St. Augustine, City of God

I have to admit that I like Augustine even less than the last time I read him nearly ten years ago, and I am correspondingly less inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. Equally unfavorably, I have come round again to the question of divine agency in history, and have to conclude that Augustine represents yet another view on the matter, as compared to Herodotus and Thukydides.

It took me nearly three books to realize that Augustine's central rhetorical strategy - and, to be fair, I do not doubt, his sincere belief - is his applying his notions of the purpose of religion and the nature of the human-divine relationship to an earlier age, and (unsurprisingly) finding the past wanting by his modern metrics. Namely, Augustine trots out innumerable examples of atrocities, misfortunes, wars and disturbances in Roman history in order to prove his contention that the Roman gods either don't care about their worshippers' misfortunes, don't exist, or are evil demons, in which case see above (which proposition he is advancing is also unclear). It is hard not to think that Augustine is willfully misunderstanding the nature of classical religion as a social institution, although (the work of Labeo not being extant) it may well be that, as the charges of the anti-Christian pagans concerning the sack of Rome in 410 CE seem to show, the entire society-wide conception of religion had already completely shifted by this point. Certainly any of the figures of Roman history whose unhappy fates he cites would have boggled at his (to them, doubtless, naive) conviction that gods are there to do something for their worshippers and that history shows divine purpose or plan. (Indeed, the Stoics and the Epicureans would have had a great deal, most of it scornful, to say on this point.)

Nonetheless, such is Augustine's conviction, and by the standards of his time - and, it must be said, of the later Church - his rhetoric is convincing as long as you accept his central premise, that there is a divine plan in history and that, furthermore, the events of history can be made to serve as evidence of a transcendent morality. Thus the dark night of paganism gives way to the fortunate dawn of Christ, and - although inscrutable - God's providence is certainly abroad in the world and being accomplished. If you do not share that conviction, his persistent presentation of the events of Roman history in the worst possible and most moralistic - if not obtuse - light quickly becomes tedious, to say the least.