared the vanquished in the dwellings of their gods? Let us look at the Romans themselves; the Romans themselves, I say, let us recall and consider, of whom it was said, as their special praise, “to spare the subject and subdue the proud”, and that when wronged they preferred to pardon rather than to avenge. When they stormed, took, and overthrew so many great cities to extend their rule, let someone read us which temples they used to exempt, so that whoever fled to them was set free. Or did they do so, and the writers of their history kept silent about it? Would those writers, who sought out above all things to praise, pass over what by their own standards are the most brilliant signs of piety? Marcus Marcellus, a man who did honor to the Roman name, who took the magnificent city of Syracuse, is reported to have wept for it before it fell and to have shed his tears for it before its blood. He also took care to preserve chastity even in the enemy. For before, as victor, he ordered the town to be entered, he laid down by edict that no one should violate a free person's body. Yet the city was overthrown in the manner of wars, and nowhere do we read that so chaste and merciful a commander ordered that whoever fled to this or that temple should be held unharmed. Such a thing would certainly not have been passed over, when neither his weeping nor his edict for the protection of chastity could go unmentioned. Fabius, who overthrew the city of Tarentum, is praised for having refrained from plundering the images. For when his clerk asked him what he ordered to be done with the statues of the gods, many of which had been captured, he seasoned his restraint even with a jest. He asked what they were like, and when he was told that many were not only large but even armed, he said: “Let us leave the Tarentines their angry gods.” Since, then, the writers of Roman history could not keep silent about the one man's weeping or the other's laughter, about the one's chaste mercy or the other's witty restraint, how would it have been passed over if they had spared any people in honor of one of their gods by forbidding slaughter or captivity in some temple?

Chapter 7. That in the overthrow of the City what was done harshly came from the custom of war, but what was done mercifully came from the power of the name of Christ.

Whatever devastation, slaughter, plundering, burning, and affliction was committed in this most recent Roman disaster, the custom of war did it. But what was done in a new way, that barbarian savagery, in an unheard-of turn of events, appeared so gentle that the largest basilicas were chosen and designated to be filled with people who were to be spared, where no one would be struck down, from which no one would be carried off, to which many were led by merciful enemies to be set free, and from which none were led away into captivity even by cruel enemies: whoever does not see that this must be credited to the name of Christ, to the Christian era, is blind; whoever sees it and does not praise it is ungrateful; whoever resists one who praises it is mad. Far be it from any sensible person to credit this to the ferocity of the barbarians. The most savage and cruel minds were terrified, bridled, and wonderfully tempered by him who said through the prophet so long before: “I will visit their iniquities with a rod and their sins with scourges; but my mercy I will not scatter from them.”

Chapter 8. On the advantages and disadvantages that are for the most part common to the good and the wicked.

Someone will say: Why then did this divine mercy reach even the ungodly and ungrateful? Why do we think, if not because it was granted by him who daily “makes his sun rise on the good and the evil and sends rain on the just and the unjust”? For though some of them, reflecting on these things, correct themselves from ungodliness by repentance, while others, as the apostle says, “despising the riches of God's goodness and long-suffering, according to the hardness of their heart and impenitent heart store up for themselves wrath on the day of wrath and of the revelation of the just judgment of God, who will render to each according to his works”, still the patience of God invites the wicked to repentance, just as the scourge of God trains the good to patience; and likewise the mercy of God embraces the good to cherish them, just as the severity of God rebukes the wicked to punish them. For it has pleased divine providence to prepare for the future good things for the righteous which the unrighteous will not enjoy, and evil things for the ungodly by which the good will not be tormented; but these temporal goods and evils it has willed to be common to both, so that the good things which the wicked are also seen to have may not be sought too greedily, and the evil things by which the good too are very often afflicted may not be shamefully avoided. But it makes a very great difference how one uses both the things called prosperous and those called adverse. For the good man is neither lifted up by temporal goods nor broken by temporal evils; but the wicked man is punished by misfortune of this kind precisely because he is corrupted by good fortune. Yet God often shows his working more plainly even in distributing these things. For if every sin were now punished with manifest penalty, nothing would be thought to be kept for the last judgment; again, if the Godhead punished no sin openly now, it would be believed that there is no divine providence. Similarly in prosperity: if God did not grant it to some who ask with the most evident generosity, we would say these things do not belong to him; and again, if he gave it to all who ask, we would think he must be served only for such rewards, and such service would make us not godly but covetous and greedy. This being so, when good and wicked have been afflicted alike, they are not therefore undistinguished because what both suffered is undistinguished. For the unlikeness of the sufferers remains even in the likeness of the sufferings, and though under the same torment, virtue and vice are not the same. For as under one fire gold glows and chaff smokes, and under the same threshing-sledge the straw is crushed and the grain is cleaned, and the lees are not mixed with the oil because they are pressed out by the same weight of the press, so one and the same force falling upon them proves, purifies, and refines the good, but condemns, ruins, and destroys the wicked. So in the same affliction the wicked curse and blaspheme God, while the good pray and praise. So much does it matter, not what things one suffers, but what kind of person suffers them. For stirred by the same motion, filth gives off a horrible stench and ointment a sweet fragrance.

Chapter 9. On the reasons for the chastisements by which both good and wicked are scourged alike.

What, then, did the Christians suffer in that general devastation that did not serve rather for their advancement, if they considered these things faithfully? First, because, humbly reflecting on the very sins in anger at which God has filled the world with such calamities, even if they are far from the criminal, the depraved, and the ungodly, they still do not count themselves so free of faults as to judge themselves unworthy to suffer temporal evils for them. For, apart from the fact that everyone, however praiseworthily he lives, yields in some things to carnal desire, if not to monstrous crimes, the abyss of depravity, and the abomination of ungodliness, then at least to some sins, whether rare or more frequent the smaller they are, apart from this, I say, who can easily be found who treats those very people, for whose horrible pride, luxury, and avarice, and whose detestable iniquities and impieties God, as he foretold in his threats, crushes the earth, as they ought to be treated, and lives with them as one ought to live with such people? For very often we wrongly hold back from teaching and admonishing them, and sometimes also from reproving and rebuking them, either because the labor irks us, or because we are ashamed to offend them to their face, or because we avoid their enmity, lest they hinder and harm us in these temporal things, whether things our greed still seeks to gain or things our weakness fears to lose. So although the life of the wicked displeases the good, and therefore they do not fall with them into the damnation prepared for such people after this life, yet, because they spare their damnable sins for this reason, fearing for their own sins, even though light and pardonable, they are rightly scourged with them in time, although they are by no means punished in eternity; rightly they find this life bitter when they are afflicted by God along with them, because, loving its sweetness, they were unwilling to be bitter to them when they sinned. For if someone holds back from reproving and rebuking wrongdoers because he looks for a more suitable time, or fears for them lest they become worse through it, or lest they hinder others who are weak from being trained in a good and godly life, oppress them, and turn them from the faith, this seems not an occasion of greed but a counsel of love. What is blameworthy is that those who live differently and shrink from the deeds of the wicked nevertheless spare other people's sins, which they ought to correct or rebuke, while they guard against offending them lest they harm themselves in those things which the good use lawfully and innocently, but more greedily than befits those who are pilgrims in this world and profess the hope of a heavenly homeland. For not only the weaker ones, who lead married lives, have children or seek to have them, and possess houses and households (those whom the apostle addresses in the churches, teaching and admonishing how they ought to live, wives with husbands and husbands with wives, children with parents and parents with children, slaves with masters and masters with slaves), gladly acquire many temporal and earthly things and lose them with distress, and for their sake do not dare to offend people whose most defiled and wicked life displeases them; but even those who hold a higher rank of life, are not entangled in the bonds of marriage, and make do with little food and clothing, very often abstain from reproving the wicked while they fear their plots and attacks against their reputation and safety. And though they do not fear them so much as to yield to any of their threats and wickedness so as to commit similar things, still they are often unwilling to rebuke the very things they do not commit with them, when perhaps they could correct some by rebuking them, lest, if they fail, their own safety and reputation come into danger and ruin. And this is not from the consideration by which they see that their reputation and safety are needed for the good of instructing people, but rather from that weakness which delights in the flattering tongue and the day of human approval, and dreads the judgment of the crowd and the torment or destruction of the flesh; that is, because of certain bonds of greed, not because of the duties of love. This, then, seems to me no small reason why the good too are scourged with the wicked, when it pleases God to punish depraved morals even by the affliction of temporal penalties. For they are scourged together, not because they lead an evil life together, but because they love the temporal life together, not equally, yet together; the life which the good ought to despise, so that the wicked, rebuked and corrected, might attain eternal life; and if they would not be companions in attaining it, they should be borne with and loved as enemies, since as long as they live it is always uncertain whether they will change their will for the better. In this matter those to whom it is said through the prophet have not an equal but a far heavier case: “He indeed shall die in his sin, but his blood I will require at the hand of the watchman.” For watchmen, that is, those set over the peoples, have been appointed in the churches for this purpose, that they may not spare to rebuke sins. Yet one who is not a leader is not therefore entirely free of this kind of fault, if among those with whom the needs of this life join him he knows of many things to be admonished or reproved and neglects them, avoiding offending them for the sake of things which he uses in this life not wrongly, but in which he takes more delight than he ought. Then the good have another reason for being afflicted by temporal evils, such as Job had: that the human spirit may be proved and known to itself, how great the strength of its godliness is in loving God for nothing.

Chapter 10. That the saints lose nothing in losing temporal things.

When these things have been rightly considered and examined, see whether anything evil happened to the faithful and godly that was not turned to their good; unless perhaps we must think that the apostle's saying is empty, where he says: “We know that for those who love God all things work together for good.” They lost everything they had. Their faith? Their godliness? The goods of the inner man, who is rich before God? These are the riches of Christians, in which the apostle was wealthy when he said: “But godliness with contentment is great gain. For we brought nothing into this world, nor can we take anything out. Having food and covering, with these we are content. For those who want to become rich fall into temptation and a snare and many foolish and harmful desires, which plunge men into ruin and destruction. For avarice is the root of all evils; and some, craving it, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many sorrows.” Those, then, whose earthly riches perished in that devastation, if they held them as they had heard from this man, poor outwardly and rich within, that is, if they used the world as though not using it, could say what that man said who was sorely tempted and by no means overcome: “Naked I came from my mother's womb, naked I shall return to the earth. The Lord gave, the Lord has taken away; as it pleased the Lord, so it has been done; blessed be the name of the Lord.” So a good servant would count his Lord's will itself as his great wealth; following it, he would grow rich in mind, and would not grieve, while still alive, at being left by the things he would soon have left at his death. But those weaker ones who clung to these earthly goods with some small greed, though they did not prefer them to Christ, discovered by losing them how much they had sinned by loving them. For they grieved just as much as they had pierced themselves with sorrows, as I recalled above that the apostle said. For those who had so long neglected the instruction of words needed to have the instruction of experience added. For when the apostle said, “Those who want to become rich fall into temptation” and the rest, he was certainly rebuking greed in riches, not the means, since elsewhere he commanded: “Charge the rich of this world not to be proud nor to hope in uncertain riches, but in the living God, who richly provides us with all things to enjoy; let them do good, be rich in good works, give readily, share, store up for themselves a good foundation for the future, that they may lay hold on the true life.” Those who did this with their riches were consoled for light losses by great gains, and rejoiced more over what they kept more safely by giving it readily than they grieved over what they lost more easily by keeping it fearfully. For what could perish on earth was what they had been reluctant to transfer from there. For those who accepted the counsel of their Lord when he said, “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves dig through and steal; but lay up for yourselves treasure in heaven, where no thief comes near and no moth corrupts; for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also,” proved in the time of tribulation how rightly they had judged in not despising the most truthful teacher and the most faithful and invincible guardian of their treasure. For if many rejoiced that they had kept their riches in a place the enemy happened not to reach, how much more surely and securely could they rejoice who, at the warning of their God, had moved them to where the enemy could not come at all! So our Paulinus, bishop of Nola, who from being very wealthy became by his own choice very poor and most abundantly holy, when the barbarians laid waste Nola itself and he was held by them, prayed thus in his heart, as we afterwards learned from him: “Lord, let me not be tortured for gold and silver; for where all my things are, you know.” For he had all his things where he had been shown to store and treasure them by him who foretold that these evils would come upon the world. And so those who had obeyed their Lord's warning about where and how they ought to lay up treasure did not lose even their earthly riches when the barbarians overran them. But those who repented of not having obeyed learned what should be done with such things, if not by wisdom going before, then at least by experience following after. But, they say, some good people, even Christians, were tortured to make them hand over their goods to the enemy. They could neither hand over nor lose the good by which they themselves were good. But if they preferred to be tortured rather than hand over “the mammon of iniquity,” they were not good. They should have been admonished, since they suffered so much for gold, how much must be endured for Christ, so that they might learn rather to love him who would enrich with eternal happiness those who suffered for him, not gold and silver, for which it was most wretched to suffer, whether it was hidden by lying or handed over by telling the truth. For under torture no one lost Christ by confessing him; no one saved gold except by denying it. So perhaps the tortures were more useful, teaching them to love the incorruptible good, than those goods which tormented their owners with love of them without any useful fruit. But some, even having nothing to hand over, were tortured because they were not believed. Perhaps these too desired to have, and were not poor by holy choice; to them it had to be shown that not their means but their very desires deserved such torments. But if, by the resolve of a better life, they had no gold and silver hidden away, I do not know whether it happened to any of them to be tortured while thought to have it; but even if it did, surely whoever confessed holy poverty amid those tortures confessed Christ. Therefore, even if he did not deserve to be believed by the enemy, the confessor of holy poverty could not be tortured without a heavenly reward. Many, they say, even Christians, were destroyed by long famine. This too the good faithful turned to their use by enduring it godly. For those whom famine killed it rescued from the evils of this life, as bodily sickness does; those whom it did not kill it taught to live more sparingly and to fast longer.

Chapter 11. On the end of temporal life, whether longer or shorter.

But, they say, many Christians too were killed; many were carried off by a hideous variety of many kinds of death. If this is hard to bear, it is certainly common to all who have been born into this life. This I know: no one has died who was not going to die at some time. The end of life makes a long life and a short one the same. For what has equally ceased to be is not one better and another worse, or one greater and another shorter. And what does it matter by what kind of death this life is ended, when he whose life is ended is not forced to die again? Since for every mortal, amid the daily accidents of this life, countless deaths in a way threaten, as long as it is uncertain which of them will come, I ask whether it is better to suffer one by dying or to fear all by living. I am not unaware how much more readily people choose to live long under the fear of so many deaths than by dying once to fear none thereafter. But what the sense of the flesh in its weak fear shrinks from is one thing; what the reasoning of the mind, carefully examined, proves is another. A death must not be thought evil which a good life has preceded. For nothing makes death evil except what follows death. So those who must necessarily die need not care much what happens to make them die, but where they are compelled to go by dying. Since, then, Christians know that the death of the godly poor man among the licking tongues of the dogs was far better than that of the ungodly rich man in purple and fine linen, how did those terrible kinds of death harm the dead who had lived well?