Text
Quodvultdeus, Book of the Promises and Prophecies of God 3.38:
In Africa, at Carthage, Caelestis - as they called her - had a temple of very substantial size ringed around by sanctuaries of all their gods. Its precinct was decorated with mosaic pavements and expensive columns and walls, and extended nearly 1000 paces. When it had been closed for a long time and, from neglect, thorny thickets invaded the enclosure, and the Christian inhabitants wanted to claim it for the use of the true religion, the pagan inhabitants clamoured that there were snakes and serpents there to protect the temple. This only aroused the fervour of the Christians all the more and they removed everything with ease and without suffering any harm so as to consecrate the temple to the true celestial king and master. And in fact when the solemn feast of holy Easter was celebrated and a great crowd had gathered there and was approaching from every direction full of curiosity, the father of many priests and a man worthy of remembrance, the bishop Aurelius - now a citizen of the heavenly homeland - placed his chair there on the spot [previously occupied by the cult statue of Caelestis and sat down. … something amazing and unbelievable confronted our gaze: on the façade of the temple, in very large letters of bronze, an inscription was written - ‘Aurelius the chief priest dedicated [this]’. When they read this, the people marvelled at this deed inspired by the prophetic Spirit in a former time, which the prescient ordering of God had brought to this appointed outcome.
And when a pagan made known a false prophecy, as if from the same Caelestis, to the effect that the sacred way and the temples would once again be restored to the ancient ritual of their ceremonies, God, the true God, whose prophetic utterances do not know how to lie or deceive at all, brought it about, under Constantinus [III] and the empress [Galla] Placidia - whose son, the devout and Christian Valentinian [III], is now emperor - and by the efforts of the tribune Ursus, that all those temples were razed to the ground, leaving, appropriately, a piece of land for the burial of the dead; and the hand of the Vandals [who occupied Carthage in 439] has now destroyed that sacred way without leaving any remainder of it.
Source (list of abbreviations)
Quodvultdeus, Book of the Promises and Prophecies of God 3.38
Bibliography
| Lee 2000, 138-139 | Lee, A. D. Pagans and Christians in Late Antiquity. A Sourcebook. London, New York: Routledge 2000. |
Amar Annus
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