other · 440 · Marseille
Every other Christian writer answering this question in the fifth century argues that the disasters are not as bad as they look, or not deserved, or not God's doing. Salvian says the opposite as loudly as he can. The Romans are worse men than the barbarians: the Goths and Vandals are chaste where Romans are not, the invaders keep faith where Romans break it, and Roman landowners and tax-collectors grind the poor harder than any conqueror does — so hard, he says, that men flee to the barbarians to be free. He knows the Goths are Arians and answers that too: they are heretics without knowing it, having been taught wrongly, while we hold the true faith and live worse than they do. It is the sharpest social criticism to survive from the Latin fifth century and it was written by a man perfectly placed to make it, a Trier aristocrat who had seen his own city sacked and then become a priest at Marseille. Gennadius knew him and writes in the present tense: a master among bishops, and "still living at a good old age."
The empire is being overrun. Christians are asking how a just God permits it.
He does not permit it. He is doing it, and we deserve it.