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Having begun to speak of the city of God, I have thought it
necessary first of all to reply to its enemies, who, eagerly pursuing
earthly joys and gaping after transitory things, throw the blame of all
the sorrow they suffer in them, rather through the compassion of God
in admonishing than His severity in punishing, on the Christian
religion, which is the one salutary and true religion. And since
there is among them also an unlearned rabble, they are stirred up as by
the authority of the learned to hate us more bitterly, thinking in
their inexperience that things which have happened unwontedly in their
days were not wont to happen in other times gone by; and whereas this
opinion of theirs is confirmed even by those who know that it is false,
and yet dissemble their knowledge in order that they may seem to have
just cause for murmuring against us, it was necessary, from books in
which their authors recorded and published the history of bygone times
that it might be known, to demonstrate that it is far otherwise than
they think; and at the same time to teach that the false gods, whom
they openly worshipped, or still worship in secret, are most unclean
spirits, and most malignant and deceitful demons, even to such a pitch
that they take delight in crimes which, whether real or only
fictitious, are yet their own, which it has been their will to have
celebrated in honor of them at their own festivals; so that human
infirmity cannot be called back from the perpetration of damnable
deeds, so long as authority is furnished for imitating them that seems
even divine. These things we have proved, not from our own
conjectures, but partly from recent memory, because we ourselves have
seen such things celebrated, and to such deities, partly from the
writings of those who have left these things on record to posterity,
not as if in reproach but as in honor of their own gods. Thus Varro,
a most learned man among them, and of the weightiest authority, when
he made separate books concerning things human and things divine,
distributing some among the human, others among the divine, according
to the special dignity of each, placed the scenic plays not at all
among things human, but among things divine; though, certainly, if
only there were good and honest men in the state, the scenic plays
ought not to be allowed even among things human. And this he did not
on his own authority, but because, being born and educated at Rome,
he found them among the divine things. Now as we briefly stated in the
end of the first book what we intended afterwards to discuss, and as we
have disposed of a part of this in the next two books, we see what our
readers will expect us now to take up.
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