It’s been a long time since I read any of St. Augustine’s monumental City of God. I recently decided to pick it up again. What incredible brilliance! It’s hard to believe that something written in the Fifth Century can remain so erudite and fresh. Of course, most modern readers won’t always agree with Augustine, but many of his arguments apply as well today as they did 1500 years ago. There really is nothing new under the Sun. As I read through the City of God, I’ll post about the gems I find there. So here is the first one:
Augustine lived in tumultuous times. The supposedly eternal city of Rome was sacked by the Goths in the year 410, marking the end of Roman hegemony. This would be equivalent today to the fall of New York, Washington and Los Angeles to a hostile foreign army. In Book I, Augustine responds to arguments by Pagans that Christianity caused the fall of Rome. One major Pagan argument was that the death, rape, torture, enslavement and exile of Christians by the Goths demonstrated that Christianity was inferior to the old pagan religions. Augustine responds first by establishing that pagans have suffered in the Gothic sack, and in previous wars, as much as Christians. He then contrasts Christian suffering with that of the pagans, in a beautiful reflection on how the response to suffering shapes the event:
The sufferers are different even though the sufferings are the same trials; though what they endure is the same, their virtue and vice are different. For, in the same fire, gold gleams and straw smokes; under the same flail the stalk is crushed and the grain threshed; the lees are not mistaken for oil because they have issued from the same press. So, too, the tide of trouble will test, purify, and improve the good, but beat, crush, and wash away the wicked. So it is that, under the weight of the same affliction, the wicked deny and blaspheme God, and the good pray to Him and praise Him. The difference is not in what people suffer but in the way they suffer. The same shaking that makes fetid water stink makes perfume issue a more pleasant odor.
Awesome.