文集（天主之城·論三位一體等） 第 7 章

[Preface] In the five preceding books I seem to myself to have disputed sufficiently against those who think that the many false gods — which the Christian truth convicts of being either useless images, or unclean spirits and pernicious demons, or at any rate creatures, not the Creator — are to be venerated and worshipped, for the sake of the utility of this mortal life and of earthly things, with that rite and service which in Greek is called 'latreia' and is owed to the one true God alone. And who does not know that, whether from excessive folly or obstinacy, neither these five books nor any others, however great their number, could suffice? — since it is reckoned the glory of vanity to yield to no forces of truth, to the utter ruin, indeed, of him over whom so monstrous a vice holds sway.

For even against all the industry of the one caring for him, the disease of the incurably sick man — no fault of the physician — has proved unconquerable.

But those who weigh the things they read, understood and considered either without any, or without great and excessive, obstinacy of their old error, will more easily judge that we have discussed, within this fixed number of five volumes, more than the necessity of the question itself demanded, rather than less; and they will be unable to doubt that all the odium which the ignorant attempt to cast upon the Christian religion because of the disasters of this life and the wearing down and change of earthly things — with the learned not only dissembling but even, against their own conscience, favoring it, whom mad impiety has possessed — is altogether empty of right thought and reason, and full of the most frivolous rashness and most pernicious animosity.

[I] Now therefore, since next, as the promised order requires, those also are to be refuted and instructed who contend that the gods of the nations — which the Christian religion destroys — are to be worshipped not for the sake of this life, but for the sake of that which is to be after death: it pleases me to take the beginning of my disputation from the truthful oracle of the holy psalm: 'Blessed is he whose hope is the Lord his God, and who has not regarded vanities and lying follies.'

Yet nevertheless, amid all vanities and lying follies, the philosophers are far more tolerably to be heard — those to whom these opinions and errors of the peoples were displeasing, peoples who set up images to the divinities and either invented, or believed the invented, many false and unworthy things about those whom they call the immortal gods, and mingled the things believed with their worship and the rites of the sacred ceremonies. With these men — who, if not by freely preaching, at least somehow by murmuring in their disputations, testified that they disapproved of such things — this question is not so unfittingly treated:

namely, whether it is fitting to worship, for the sake of the life which is to be after death, not the one God who made every spiritual and corporeal creature, but many gods — whom certain of those same philosophers, more excellent and more noble than the rest, held to have been made by that one God and to have been sublimely placed on high. But who could endure it to be said and contended that those gods — certain of whom I mentioned in the fourth book, to each of whom, one by one, the offices of trifling matters are distributed — should bestow eternal life upon each person?

But those most skilled and most acute men, who boast that they have taught in their writings—as a great benefit—that one might know to which god each prayer should be addressed and what should be sought from each, lest by a most shameful absurdity (such as is wont to occur in jest upon the mime's stage) water be sought from Liber and wine from the Lymphs: will they, I ask, be authorities to any man who prays to the immortal gods, so that, when he has asked wine of the Lymphs and they have answered him, 'We have water; ask this of Liber,' he may rightly say, 'If you have no wine, at least give me eternal life'? What could be more monstrous than this absurdity? Will not those goddesses, bursting into laughter (for they are readily inclined to mirth), if they do not aim to deceive as demons do, reply to their suppliant:

'O man, do you suppose that we have life in our power—we of whom you hear that we have not so much as a vine?' It is therefore the most shameless folly to seek or hope for eternal life from such gods, who are said to watch over only the several particular portions of this most wretched and most brief life, and of whatever pertains to its support and propping up, so that if what lies under the guardianship and power of one be sought from another, it is as unfitting and absurd as to seem most like the buffoonery of the mime. When this is done by mimes who know what they are about, they are deservedly laughed at in the theater; but when it is done by fools who know it not, they are still more deservedly laughed at in the world.

To which god or goddess prayer should be made, and for what—so far as concerns those gods whom the states have established—was ingeniously discovered by the learned and committed to memory: what should be sought from Liber, for instance, what from the Lymphs, what from Vulcan, and so from the rest, some of whom I mentioned in the fourth book and some I thought fit to pass over. Now if it is an error to seek wine from Ceres, bread from Liber, water from Vulcan, or fire from the Lymphs, how much greater a madness must it be understood to be, if one should pray to any of these for eternal life!

Wherefore, if, when we inquired concerning an earthly kingdom—which of those gods or goddesses ought to be believed able to bestow it upon men—after examining all, it was shown to be far removed from the truth to think that any of these many false divinities had determined even to establish earthly kingdoms: is it not the most insane impiety, if it should be believed that eternal life—which without any doubt or comparison is to be preferred to all earthly kingdoms—can be given to anyone by any of them? For such gods seemed unable to give even an earthly kingdom, not because they are great and exalted while this thing is something small and mean which in such loftiness they would not deign to care for;

but rather, however justly anyone, considering human frailty, may despise the fleeting pinnacles of an earthly kingdom, those gods showed themselves such that they seemed most unworthy to have even these things entrusted to their giving and keeping. And by this, if (as the matters treated in the two preceding books have taught) no god out of that throng—whether of the plebeian, as it were, or of the noble gods—is fit to give mortal kingdoms to mortals, how much less can they make immortals out of mortals!

To this is added that, if now we are dealing with those who hold that the gods are to be worshipped not for the sake of this life but for the sake of the life that is to come after death, then they are by no means to be worshipped even for the sake of those things which are attributed to the power of such gods as, so to speak, parcelled out and proper to them—not by the reasoning of truth but by the opinion of vanity—as those believe who contend that their worship is necessary for the advantages of this mortal life; against whom I have already argued sufficiently, so far as I could, in the five preceding volumes. This being so, if the very age of those who worshipped the goddess Youth were to flourish more conspicuously, while those who despised her were either to die within the years of youth or to grow cold in it, as with the torpor of old age;

if bearded Fortune were to clothe the cheeks of her worshippers more handsomely and more festively, while those by whom she was spurned we should see beardless or ill-bearded: even so we should most rightly say that these several goddesses are able to do only thus much, being in a manner limited to their own offices, and that therefore eternal life ought not to be sought from Youth, who could not give a beard, nor should any good after this life be hoped for from bearded Fortune, whose power in this life was nothing, since she could not even bestow that age at which a beard is put on.

But as it is, since the worship of these goddesses is not necessary even for the sake of those very things which men suppose subject to them—for many who worshipped the goddess Youth by no means flourished in that age, and many who did not worship her rejoice in the vigor of youth; likewise many suppliants of bearded Fortune could attain to no beard, or an unshapely one, and if any venerate her to obtain a beard, they are laughed at by her bearded despisers—does the human heart so far lose its wits that, whereas it recognizes the worship of those gods to be empty and ridiculous even for the sake of those very temporal and swiftly passing gifts over which they are severally said to preside, it should yet believe it to be fruitful for the sake of eternal life?

That these gods could give eternal life, not even those have dared to assert who, in order that they might be worshipped by foolish peoples, distributed these temporal works among them piecemeal—because they thought them too many, lest any one of them should sit idle. [II] Who has inquired into these matters more curiously than Marcus Varro? Who has discovered them more learnedly? Who has considered them more attentively? Who has distinguished them more acutely? Who has written of them more diligently and more fully? Who, though he is less pleasing in eloquence, is nevertheless so filled with learning and with wise thoughts that, in all that erudition which we call secular but they call liberal, he instructs the student of things as much as Cicero delights the student of words.

Indeed even Tullius himself bears such testimony to this man, that in his Academic books he says he held that discussion which is there conducted with Marcus Varro, 'a man,' he says, 'by far the most acute of all and beyond any doubt the most learned.' He does not say 'the most eloquent' or 'the most fluent,' since in truth in this faculty he is much unequal; but 'by far,' he says, 'the most acute of all,' and in those very books, that is the Academics, where he contends that everything must be doubted, he added 'beyond any doubt the most learned.' Assuredly he was so certain of this matter that he set aside the doubt which he is wont to apply to all things, as though, being about to dispute even about this one thing in accordance with the Academics' doubt, he had forgotten that he himself was an Academic.

But in the first book, while praising the literary works of the same Varro, he says: 'We, wandering and straying like strangers in our own city, were led back, as it were, home by your books, so that we might at length recognize who and where we were. You have laid open the antiquity of our fatherland, the reckonings of the ages, the laws of things sacred and of the priests, our domestic and our public discipline, the situation of regions and places, and the names, kinds, offices, and causes of all things divine and human.' This man, then, of such notable and excellent skill—and, as Terentianus too briefly says of him in a most elegant little verse: 'Varro, in every field the most learned man'—who read so much that we marvel he had any leisure to write anything;

he wrote so much as we can scarcely believe anyone could have read: this man, I say, so great in genius and so great in learning, had he been an assailant and destroyer of those matters he calls, as it were, divine, and had said that they pertain not to religion but to superstition, I know not whether he would have written down in them so many things to be laughed at, despised, and detested.

But since he so worshipped these same gods and judged that they ought to be worshipped, that in that very work of his letters he says he fears lest they perish—not by hostile assault, but by the negligence of the citizens—from which ruin, as it were, he says that by himself they are being delivered and stored up and preserved in the memory of good men through books of this kind, by a more useful care than that whereby Metellus is famed to have rescued the sacred things of Vesta from the fire, and Aeneas the household gods from the destruction of Troy; and yet he hands down to be read by the ages things which by the wise and the foolish alike are deservedly to be cast away and to be judged most hostile to the truth of religion:

what ought we to think but that a man most keen and most skilled, yet not made free by the Holy Spirit, was overwhelmed by the custom and laws of his state, and nevertheless was unwilling to keep silent about those things by which he was moved, under the guise of commending religion. [III] He wrote forty-one books of Antiquities; these he divided into human and divine matters, assigning twenty-five to human matters and sixteen to divine, following in that division this plan: that he should give six books each to four parts of human matters. For he had in view those who act, where they act, when they act, and what they act. So in the first six he wrote of men, in the second six of places, the third six of times, and the fourth and last six he completed concerning things.

Now four times six make twenty-four. But he placed at the head one single book, which should speak in general of them all beforehand. In divine matters likewise the same form of division was kept by him, so far as concerns those things which are to be rendered to the gods. For sacred rites are rendered by men in places and times. These four things, which I have named, he embraced in three books each: for the first three he wrote of men, the following of places, the third of times, the fourth of sacred rites, here too commending by a most subtle distinction who render them, where they render them, when they render them, what they render.

But since it was needful to say—and this above all was expected—to whom they render these things, concerning the gods themselves he wrote three final books, so that five times three should make fifteen. But they are all, as I said, sixteen, because at the outset of these too he prefixed one single book which should speak first of all. When this was completed, following upon it, out of that fivefold distribution he thus subdivided the three preceding books, which pertain to men, that the first should be about pontiffs, the second about augurs, the third about the fifteen men in charge of sacred things; the second three, pertaining to places, thus, that in one of them he should treat of shrines, in another of sacred buildings, in the third of religious places;

and the three that follow these and pertain to times, that is to festal days, thus, that he should make one of them concerning holy days, another concerning the games of the circus, the third concerning the stage games; of the fourth three, pertaining to sacred rites, he gave one to consecrations, another to private rites, the last to public rites. This procession, as it were, of ceremonies the gods themselves follow last, in the three that remain, they for whom all this worship has been expended: in the first the certain gods, in the second the uncertain, in the third and last of all the chief and select gods.

[IV] In this whole series of most beautiful and most subtle distribution and distinction, that eternal life is sought and hoped for in vain, and is most shamelessly even wished for, appears most easily—from what we have already said and from what is to be said hereafter—to any man who, with obstinate heart, has not become his own enemy.

For these institutions are either of men or of demons—not such as they call good demons, but, to speak more plainly, of unclean and without controversy malignant spirits, who with wondrous envy secretly implant harmful opinions in the thoughts of the impious (opinions by which the human soul grows ever more empty and cannot be fitted and made to cleave to the unchangeable and eternal truth), and sometimes openly thrust them upon men's senses, and by whatever deceitful attestation they can, confirm them. This very Varro testifies that for this reason he wrote first of human matters and afterward of divine, because states existed first and then these institutions were established by them.

But true religion was not instituted by any earthly state; rather, it plainly instituted the heavenly state. And the true God, the giver of eternal life, inspires and teaches it to his true worshippers. Varro's reasoning, then—when he confesses that for this reason he wrote first of human matters and afterward of divine, because these divine matters were instituted by men—is this: 'Just as,' he says, 'the painter is prior to the painted panel, the builder prior to the building:

so states are prior to the things instituted by states.' But he says that he would have written first of the gods and afterward of men, if he were writing of the whole nature of the gods—as though here he were writing of some part of it and not of the whole, or as though even some part of the nature of the gods, though not the whole, ought not to be prior to that of men. What of the fact that in those three last books, carefully setting forth the certain and uncertain and select gods, he seems to pass over no nature of the gods? What then does he mean when he says: 'If we were writing of the whole nature of gods and men, we should have finished the divine before we touched the human'? For either he writes of the whole nature of the gods, or of some part, or of none at all.

If of the whole, it is certainly to be placed before human matters; if of some part, why should not that part itself also precede human matters? Or is a part of the gods unworthy to be preferred even to the whole nature of men? But if it is too much that some divine part be preferred to all human matters, at least it is worthy to be preferred to Roman ones. For he wrote the books of human matters not as regards the whole world, but only as regards Rome; yet he said that with good reason he preferred them, in the order of writing, to the books of divine matters—like the painter to the painted panel, like the builder to the building—most openly confessing that these divine matters too, like a painting, like a structure, were instituted by men.

It remains that he be understood to have written of no nature of the gods, and that he was unwilling to say this openly, but left it to the discerning. For when 'not the whole' is said, it is customarily understood as 'some'; but it can also be understood as 'none,' since that which is none is neither the whole nor some. For, as he himself says, if the nature of the gods of which he wrote were the whole, it would in the order of writing have to be placed before human matters; but—as, even with him silent, the truth cries out—it would certainly have to be placed before Roman matters, even if not the whole, but at least some. Rightly, however, it is placed after; therefore it is none. And so he did not wish to set human matters before divine, but he was unwilling to set false things before true.

For in those things which he wrote of human matters, he followed the history of deeds done; but what he wrote of those things which he calls divine, what were they but opinions of vain things? This is doubtless what he wished to show by a subtle intimation—not only by writing of these things later than of those, but also by rendering the reason why he did so. For had he kept silent about it, this deed of his might perhaps have been defended otherwise by others. But in that very reason which he rendered, he left nothing for others to conjecture at their pleasure, and proved sufficiently that he had preferred men to the institutions of men, not the nature of men to the nature of the gods.

Thus he confessed that he wrote his books of divine matters not concerning the truth which pertains to nature, but concerning the falsehood which pertains to error. This he set down more openly elsewhere, as I recalled in the fourth book: that he would have written according to the rule of nature, had he himself been founding a new state; but because he had found an old one already, he could not but follow its custom. [V] Then what sort of thing is this, that he says there are three kinds of theology—that is, of the reasoning which is set forth concerning the gods—and that one of them is called mythical, another physical, the third civil? If usage in Latin allowed it, we should call the kind he set first 'fabular'; but let us call it 'fabulous';

for mythicon is so called from fables, since muthos in Greek means a fable. As for the second, that it be called 'natural,' the custom of speech already allows. The third he himself also expressed in Latin, which is called 'civil.' Then he says: 'They call mythical that which the poets chiefly use; physical, that which the philosophers use; civil, that which the peoples use. The first, which I have named,' he says, 'contains many things feigned contrary to the dignity and nature of the immortals. For in it there is that one god is born from a head, another from a thigh, another from drops of blood; in it, that gods have thieved, have committed adultery, have served a man;

in short, in this kind all those things are attributed to the gods which can befall not only a man, but even the most despised of men.' Here surely, where he could, where he dared, where he thought it would go unpunished, he expressed without any cloud of ambiguity how great an injury is done to the nature of the gods by the most lying fables. For he was speaking not of natural theology, nor of civil, but of the fabulous, which he thought he might freely censure. Let us see what he says of the other. 'The second kind,' he says, 'is that which I have set forth, concerning which the philosophers have left many books; in which is treated: who the gods are, where, of what kind, of what sort they are: whether the gods have been from a certain time or from everlasting;

whether they are of fire, as Heraclitus believes, or of numbers, as Pythagoras, or of atoms, as Epicurus says. And so with other matters, which ears can more easily bear within walls in the school than outside in the forum.' In this kind he found nothing to blame, which they call physical and which pertains to the philosophers—only that he recorded their controversies among themselves, through whom there came to be a multitude of dissenting sects. Yet he removed this kind from the forum, that is, from the peoples, and shut it up in schools and within walls. But that first kind, most lying and most base, he did not remove from the states. O the religious ears of the peoples, and among them even the Roman! What the philosophers dispute concerning the immortal gods, they cannot bear;

but what the poets sing and the actors perform—things feigned contrary to the dignity and nature of the immortals, because they can befall not only a man but even the most despised of men—these they not only bear, but even gladly hear. Nor that only, but they decree that these things please the gods themselves and that by these the gods are to be appeased. Someone may say: Let us distinguish these two kinds, the mythical and the physical—that is, the fabulous and the natural—from this civil kind, which is now under discussion, from which he himself distinguished them, and now let us see how he sets forth the civil itself. I see indeed why the fabulous ought to be distinguished: because it is false, because it is base, because it is unworthy.

But to wish to distinguish the natural from the civil—what else is it than to confess that the civil itself also is faulty? For if that is natural, what has it deserving of reproach, that it should be excluded? But if this which is called civil is not natural, what has it deserving, that it should be admitted? This indeed is that very cause why he wrote first of human matters and afterward of divine, since in divine matters he followed not nature, but the institutions of men. Let us look then also at the civil theology. 'The third kind,' he says, 'is that which in cities the citizens, and chiefly the priests, ought to know and administer. In it is contained which gods each one ought publicly to worship and to what sacred rites and sacrifices he ought to attend.' Let us still attend to what follows.

'The first theology,' he says, 'is chiefly suited to the theater, the second to the world, the third to the city.' Who does not see to which he has given the palm? Assuredly to the second, which above he said was the philosophers'. For he testifies that this pertains to the world, than which these men think there is nothing more excellent among things. But those two theologies, the first and the third—namely of the theater and of the city—did he distinguish them or join them? For we see that what belongs to the city cannot forthwith pertain also to the world, although we see that cities are in the world; for it can happen that in a city, according to false opinions, things be worshipped and believed whose nature exists nowhere in the world or beyond the world: but where is the theater save in the city?

Who instituted the theater but the city? For what purpose did it institute it but for the stage games? Where are the stage games but among the divine matters, concerning which these books are written with such great skill? [VI] O Marcus Varro, since you are a man the most acute of all and beyond any doubt the most learned, yet nevertheless a man, not God, nor lifted up by the Spirit of God to see and announce divine things in truth and freedom, you discern indeed how greatly divine matters are to be separated from human trifles and lies;

but you fear to offend the most vicious opinions and customs of the peoples in the public superstitions, which you both perceive yourself—when you consider them on every side—to be abhorrent to the nature of the gods, or of such beings as the frailty of the human mind surmises to exist in the elements of this world, and which all your literature echoes round about. What does the human genius, however excellent, here avail? What does human learning, though manifold and vast, avail you in these straits? You desire to worship the natural gods; you are compelled to worship the civil. You have found others, the fabulous, upon whom you may more freely vomit forth what you feel, whence you may, willy-nilly, bespatter even these civil ones.

For you say that the fabulous gods are suited to the theater, the natural to the world, the civil to the city, whereas the world is a divine work, but cities and theaters are works of men; nor are other gods laughed at in the theaters than those who are adored in the temples, nor do you exhibit games to others than those to whom you immolate victims. How much more freely and more subtly would you have divided these matters, saying that some gods are natural, others instituted by men; but that concerning the instituted ones, the writings of the poets have one thing, those of the priests another, yet both are so friendly to each other in a partnership of falsehood that both are pleasing to the demons, to whom the doctrine of truth is an enemy!

Setting aside for a little, therefore, the theology which they call natural, of which we must treat afterward, is it at last your pleasure that eternal life be sought or hoped for from the poetic, theatrical, ludicrous, stage-gods? Far be it; nay rather, may the true God avert so monstrous and sacrilegious a madness. What? Is eternal life to be demanded from those gods whom these things please and whom these things appease, when their own crimes are there thronged and repeated? No one, I think, so raves as to reach such a precipice of most furious impiety. Neither by the fabulous, then, nor by the civil theology does anyone attain everlasting life. For the one sows shameful things by feigning them of the gods, the other reaps by favoring them; the one scatters lies, the other gathers them;

the one assails divine matters with false crimes, the other embraces the games of those very crimes among divine matters; the one, in the songs of men, resounds with wicked figments concerning the gods, the other consecrates them at the festivities of the gods themselves; the one sings the misdeeds and outrages of the deities, the other loves them; the one betrays or feigns them, the other either attests them as true or takes delight even in the false. Both are base, and both are damnable; but the one, which is theatrical, professes a public shamefulness; the other, which is civic, is adorned with the shamefulness of the former. Is eternal life to be hoped for from that source, whence this brief and temporal life is polluted?

But does the fellowship of wicked men pollute life, if they insinuate themselves into our affections and assents, while the society of demons—who are worshipped by their very crimes—does not pollute it? If by true crimes, how wicked they are! if by false, how wickedly they are worshipped! When we say these things, it may perhaps seem to someone too ignorant of these matters that only those things unworthy of divine majesty—those ridiculous and detestable things—are celebrated of such gods, which are sung in poetic songs and acted in stage games; but that those sacred rites which not actors, but priests perform, are purged and free from all disgrace.

If this were so, no one would ever judge that theatrical shamefulness ought to be celebrated in their honor, nor would the gods themselves ever command such things to be exhibited to them. But for this very reason there is no shame in doing such things in the theaters for the homage of the gods, because like things are done in the temples. In short, when the aforesaid author tried to distinguish civil theology, as a certain third kind of its own, from the fabulous and the natural, he wished it to be understood as rather tempered from both than separated from both. For he says that the things which the poets write are less than the peoples ought to follow; but that those which the philosophers write are more than it is expedient for the common crowd to scrutinize. 'These so far diverge,' he says, 'that nevertheless not a few things have been taken from both kinds into the civil systems.

Wherefore what things shall be common with the proper, we shall write together with the civil; among which we ought to have a greater fellowship with the philosophers than with the poets.' Not, then, none with the poets. And yet in another place he says that concerning the generations of the gods the peoples were more inclined to the poets than to the natural philosophers. For here he said what ought to be done, there what is done. He said that the physicists wrote for the sake of usefulness, the poets for the sake of delight. And by this, those things which, written by the poets, the peoples ought not to follow, are the crimes of the gods, which nevertheless delight both the peoples and the gods. For the poets write, as he says, for the sake of delight, not of usefulness; yet they write those things which the gods demand and the peoples exhibit.

[VII] Therefore the fabulous, theatrical, stage-theology is brought back to the civil theology; and this whole theology, full of unworthiness and shamefulness, which is deservedly judged to be blamed and rejected, is a part of that which is judged to be worshipped and observed—not indeed an incongruous part, as I have undertaken to show, one that, foreign to the whole body, has been unseasonably connected and hung upon it, but wholly consonant, and, as a member of the same body, most fittingly joined to it. For what else do those images show—the shapes, ages, sexes, garb of the gods? Do the poets have a bearded Jupiter, a beardless Mercury, while the pontiffs do not? Did the mimes make monstrous private parts for Priapus, and not also the priests?

Does a god stand to be adored in sacred places in any different way than he comes forward to be laughed at in the theatres? Are aged Saturn and youthful Apollo the masks of actors in such a way that they are not also the statues of the shrines? Why are Forculus, who presides over doors, and Limentinus, who presides over the threshold, male gods, while among these Cardea is a female who guards the hinge? Are not these things found in the books of divine matters, which serious poets judged unworthy of their own songs? Does the theatrical Diana bear arms while the city's Diana is simply a virgin? Is the stage-Apollo a lyre-player while the Delphic one is free of that art? But these are more respectable in comparison with fouler things. What did they think about Jupiter himself, who set up his nurse in the Capitol?

Did they not bear witness to Euhemerus, who recorded—not by fabulous chatter but by historical diligence—that all such gods had been men and mortal? And those who appointed banqueting gods, the parasites of Jupiter, at his table—what else did they intend but that the rites should be like a mime-show? For if a mime-actor had said that the parasites of Jupiter were brought to his feast, he would surely have seemed to be seeking a laugh. Yet Varro said it! And he said it not while mocking the gods, but while commending them; the books of divine, not human, affairs testify that he wrote this, and not where he was setting forth the stage-games, but where he was expounding the laws of the Capitol. In short, he is overcome by such things and confesses that, just as they made the gods in human form, so they believed the gods to be delighted with human pleasures.

For the malignant spirits, too, did not fail in their business, so as to confirm these harmful opinions by the deluding of human minds. Hence also comes this: the keeper of Hercules' temple, being idle and at leisure, played at dice by himself, alternating with both hands, placing Hercules in the one hand and himself in the other, on this condition, that if he himself won, he would prepare a supper for himself from the temple's alms-money and hire a mistress; but if the victory fell to Hercules, he would furnish the very same for the pleasure of Hercules out of his own money. Then, when he had been beaten by himself as though by Hercules, he gave the due supper and the most famous courtesan Larentina to the god Hercules.

But she, having slept in the temple, saw in her dreams that Hercules had lain with her and had told her that, on departing from there, she would find her wages with the first young man she met, and that she should believe this to be paid to her by Hercules. And so, as she was going away, when the very wealthy young man Tarutius met her first and, having grown fond of her, kept her long with him, she was left his heir when he died. Having obtained an immense fortune, so that she might not seem ungrateful for the divine wages, she wrote the Roman people her own heir—which she deemed most acceptable to the divine powers—and when she disappeared, her will was found. For which services they say she even merited divine honors.

If poets were to invent these things, if mime-actors were to perform them, they would without doubt be said to belong to the fabulous theology and would be judged as things to be separated from the dignity of the civil theology. But since these disgraceful matters are betrayed by so great a teacher as belonging not to the poets but to the peoples, not to the mimes but to the sacred rites, not to the theatres but to the temples—that is, not to the fabulous but to the civil theology—then it is not without cause that the actors feign by their playful arts so great a baseness of the gods; but it is plainly in vain that the priests attempt, as by sacred rites, to feign a decency of the gods which does not exist. The rites of Juno are sacred, and these were celebrated on her beloved island Samos, where she was given in marriage to Jupiter; the rites of Ceres are sacred, where Proserpine, snatched away by Pluto, is sought;

the rites of Venus are sacred, where her beloved Adonis, a most beautiful youth slain by a boar's tusk, is lamented; the rites of the Mother of the gods are sacred, where Attis, a handsome young man loved by her and, out of a woman's jealousy, castrated, is bewailed together with the misfortune of the castrated men whom they call Galli. Since these things are more deformed than every stage-obscenity, what reason is there that they should strive to set apart the fabulous inventions of the poets about the gods—belonging plainly to the theatre—from the civil theology, which they wish to belong to the city, as if the shameful and unworthy from the honorable and worthy? Therefore thanks are rather owed to the actors, who spared the eyes of men and did not lay bare in their spectacles all those things which are hidden within the walls of the sacred temples.

What good is to be thought of their rites which are covered over in darkness, when the things brought into the light are so detestable? And certainly, what they do in secret by means of the castrated and effeminate, let them see to that themselves; yet those same men, unhappily and shamefully unmanned and corrupted, they could by no means conceal. Let them persuade whomever they can that they perform something holy through such men, whom they cannot deny to be numbered and busied among their sacred things. We do not know what they do, but we do know through what sort of men they do it. Now we know what things are performed on the stage, into which no castrated or effeminate man has ever entered, not even into the chorus of harlots; and yet even those things are performed by the base and infamous—for indeed they ought not to have been performed by the honorable.

What then are those sacred rites, for whose performance holiness chose such men as even the obscenity of the stage did not admit into itself? [VIII] But, they say, these things have certain physiological interpretations—that is, interpretations of natural principles. As if indeed in this discussion we were seeking physiology and not theology, that is, the 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 certainly the nature of a man, and of a beast, and of a tree, and of a stone, none of which is God. But if the head of this interpretation, when the rites of the Mother of the gods are treated, is certainly that the Mother of the gods is the earth—what more do we seek, what else do we scrutinize?

What more evidently supports those who say that all these gods were men? For they are earth-born, and thus the earth is their mother. But in the true theology the earth is the work of God, not his mother. Nevertheless, however they may interpret her rites and refer them to the nature of things: for males to suffer what belongs to women is not according to nature, but against nature. This disease, this crime, this disgrace has among those sacred rites an open profession, which among the vicious morals of men scarcely has confession even under torture. Then if these rites, which are proven to be fouler than the stage's obscenities, are excused and cleared on this ground, that they have their own interpretations by which they are shown to signify the nature of things:

why should not the poetic inventions likewise be excused and cleared? For many have interpreted these too in the same manner, to such a degree that what is said by them to be most monstrous and unspeakable—that Saturn devoured his own sons—some interpret thus: that the length of time, which is signified by the name of Saturn, itself consumes whatever it begets; or, as the same Varro thinks, that Saturn pertains to the seeds which fall back again into the earth from which they arise. And likewise others interpret the rest in another manner and in the same way.

And yet the fabulous theology is called such, and together with all interpretations of this kind it is censured, rejected, and disapproved—not only by the natural theology, which is the philosophers', but also by that civil one which we are discussing, which is asserted to belong to the cities and peoples; and on the ground that it has feigned unworthy things about the gods, it is deservedly discerned as something to be repudiated. And this indeed by such a design that, since the 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 former but did not dare the latter; they set forth the former as blameworthy, but they exhibited the latter as its like, to be compared with it—

not so that this latter should be chosen to be held in preference to the former, but so that it might be understood as needing to be rejected along with the former; and thus, without danger to those who feared to censure the civil theology, both being held in contempt, that which they call the natural might find a place among the better minds. For both the civil and the fabulous are both fabulous and both civil; whoever prudently inspects the vanities and obscenities of both will find both to be fabulous; and both to be civil, whoever observes the stage-games, which belong to the fabulous, at the festivals of the civil gods and in the divine rites of the cities.

How then is the power of granting eternal life attributed to any of these gods, whom their own images and rites convict of being most manifestly most like the fabulous gods—already most openly reproved—in forms, ages, sex, dress, marriages, generations, and rites? In all of which they are understood either to have been men, for each of whom, according to his life or death, sacred and solemn rites were established, while demons insinuated and confirmed this error; or else, from whatever occasion, that most unclean spirits have crept in to deceive human minds. [IX] What then?

The very functions of the divinities, so cheaply and minutely cut up—on account of which they say that supplication ought to be made to each for his own proper office, whereof we have already said not indeed all, but many things—do they not accord more with the buffoonery of the mime than with divine dignity? If someone were to employ two nurses for an infant, of whom one gave nothing but food and the other nothing but drink, just as these men employed two goddesses for this purpose, Educa and Potina: surely he would seem to be playing the fool and doing something like a mime in his own house. They wish Liber to be named from 'liberation' (liberamentum), because through his benefit males are freed in intercourse by the emission of seed; and they say that Libera does this same thing in females, whom they also think to be Venus, because they hold that she too emits seed;

and on this account they place in the temple the male part of the body for Liber and the female part for Libera. To this they add women assigned to Liber, and wine for the exciting of lust. Thus the Bacchanalia were celebrated with the utmost frenzy; and Varro himself confesses that such things could not have been done by the Bacchants except with a mind disturbed. Yet these things afterward displeased a saner senate, and it ordered them to be removed. Here at least, perhaps, they at last perceived what unclean spirits, while they are held to be gods, can accomplish in the minds of men. These things certainly would not be done in the theatres; for there they play, they do not rage—though to have gods who are delighted even by such games is itself akin to madness.

But what sort of thing is this, that although he distinguishes the religious man from the superstitious by this distinction—that the gods are feared by the superstitious, but merely revered by the religious as parents are revered, not feared as enemies, and he says they are all so good that it is easier for them to spare the guilty than to harm any innocent person—yet he records that to a woman who has just given birth three guardian gods are employed, lest the god Silvanus enter by night and vex her; and that, to signify these guardians, three men go round the thresholds of the house by night, and first strike the threshold with an axe, then with a pestle, thirdly sweep it with brooms, so that by these given signs of cultivation the god Silvanus may be kept from entering—because trees are neither cut nor pruned without iron, nor is meal made without a pestle, nor are crops heaped up without brooms;

and from these three things three gods are named: Intercidona from the cutting of the axe (intercisio), Pilumnus from the pestle (pilum), Deverra from the brooms (scopae), by which guardian gods the woman who has given birth might be preserved against the violence of the god Silvanus. Thus against the savagery of a harmful god the guardianship of the good ones would not have prevailed, unless they were more against one, and unless against him—rough, dreadful, uncouth, and, being of the woods, wild—they fought back with the signs of cultivation as with things contrary to him. Is this then the innocence of the gods, this the concord? Are these the wholesome divinities of cities, more to be laughed at than the mockeries of the theatres? When male and female are joined, the god Iugatinus is employed; let this be borne. But she who marries must be led home; and the god Domiducus is employed; that she may be in the home, the god Domitius is employed;

that she may remain with her husband, the goddess Manturna is added. What more is sought? Let human modesty be spared; let the concupiscence of flesh and blood complete the rest, the secret of shame having been provided for. Why is the bedchamber filled with a throng of divinities, when even the groomsmen depart from it? And it is filled for this purpose—not that by the thought of their presence greater care for chastity might be had, but that from the woman, weak in her sex and timid in the novelty, with their cooperation, virginity might be taken away without any difficulty. For the goddess Virginensis is present, and the father-god Subigus, and the mother-goddess Prema, and the goddess Pertunda, and Venus and Priapus. What is this? If it was altogether necessary for the man laboring in that work to be aided by the gods, would not some one god or some one goddess suffice?

Would Venus alone be too little, who is even said to be named from this—that without force (vis) a woman does not cease to be a virgin? If there is any shame in men which is not in the divinities, will not married people, when they believe that so many gods of both sexes are present and pressing upon this work, be so affected with shame that the man is less moved and the woman resists more? And certainly, if the goddess Virginensis is present to loose the virgin's girdle; if the god Subigus is present that she may be subdued to the man; if the goddess Prema is present that, once subdued, she may be pressed down so as not to stir—what does the goddess Pertunda do there? Let her blush, let her go outside; let the husband also do something. It is very indecent that anyone but he should accomplish what she is named for.

But perhaps she is tolerated for this reason, because she is said to be a goddess, not a god. For if a male were believed and were 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 even Priapus is there, an over-mighty male, upon whose monstrous and most shameful member the new 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, try to distinguish the civil theology from the fabulous theology, cities from theatres, 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 trifling, serious from playful, things to be sought from things to be spat out.

We understand what they are doing: they know that the theatrical and fabulous theology hangs upon this civil one, and is reflected back from the songs of the poets as from a mirror; and therefore, this civil theology 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 itself, of which the other is an image. And yet the gods themselves so love it, as though beholding themselves in the same mirror, that who and what sort they are may be better seen in both.

Hence also they have compelled their own worshippers by terrible commands to dedicate to them the filth of the fabulous theology, to place it in their solemnities, to hold it among divine matters; and thus they have both taught more manifestly that they themselves are most unclean spirits, and have made that abject and reprobate theatrical theology a member and part of this urban theology, as though it were chosen and approved—so that, since 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: now, on account of Varro's division, I have shown sufficiently, I think, that both the urban and the theatrical theology belong to the one civil theology.

Wherefore, since both are of like baseness, absurdity, unworthiness, 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 record and enumerate the gods from the conception of a man, of which number he began with Janus, and carried that series through to the death of a decrepit man; and he closed the gods pertaining to the man himself with the goddess Nenia, who is sung at the funerals of the aged. Then he began to display other gods, who pertained not to the man himself but to those things which are man's, such as food and clothing and whatever else is necessary for this life, showing in all cases what is the office of each and for what each is to be supplicated;

in all which diligence he pointed out and named no gods from whom eternal life is to be sought—for the sake of which one thing alone we are properly Christians.

Who then would be so dull as not to understand that this man, by so diligently expounding and opening up the civil theology, and by demonstrating it to be like that fabulous, unworthy, and shameful one, and by teaching clearly enough that this very fabulous theology is a part of the civil, is contriving a place in the minds of men for none but that natural theology which he says belongs to the philosophers—and this with such subtlety that he censures the fabulous, but does not indeed dare to censure the civil, yet by betraying it shows it to be reprehensible; and thus, both being rightly reproved by the judgment of those who understand aright, the natural alone remains to be chosen? Concerning which, in its own place, with the help of the true God, we must discuss more diligently.

[X] The freedom, indeed, which this man lacked—so that he did not dare openly to censure this urban theology, most like the theatrical, as he censured the latter—was not lacking, not indeed wholly but in some part, to Annaeus Seneca, whom by certain indications we find to have flourished in the times of our apostles. It was present to him as he wrote, but lacking to him as he lived. For in that book which he composed against superstitions, he himself censured this civil and urban theology far more copiously and vehemently than Varro censured the theatrical and fabulous. For when he was treating of images:

"They dedicate," he says, "the sacred, immortal, and inviolable gods in the vilest and most immovable matter; they clothe them with the shapes of men, of beasts, and of fishes, and some indeed with mixed sex and diverse bodies; they call them divinities which, if they suddenly came to life having received breath, would be held to be monsters." Then somewhat later, when in praising the natural theology he had reviewed the opinions of certain philosophers, he set against himself a question and said: "At this point someone says: Shall I believe that heaven and earth are gods, and some others above the moon, others below? Shall I bear either Plato or the Peripatetic Strato, of whom the one made a god without a body, the other without a mind?" And answering this:

"What then, in the end," he says, "do the dreams of Titus Tatius or Romulus or Tullus Hostilius seem to you truer? Tatius dedicated the goddess Cluacina; Romulus, Picus and Tiberinus; Hostilius, Fear (Pavor) and Pallor, most hideous affections of men, of which the one is a movement of a terrified mind, the other not even a disease of the body, but a color. Will you rather believe these to be divinities and receive them into heaven?" But concerning the rites, cruelly base, how freely he wrote! "That one," he says, "cuts off his own male parts, that one gashes his arms. Where do they fear the angry gods, who thus earn their favor? But the gods ought to be worshipped by no kind of rite, if they wish this.

So great is the frenzy of a mind disturbed and driven from its seat, that the gods are appeased in a manner in which not even the most hideous of men, and those handed down in fables for their cruelty, rage. Tyrants have torn the limbs of some, but they ordered no one to tear his own. Some have been castrated for the pleasure of royal lust; but no one, at his master's bidding, laid hands on himself so as not to be a man. They butcher themselves in the temples, they make supplication with their own wounds and blood. If anyone has leisure to observe what they do and what they suffer, he will find things so unbecoming to the honorable, so unworthy of the free, so unlike the sane, that no one would have doubted them to be mad, if they raged with the few;

now the throng of the insane is the patronage of sanity." Already those things which he records as accustomed to be done in the Capitol itself, and which he intrepidly refutes altogether—who would believe them to be done except by mockers or madmen? For when in the Egyptian rites Osiris, lost, is mourned, and then, being found, is celebrated with great joy, he derided this—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: "Yet to this frenzy," he says, "there is a fixed time. It is tolerable to go mad once a year. Come into the Capitol; one will be ashamed of the madness made public, which vain frenzy has assigned to itself as a duty. One assigns names to the god, another announces the hours to Jupiter;

one is a bather, another an anointer, who by a vain motion of his arms imitates one anointing. There are women who arrange the hair of Juno and Minerva (standing far from the temple, not to say far from the image, they move their fingers in the manner of those who dress the hair); there are those who hold a mirror; there are those who summon the gods to their court-bonds; there are those who offer petitions and instruct them in their case. A learned archmime, an old man already decrepit, daily performed a mime in the Capitol, as though the gods gladly watched him whom men had ceased to watch. Every kind of craftsman there sits idle, having done his work for the immortal gods." And a little after: "These, however," he says, "promise the god a use that is at least superfluous, not base nor infamous. Certain women sit in the Capitol who think that they are loved by Jupiter;

they are not even frightened, if you are willing to believe the poets, by the regard of most wrathful Juno." This freedom Varro did not have; he dared only to censure the poetic theology, he did not dare 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 theatres where they are feigned. Whence, in these sacred rites of the civil theology, Seneca rather chose these parts for the wise man—that he should not hold them in the religion of his soul, but 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," he says, "that we join even the marriages of the gods, and not even piously, marriages of brothers and sisters! We match Bellona with Mars, Venus with Vulcan, Salacia with Neptune.

Yet some we leave unwed, as though a match had been wanting—especially since certain of them are widows, such as Populonia or Fulgora and the goddess Rumina; for whom I do not wonder that a suitor was lacking. All that ignoble throng of gods, which long superstition has heaped together over a long age, we shall," he says, "so adore that we remember its worship pertains rather to custom than to reality." Neither those laws, therefore, nor custom instituted in the civil theology anything that was pleasing to the gods or pertained to reality. But this man, whom the philosophers made as it were free, nevertheless, because he was an illustrious senator of the Roman people, worshipped what he censured, did what he condemned, adored what he found fault with;

because, namely, philosophy had taught him something great—that he should not be superstitious in the world—but on account of the laws of the citizens and the customs of men he did not indeed act as a stage-player feigning in the theatre, but imitated one in the temple; and this the more damnably, because those things which he did falsely he so did that the people supposed him to do them truly; whereas the stage-player would rather delight by playing than deceive by cheating. [XI] Here, among the other superstitions of the civil theology, he censures also the sacraments of the Jews, and especially the Sabbaths, affirming that they do uselessly, in that by those single days interposed every seventh they lose nearly a seventh part of their life in idleness, and are harmed by not doing many things pressing in their time.

Yet the Christians, already 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 censure them perhaps against his own will. When he was speaking of those Jews, he said: "Meanwhile the custom of that most wicked nation has so prevailed that it is now received throughout all lands; the conquered have given laws to the conquerors." Saying these things he marveled, and, ignorant of what was being divinely wrought, he plainly subjoined a sentence by which he signified what he thought concerning the reason of their sacraments. For he said: "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—why, or to what extent, they were instituted by divine authority, and afterward, at the time when it was fitting, were removed by the same authority from the people of God, to whom the mystery of eternal life has been revealed—we have spoken both elsewhere, especially when we were arguing against the Manichees, and it must be treated in a more opportune place in this work.

[XII] Now, on account of the three theologies which the Greeks call mythical, physical, and political, and which in Latin may be called fabulous, natural, and civil: since neither from the fabulous—which even the worshippers of many false gods have themselves most freely censured—nor from the civil, of which the fabulous is convicted of being a part, and to which this civil is found most like or even worse, is eternal life to be hoped for; if to anyone the things said in this volume are not enough, let him add also those things which in the earlier books, and especially in the fourth, were disputed at great length concerning God the giver of felicity. For to whom, if not to felicity alone, ought men to be consecrated on account of eternal life, if felicity were a goddess? But since it is not a goddess but a gift of God:

to what god, if not to the giver of felicity, are we to be consecrated—we who with pious charity love that eternal life in which there is true and full felicity? Now that none of these gods, who are worshipped with such great baseness and, unless they are so worshipped, are much more basely angered—and on this account confess themselves to be most unclean spirits—is a giver of felicity, I think that from what has been said no one ought to doubt. 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 the unclean spirits themselves also shall be tormented, that is rather eternal death than life. For there is no greater and worse death than where death does not die.

But because the nature of the soul, by that whereby it was created immortal, cannot be without some kind of life, its supreme death is estrangement from the life of God in the eternity of punishment. Eternal life, therefore—that is, life happy without any end—he alone gives who gives true felicity. Since those gods whom this civil theology worships have been convicted of being unable to give it: not only on account of these temporal and earthly things, which we showed in the preceding five books, but much more on account of the eternal life which is to come after death, which in this one book we have treated with even their own cooperation, they are not to be worshipped.

But since the force of a torpid custom has its roots too deep, if to anyone I seem to have discussed too little concerning this civil theology's being spat out and shunned, let him direct his attention to another volume, which, with God's help, is to be joined to this one.