I have already mentioned the phrase victos penates, which Augustine borrows from Virgil's Aeneid, 1:67. But it may be helpful, thinking not only about this phrase but also about the situation of the Roman exiles in northern Africa, to draw a comparison to modern political life. The "vanquished gods," in R.W. Dyson's translation, have certainly had their echo in our own time.
Penates, of course, are not gods in general. They are the household gods, the ones kept on a little shrine in one's home and offered a bite of the family meal by way of sacrifice. The penates that Aeneas carried off after the fall of Troy, which is to say the ones in question here, seem to be a public version of those private deities. According to tradition, it was these very figures which were kept in the Temple of Vesta. And so, to Augustine's mind, they are doubly vanquished: first when Troy fell to the Greeks, and now when Rome has fallen to the Goths.
The God That Failed --which some readers may know better as a song by Metallica -- could have been Augustine;s description of Trojan Juno or Roman Minerva. But in fact it is the title of a book published in 1949 by six former Communists. They were a well-known bunch, including Arthur Koestler, Stephen Spender and Ignazio Silone.
In the early part of the 20th century, membership in or sympathy with the Communist movement was trendy among young intellectuals, especially those who felt some particular sense of alienation from or even grudge against the social order that was coming to dominate America and Europe. Koestler, a Hungarian Jew and erstwhile Zionist, hoped that an international movement could resolve "the Jewish problem." Likewise, Richard Wright wrote that "anyone with common sense could easily guess that I was a Communist because I was a Negro."
On needn't have been young, much less stupid, to believe these things. George Bernard Shaw, already in his sixties by the time of the Russian Revolution, became and remained throughout his life and enthusiast for the Soviet style of communism -- a disturbing fact, when one considers that he lived until 1950. For younger and less sophisticated minds to have been taken in by the allure of Marxism is hardly surprising.
By the 1930s, however, the infatuation of these young intellectuals with Communism was fading. Many left the Party; some turned strongly against it. By the late 1940s, after the Iron Curtain descended on Eastern Europe, the trend accelerated. W.H. Auden went through his published poetry and made revisions to reflect both the aesthetic and political judgments of his mature years. Of course there were diehards, some of whom, unlike Shaw, genuinely betrayed their own nations -- the Rosenbergs, Kim Philby, Alger Hiss. But from the late 30s forward, and certainly from the 40s, fashionable lefties made a point of distinguishing themselves from the Soviet Union and its ideology. (Jane Fonda's ill-advised trip to Viet Nam is probably the closest anybody came.)
And with the decline of the trendy young Reds arose another category in the American political spectrum, one which continues to play a more active role in our public life than actual Communism ever did: the Ex-Communist or, in a later and adulterated form, the Neo-Conservative. This particular transition wasn't automatic -- some ex-Reds remained political liberals, and in any case the emergence of the neocons by name took another generation. But at Encounter, Spender did work side by side with Irving Kristol, whose son Bill remains a talk-show fixture to this day.
As the title of the book makes clear, Communism -- despite its claims to be scientific, materialistic and atheistic -- was a kind of religion. A particularly bad one, but a religion nonetheless. If it was to be accepted, then it could only be accepted on faith, rather than because of any particular evidence that it worked, which of course it manifestly did not. The six essayists spoke of "conversion" to it; of leaving, they might as well speak of apostasy.
So it seems to me that a modern reader, trying to follow Augustine's argument, can do worse than to think of the Berlin Wall and the sudden collapse of Communism. The traditional Greco-Roman religion, says Augustine, has failed, and has failed catastrophically. Its gods have been vanquished, its crown city gutted.
This is not so different from the triumphalism that was sometimes heard in the West after 1989. Does anybody remember "the end of history" or, worse yet, the blather about a "unipolar world"? Perhaps it is just me, but I think I hear the same sort of thing in DCD, at least so far. Augustine thinks hat the old pagan world has definitively ended and is sounds as though he is about to suggest that Christianity is replacing it.
I hope that's not where DCD goes next, because it's a little shallow. A theologian as keenly alert to the prevalence of sin surely knows that idolatry, of one sort or another, is an ineluctable part of human existence. To argue otherwise would move Augsutine, willy nilly, toward Julian of Eclanum and the semi-Pelagian camp.
Still, a certain amount of triumphalism -- if it comes -- will prove to have been vindicated by history. Christianity did indeed dominate the Mediterranean and Europe, which is what Augustine would have understood to be the World, from the fifth century forward. The sphere of pagan influence would shrink progressively northward for half a millennium, and eventually disappear into story books.
On the other hand, in just a few hundred years, the Christian society of Egypt and North Africa, the society shaped by Cyprian, Tertullian, and Augustine himself (along with Origen and, erh, Arius) would begin its slow path toward extermination. Which just proves the point that all triumphalism is premature.
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