Works (City of God, On the Trinity, etc.) 4 part 4/4

Cruel civil wars, more bitter than all wars against foreign foes—as even their own authors confess—wars by which that commonwealth was judged not merely afflicted but utterly destroyed, arose long before the coming of Christ. By a chain of wicked causes they passed from the war of Marius and Sulla to the wars of Sertorius and Catiline (of whom the one had been proscribed by Sulla, the other nurtured by him), thence to the war of Lepidus and Catulus (of whom the one desired to rescind the acts of Sulla, the other to defend them), thence to the war of Pompey and Caesar (of whom Pompey had been a follower of Sulla and had either equalled or even by now surpassed his power;

but Caesar could not endure Pompey's power—for the reason that he had no such power himself, though when Pompey was conquered and slain he surpassed it), and thence they came to that other Caesar who was afterward called Augustus, under whose rule Christ was born. For Augustus himself also waged many civil wars, and in them many most illustrious men perished, among them Cicero, that eloquent master of the art of governing the commonwealth. For Gaius Caesar, who conquered Pompey and used his civil victory with clemency and granted his adversaries their lives and dignity, was cut down in the very Senate-house, as though an aspirant to kingship, by a conspiracy of certain noble senators, as it were on behalf of the liberty of the commonwealth.

Then Antony, a man far different in character and defiled and corrupted by every vice, seemed to be reaching after his power; and against him Cicero vehemently resisted, for the sake of that same supposed liberty of the fatherland. At that time there had emerged that other Caesar, a young man of wondrous native gifts, the adopted son of that Gaius Caesar, who, as I have said, was afterward called Augustus.

Cicero favored this young Caesar, that his power might be fostered against Antony, hoping that when Antony's domination had been driven off and crushed he would restore the liberty of the commonwealth—so blind and improvident was he of the future, that this very youth, whose dignity and power he was cherishing, both permitted the same Cicero to be handed over to Antony to be killed by a kind of pact of reconciliation, and subjected to his own sole rule that very liberty of the commonwealth for which Cicero had cried out so loudly. [XXXI] Let them accuse their own gods for such great evils, they who are ungrateful to our Christ for such great goods.

Certainly, when those evils were happening, the altars of the deities were warm, breathing with Sabaean incense and fresh garlands; the priesthoods were resplendent, the shrines glittered; there was sacrificing, there were games, there was frenzy in the temples—while everywhere so much blood of citizens was being shed by citizens, not only in other places but even among the very altars of the gods. Tullius did not choose a temple to flee to, because Mucius had chosen one in vain. But these men, who insult the Christian times far more shamelessly, either fled to places most sacredly dedicated to Christ, or thither the barbarians themselves led them that they might live.

This I know, and this anyone who judges without party bias most readily acknowledges together with me (to pass over the many other things I have recounted, and the many more still that I thought it too long to recount): if the human race before the Punic Wars had received the Christian discipline, and there had followed so great a devastation of affairs as in those wars crushed Europe and Africa, none of these men such as we now endure would have failed to attribute those evils to the Christian religion. And much less would their voices be tolerated—so far as concerns the Romans—if upon the reception and spread of the Christian religion there had followed either that irruption of the Gauls, or that devastation by the Tiber's flood and by fire, or, what surpasses all evils, those civil wars.

And other evils too, which happened so incredibly that they were reckoned among prodigies—if they had occurred in Christian times, to whom would they have imputed them as crimes save to Christian men? I pass over indeed those things which were more marvelous than harmful: oxen that spoke, infants not yet born that cried out certain words from their mothers' wombs, serpents that flew, women and hens and men that were turned into the male sex, and other things of this kind, which in their books—not fabulous but historical, whether true or false—bring men not destruction but astonishment.

But when it rained earth, when it rained chalk, when it rained stones (not what is usually called by the name of hail, but stones outright), these assuredly could even do grievous harm. We read in their writings that, when the fires of Aetna ran down from the very summit of the mountain to the nearest shore, the sea so boiled that the rocks were scorched and the pitch of the ships was melted. This was surely no light injury, however incredibly marvelous. By that same blaze of fire again, they have written that Sicily was so filled with a mass of ash that the roofs of the city of Catina were buried and crushed and gave way; moved by which calamity, the Romans mercifully remitted to it that year's tribute.

They have recorded in their writings that there was in Africa a multitude of locusts resembling a prodigy, at a time when it was already a province of the Roman people; for after the fruits and the leaves of the trees had been consumed, they say that a vast and immeasurable cloud of them was cast into the sea, and, when it had died and been given back to the shores, and from this the air had become corrupted, so great a pestilence arose that in the kingdom of Masinissa alone eight hundred thousand men are reported to have perished, and far more in the lands nearest the shores. Then at Utica, of thirty thousand young men who were there, they affirm that ten thousand remained. Such vanity, then, as we endure and are compelled to answer—which of these things would it not attribute to the Christian religion, if it saw them in Christian times?

And yet they do not attribute these things to their own gods, whose worship they seek out precisely so that they may not suffer even lesser evils than these, though they endured greater ones from those by whom they were formerly worshiped.