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>In City of God, St Augustine blames the fall of Rome on the christians in the city ignoring the depravity of the pagans. Christians for centuries were the peo
by midoridensha 4y ago
>In City of God, St Augustine blames the fall of Rome on the christians in the city ignoring the depravity of the pagans.
Christians for centuries were the people that burned people at the stake for believing the wrong religion, or even the wrong version of Christianity. They're far from "righteous".
What did the pagans do wrong? They seemed to be pretty decent overall, by the standards of the time: they even had a holiday, Saturnalia (that the Christians co-opted), where the masters served the slaves and people shared gifts. Slaves could even save money and buy their freedom in Roman society. Under Christianity, slaves were brutally beaten and murdered on plantations and could never be free; Christians even happily fought a brutal war to keep slavery intact when the Europeans had long since banned the practice.
- trgn 4y agoMy comment was not about christians=good, pagans=bad. It's that St Augustine, somewhat counter-intuitively puts the blame of the collapse of the roman empire, not on the barbarian hordes, but on the upstanding romans being too timid to confront the moral decay amongst their neighbors.
- midoridensha 4y agoRome was at its peak during the pagan times; after they adopted Christianity things went downhill. Of course, correlation does not equal causation, but I don't see how Christians have any valid claim to moral righteousness. If any one thing could be pointed to for Rome's collapse, it's probably just corruption, which can happen to any society, and is not at all the same as "moral decay".