St. Augustine is many things: philosopher, theologian, bishop and monk. He is not, however, a military historian.
So when we get to a chapter (2, in this case) headed "That in no wars ever before recorded have the victors spared the vanquished for the sake of their gods," readers shouldn't be surprised to discover that Augustine is simply mistaken. We've already pointed to two examples in which victors did just that. And if Augustine had just thrown this in as a bit of trivia, it would not matter that he is wrong. Unfortunately, it is a big part of his argument.
He is trying to argue that, when some Romans hid in Christian churches and were spared by Alaric's soldiers, this was a demonstration of power unique to the God recognized by Christians. If the Goths did in fact respect what would later be called the right of sanctuary, as I said last time, it is likely to have been because they were Christians themselves. And that is the idea that no less than Philip Schaff seems to attribute to Augustine. However, it is not what Augustine says here. Over and over, he treats the Goths as "monstrous barbarians (immanitas barbara, ch. 4 & 7)," outsiders, an uncivilized race entirely different from Greeks or Romans, whether pagan or Christian.
The argument of these chapters is, in essence, that the pagan deities were unable to protect Rome, and that trusting them in the first place had not been "prudent." Minerva, the patroness of Rome, was powerless to help her city; indeed, so powerless was she that she depended upon the Romans to defend her statue: "it was not, therefore, the effigy who protected the men, but the men who were protecting the effigy."
What interests me most (and may confuse some readers) about these chapters is the use Augustine makes of Virgil. I looked at it in ch. 1, and see now that it continues through ch. 7, at which point the tone shifts.
Classicists speak of "intertextuality," as when (for example) Virgil self-consciously builds upon Homer to tell the story of Aeneas. The first seven chapters of DCD are deliberately intertextual, as Augustine uses Virgil's narrative of the mythical foundation of Rome to describe its recent fall. (It is important to understand that the Romans believed themselves to be descended from Aeneas and his Trojan exiles, one race.)
So while Augustine is talking about how Minerva's shrine in Rome was despoiled by invaders, he also talks about how (in Aeneid 2), King Priam is dragged bodily before the shrine of his own ancestral gods and killed, so that "his blood quenched the sacred flames he had himself kindled." Likewise, Juno could not protect her shrine in Troy, even though it was guarded by Aerneas himself. (And, he notes almost with evident delight, while the pagan shrine was a place where treasure was held captive, the Christian shrines were places where people were set free.) The point is that as the gods of the Trojans were impotent, so were the gods of their children.
Augustine quotes a telling phrase from Virgil: the victos penates, the vanquished gods (Aen. 1:67) carried from Troy by Aeneas. "Was is prudent," asks Augustine, "to entrust Rome to these 'vanquished gods'?" Evidently not.
How seriously did Augustine take Virgil? Would a Christian, and a rather severe one, naturally engage so deeply with a pagan poet? After all, we can easily find in DCD and other writings of Augustine what looks like an aversion to the arts, especially theater -- both on the grounds that it depicts the false gods, and that it deals in stories that are nor true. (This argument would be taken over, in various forms, by Christians in later ages, as in the Puritan closure of English theaters in Shakespeare's day; it is at least according to tradition the same argument, as made by Stephen Gosson, that provoked Sidney's brilliant Apologie for Poetry as a counterattack). It is easy to imagine Augustine sternly condemning Virgil's tale of the false gods, rather than treating is as a basic resource for a theological discussion.
Or, if not theology per se, Augustine treats Virgil as a basic resource for history. He even asks whether in fact the Greeks had spared some of their Trojan co-religionists, and whether "Virgil, after the custom of poets, has misled us (ch. 4)." His answer is no. On ethe contrary; Virgil is taught to small boys so that they may be steeped in this "greatest and most famous and best of all poets." He adduces some other witnesses -- Sallust, quoting Caesar -- to demonstrate what any cultured Roman, apparently including Augustine, took for granted: that Virgil was an impeccable source.
Therefore, Augustine argues, we know that the universal custom of war has always been to slaughter the conquered without regard for any appeal to divine power; even Romans themselves have done so (here he cites he cites Marcellus, which again is probably a purposeful contrast with his "beloved son," the Christian Marcellinus)); the mercy shown by Alaric is a new thing, "to be attributed to the name of Christ and to the Christian age."
Bear in mind that this argument is, according to other classical sources, factually incorrect. Still, it is hard to imagine that, if Augustine were confronted by the examples of Alexander and Agesilaus, he would have simply given up and stopped writing. Even if Greco-Roman civilization had occasionally shown mercy to those who trusted its gods, I like to imagine he would have argued, it was the Christian God who embodied mercy, whose presence commanded it and enforced the command.
That's the argument I like to imagine Augustine making; but in the passages at hand, he makes one that is a little less edifying -- an argument less about mercy than about power, and therefore (as Lutherans say) less about the Cross than about glory. Our God, says Augustine, has triumphed, albeit in a limited fashion; their gods, in Rome as in Troy, have been unreservedly vanquished.
No comments:
Post a Comment