Augustine in His Own Words (continued)
regions, to capture cities, and to subdue whole populations, then it can with fuller right assume the title of kingdom, which in the public estimation is conferred upon it, not by the renunciation of greed, but by the increase of impunity. The answer which a captured pirate gave to the celebrated Alexander the Great was perfectly accurate and correct. When that king asked the man what he meant by infesting the sea, he boldly replied: "What you do by warring on the whole world, I do by fighting on a tiny ship, and they call me a pirate; you do yours with a large fleet, and they call you Commander."44
A Philosophy of Religion
Pagans argued that Rome's destruction came because traditional sacrifices to the gods had been outlawed. This charge brought to the fore a debate on the nature of religious sacrifice, ritual, and worship. Augustine was attuned to concerns of educated pagans (such as those in Volusianus's circle) and confronted arguments by Platonists such as Porphyry who had extolled theurgy, that is, sacrificial rites addressed to lesser spirits, or daemons, who, it was believed, acted as mediators in bridging the cosmic gap between the divine realm and humanity.45 In Book 9, Augustine meditates at length on mediation and mediators. He agreed with Platonists that there exists a vast ontological gap between the divine and the human and that we require a mediator to bridge it, but denounced pagan sacrifices to daemons as useless and as demonic. He also denied Platonist claims that humanity and divinity could have "no immediate communication" since in Christ humankind had a mediator at once fully divine and fully human. In Book 10, Augustine sketches a philosophy of religion, spelling out the deeper purpose of rites and sacrifices, arguing that religion is not for God's sake, but for ours, and that while sacrifice may use visible signs, its real intent is to shape the individual's and the broader community's character. Volusianus's circle had complained of the inconsistency of Old Testament commandments requiring animal sacrifice and the New Testament rejection of such sacrifice. To address all this, Augustine appeals to his theory of sign and sacrament. Medieval and Reformation theologians routinely appealed to this text in their debates and formulations on sacraments and eucharistic sacrifice. From On the City of God, Book 10:
(3) If the Platonists and others who, like them, have a knowledge of God would only glorify Him as such and render Him thanks and not become vain
44. Civ. Dei 4.3–4 (CCL 47:100–102); trans. Zema and Walsh, FOTC 8:193–95. 45. We saw mention of Porphyry in Chapters 1 and 2, with regard to those "books of the Platonists" that had played a role in Augustine's conversion. Porphyry was a leading neo-Platonist philosopher who served as Plotinus's biographer and the editor of Plotinus's Enneads. Much of civ. Dei 10 addresses Porphyry's views on theurgy that appear in a lost treatise, On the Return of the Soul (De regressu animae), which may have been part of a larger work, Philosophy from Oracles. See Frederick Van Fleteren, "Porphyry," in AugEncy, 661–63; John J. O'Meara, 'Philosophy from Oracles' in Augustine, CEASA 9 (Paris: Institut d'Études augustiniennes, 1959).