20 Augustine, City of God 19.8
After the sack of Rome by the Visigoths in 410 CE, many non-Christian Romans blamed Christianity for the stunning violation of the city, the first by a foreign army in 800 years. Augustine, an eminent theologian from north Africa, sought to defend Christianity in the City of God Against the Pagans, a sprawling work of philosophy, theology, and history that sought to contextualize the Visigothic sack within an ongoing earthly struggle between God and the Devil. This passage is one of several that seeks to explain the true happiness of Christians.
| 1 | Sī autem nōn contingat quaedam ignōrantia similis dēmentiae, quae tamen in hūius vītae miserā condiciōne saepe contingit, |
| 2 | ut crēdātur vel amīcus esse quī inimīcus est, vel inimīcus quī amīcus est, |
| 3 | quid nōs cōnsōlātur in hāc hūmānā societāte errōribus aerumnīsque plēnissimā |
| 4 | nisi fidēs nōn ficta et mūtua dīlēctiō vērōrum et bonōrum amīcōrum? |
| 5 | Quōs quantō plūrēs et in locīs plūribus habēmus, tantō longius lātiusque metuimus, nē quid eīs contingat malī dē tantīs malōrum aggeribus hūius saeculī. |
| 6 | Nōn enim tantummodo sollicitī sumus nē famē, nē bellīs, nē morbīs, nē captīvitātibus afflīgantur, nē in eādem servitūte tālia patiantur quālia nec cōgitāre sufficimus; |
| 7 | vērum etiam, ubi timor est multō amārior, nē in perfidiam malitiam nēquitiamque mūtentur. |
| 1 | sī…contingat: the start of a mixed conditional (‘should…does (cōnsōlātur)…’); something — esp. something bad — can “lay hold” of us in the sense of “befall” or “happen to”; the dative of person can be explicit or understood, as here.
quaedam ignōrantia: the subject of a sentence might be postponed for a number of reasons; here largely to create greater euphony and balance in the line. |
| 2 | ut crēdātur: result clause; crēdātur is the verb for both amīcus and inimīcus. |
| 3 | errōribus aerumnīsque plēnissimā: remember that –que strongly links its word with what came before, here indicating that society is full of both errōribus and aerumnīs; note how the distribution of words in this prepositional phrase, in… societāte…plēnissimā serves to encompass words related to the phrase. |
| 5 | quantō…tantõ: quantō is postponed so that the connective relative can stand at the start of the sentence but observe the correlative (“the more… the more…”
nē… contingat: fear clause explaining what we fear (metuimus); remember that a negative fear clause indicates what the speaker does not wish to happen (i.e. what they do fear). quid…malī: after sī, nisi, num, and nē…; malī is a partitive genitive limiting quid, “some misfortune”. |
| 6 | nē….afflīgantur: another fear clause dependent on sollicitī sumus; each possible source of harm is introduced by an emphatic nē. nē…patiantur and then nē… mūtentur expand the previous list of woes, culminating in the worst ruination of a friendship. |
| 7 | multō: ablative of degree of difference with the comparative amārior (< amārus, not a derivative of amõ), “the more bitter by far.” |
Interrogata
- According to Augustine, are true friendships common?
- If true friendships are good, what risks does having many friends pose? Are particular kinds of friends especially dangerous?
