Letters & Polemics (CSEL) 3 part 19/87

the books of divine, not of human affairs, testify that he wrote this, nor where he was setting forth the stage games, but where he was unfolding the Capitoline laws. In short, by such things he is overcome and confesses that, just as they made the gods in human form, so they believed them to be delighted by human pleasures. For neither were the malignant spirits wanting to their own business, that they might confirm these noxious opinions by the mockery of human minds. Hence too is that story, that the keeper of Hercules' temple, idle and at leisure, played at dice with himself, alternating each hand, in one placing Hercules, in the other himself, on this condition: that if he himself won, he should provide himself a supper from the temple offerings and hire a mistress;

but if the victory should fall to Hercules, he would exhibit this same thing out of his own money for the pleasure of Hercules. Then, when he was beaten by himself as if by Hercules, he gave the supper that was due and a most noble courtesan, Larentina, to the god Hercules. But she, when she had slept in the temple, saw in a dream that Hercules had had intercourse with her, and had said to her that, on departing thence, with the first youth she met she would find her reward, which she should believe to have been paid to her by Hercules. And so, as she went away, when the first youth, Tarutius, a most wealthy man, met her, and having loved her had kept her with him for a long while, he died leaving her his heir.

She, having obtained a most ample fortune, lest she should seem ungrateful for the divine reward, wrote the Roman people itself as her heir — which she thought most acceptable to the deities — and, when she had disappeared, the testament was found; by which merits they say she earned even divine honours. If the poets had feigned these things, if the mimes had acted them, they would without doubt be said to pertain to the fabulous theology and would be judged to be separated from the dignity of the civil theology. But when these disgraceful things are brought forth, not by poets but by peoples; not by mimes but by sacred rites; not by theatres but by temples — that is, not of the fabulous but of the civil theology — by so great an author:

it is not in vain that the players, by their sportive arts, feign so great a baseness of the gods, as there truly is; but it is altogether in vain that the priests, as it were by sacred rites, endeavour to feign for the gods such honour as there is none. There are sacred rites of Juno, and these used to be celebrated in her beloved island Samos, where she was given in marriage to Jupiter; there are sacred rites of Ceres, in which Proserpina, snatched away by Pluto, is sought; there are sacred rites of Venus, in which her beloved Adonis, a most beautiful youth, slain by the boar's tusk, is bewailed; there are sacred rites of the Mother of the gods, in which the handsome youth Attis, beloved by her and emasculated through womanish jealousy, is also lamented in the wretchedness of the emasculated men whom they call Galli.

Since these things are more deformed than any scenic foulness, what is the meaning of their striving to separate, as it were, the fabulous fictions of the poets concerning the gods, which evidently pertain to the theatre, from the civil theology, which they wish to pertain to the city — as unworthy and base things from honourable and worthy ones? And so there is rather cause why thanks should be owed to the players, who have spared the eyes of men and have not laid bare in spectacles all those things which are hidden by the walls of the sacred buildings. What good ought to be thought of their sacred rites, which are covered with darkness, when those things which are brought forth into the light are so detestable? And certainly, what they do in secret through the emasculated and the effeminate, let them themselves look to it;

yet they could by no means conceal those same men, unhappily and basely unmanned and corrupted. Let them persuade whom they can that they perform anything holy through such men, whom they cannot deny to be numbered and to dwell among their holy things. We know not what they do, but we know through what manner of men they do it. For we know what things are done on the stage, where never, even into the chorus of harlots, has an emasculated or effeminate man entered; and yet even these base and infamous persons act them; for indeed they ought not to have been acted by honourable men. What then are those sacred rites, for the performing of which sanctity has chosen such men as not even the obscenity of the stage has admitted into itself? CHAPTER VIII. Concerning the interpretations of natural reasons, which the pagan teachers endeavour to show on behalf of their gods.

But these things, they say, have certain physiological meanings, that is, interpretations drawn from natural causes. As though in this discussion we were inquiring into physiology and not theology, that is, an account not of nature but of God. For although He who is the true God is God not by opinion but by nature, yet not every nature is God; for there is assuredly a nature of man and of beast, of tree and of stone, none of which is God. But if the chief point of this interpretation, when the rites of the Mother of the gods are in question, is certainly that the Mother of the gods is the earth, why do we seek further, why do we sift the rest? What more plainly favors those who say that all these gods were once men? For thus they are earth-born, and thus their mother is the earth.

But in true theology the earth is the work of God, not His mother. Yet however they interpret their sacred rites and refer them to the nature of things, for men to suffer what is womanish is not according to nature but against nature. This disease, this crime, this disgrace finds among those sacred rites an open profession, which among the vicious habits of men scarcely finds confession even under torture. Then, if these rites, which are proved to be fouler than the obscenities of the stage, are here excused and cleansed on the ground that they have their own interpretations by which they are shown to signify the nature of things, why are not poetical things likewise excused and cleansed?

For many have interpreted these poetical things too in the same manner, to such a degree that what is told of them as most monstrous and unspeakable—that Saturn devoured his own sons—some interpret to mean that the length of time, which is signified by the name of Saturn, itself consumes whatever it begets; or, as the same Varro holds, that Saturn pertains to the seeds which fall back again into the earth from which they spring. And in like manner others interpret the rest, each in his own way.

And yet this is called fabulous theology, and together with all its interpretations of this kind it is censured, rejected, and disapproved—and that not only by the natural theology, which belongs to the philosophers, but even by this civil theology of which we are treating, which is asserted to pertain to cities and peoples; and because it has fashioned unworthy fables about the gods, it is deservedly judged fit to be repudiated and set apart. And this no doubt with this design: that, since those most acute and most learned men by whom these things were written understood that both were to be disapproved—both the fabulous, that is, and the civil—they yet dared to disapprove the fabulous, but did not dare to disapprove this latter;

they set forth the former as blameworthy, and exhibited this latter as comparable to it as being like it—not that this should be chosen as to be held in preference to the former, but that it should be understood as to be spat out along with the former; and thus, without danger to those who feared to censure the civil theology, both being despised, that which they call natural might find a place in better minds. For both the civil and the fabulous are alike fabulous, and both alike civil: whoever prudently inspects the vanities and obscenities of both will find both fabulous; whoever observes that the scenic plays belonging to the fabulous are present in the festivals of the civil gods and in the divine affairs of cities, will find both civil.

In what way, then, is the power of bestowing eternal life attributed to any of these gods, whom their own images and rites convict of being most evidently like the openly reprobated fabulous gods in forms, ages, sex, attire, marriages, generations, and rites? In all of which it is understood either that they were men, and that sacred and solemn rites were established for them according to the life or death of each, while demons insinuated and confirmed this error; or else assuredly that on some occasion or other most unclean spirits crept in to deceive human minds. CHAPTER IX. Of the offices of the several gods. What of this?

Do not those very offices of the deities, chopped up so cheaply and minutely—on account of which they say one must supplicate them each for his own particular function, of which we have already said not all indeed, but many things—do they not accord rather with the buffoonery of the mime than with the dignity of the divine? If someone were to employ two nurses for an infant, one of whom should give nothing but food and the other nothing but drink—just as these people employed two goddesses for this purpose, Educa and Potina—surely he would seem to be foolish and to be doing in his home something resembling a mime. They will have it that Liber is so named from "liberation," because by his benefit males in copulation are freed by the emission of seed; and that Libera does the same in females (whom they also think to be Venus), because they hold that she too emits seeds;

and on account of these things they set the male part of the body in the temple for Liber, and the female part for Libera. To these they add women assigned to Liber, and wine for the purpose of arousing lust. Thus the Bacchanalia were celebrated with the utmost frenzy; where Varro himself confesses that such things could not have been done by the Bacchants except with a mind deranged. These things, however, afterwards displeased a saner senate, and it ordered them to be done away with. Here at last perhaps they perceived what unclean spirits, while held to be gods, can do in the minds of men. Certainly these things would not be done in the theaters; for there they play, they do not rave—although to have gods who take delight even in such plays is itself a kind of madness.

But what is to be said of this: that, while he distinguishes the religious man from the superstitious by this distinction—that the superstitious man is said to fear the gods, but the religious man only to revere them as parents, not to fear them as enemies, and says that they are all so good that it is easier for them to spare the guilty than to harm any innocent person—yet he relates that for a woman who has just given birth, after the delivery, three guardian gods are employed, lest the god Silvanus should enter by night and trouble her; and that, to signify these guardians, three men by night

go round the thresholds of the house, and first strike the threshold with an axe, then with a pestle, and thirdly sweep it with brooms, so that, by these tokens of cultivation having been given, the god Silvanus might be hindered from entering; because trees are neither felled nor pruned without iron, nor is spelt prepared without a pestle, nor are crops heaped up without brooms; and from these three things three gods were named: Intercidona from the cutting of the axe, Pilumnus from the pestle, Deverra from the brooms; by which guardian gods the newly delivered woman might be preserved against the violence of the god Silvanus. Thus the guardianship of the good would not avail against the cruelty of a harmful god, unless they were many against one, and unless they fought against him—rough, dreadful, and uncultivated, being as it were of the woods—with tokens of cultivation as with things contrary to him.

Is this, then, the innocence of the gods? Is this their concord? Are these the deities salutary to cities—more to be laughed at than the mockeries of the theaters? When male and female are joined, the god Jugatinus is brought in; let this be borne. But she who marries must be led home; the god Domiducus too is brought in; that she may be in the house, the god Domitius is brought in; that she may remain with her husband, the goddess Manturna is added. What more is sought? Let human modesty be spared; let the lust of flesh and blood perform the rest, the secret of shame being provided for. Why is the bedchamber filled with a throng of deities, when even the groomsmen depart from it?

And it is filled for this purpose, not that by the thought of their presence greater care of chastity might be taken, but that the woman, weak in her sex and timid in her novelty, might, with their cooperation, have her virginity taken away without any difficulty. For there are present the goddess Virginiensis, and the god-father Subigus, and the goddess-mother Prema, and the goddess Pertunda, and Venus, and Priapus. What is this? If it was at all needful that the man laboring in that work should be aided by the gods, would not some one god or some one goddess suffice? Would Venus alone not be too little—she who is said to be so named for this very reason, that without force a woman does not cease to be a virgin?

If there is any sense of shame in men which is not in the deities, when married persons believe that so many gods of either sex are present and busy about this work, are they not so affected with shame that the man is less moved and the woman struggles more? And surely, if the goddess Virginiensis is present, that the virgin's girdle may be loosed; if the god Subigus is present, that she may be subdued to the man; if the goddess Prema is present, that, being subdued, she may be pressed down lest she stir herself—what is the goddess Pertunda doing there? Let her blush; let her go outside; let the husband also do something. It is most dishonorable that what she is called from, anyone but he should accomplish. But perhaps she is tolerated because she is said to be a goddess, not a god.

For if a male were believed in and called Pertundus, the husband would demand greater aid against him for his wife's chastity than the woman in childbed against Silvanus. But why should I say this, when Priapus too is there—a male all too male—upon whose huge and most shameful member the newly wedded bride was bidden to sit, by the most honorable and most religious custom of matrons? Let them still go on and, by whatever subtlety they can, attempt as it were to distinguish civil theology from fabulous theology, cities from theaters, temples from stages, the sacred rites of the pontiffs from the songs of the poets—as honorable things from base, truthful from deceitful, weighty from frivolous, serious from ludicrous, desirable from things to be spat out. We understand what they are about;

they know that that theatrical and fabulous theology depends upon this civil one, and is reflected back to it from the songs of the poets as from a mirror; and therefore, this civil one being set forth—which they dare not condemn—they more freely accuse and censure that image of it, so that those who recognize what they mean may detest this very face of which that is the image. Yet the gods themselves, beholding themselves as in the same mirror, so love it that they may the better be seen in both what and what kind they are.

Whence also they have compelled their worshipers by terrible commands to dedicate to themselves the uncleanness of the fabulous theology, to set it in their solemnities, to hold it among divine things; and thus they have both more manifestly shown themselves to be most unclean spirits, and have made that abject and reprobated theatrical theology a member and part of this urban theology, as though it were the chosen and approved one—so that, while the whole is base and deceitful and contains within itself fictitious gods, one part of it is in the writings of the priests, the other in the songs of the poets. Whether it has yet other parts is another question: for the present, on account of Varro's own division, I have sufficiently shown, as I think, that both the urban and the theatrical theology pertain to the one civil theology.

Wherefore, since both are alike in baseness, absurdity, indignity, and falsehood, far be it from true religious men that eternal life should be hoped for from either the one or the other. Finally, Varro himself began to commemorate and enumerate the gods from the conception of man, the number of whom he began from Janus, and carried that series on down to the death of a decrepit man, and closed the gods pertaining to man himself with the goddess Nenia, who is chanted at the funerals of the aged; then he began to set forth other gods, who pertained not to man himself, but to those things which are man's, such as food and clothing and whatever else is necessary to this life, showing in all of them what is each one's office, and for what reason supplication is to be made to each;

yet in all this diligence he pointed out and named no gods from whom eternal life is to be sought—on account of which alone, properly speaking, we are Christians.

Who, then, would be so dull as not to understand that this man, by so diligently expounding and laying open civil theology, and by demonstrating it to be like that fabulous, unworthy, and shameful one, and by teaching plainly enough that the fabulous itself is a part of this—is contriving a place in the minds of men for none other than that natural theology, which he says pertains to the philosophers; doing this with such subtlety that he censures the fabulous, but indeed does not dare to censure the civil, yet by exhibiting it shows it to be censurable; and thus, both being reprobated by the judgment of those who rightly understand, the natural alone remains to be chosen? Of which, in its own place, with the help of the true God, it must be more diligently discoursed. CHAPTER X.

On the liberty of Seneca, who censured civil theology more vehemently than Varro the fabulous. The liberty indeed which was lacking to this man—so that he should not dare openly to censure this urban theology, most like the theatrical, as he censured the fabulous—was not wholly, but in some part, not lacking to Annaeus Seneca, whom we find by certain indications to have flourished in the times of our apostles. For it was present to him as a writer, though lacking to him as a liver. For in that book which he composed against the superstitions, he himself censures this civil and urban theology much more copiously and vehemently than Varro the theatrical and fabulous. For when he was treating of the images, he says:

"They dedicate the sacred, immortal, inviolable gods in the basest and most motionless matter; they clothe them with the forms of men and beasts and fishes, and some even with bodies of mixed sex, of diverse bodies; they call those things deities, which, if they should suddenly meet us having received breath, would be held to be monsters." Then, somewhat later, when, while extolling natural theology, he had set forth the opinions of certain philosophers, he put a question to himself and said: "At this point someone says: Am I to believe that heaven and earth are gods, and that there are some above the moon and some below? Shall I bear either Plato or the Peripatetic Strato, of whom the one made a god without a body, the other a god without a soul?" And, replying to this:

"What then, after all," he says, "do the dreams of Titus Tatius or Romulus or Tullus Hostilius seem to you more true? Tatius dedicated the goddess Cloacina; Romulus, Picus and Tiberinus; Hostilius, Pavor (Fear) and Pallor (Paleness), the most loathsome of all affections—of which the one is a movement of a terrified mind, the other not even a disease, but merely a color of the body. Will you rather believe these to be deities and receive them into heaven?" And how freely did he write of the rites themselves, cruelly base! "This one," he says, "cuts off his male parts; that one slashes his arms. Where do they fear angry gods, who thus deserve them propitious? But the gods ought to be worshiped by no such kind of rite, if they want this."

"So great is the frenzy of a mind disturbed and driven from its seat, that the gods are thus appeased in a manner in which not even the most loathsome men rage, men of a cruelty handed down in fables. Tyrants have mangled the limbs of certain men, but have ordered no one to mangle his own. For the pleasure of royal lust some have been castrated; but no one, at his master's bidding, laid hands on himself that he might cease to be a man. They butcher themselves in the temples; they supplicate with their own wounds and blood. If one has leisure to observe what they do and what they suffer, he will find things so unbecoming to honorable men, so unworthy of free men, so unlike sane men, that no one would have doubted them to be mad, if they raved with fewer companions;

as it is, the multitude of the insane is the protection of their sanity." Now those things which he relates as wont to be done in the Capitol itself, and which he quite fearlessly exposes—who would believe them to be done save by mockers or madmen? For when he had derided how in the Egyptian rites Osiris, lost, is mourned, and presently, found, is the occasion of great joy—since both his loss and his finding are feigned, yet that grief and gladness are truly expressed by those who have lost nothing and found nothing—he says: "Yet to this frenzy a fixed time is appointed. It is tolerable to go mad once a year. Go into the Capitol: you will be ashamed of the madness made public, which empty frenzy has assigned to itself as a duty.

One announces the names to the god; another reports the hours to Jupiter; one is a lector, another an anointer, who with vain movement of the arms imitates one anointing. There are women who arrange the hair of Juno and Minerva (standing far from the temple, not only from the image, they move their fingers in the manner of those who dress the hair); there are women who hold a mirror; there are those who summon the gods to attend their lawsuits; there are those who offer petitions and instruct them in their case. A learned arch-mime, now a decrepit old man, daily played the mime in the Capitol, as though the gods would gladly watch him whom men had ceased to watch. Every kind of artisan there sits idle, employed in the service of the immortal gods." And a little after he says: "These, however, even if they promise the god a use that is superfluous, promise nothing base or infamous.

Certain women sit in the Capitol who think they are loved by Jupiter; nor are they frightened even by the regard of most wrathful Juno, if you are willing to believe the poets." This liberty Varro did not have; he dared only to censure the poetical theology, but did not dare to censure the civil, which this man cut to pieces. But if we attend to the truth, the temples where these things are done are worse than the theaters where they are feigned. Hence in these rites of civil theology Seneca chose rather these parts for the wise man: that he should not hold them in the religion of the soul, but should feign them in his acts. For he says: "All these things the wise man will observe as commanded by laws, not as pleasing to the gods." And a little after: "What of the fact that we even join the gods in marriage, and that not even piously—of brothers and sisters!

We give Bellona to Mars, Venus to Vulcan, Salacia to Neptune. Yet some we leave celibate, as though a match had failed—especially since certain ones are widows, like Populonia or Fulgora and the goddess Rumina; for whom I do not wonder that a suitor was wanting. All that ignoble crowd of gods, which long superstition has heaped up through a long age, we shall so adore," he says, "as to remember that its worship pertains rather to custom than to reality." Neither those laws, then, nor custom in civil theology instituted what was pleasing to the gods or pertained to reality. But this man, whom the philosophers had as it were made free, nevertheless, because he was a senator of the illustrious Roman people, worshiped what he censured, did what he reproached, adored what he blamed;

because, namely, philosophy had taught him something great—that he should not be superstitious in his soul; but on account of the laws of the citizens and the customs of men, he would indeed not act the part of the feigning player in the theater, but would imitate it in the temple: and this the more damnably, in that those things which he did mendaciously, he did in such a way that the people supposed him to be doing them truly; whereas the stage-player, by playing, would rather give delight than deceive by imposture. CHAPTER XI. What Seneca thought concerning the Jews.

Among the other superstitions of civil theology he censures also the sacred observances of the Jews, and most of all the sabbaths, affirming that they act unprofitably, in that by those single days interposed at intervals of seven they lose nearly a seventh part of their life in idleness, and are harmed by not doing many things that are pressing at the time. The Christians, however, who were even then most hostile to the Jews, he did not dare to mention on either side, lest he should either praise them against the ancient custom of his country, or perhaps censure them against his own will. Of those Jews, indeed, when he spoke, he says: "Meanwhile the custom of that most accursed nation has so prevailed that it has now been received throughout all lands: the conquered have given laws to the conquerors."

Saying these things, he marveled at them; and being ignorant of what was being divinely wrought, he added plainly a sentence by which he might signify what he thought concerning the rationale of those sacred observances. For he says: "They, however, know the causes of their rite; the greater part of the people does that which it knows not why it does." But concerning the sacraments of the Jews, both why and how far they were instituted by divine authority, and afterwards by the people of God, to whom the mystery of eternal life was revealed, were by the same authority abolished at the time when it behooved—of these we have spoken elsewhere, especially when we were acting against the Manichaeans, and in this work too there is a more opportune place where it must be said. CHAPTER XII.

That, the vanity of the gods of the nations being uncovered, it cannot be doubted that they can bestow eternal life on no one, since they do not even aid temporal life. Now, on account of the three theologies which the Greeks call mythical, physical, and political, and which in Latin can be called fabulous, natural, and civil—since eternal life is to be hoped for neither from the fabulous, which even the worshipers of many false gods have most freely censured, nor from the civil, of which the fabulous is convicted to be a part, and to which this latter is found to be most like or even worse—if to anyone the things said in this volume are not enough, let him add also those things which in the preceding books, and especially in the fourth, were most fully discussed concerning God the giver of felicity.

For to whom but to felicity alone, on account of eternal life, ought men to consecrate themselves, if felicity were a goddess? But since she is not a goddess but a gift of God, to what god save the giver of felicity ought we to be consecrated—we who with pious love love eternal life, where there is true and full felicity? But that none of these gods, who are worshiped with such great baseness, and who, unless they be so worshiped, grow angry far more basely, and on this very account confess themselves to be most unclean spirits—that none of them is the giver of felicity, I think that, from what has been said, no one ought to doubt. And further, he who does not give felicity, how could he give eternal life? For we call that life eternal in which there is felicity without end.

For if the soul lives in eternal punishments, by which those very unclean spirits also shall be tormented, that is rather eternal death than life. For there is no death greater and worse than where death dies not. But because the nature of the soul, in that it was created immortal, cannot be without some sort of life, its utmost death is alienation from the life of God in the eternity of punishment. Eternal life, therefore—that is, a life happy without any end—He alone gives who gives true felicity. Since those whom this civil theology worships have been convicted of being unable to give it,

not only on account of those temporal and earthly things, which we showed in the preceding five books, but much more on account of eternal life, which is to be after death—which we have treated in this one book, with even those gods themselves cooperating—they are not to be worshiped. But since the force of a sluggish, deep-rooted custom has its roots too deeply in the depths, if to anyone I seem to have discoursed too little concerning the rejecting and shunning of this civil theology, let him direct his mind to another volume, which, by the help of God, is to be joined to this one. PREFACE.