The City of God

Augustine will now turn his argument to the role of the gods in the spread of the Roman empire. He cautions that one shouldn’t be blinded by “high-sounding words like ‘peoples’, ‘realms’, ‘provinces’”: as with individual human lives, it’s the quality of an empire, not its wealth or grandeur, that determines its worthiness (138). And without justice, a kingdom is a mere criminal gang.

The legendary King Ninus, whose ambition led him to expand the Assyrian empire by continual warfare, comes up as a counterexample to those who’d argue that the Roman empire became great through the help of the gods. The Assyrians didn’t worship those gods, but their empire was powerful. That empire also fell—and Christianity wasn’t there for the Assyrians to blame.

Augustine now turns to the vast numbers of Roman gods. There isn’t, for example, one god of nature, but gods specifically allocated to hills, mountains, valleys—and even different gods for crops before and after they sprout. This seems obviously ridiculous. But even the bigger and more powerful gods, like Jupiter and Juno, have inconsistent and overly convoluted theologies attached to them.

What of the argument that Jupiter plays a central role as a kind of world-soul, inhabiting all the other gods and the world itself? Augustine rubbishes this idea with a long catalogue of the many, many different roles Jupiter would then have to play.