Read City of God (Penguin Classics) Online
Authors: Saint Augustine
Furthermore, we assume that it is just because they have stars that Mercury and Mars are considered to be parts of the world, and so can be reckoned as gods – since it is obvious that speech and war are human activities, not parts of the world. Why is it that the Ram, the Bull, the Crab, the Scorpion, and the rest of them, which are counted as celestial signs, consisting not of single stars but each of them made up of a cluster, and which are placed above the planets in the height of heaven where a more regular motion provides the stars with an unvarying course – why is it that they have had no altars established for them, no rites, no temples? Why is it that they have not been given a place, if not among the ‘select’ gods, at least among what we may call the plebeian deities?
16.
Concerning Apollo, Diana, and the other ‘select?’ gods, reckoned to be parts of the world
Apollo is held to be the prophet and the healer; yet the pagans were determined to locate him in some part of the world, and so they said that he was the sun. And his sister Diana was the moon and the goddess in charge of roads
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– hence they insisted that she was a virgin, because a road is unproductive. The reason why these two carry arrows is that those two stars extend their rays from the sky to
the earth. Vulcan is supposed to be the fire of the world, Neptune its waters, while Dis pater, that is, Orcus, is the lower, terrestrial part of the world. Liber and Ceres
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are responsible for seeds, the former in charge of the male, the latter of the female seeds; or else Liber is in command of the liquid part, Ceres of the dry element, in the seeds. And all this evidently refers to the world, that is, to Jupiter, who is called ‘father and mother’ just because he emits all seeds from himself and receives them all into himself. Sometimes they want to identify Ceres with the Great Mother, and they say that she is nothing other than the earth; and they say the same of Juno, and for that reason they assign to her the secondary causes. Yet it is Jupiter who is called ‘father and mother of the gods’, because, in their theory, Jove is himself the whole of the world. As for Minerva, they have given her the responsibility for the arts of mankind; but they have not found a star to be her habitation, and so they have identified her with the upper region of the ether, or even with the moon. Vesta also has been considered the greatest of the goddesses, simply because she is the earth,
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although they believed that they should attribute to her the lighter fire of the world – the fire which is readily available for the use of mankind – and not the violent element, which is the kind of fire which belongs to Vulcan.
Thus the contention is that all those ‘select’ gods are in fact the world; some represent the whole universe, some the parts of it. Jupiter, for example, is the whole; while Genius, the Great Mother, the Sun and Moon (or rather Apollo and Diana), are parts. Sometimes one god is identified with a number of things, sometimes one thing is represented by a number of gods. Jupiter is an instance of one god standing for a number of things; according to their way of thinking and their way of talking, the whole world is Jupiter, and the sky by itself is Jupiter, and one star by itself is Jupiter. Similarly, Juno is the mistress of secondary causes, and Juno is the air,
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Juno is the earth, and, if she had triumphed over Venus, Juno would be a star. In the same way, Minerva is the highest region of the ether, and Minerva is also the moon, which is regarded as situated on the lower boundary of the ether. Examples of a number of gods standing for one thing are found in the representation of the world by both Janus and Jupiter, and of the earth by Juno, by the Great Mother, and by Ceres.
17.
The ambiguities in Varro’s theories about the gods
The examples of interpretation which I have given produce confusion rather than enlightenment. Under the compulsion of their extravagant superstition, these interpreters dart hither and thither; they advance and then retreat – so much so that Varro himself prefers to suspend judgement on every case, rather than make any firmy statement. After completing the first of his three last books, which is devoted to the. ‘certain’gods, he begins the second, on the ‘uncertain’gods, with these words:
I ought not to be blamed for having advanced hesitating opinions about the gods in this book. Anyone who thinks that a clear decision is desirable and possible will make that decision for himself, after hearing what I have to say. For my part, I could more readily be induced to call in doubt what I have said in the first book, than to bring to any firm conclusion what I am going to write in this volume.
Thus he brings uncertainty not only into his book on ‘uncertain’gods, but even into that on ‘certain’ deities.
In the third of these books on ‘select’ gods he begins with a preface on ‘natural’ theology, making such points as he thinks necessary, before entering upon the follies and crazy falsehoods of ‘civil’ theology, where, so far from being guided by the actual truth, he writes under the pressure of tradition. ‘In this book’, he says,
I shall be writing about the official divinities of the Roman people, the gods to whom they have dedicated temples, and whom they have distinguished by setting up numerous statues in their honour. But I shall be writing, in the manner of Xenophanes
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of Colophon, an account of my opinions, not my convictions. For on these subjects men have ideas; only God has knowledge.
And so, as he approaches the subject of religious practices of human institution, all that Varro promises, and that with trepidation, is a discourse on matters where there is neither comprehension nor firm belief – where only doubt and surmise are possible. He was sure of the existence of the world, of the sky and the earth – the sky brilliant with stars, the earth fertile with seeds – and of other things of this kind; he believed, with unshaken intellectual conviction, that all this vast structure of nature is ruled and directed by some invisible force.
But he could have no such confidence in asserting that Janus is identical with the world, or in discovering in what sense Saturn is the father of Jupiter, and at the same time subject to Jupiter’s kingly rule, or in making pronouncements on other similar questions.
18.
The most probable reason for the spread of pagan superstition
The most plausible explanation of all this is the suggestion that the gods were once human beings
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who received adulation from men who wished to have them as gods. Those men instituted rites and ceremonies in honour of each of their heroes, based on their personalities, their characters, their achievements, and their adventures. These observances gradually won a hold on men’s souls (which resemble the demons in their avidity for frivolous entertainment) and attained wide popularity, tricked out as they were by the fictions of the poets and helped by the seductive arts of the deceitful spirits. The supposition that an unfilial son, or a son who was afraid of being killed by his father, had driven his father from the throne is more credible than Varro’s interpretation of the story of Saturn – that the explanation of Jupiter’s conquest of his father is that the cause (represented by Jupiter) is anterior to the seed (represented by Saturn). If that were the case, Saturn would not have preceded Jupiter; nor would he have been his father. For the cause always precedes the seed; it is never engendered by it. In fact, the attempts to dignify these stories (which are either nonsensical fables or tales of human exploits) by pretended interpretations in terms of natural phenomena, reduce the interpreters to such straits, for all their ingenuity, that we cannot help grieving at the nonsense they also convey.
19.
The rationalizing explanations of the cult of Saturn
‘We are told’, says Varro, ‘that Saturn had the habit of devouring his offspring. This is because the seed returns to the place from which it is produced. The story that a clod of earth was given to him to devour as a substitute for Jupiter, symbolizes the fact that before the invention of ploughing, the seedlings, after sowing, were covered with soil by hand.’ According to that, Saturn ought to be called the earth, not the seed; for it is the earth which, in a way, devours what it has engendered,
since the seeds are produced from the earth and return to the earth to be taken into it. As for the story of the substitution of a clod of earth, what has that to do with the fact that the seed used to be covered with soil by hand? How can this covering with soil mean that it is not devoured like the others? The explanation assumes that the man who put on the soil removed the seed (as in the fable Saturn was offered the clod, and then Jupiter was removed), whereas in fact the covering of the seed by the soil results in its being devoured more thoroughly. And again, on this showing, Jupiter is the seed, not the cause of the seed, as I said just now. But what can one expect? How can a sensible interpretation be found for such nonsense?
‘Saturn has a hook’, says Varro, ‘on account of agriculture.’ To be sure, in Saturn’s reign agriculture did not yet exist; and the reason for the ascription of a very early period to Saturn, according to Varro’s own interpretation of the stories, is just that primitive man lived on the seeds which the earth produced spontaneously. Perhaps Saturn received his hook after losing his sceptre? In that case he would have been in early times a king with nothing to do, becoming a hardworking labourer in the reign of his son!
Varro goes on to tell us that some peoples used to sacrifice children to Saturn, as did the Carthaginians; others, like the Gauls, used to sacrifice adults. The reason for this practice was that of all seeds the human race is the best. There is no need to waste words on such barbarous folly. Let us instead observe this fact, and take it to heart: that these interpretations have nothing to do with the true God, the living, incorporeal, unchangeable being from whom we must beg the life of eternal happiness; their concern is limited to things material, temporal, subject to change and dissolution.
‘The myth of the castration of Heaven (Uranus) by his son, Saturn, stands for the fact that the divine seed belongs to Saturn, not to Heaven.’ Varro’s interpretation, in so far as it is intelligible at all, depends on the fact that nothing in the sky is produced from seeds. But notice, if Saturn is the son of Heaven, then he is the son of Jupiter; for we have innumerable earnest assurances that Jupiter is identical with the sky. That is the way those theories which do not spring from truth destroy themselves without any help from outside.
Varro says that Saturn was called
Chronos
,
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a Greek word meaning ‘time’; for ‘without the passage of time’, he says, ‘the seed cannot be productive.’ Many other things are said about Saturn and they all
have reference to seed. And surely Saturn, with all that power of his, should have been competent to deal with seeds by himself. Then why were other deities brought in, especially Liber and Libera (that is, Ceres)? And when Varro comes to deal with these divinities, he says so much about seeds that he might never have mentioned Saturn.
20.
On the ceremonies of Ceres of Eleusis
Among the rites of Ceres, the Eleusinian cult
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is widely known, for it was the most notable religious ceremony held at Athens. Varro offers no interpretation of it, except for a reference to the discovery of corn by Ceres, and to her loss of Proserpina, when Orcus carried her off. He asserts that Proserpina represents the fertility of seeds. When this fertility had failed on one occasion, and the earth was in a mournful state of sterility, the idea grew up that the daughter of Ceres, namely fertility (Proserpina being derived from
proserpere
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– ‘to come forth’), had been carried off by Orcus and detained in the underworld. This event was solemnized by national mourning. Then fertility was restored; there was an outbreak of rejoicing at the ‘return of Proserpina’; and this led to the establishment of these ceremonies. Varro adds that there are many traditional rites in the mysteries of Ceres, all of them relating to the discovery of grain.
21.
The obscenities of the rites of Liber
Liber
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is the god whom they have put in command of liquid seeds – not only the liquors derived from fruits, among which wine holds, one may say, the primacy, but also the seeds of animals. The depth of obscenity reached in his ceremonies would take so long to tell that one would be reluctant to embark on the task; but in the face of the arrogant stupidity of the pagans the reluctance can be overcome.
There are so many points that I must omit most of them. But I have
to mention that Varro tells us about some of the rites of Liber which were celebrated at the crossroads in Italy with such obscene licence that the male organs were made the objects of worship in honour of this divinity. And this was not done in secret, so that some degree of modesty might be retained; it was performed as a public display in an exultation of debauchery. During the festival of Liber this obscene organ was mounted, with great honour, on carts, and exhibited first at the crossroads in the country, and afterwards conveyed to the city. In the town of Lavinium a whole month was consecrated to Liber, during which time everyone used the most indecent language, until the time when that organ was conveyed across the forum and brought to its final resting-place. It was obligatory for the most respected mother of a family to place a crown on this disreputable organ in full view of the public. This was how Liber had to be placated to ensure successful germination of seeds; this was how evil spells had to be averted from the fields. A matron had to be compelled to perform an act in public, which even a harlot ought not to have been allowed to perform in the theatre if there were matrons in the audience.
This was why Saturn was not thought to have sufficient power by himself to look after seeds; it was so that the impure soul might find occasions for multiplying deities, and, being abandoned by the one true God as a just punishment for impurity, and prostituted to numerous false gods in its avidity for even greater impurity, might give the name of sacred rites to those blasphemies and offer itself to crowds of filthy demons for defilement and pollution.