province. Augustine, at the request of the mother of Volusian, a Roman of high position, and now or afterwards Proconsul of Africa, had put himself into correspondence with her son. Volusian sent him notes of some difficulties, relating chiefly to the Incarnation, which had been raised at a meeting of himself and his friends, and which stood in the way of their acceptance of Christianity. At the same time Marcellinus, who knew Volusian well, and was also anxious to win him over to Christianity, wrote to say that Volusian had confined himself to these points in writing to Augustine, but that difficulties as to the consistency of Christian teaching (e.g. of the Sermon on the Mount) with the imperial rule of Rome, and as to the misfortunes which had befallen the Empire under Christian emperors, were constantly discussed in the group of statesmen and great Roman officials to which Volusian belonged. He therefore urges Augustine to reply at length,1 telling him that his answer would pass into many hands. Augustine sent replies to both of his correspondents at once, but he meets Marcellinus's request more fully in the work before us.2

:

It was not, indeed, only for Volusian and his friends that Augustine wrote. The shock of the fall of Rome was deeply felt it penetrated to the utmost bounds of the Empire. Men saw at once that it was one of those events which mark epochs in world-history. It was much more than the fall of the greatest city of the world: it was the sign and symbol of the collapse of the old social order. 'When Rome, the head of the world,' Lactantius had written earlier,' shall have fallen, who can doubt that the end is come of human things, aye, and of the earth itself?' St. Augustine saw the opportunity. When men's hearts were failing them for fear, and for dread of what should come, Christianity stepped boldly forward to assert her claim to the vacant throne. The claim is made in the De Civitate Dei. Yet it is made rather in defence than in aggression. It was in Rome itself that paganism made its last serious rally. In the year 383 Symmachus, prefect of Rome, had petitioned Theodosius for permission to worship the old gods in the old way. The fall of Rome drove many Romans to take refuge in Africa, the only part of the world, as it seemed, secure from the advancing

1

6 :

Ep. 136 Plenus debet et elucubratus solutionis splendor ostendi’– a characteristically Roman point of view.

2 Ep. 132-8. Marcellinus was killed in the year in which St. Augustine began his book, but it is addressed to him.

3 Lactantius Inst. vii. 25.

hosts of the Goths. They were pagans and openly ascribed the calamities of the Empire to the neglect of the ancient gods of Rome and the rise of Christianity. Their arguments were putting a strain on the African Christians, and St. Augustine wrote, as he tells us in the Retractations,' to answer the attacks which they made on the Christian religion, and also, as is clear from the whole drift of the book, to reassure his friends. In the first five books he deals with the position of those who base the duty of worshipping the pagan gods on the immediate temporal advantages to be thus obtained. The more definitely apologetic section is completed by five more books in answer to the philosophic paganism which associated the worship of the heathen gods with the goods of the world to come. The second or mainly constructive section consists of twelve books, tracing the origin, growth, and end of the two cities, the City of God and the city of this world. The two sides are, however, necessarily intertwined, and this is especially the case in the earlier section, in which St. Augustine, at intervals or at the ends of books frequently relieves the critical analysis of his opponent's views by showing that Christianity gives a full and satisfactory answer to the difficulties which he exposes.

It is impossible, within the limits at command, even to touch on all the varied lines of thought which Augustine works out or suggests in the De Civitate Dei. To do so would need a book. It is therefore necessary to select. We do not propose to say anything here of St. Augustine's direct contribution to dogmatic theology, except in regard to the doctrine of the Church. For a complete statement of his teaching on the Trinity, on the Incarnation, on the Sacraments, on Grace, we have to look to other writings than the one now before

us.

But the characteristic points of the De Civitate Dei, those in which it throws the fullest light, among all Augustine's writings, on his views, are (1) its philosophy of history, (2) its survey of the different systems of thought which contested with Christianity in the fifth century the sway over men's minds, and (3) the conception of the two cities and of their relation to one another. On each of these points we give some account of the drift of St. Augustine's teaching.

I. At the outset St. Augustine sets himself to justify God's ways to those Christians who had suffered grievous losses in the sack of Rome. He lays down the broad principle that temporal good and evil are common to the good and bad. If temporal goods were given only to the good, men 1 Retract. ii. 43.

would serve God from lower motives; if they were given to none, men would fail to realise that their lives were in God's hands. The difference between good and bad men is to be seen in the use which they make of the fortune, good or bad, which comes to them. The same fire makes gold glitter and straw smoke. What matters is, not what things a suffers, but what kind of man he is who suffers them. Nor must the good plead that they deserve no punishment: besides their own lesser sins they have to reproach themselves with their tolerance of greater sins in others. Such unfaithfulness is rightly punished with temporal loss, though not with eternal punishment. But the temporal loss will benefit and not harm them, if their wills remain steadfast. No loss of goods can touch those who are already poor in will; those who are not may learn from it a needed lesson. 'They lost all they had; but did they lose faith? or piety? or the goods of the inner man, which are before God the true riches?'

And then he turns from comforting his own flock to meet their foes. Where are their own gods? Why have they not saved them? Has not the very name of Christ been a refuge to His friends and even to His enemies, for the Goths spared the Christian churches and all who took shelter therein? What temples were spared? Here the defence broadens out into a general indictment of paganism. So far from the common saying being true, 'Pluvia defit; causa Christiani sunt,' history shows us that Rome suffered the most terrible evils before the very name of Christ was known. Nor were those evils merely temporal losses; they included the greatest calamity which a State can undergo, the gradual decay of morality. Listen to the evidence of Sallust: 'Respublica paullatim mutata ex pulcherrima atque optima, pessima atque flagitiosissima facta est;' and Cicero confirms it. What did the gods do to save the falling State? They did nothing: they may have whispered counsels of virtue in the ears of some select few, but there was no public preaching of morality; there was nothing to arrest the people in their downward course. Nay, more, the gods themselves gave the first impulse to Rome's decline: they allowed and loved the scandalous stories men told of them: they insisted on the public display of unutterable abominations in the scenic games. Are not the Christians justified in saying that these gods were dæmons, and that it is only the true God who can restore men to health and freedom ? 2

But, if the question is to be of temporal loss, then a review 2 I. 29-33, II. 3-end.

1 I. 8-28.

of Roman history, from the foundation of the city to the time of Augustus, shows us clearly enough that Rome had her fair share of those earthly calamities which befall good and bad alike. Neither temples nor images saved the city from grave disasters, though they were reverenced, not as perishing symbols of eternal things, but exactly as preservatives of present goods. Nor did the gods themselves secure their worshippers that prosperity for which they worshipped them.1

But, it is urged, it is under the protection of these gods that Rome has grown up and her empire spread over the earth. To this objection St. Augustine has two answers: the first traverses the ground on which the objection rests; the second shows that, even assuming that ground to be true, the position of the objector is confused and untenable. The assumption which underlies the objection is that greatness is to be measured by size. Is this a true test? It is not in proportion to the vast area over which it rules that a state is great, but in proportion to its justice, i.e. the strength of the forces which bind it into one coherent and moral whole. Without justice a state is but a band of robbers.2 No doubt it is well that the good should rule widely-well, that is, for human affairs, rather than for themselves. For themselves piety and honesty are sufficient, and it is a matter of indifference whether they rule or are ruled. But the rule of the bad hurts themselves more than their subjects, and it hurts them the more, the more widely extended it is; it gives them a larger field whereon to display the vices by which they are enslaved. Further, large kingdoms are always due to wrongdoing, either their own or their neighbours'. They have their origin, one way or other, in injustice. The true and natural type of earthly society is to be found in a number of small states living at peace with one another, like the many houses in one city. We shall have occasion to allude again to this passage in discussing St. Augustine's theory of the State; but we notice here the completeness of its challenge to the fundamental political conceptions of his time. As against imperial Rome, gathering all races under her world-wide sway, he sets the ideal of a federation of nation-states at peace with one another, and guided-for this is implied-by the peace-working maxims of Christian morality, like many houses within one City of God. As against the Roman glorification of force 1 III. passim, esp. 18.

3

2 Remota itaque justitia, quid sunt regna nisi magna latrocinia?' IV. 4. 3 IV. 4-6, 15.

and power, as such, he holds-and here he is at one both with the Stoics and with Plato-that justice is the true bond of States, and that the ultimate ground which induces the just to rule is that, on the whole, it is better so than that they should be ruled by the unjust and evil.

Secondly, St. Augustine brings out, in a series of chapters of great dialectic force, though of less interest to us, the contradictory and inconsistent nature of the Roman mythology. Rome grew under the protection of the gods. But which of the gods? Was it Jupiter? Jovis omnia plena.' But why then surround him with a crowd of lesser gods and goddesses, one for every function of life? Would not Victoria be enough, or Felicitas? And are not these things divine gifts rather than gods? Yes, answers the cultivated polytheist, gifts of unknown gods, whom we worship under their name. But why not, then, gifts of one God unknown to them but known to us, the Author and Giver of all good things?1

And so from the attack on the pagan gods he passes to explain from a Christian standpoint the vast empire of Rome. No mere fate is adequate to explain the phenomena of human life. It is God, the one true God, who is the God of all history, Roman as well as Jewish. It was He who allowed the Roman power so to increase. The distinctive mark of Rome was ambition, the love of glory and human praise; led by ambition, the Romans sought liberty for themselves and rule over others. For this they made great sacrifices, they disciplined themselves, and surrendered their private fortunes to the State. And ambition may be regarded as relatively a virtue. For, if baser lusts are not to be reined in by faith and piety, with the aid of the Holy Spirit, and by the love of rational beauty, it is better they should be so by the love of glory and human praise than not at all. Yet ambition is absolutely a vice, though in some it may be an approach to virtue. Cato, who did not seek glory, but to whom it came, is a nobler character than Cæsar, who sought it for its own sake. And so the saints of God fought with ambition as an enemy of the fear and love of God. To both God gives the appropriate reward. To the Romans earthly success was the one end. They loved glory, and for it they resisted avarice, lust, and crime. Their empire became great; their fame is throughout the world; they have no reason to complain of the justice of God: 'perceperunt mercedem suam.' But the sacrifices of the saints are greater, and so is their reward. - Their City is eternal: no departure of the dying, no birth of 1 IV. 8-25, 33.