Augustine in His Own Words
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).
On the City of God 341 in their thoughts, whether by starting errors among the people or by failing to correct them, surely they would acknowledge that, in order to be immortal and blessed, both immortal blessed spirits and we miserable mortals must worship the one God of gods who is our God as well as theirs. Both in outward signs and inner devotion, we owe to God that service which the Greeks call latreía. Indeed, all of us together, and each one in particular, constitute His temple because He deigns to take as a dwelling both the whole community and the person of each individual. Nor is He greater in the whole than in each, since He cannot be extended by numbers nor diminished by being shared. When raised to Him, our heart becomes His altar; His only-begotten Son is the priest who wins for us His favor. It is only by the shedding of our blood in fighting for His truth that we offer Him bloody victims. We burn the sweetest incense in His sight when we are aflame with holy piety and love. As for the best gifts, we consecrate and surrender to Him our very selves which He has given us. We dedicate and consecrate to Him the memory of His bounties by establishing appointed days as solemn feasts lest the lapse of time, ingratitude, and forgetfulness should steal upon us. On the altar of our heart, we offer to Him a sacrifice of humility and praise, aglow with the fire of charity. In order to see Him as, one day, it will be possible to see and to cling to Him, we cleanse ourselves from every stain of sin and evil desire, sanctifying ourselves by His name. For He is the source of our happiness and the very end of all our aspirations. We choose Him (or rather, re-choose Him whom, by neglect, we had lost). We offer Him our re-chosen allegiance, for "re-choosing" (religentes) and "religion" (religio) are, at root, the same term. We pursue Him with our love so that when we reach Him we may rest in perfect happiness in the One who is our goal. For our goal . . . is nothing else than union with the One whose spiritual embrace alone can impregnate—so to speak—the intellectual soul and fill it with true virtue.
It is this Good which we are commanded to love with our whole heart, with our whole mind, and with all our strength. It is toward this Good that we should be led by those who love us, and toward this Good we should lead those whom we love. In this way, we fulfill the commandments on which depend the whole Law and the Prophets: "You shall love the Lord your God with your whole heart, and your whole soul, and with your whole mind"; and "You shall love your neighbor as yourself" (Mt 22:37, 39). For in order that a person might learn how to love himself, a standard was set to regulate all actions on which happiness depends.46 For to love one's own self is nothing but to wish to be happy, and the goal is to cling to God. When, therefore, a person
46. "How to love himself": On this theme, see O'Donovan, Problem of Self-Love, 112–36.