Read City of God (Penguin Classics) Online
Authors: Saint Augustine
Does lust for praise inflame you? There are rites
Of expiation which will work a cure
If you three times rehearse the formula
Set in the prayer book, with a pure intent.
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And in one of his Odes he urges the conquest of the lust of domination when he says,
Vaster your realm, when you subdue your passions,
Than if you join Cadiz to far-off Libya
Under your sway, and all the Punic Empire
Have you for master.
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For all that, if men have not learnt to restrain their discreditable passions by obtaining the help of the Holy Spirit through their devout faith and their love of the Intelligible Beauty,
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at least it is good that the desire for human praise and glory makes them, not indeed saints, but less depraved men.
Cicero himself could not disguise this fact; in his treatise
On the Commonwealth
,
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speaking of the appointment of a chief of state, he lays it down that he must be ‘nourished by glory’, and goes on to recall that it was the greed for glory that inspired his ancestors to many famous and admirable achievements. Thus the Romans not only did not resist this fault; they held that it should be aroused and kindled, considering it to be in the interests of the commonwealth. And even in his philosophical writings Cicero does not disguise this pernicious doctrine; in fact he makes it as clear as daylight. For when speaking of the studies which should be pursued in the quest of the true good, rather than of the hollowness of human praise, he brings in this general and universal sentiment: ‘It is honour that nourishes the arts; it is glory that kindles men to intellectual effort. All pursuits lose lustre when they fall from general favour.’
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14.
Love of human praise is to be checked, because all the
glory of the righteous is in God
There can be no doubt that it is better to resist this passion than to yield to it. A man is more like God, the purer he is from this contamination. In this life it cannot wholly be rooted out from the heart, because even those souls which are making good progress are not exempt from the temptation. But at least the greed for glory should be overcome by the love of justice; and so, if things which are themselves good and right ‘lose lustre’ because of general disfavour, then the love of human praise itself should be ashamed, and yield place to the love of truth. For this vice is an enemy to devout faith, if the greed for glory is stronger in the heart than the fear or the love of God; so much so, that the Lord said, ‘How can you believe, when you look for glory from one another, and do not seek the glory which comes from God alone?’
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Again, the Evangelist speaks of those who believed in Christ but were afraid to confess it openly, when he says, ‘They loved the glory of men rather than the glory of God.’
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This was not how the apostles behaved. They preached the name of Christ in places where that name was not in ‘general favour’, and we recall Cicero’s statement: ‘All pursuits lose lustre when they fall from general favour.’ They preached in places where, in fact, Christ’s name was held in utter detestation. They kept in mind what they had been told by their good master, the physician of souls, ‘If anyone denies me before men, I will deny him in the presence of my Father in Heaven’, or ‘in the presence of the angels of God.’
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Amidst curses and slanders, amidst the severest persecutions and the harshest punishments, all the clamorous hostility of men did not stop them from preaching men’s salvation. The divine quality of their actions, their words and their lives, their triumphs, as one may say, over hard hearts, and their introduction of the peace of righteousness; all these brought them immense glory in the Church of Christ. And yet they did not rest on that glory, as if they had attained the goal of their own virtue. They ascribed it all to the glory of God, whose grace had made them what they were.
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And this was a torch which kindled the fire of the love of God in the hearts of those they guided, the torch which was to make them such as the apostles were. Their master had taught the apostles not to be good in order to gain glory from men. He told them, ‘Take care not to perform your righteous acts in the presence of men, so as to be seen
by them: or you will have no reward with my Father, who is in heaven.’
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On the other hand, so that men should not put a perverse interpretation on this injunction and reduce the influence of their goodness by concealing it, in fear of winning men’s approval, the Lord explained to what purpose they ought to seek publicity. He said, ‘Let your works shine in men’s sight, so that they may see your acts of goodness, and glorify your Father, who is in Heaven’;
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so the purpose is not ‘to be seen of them’, that is, with the intention that they should be converted to you, because by yourselves you are nothing, but ‘so that they may glorify your Father, who is in Heaven’, and so that they may be converted to
him
, and become what you are.
The martyrs followed in the steps of the apostles. They did not inflict suffering on themselves, but they endured what was inflicted on them; and in so doing they surpassed the Scaevolas, the Curtii, and the Decir
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by their true virtue, springing from true devotion, and by their countless multitude. Those Roman heroes belonged to an earthly city, and the aim set before them, in all their acts of duty for her, was the safety of their country, and a kingdom not in heaven, but on earth; not in life eternal, but in the process where the dying pass away and are succeeded by those who will the in their turn. What else was there for them to love save glory? For, through glory, they desired to have a kind of life after death on the lips of those who praised them.
15.
The temporal reward bestowed by God on Roman high qualities of character
To such men as these God was not going to give eternal life with his angels in his own Heavenly City, the City to which true religion leads, which renders the supreme worship (the Greek word for it is
latreia
)
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only to the one true God. If God had not granted to them the earthly glory of an empire which surpassed all others, they would have received no reward for the good qualities, the virtues, that is, by means of which they laboured to attain that great glory. When such men do anything good, their sole motive is the hope of receiving glory from their fellow-men; and the Lord refers to them when he says, ‘I tell you in truth, they have received their reward in full.’ They took no account of their own material interests compared with the common good, that is the commonwealth and the public purse; they resisted the temptations of avarice; they acted for their country’s well-being
with disinterested concern; they were guilty of no offence against the law; they succumbed to no sensual indulgence. By such immaculate conduct they laboured towards honours, power and glory, by what they took to be the true way. And they were honoured in almost all nations; they imposed their laws on many peoples; and today they enjoy renown in the history and literature of nearly all races. They have no reason to complain of the justice of God, the supreme and true. ‘They have received their reward in full.’
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16. The reward of the citizens of the Eternal City; the Roman virtues offer them useful examples
Very different is the reward of the saints. Here below they endure obloquy for the City of God, which is hateful to the lovers of this world. That City is eternal; no one is born there, because no one dies. There is the true felicity, which is no goddess, but the gift of God. From there we have received the pledge of our faith, in that we sigh for her beauty while on our pilgrimage. In that City the sun does not rise ‘on the good and on the evil’;
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the ‘sun of righteousness’
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spreads its light only on the good; there the public treasury needs no great efforts for its enrichment at the cost of private poverty; for there the common stock is the treasury of truth.
But more than this; the Roman Empire was not extended and did not attain to glory in men’s eyes simply for this, that men of this stamp should be accorded this kind of reward. It had this further purpose, that the citizens of that Eternal City, in the days of their pilgrimage, should fix their eyes steadily and soberly on those examples and observe what love they should have towards the City on high, in view of life eternal, if the earthly city had received such devotion from her citizens, in their hope of glory in the sight of men.
17. The profit the Romans gained from their wars and the benefits they conferred on the vanquished
As for this mortal life, which ends after a few days’ course, what does it matter under whose rule a man lives, being so soon to die, provided that the rulers do not force him to impious and wicked acts? Did the Romans do any harm to other nations when they subdued them and imposed the Roman laws, apart from the vast slaughter of the wars? If
that result had been effected by peaceful agreement, it would have had better success; but then there would have been no glory for the conquerors. The Romans themselves lived under the same laws as they imposed on the rest. If this imposition had happened without the aid of Mars and Bellona, so that Victory had no hand in it (for there would have been no fighting and therefore no victors), the condition of the Romans and that of the other peoples would have been precisely the same – especially if they had without delay taken the step, which they took later, to win gratitude for their humanity, by associating in the commonwealth, as Roman citizens, all those who belonged to the Roman Empire; for this granted to all a privilege formerly enjoyed by a few. There was one exception to this equality: the Roman lower classes, possessing no land, lived at the public expense. The contributions to their upkeep would have been furnished with a better grace, had they been presented voluntarily through the agency of equitable administrators, after a peaceful compact, instead of being taken by extortion from conquered peoples.
As far as I can see, the distinction between victors and vanquished has not the slightest importance for security, for moral standards, or even for human dignity. It is merely a matter of the arrogance of human glory, the coin in which these men ‘received their reward’, who were on fire with unlimited lust for glory, and waged their wars of burning fury. Is it the case that the conqueror’s lands are exempt from taxes? Have the victors access to knowledge forbidden to the others? Are there not many senators in other lands, who do not know Rome even by sight? Take away national complacency, and what are all men but simply men? If the perverse standards of the world would allow men to receive honours proportional to their deserts, even so the honour of men should not be accounted an important matter; smoke has no weight.
For all that, even in this we may profit from the goodness of our Lord God. Let us consider all the hardships these conquerors made light of, all the sufferings they endured, and the desires they suppressed to gain the glory of men. They deserved to receive that glory as a reward for such virtues. Let this thought avail to suppress pride in us. That City, in which it has been promised that we shall reign, differs from this earthly city as widely as the sky from the earth, life eternal from temporal joy, substantial glory from empty praises, the society of angels from the society of men, the light of the Maker of the sun and moon from the light of the sun and moon. Therefore the citizens of so great a country should not suppose that they have achieved anything
of note if, to attain that country, they have done something good, or endured some ills, seeing that those Romans did so much and suffered so much for the earthly country they already possessed. What gives special point to this comparison is that the remission of sins, the promise which recruits the citizens for the Eternal Country, finds a kind of shadowy resemblance in that refuge of Romulus,
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where the offer of impunity for crimes of every kind collected a multitude which was to result in the foundation of the city of Rome.
18.
Seeing that the Romans achieved so much for their earthly
city, to win glory from men, Christians should shun any
boasting about anything they have done for love of their
Eternal Country
This being so, is it such a great thing that one should despise, for the sake of that Eternal and Heavenly Country, all the attractions of this present life, however beguiling, if, for the sake of this temporal and earthly country, Brutus had the strength to kill his sons,
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a thing which that other country compels no one to do? It is surely a harder thing to put one’s sons to death, than to do what has to be done for that Celestial Country: to give to the poor the possessions which one had supposed should be collected and preserved for one’s children, or to let them go, if a temptation should appear which made that course necessary for the sake of faith and righteousness. Happiness, whether for us or for our children, is not the result of earthly riches, which must either be lost by us in our lifetime or else must pass after our death into the possession of those we do not know or, it may be, of those whom we do not wish to have them. It is God who gives happiness; for he is the true wealth of men’s souls.