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? ‘From a state of virtuous splendor it sank by gradual change to one of shameful corruption.’ It was before Christ’s coming, and after the destruction of Carthage, that ‘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.’

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 they 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 them 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 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.

Yet, if all would but hear and practice what that religion has to teach about the just and virtuous way to live—‘kings of the earth and all people: princes and all judges of the earth, young men and maidens … the young with the older,’1 every age and sex, and even those to whom John the Baptist addressed himself, the publicans and soldiers—then, the Roman Empire would by its happy state transform the countries of the world into so many lands flowing with milk and honey and would rise to eternal life and reign in unending bliss.

But, while one of you listens, another scoffs, and most of you are drawn more by the flattery of vice than by the salutary austerity of virtue. Thus, the servants of Christ, whether kings, princes, or judges, simple soldiers or commanders, rich or poor, freemen or slaves, men or women, are bidden, if they must, to put up with even an utterly vicious and degraded commonwealth—for, by such sufferance, they will win a place in that supremely holy and exalted angelic assemblange and heavenly country where God’s will is law.


Augustine of Hippo, The City of God, Books I–VII, ed. Hermigild Dressler, 8:102–104.