I started chipping away at St. Augustine's City of God a few weeks ago, just for fun, and decided I'd start posting quick reflections on here to exercise the gray matter.
The basic premise of Book One is to defend Christianity against accusations that it has rendered Rome vulnerable to recent invasions because it has offended the pagan deities. Augustine conducts a thorough cultural comparison to show that Rome had enough of its own problems to warrant its destruction without Christianity.
What I found most compelling about Augustine's argument in the first book, however, is his opening salvo pointing out that the barbarian hordes spared the Christians and their Churches in the most recent invasion. More significantly for his readers, a number of pagan Romans escaped slaughter by claiming to be Christian and hiding in the Churches, but then subsequently attacked the Church:
many are so inflamed with hatred against it, and are so ungrateful to its Redeemer for His signal benefits, as to forget that they would now be unable to utter a single word to its prejudice, had they not found in its sacred places, as they fled from the enemy's steel, that life in which they now boast themselves. Are not those very Romans, who were spared by the barbarians through their respect for Christ, become enemies to the name of Christ? The reliquaries of the martyrs and the churches of the apostles bear witness to this; for in the sack of the city they were open sanctuary for all who fled to them, whether Christian or Pagan. To their very threshold the blood-thirsty enemy raged; there his murderous fury owned a limit. Thither did such of the enemy as had any pity convey those to whom they had given quarter, lest any less mercifully disposed might fall upon them. And, indeed, when even those murderers who everywhere else showed themselves pitiless came to those spots where that was forbidden which the license of war permitted in every other place, their furious rage for slaughter was bridled, and their eagerness to take prisoners was quenched. Thus escaped multitudes who now reproach the Christian religion, and impute to Christ the ills that have befallen their city; but the preservation of their own life— a boon which they owe to the respect entertained for Christ by the barbarians— they attribute not to our Christ, but to their own good luck.
I find this a fairly compelling allegory for the state of intellectual affairs in the modern Western world. For centuries the Church has preserved and advanced our learning and knowledge, whether religious or secular. Likewise, the Church served as a custodian (if not originator) of Western notions of freedom and equality. Today, however, secular atheists essentially ignore this rich history and tradition, arguing that Western liberty is a purely philosophical construct that any secular society could develop without needing the Church's assistance. It's something of an evolutionary myth, that because something could arise on its own, it ought to be treated as if it arose on its own. In biological evolution, we defer to science's claims because we simply have no other knowledge of the time when life began. However, in cultural evolution, we have history. History knows the various roles the Church and its members have played in our cultural development (both when it was a positive force and when it was hijacked for less flattering uses). It is as if secularists and atheists (I'm thinking of people like Hitchens, Dawkins, Bill Maher...and possibly John Lennon) want to erase the salvific part of that history in order to deny the intellectual debts they owe the Church.
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