Pride Month Polytheism

Ancient lessons for a modern festival

This post originally appeared on the Ad Fontes website. It has been revised and updated for The New Albion.

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You will already know that it is Pride Month. The UK isn’t yet as vociferous in its “celebration” of the annual occasion as many parts of the US, but we’re getting there.

This year, Pride has coincided with me reading through Augustine’s City of God for a class I’m taking. Augustine begins his work with a withering polemic which both defends Christianity and assaults polytheism. Written in the wake of the sack of Rome in 410AD, the immediate cause of the City of God was the charge by some that Rome’s fall was punishment from the Roman gods for the empire’s embrace of Christianity. Augustine, in short, is having none of it, and comes out fighting (a rhetorical stance which has fallen by the wayside in contemporary evangelism and apologetics… but that’s another article).

To tritely summarise Augustine’s argument in the opening chapters: polytheism is evil and dumb, and this is obvious to anyone with half a brain. He gives a host of reasons why this is the case, many of which bear reflection so that we might usefully adapt them today in our preaching, discipleship, and evangelism.

One in particular leaps out at me these days: the endless multiplication of Roman gods.

What Were You The God Of Again?

For Augustine, the need to keep adding gods to the pantheon is a clear argument against the coherence of polytheism. In Book III, he takes things all the way back to Numa Pompilius (753-673BC), the legendary second king of Rome, and the supposed successor to Romulus. As king of a fledgling people, Numa did a lot to establish the Roman religion, supposedly playing a key role in developing new Roman gods based on the older Greek ones.

However, this wasn’t enough for Rome. More gods were needed:

For all that, Rome disdained to content herself with the many religious institutions established by Pompilius. She had not as yet the chief temple of Jupiter; it was King Tarquin who constructed the Capitol. Aesculapius [the god of medicine] came from Epidaurus [i.e. Greece] to solicit custom in Rome, as as to practise his profession there and to enhance his reputation by ranking as the most accomplished physician in the world’s most famous city. The Mother of the Gods [Cybele] came from Pessinus [modern day Turkey].

Book I.12 (trans. Henry Bettenson, Penguin Classics Edition)

This process goes on and on, with Rome accumulating gods-of-this and gods-of-that, in the hope of prosperity and protection. Augustine summarises where they get to:

Rome had collected for her protection far too many gods, summoning them, as it were, at a given signal by the immense volume of smoke of the sacrifices. By establishing for them a supply of temples, altars, sacrifices, and priests she was bound to offend the true supreme God, to whom alone these honours are rightly due. She had greater happiness when she lived with a smaller number. But it seemed that she needed a larger supply when she grew greater, as a larger ship needs a larger crew. I suppose she felt no confidence that those few gods, under whom she had enjoyed a better life (though storing up for herself a worse future), would suffice to support her increasing grandeur.

Book I.12

This, to Augustine, is plain evidence of the stupidity and incoherence of polytheism. The constant addition of new gods simply displays a lack of confidence in current ones. These gods were allocated increasingly specific, small-time roles (e.g. you have different gods who oversee the sowing, germination, growth, and harvest of crops, rather than just one god of agriculture); this being the case, how much of a god are they really? To paraphrase Syndrome from The Incredibles: “when everyone’s a deity, no-one will be”, and everyone’s left asking (to quote Hella from Thor: Ragnarok), “what were you the god of again?”

By taking aim at polytheism like this, Augustine (I think) puts his finger on a nerve for the Romans. He’s writing in 410AD—but Greek philosophers centuries earlier had begun to realise (through their own natural reason), that polytheism made no sense. For any god to truly be God, they must be God alone. The philosophers concluded that “oneness” must necessarily be better than multiplicity, and so God must be one, not many. This tension between the one God of the philosophers and the many gods of the state religion was, in short, an unresolved tension for the pagan Romans in Augustine’s day, and I think he knows that as he needles them here.

But let’s consider Augustine’s main point: what does it say about a culture when it cannot stop multiplying its gods? Why is this a criticism worth making?