Anyone out there still worshiping Roman gods? This entry might trigger you. It occurs to me right now that being triggered sounds exciting and pleasurable.
I've been reading Saint Augustine's The City of God again. I'd read parts of it before, parts that seemed relevant as research for Dekpa and Deborah, but now I'm ploughing through the whole thing. It's amazing how much time he spends trashing the Roman gods. It's so hard to imagine now a functioning religion around that pantheon but maybe it's Augustine we have to thank for that. He spends 400 pages on the topic in my paperback copy which, if memory serves (I don't want to get up and grab it), is just over 1000 in total. So many of his arguments seem a bit silly, some of them because I have the benefit of knowing the bloody history of Christian kings, crusades, and inquisitions in the centuries after Augustine's death. So his claim that an innate peacefulness makes Christians less prone to violent conflict is pretty weak. Though, even in his own time, someone might have pointed out that Christians hadn't had as much time in positions of power for any such propensity for peace to be tested.
He spends a lot of time griping about how numerous the Roman gods were, and how silly it was to have a whole god devoted to every single, minuscule subject. Why is it more reasonable for one god to be doing everything? I got to thinking, a lot of his arguments would fit atheism and then I got to thinking monotheism was kind of the atheism of the first millennium. If you think about how much people knew, it makes sense. A God whose plans and deeds seem contradictory or strange actually makes a lot more sense than Gods who are supposed to have predictable personalities. The mystery of God is a perfectly fitting concept for an existence that defies human ideas of rational progression.
In the midst of all the pantheon bashing, Augustine takes a moment to talk about free will versus God's knowledge of everyone's future. Augustine's thoughts on the subject were foundational to the debate over predestination. He argues that the Christian concepts differ from fatalism in that humans are free to make their choices entirely separate from the fact that God already knows what choices they're going to make. It's easy to see why this argument has never settled the dispute since, God being the one who created everybody, and therefore knowing the futures of everyone he created, He therefore created the choices of the people He made, which would be the opposite of free will.
Now, against the sacrilegious and impious darings of reason, we assert both that God knows all things before they come to pass, and that we do by our free will whatsoever we know and feel to be done by us only because we will it. (translated by Marcus Dods)
Augustine follows this with an argument that indeed departs from reason (and so why make an argument? one may ask). God knows causes but maybe not the order of them except He does but maybe not the influence of wicked will except He does. I was reminded of Milton's God in Paradise Lost.
They therefore, as to right belong’d,
So were created, nor can justly accuse
Their Maker, or their making, or their fate,
As if predestination over-rul’d
Their will dispos’d by absolute decree
Or high foreknowledge they themselves decreed
Their own revolt, not I; if I foreknew,
Foreknowledge had no influence on their fault,
Which had no less proved certain unforeknown.
It's a big part of the reason God in Paradise Lost comes off as oddly weak, even confused, like someone pathetically trying to cover his mistakes with bluster.
X Sonnet #1811
A mounting bill would build the pier again.
Decisive coins ennoble leather bags.
The lender's bowler floats a rainy spin.
Benignly look to see the letter sags.
They don't believe the crane was ever there,
The team assembled late by Pepsi brass.
Consorting shades resolve a phantom bear.
A weathered page was burnt from leaking gas.
Remembered moons were deadly orbs at night.
For seven daggers dropped the curtain low.
Condensing soup they'd salt with sweetened spite.
Contagion cracked the lover's trusty bow.
The thinking apricot was cut to brains.
In spring, the ghosts remember candy canes.
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