His Government Itself is Judgment
A fifth-century book review of Salvian's The Government of God.
The Government of God is a theodicy in which the presbyter Salvian of Marseille defends God’s sovereignty and justice at his present moment of history. This is not merely a discussion about theology or philosophy in the abstract: the immediate concern for Salvian is what God is doing (if anything) to protect the Roman people following the sack of Rome by the Goths in AD 410 and the humiliating defeat of Litorius in AD 439.
The work was written in response to the claim, apparently common in Salvian’s day, that God is “careless and neglectful of human actions, on the ground that he neither protects good men nor restrains the wicked”. These interlocutors are not atheists in any strong sense; rather, they initially might appear to be mostly orthodox Christian theists: they affirm that God exists, that God created the heavens and the earth, and even that at the end of all things he will judge the world in righteousness according to what each man has done. Whither the conflict?
The point of contention between Salvian and his interlocutors is the latter’s denial that God continually governs and judges the world throughout history, rather than only at the end of history.
Salvian’s response has two main aspects. Firstly, God rules and governs the world according to his goodness at every moment throughout history, not only at the final judgment. Secondly, Salvian considers that the harsh judgments befalling Rome are in fact strong evidence that God is righteously judging the world at all times: though Christian in name, Rome is thoroughly wicked and deserves to be judged!
God’s government is judgment
Salvian himself best summarises the first aspect of his argument:
While we declare that he will judge in the future, we also teach that he always has judged us in this life. As God always governs, so too he always judges, for his government itself is judgment.
In support of this, Salvian very quickly appeals to pagan philosophers in attempt to call upon authorities that might have weight with his interlocutors, who are “still somewhat infected by pagan unbelief”.
He also appeals to Scripture, showing many cases of God’s judgments within history: the flood in the days of Noah, the destruction of Sodom and the plagues upon Egypt leading to the exodus. God’s judgments in Scripture are not merely demonstrations of his power, but of his justice. Salvian notes insightfully that in the judgment upon Miriam’s rebellion against Moses, God engages in a kind of judicial process: he calls her to appear before him, he demands an account of her actions, and then he renders a judgment. This is an important point, because Salvian is working towards demonstrating that the present judgment upon Rome is not merely an outburst of divine anger, but a judicial act on God’s part.
For Salvian, denial of God’s continuing judgments throughout history is to deny God’s attribute of “sight” (omniscience) and therefore in substance to deny his existence as God. Salvian applies to such professors the words of Psalm 53:1: The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.
The crucial assumption underlying this argument is that Salvian’s contemporary world and the world depicted in Scripture are one and the same world. Salvian asks, in effect, Why would the God who is seen in Scripture so frequently chastising his people and judging his enemies by historical judgments not continue do that now? In relation to the Noahic flood, Salvian writes:
Perhaps these instances may seem to stupid wits to lack authority, since they happened before the Flood—in another age, as it were. As if we could assume that God was different at that time, and afterwards ceased to desire to exercise the same care for the world!
It is not only the fact of God’s non-final judgments, but also the mode of those judgments that persists to Salvian’s contemporary era: the God who long ago sent the armies of Nebuchadnezzar in judgment against Judah (Jer. 25:8-9) is the same God who has now sent the Vandals against the Roman Empire throughout the world.
The wickedness of Roman society
Throughout The Government of God, Salvian discusses some of the evils that plague Roman society and therefore justify God’s judgment upon it. Despite God’s patience and forbearance towards them in past ages, Rome continually demonstrates their ingratitude for God’s many kindnesses to them by continuing in their sins.
These sins include the public games (which are said to cause “injury” to God as they are festivals to idols) and various notorious sexual vices, especially heinous for being performed so publicly and shamelessly in places such as the city of Carthage.
Salvian also notes a category of economic sins, which involved a crippling burden of taxation imposed by the rich upon the poor, who were yet excluded from receiving commensurate benefits of that taxation. As poorer farmers sought to escape this by assigning their assets to wealthy benefactors, Salvian considered that Rome had taken its “brothers captive” as slaves. This sin also breaks down the relationship between the generations, as “the sons’ inheritance is destroyed that the fathers may be secure”. This is not mere “white-collar crime” as modern readers might think of it, but Salvian’s language portrays the effects of this sin as a breakdown in the familial unity of Rome.
Rome as the people of God
It must be asked how these terrible sins relate to Rome’s apparent Christian identity. While Salvian gives no quarter to Rome in his catalogue of their many grievous sins, he nonetheless refers to them throughout this work as “the people of God”, or similar terms. When discussing the sins of effeminacy and sexual deviance committed in Carthage, Salvian describes it as “a Christian city, in a church which the apostles founded by their teaching, which martyrs had crowned by their passion”.
It appears to me that Salvian’s aim here is to hold the Christian confession of Rome against it, perhaps in the way that one might remind an unfaithful wife that she is breaking her wedding vows to her husband. That Rome is a Christian people does not lessen the force of Salvian’s denouncements, but actually reinforces it. Salvian notes that Israel, though they were in name the people of God, were judged for their disobedience to God’s law—and Rome is now following that very same path:
But indeed I am afraid that this is true of us now no less than it was of them, since we do not obey the words of the Lord, and our disobedience certainly shows that there is no wisdom in us. […] Since this is the case, what logical reason have we for deluding ourselves by a false notion into the belief that the good name of Christian can be of any possible help to us in the evils we commit?
Salvian’s appeal to Rome’s Christian identity would have been a powerful way to convict his contemporary readers of how vile and unfitting the sins of Rome truly are. More than that, however, it also reveals the way in which Salvian understood Rome’s relationship to God: God had long been Rome’s “most indulgent father”, lightly chastising his Roman children with a view to their eventual repentance. Alas! God’s patience with Rome has at last run out.
Against functional atheism
The themes of the sovereignty of God in history and of the wickedness of the Christian Roman Empire come together in Salvian’s devastating assessment of what God is doing at that moment in history:
We are judged by the ever-present judgment of God, and thus a most slothful race has been aroused to accomplish our destruction and shame. They go from place to place, from city to city, and destroy everything.
God has employed as his instruments of judgment the Vandals and the Goths who, despite their theological heterodoxy, are judged by him to be “superior to the orthodox in their way of living”, especially noting their charity and their chastity.
The Government of God, though incomplete or perhaps partially lost, presents Salvian’s coherent and forceful case against the functional atheism of his interlocutors. Salvian’s interlocutors are thus made to taste the bitter truth: the sovereign judge of all the earth has turned on Rome in righteous wrath—and she has nobody to blame but herself!
This post is a version of a paper I wrote for my Augustine's City of God class with Davenant Hall, taught by Prof. Matthew Hoskin.