Read City of God (Penguin Classics) Online
Authors: Saint Augustine
What am I to say of the
Cynocephali
,
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whose dog’s head and actual barking prove them to be animals rather than men? Now we are not bound to believe in the existence of all the types of men which are described. But no faithful Christian should doubt that anyone who is born anywhere as a man – that is, a rational and mortal being –derives from that one first-created human being. And this is true, however extraordinary such a creature may appear to our senses in bodily shape, in colour, or motion, or utterance, or in any natural endowment, or part, or quality. However, it is clear what constitutes the persistent norm of nature in the majority and what, by its very rarity, constitutes a marvel.
Moreover, the explanation given for monstrous human births among us can also be applied to some of those monstrous races. For God is the creator of all, and he himself knows where and when any creature should be created or should have been created. He has the wisdom to weave the beauty of the whole design out of the constituent parts, in their likeness and diversity. The observer who cannot view the whole is offended by what seems the deformity of a part, since he does not know how it fits in, or how it is related to the rest. We know of cases of human beings born with more than five fingers or five toes. This is a comparatively trivial abnormality; and yet it would be utterly wrong for anyone to be fool enough to imagine that the Creator made a mistake in the number of human fingers, although he may not know why the Creator so acted. So, even if a greater divergence from the norm should appear, he whose operations no one has the right to criticize knows what he is about.
At Hippo Zaritus
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there is a man with feet shaped like a crescent, with only two toes on each, and his hands are similarly shaped. If there were any race with those characteristics it would be listed among the marvels of nature. But are we therefore going to deny that this man is descended from that one man who was first created?
As for
Androgynes
, also called Hermaphrodites, they are certainly very rare, and yet it is difficult to find periods when there are no examples of human beings possessing the characteristics of both sexes, in such a way that it is a matter of doubt how they should be classified. However, the prevalent usage has called them masculine, assigning them to the superior sex; for no one has ever used the feminine names,
androgynaecae
or
hermaphroditae
.
Some years ago, but certainly in my time, a man was born in the East with a double set of upper parts, but a single set of the lower limbs. That is, he had two heads, two chests, and four arms, but only one belly and two feet, as if he were one man. And he lived long enough for the news of his case to attract many sightseers.
In fact, it would be impossible to list all the human infants very unlike those who, without any doubt, were their parents. Now it cannot be denied that these derive ultimately from that one man; and therefore the same is true of all those races which are reported to have deviated as it were, by their divergence in bodily structure, from the normal course of nature followed by the majority, or practically the whole of mankind. If these races are included in the definition of ‘human’, that is, if they are rational and mortal animals, it must be admitted that they trace their lineage from that same one man, the first father of all mankind. This assumes, of course, the truth of the stories about the divergent features of those races, and their great difference from one another and from us. The definition is important; for if we did not know that monkeys, long-tailed apes and chimpanzees are not men but animals, those natural historians who plume themselves on their collection of curiosities might pass them off on us as races of men, and get away with such nonsense. But if we assume that the subjects of those remarkable accounts are in fact men, it may be suggested that God decided to create some races in this way, so that we should not suppose that the wisdom with which he fashions the physical being of men has gone astray in the case of the monsters which are bound to be born among us of human parents; for that would be to regard the works of God’s wisdom as the products of an
imperfectly skilled craftsman. If so, it ought not to seem incongruous that, just as there are some monstrosities within the various races of mankind, so within the whole human race there should be certain monstrous peoples.
I must therefore finish the discussion of this question with my tentative and cautious answer. The accounts of some of these races may be completely worthless; but if such peoples exist, then either they are not human; or, if human, they are descended from Adam.
9.
The story of the ‘antipodes’
As for the fabled ‘antipodes’, men, that is, who live on the other side of the earth, where the sun rises when it sets for us, men who plant their footsteps opposite ours, there is no rational ground for such a belief.
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The upholders of this notion do not assert that they have discovered it from scientific evidence; they base their conjecture on a kind of
a priori
reasoning. They argue that the earth is suspended within the sphere of the heavens, so that the lowest point and the middle point of the world are identical; and this leads them to suppose that the other half of the world which lies below this part cannot be devoid of human inhabitants. They ignore the fact that even if the world is supposed to be a spherical mass, or if some rational proof should be offered for the supposition, it does not follow that the land on that side is not covered by ‘the gathering together of the waters’.
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Again, even if the land were uncovered, it does not immediately follow that it has human beings on it. For there is no untruth of any kind in the Scripture, whose reliability in the account of past events is attested by the fulfilment of its prophecies for the future; and it would be too ridiculous to suggest that some men might have sailed from our side of the earth to the other, arriving there after crossing the vast expanse of ocean, so that the human race should be established there also by the descendants of the one first man.
Let us therefore search among those early peoples of mankind who were, we gather, divided into seventy-two nations and as many languages, to see if we can find among them the City of God on
pilgrimage here on earth. We have brought its story down to the Flood and the ark, and have shown its continuance in the sons of Noah through his blessings on those sons, especially in the eldest of them, who was called Shem; for Japheth was blessed only in respect of his dwelling in the habitations of his brother Shem.
10.
The progress of the City of God towards Abraham, by way of Shem’s descendants
Thus the line of descent must be followed from Shem himself, to show us the City of God after the Flood, in the same way as the line from the man called Seth showed it before the Flood. This is the reason why the inspired Scripture, after showing the earthly city in Babylon, that is, in ‘confusion’, goes back to the patriarch Shem, to make a fresh start; and from that point it begins the list of generations down to Abraham, mentioning also the number of years that passed before each man named became the father of the son belonging to this line, and the length of each man’s life. And here we must recognize the explanation of the passage which I promised earlier to explain;
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we can see why it was said of the sons of Heber, ‘The name of one of them was Peleg, because in his time the earth was divided.’
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For the statement that the earth was divided can only refer to its division by the diversity of languages.
The record omits the rest of Shem’s sons, who are irrelevant to the purpose, and gives the series of generations to bring us down to Abraham, just as before the Flood we were given only the list which led directly to Noah in the line of descent from the son of Adam whose name was Seth. Thus the list of generations begins, ‘These are the generations of Shem. Shem, the son of Noah, was a hundred years old when he became the father of Arphaxad, in the second year after the Flood. And Shem lived five hundred years after the birth of Arphaxad, and he had other sons and daughters, and then he died.’
57
The narrative goes on to mention the others in the same fashion, giving the age at which each became the father of the son belonging to the line leading to Abraham, and stating how many years he lived after that, and noting that he had other sons and daughters. The purpose of this last information is to let us know the sources from which the population was able to increase; for otherwise, if our attention was limited to the few names that are listed, we might be held up by the childish question about how such vast extents of lands and kingdoms could have
been stocked by Shem’s posterity, especially when we think of the Assyrian Empire. For it was from Assyria that Ninus, the great conqueror of the nations throughout the East, ruled in vast prosperity, and handed down to his successor an empire of enormous extent and extreme stability, which was to endure for a very long time.
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For our part, to avoid lingering on this period unnecessarily, we are not putting down the number of years of each man’s life in these successive generations; we note only the age at which each had his son, the purpose of the record being to calculate the number of years from the end of the Flood down to the time of Abraham; and any other points that compel our attention will be briefly touched on in passing.
Well, then, in the second year after the Flood Shem became the father of Arphaxad. Arphaxad, in his turn, had a son called Cainan, at the age of 135. Cainan, when 130 years old, became the father of Salah; and Salah himself was the same age when his son Heber was born. Heber was 134 at the birth of his son Peleg, ‘in whose time the earth was divided’. Now Peleg lived 130 years, and then had a son called Reu; and Reu lived 132 years and became the father of Serug. Serug lived 130 years and begot Nahor. Nahor lived seventy-nine years and begot Terah. Terah lived seventy years and begot Abram whose name God changed, calling him Abraham.
59
And so the years from the Flood to Abraham make a total of 1,072 according to the standard version, that is, the Septuagint. But we are told that a much smaller total of years is found in the Hebrew texts; and for this discrepancy there is offered either no explanation or one very difficult to follow.
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Thus when we look for the City of God among those seventy-two tribes, we cannot say with certainty that at that time, when men had one tongue, that is, one way of speaking, the human race had been already so estranged from the worship of the true God that true religion continued only in those generations which were descended from the line of Shem through Arphaxad, leading to Abraham. Yet, as a result of the arrogance shown in building a tower to reach into the sky, the city, that is, the society, of the ungodly became apparent. It may be that this city had not existed before that time, or it may have existed in concealment; or perhaps both cities were there all the time, the godly city continuing in the two sons of Noah who received the blessing, and in their posterity, the ungodly in the son who was
cursed, and in his descendants, among whom arose that ‘giant hunter against the Lord’.
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It is not easy to decide among these possibilities.
For it is possible (and this is the most plausible suggestion) that there were already, among the descendants of the two good sons, men who treated God with contempt, even before the building of Babylon started, while there were also those who worshipped God among the descendants of Ham. However this may be, we are bound to believe that the world was never devoid of men of both these kinds. In fact, even when the Scripture says, ‘All men have gone astray; all alike have become useless: there is no one who does good, not a single one’, in both the psalms which contain these words we also read, ‘Will none of them understand, these workers of wickedness, who devour my people in the bread they eat?’ And so the inference is that even at that time the people of God existed. Hence the words, ‘there is no one who does good’ refer to the sons of men, not to the sons of God. For the previous verse reads, ‘God looked down from heaven on the sons of men, to see if there was anyone who understood or looked for God.’
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After that are added the words which show the rejection of all the ‘sons of men’, that is, those who belong to the city which lives by the standards of men, instead of the standards of God.
11.
Hebrew was the original language, named after Heber
Accordingly, just as when all men had one language, that did not mean that the ‘sons of pestilence’
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were not to be found – for there was only one language before the Flood, and yet all men deserved to be wiped out by the Flood, except for the one family of the righteous Noah – so also when the nations received the merited punishment for their impious presumption and were divided by diversity of languages, and the city of the ungodly received the name ‘Confusion’, that is, was called Babylon,
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even then there existed one family, the family of Heber, in which the language which was formerly that of all mankind could continue. This is the reason why, as I mentioned above,
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Heber is given prominence as the first in the list of those sons of Shem who were the ancestors of individual nations, although Heber was Shem’s great-great-grandson, that is, he is found to be fifth
in descent from Shem. The same language continued to be used in his family when the other nations were divided by different languages, and there is good reason for believing that this was the language common to all mankind in previous ages. This explains why this language was thenceforward called Hebrew. For at that point it had to be distinguished from the other tongues by a proper name, just as the others were given their proper names; but when there was only one language it had no other name than ‘the human tongue’ or ‘human speech’, since it was the only language spoken by mankind.