Augustine in His Own Words
in this life but to which he is unduly attached. Finally, there is another reason, well known to Job, why even the good must drink the bitter cup of temporal adversity: in order that the human spirit may test its mettle and come to know whether it loves God with the virtue of religion and for His own sake.37
Rome Never a Commonwealth
In Book 2, Augustine sets forth his core polemic against those who blamed Christianity for Rome's downfall. He argues that the Republic had already lost its legitimacy well before Christ's coming since it lacked social justice. This argument highlights Augustine's strategy as an apologist: drawing on classical authors widely esteemed by his pagan audience and using them against his opponents. From On the City of God, Book 2:
(19) Take a look at your Roman republic. I am not the first to paint this picture. The writers whose works we studied in school for a fee told the tale before Christ's coming. Remember? [As Cicero notes,] "from a state of virtuous splendor [Rome] sank by gradual change to one of shameful corruption."38 It was before Christ's coming and after the destruction of Carthage that [according to Sallust] "the morals of our forefathers declined, not little by little as before, but rushing headlong like a torrent. So deep into immorality and avarice did the younger generation sink."39 Let our critics read to us any commandments which the gods ever gave to their Roman people, setting bounds to debauchery and greed. It is not merely that [the gods] had abstained from any mention of chastity and modesty to the people. They went so far as actually to demand lewdness and indecency. They gave those things the sanction of divine approval. As against all this, let [our opponents] turn to our moral teachings. The Prophets, the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, and the Epistles have thundered their condemnation of greed and lust into the ears of the throngs assembled in every part of the empire for the very purpose of hearing them. Sublime and divinely inspired utterances, they are not like the cackle of contentious philosophers, but like oracles from God's heaven. But strangely enough, while our pagan foes are slow to impute to their gods the fact that immodesty, avarice, brutal and shameful living turned the Roman commonwealth into [what Sallust called] a "sink of corruption" before the advent of Christ, they loudly reproach the Christian religion for whatever bitter pill their arrogance and their love of pleasure have to swallow at the present time. . . .
37. Civ. Dei 1.8–9 (CCL 47:7–10); trans. Zema and Walsh, FOTC 8:28–33. 38. Cicero, In Catilinam 5.9. 39. Sallust, Historiae 1.16.