Read City of God (Penguin Classics) Online
Authors: Saint Augustine
10.
If the fire of hell is material fire, can it affect immaterial demons
?
At this point we are confronted with another question: If this fire is not to be immaterial, like the pain of the soul, but material fire, inflicting pain by contact, so that bodies can be tortured by it, then how will there be punishment in it for the evil spirits? It is obviously the same fire which will be used for the punishment of the demons as well as human beings; for Christ says, ‘Out of my sight, you accursed, into the eternal fire, which is prepared
for the Devil and his angels
.’
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Now it may well be that demons have a kind of body of their own, as learned men have thought, composed of the thick moist air of this atmosphere whose pressure we feel when the wind is blowing. If an element of this sort could not be affected by fire it would not burn us when it has been heated in the baths; for it is first burned so that it can burn, and it passes on an experience it undergoes.
If, however, anyone maintains that demons have no bodies at all,
there is no need for us to toil at a laborious inquiry into the question, or to engage in any contentious debate. Why, in fact, should we not say that immaterial spirits can be tormented by the pain of material fire in a way which is real, however amazing, seeing that the spirit of man, which without doubt is immaterial also, can at this present time be shut up within the framework of a material body, and that it will be possible at the judgement for them to be bound to their bodies with an indissoluble connection? And so, even if they have no bodies, the spirits of the demons, or rather the demons who are spirits, will be in contact with material fires for their torment, though they themselves are immaterial. This will not mean that the fires with which they are in contact will, because of this conjunction, receive spirit and so become living beings, composed of body and spirit. As I said, this contact will be in a wondrous manner that cannot be described; and the spirits, instead of giving life to the fire, will receive their punishment from the fire. There is a different manner of contact of spirit with body, which produces a living being; and that conjunction is utterly amazing and beyond our powers of comprehension. I am speaking of man himself.
I should indeed have said that the spirits are destined to burn, without possessing any material body, just as the rich man was on fire in Hades when he said, ‘I am tortured in those flames’;
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this is what I should have said, if I had not observed that the appropriate reply would be that the flames in the parable were of the same kind as the eyes which the rich man ‘raised and saw Lazarus’, and the tongue on which he longed for a drop of water to be poured, and the finger of Lazarus which he suggested as the instrument of that boon – and yet these characters were souls without bodies. Thus the flames burning the rich man and the little drop of water he craved were of the same nature as visions seen in dreams, or in an ecstasy, when people perceive entities which are immaterial and yet display the likeness of material realities. For even when the subject himself appears in such visions (in spirit, not in body), he sees himself there so like his own bodily appearance as to be completely indistinguishable from it. But in fact that hell, which is also called ‘the lake of fire and sulphur’,
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will be a material fire and will torture the bodies of the damned, whether the bodies of human beings and also of demons – the solid bodies of human beings, the demons’ bodies of air – or the body together with the spirit in the case of human beings, but in the case of demons the spirits without bodies – those spirits being in contact with
the fire for their punishment, not for the imparting of life to material fire. The fire will assuredly be one and the same for both classes of the damned, as the Truth has told us.
11.
The proportion between the offence and the punishment in respect of time
Now some of those adversaries against whose attacks we are defending the City of God may consider it unjust that in retribution for sins which, however serious, were certainly committed in a short space of time, each person should be condemned to eternal punishment; as if the justice of any law at any time consisted in its concern that the length of the punishment of the offender should be equal to the length of time of the offence! Cicero
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tells us that there were eight types of punishment provided in the laws: fines, imprisonment, flogging, equivalent damages, deprivation, exile, death, and slavery. Now can any of those be confined within the brief space of time that would correspond to the swiftness of the misdeed, so that the punishment should be effected in the few moments that it takes to arrest the offender? Perhaps the fourth punishment, but no other. For ‘equivalent damages’ is the procedure by which the offender suffers what he has inflicted, as prescribed in the law of ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’.
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It is in fact possible for a man to lose an eye by this severe act of vengeance, in as short a time as it took him to put out the other man’s eye by his heinous crime. But, to take another case, if it is thought reasonable that a man should be flogged for kissing another man’s wife, then surely the action of a moment is punished by a flogging whose pain lasts a matter of hours. There is no comparison between the durations; and a fleeting pleasure is punished by a lasting pain. Then again, what of imprisonment? Are we to suppose that each offender is to be judged to deserve imprisonment for as long a time as it took to commit the offence for which he is confined? In fact, a slave is very justly punished by a term of years in fetters when he has attacked his master with a passing word or has inflicted on him a blow that is over in a swift second. While as for fines, deprivations, exile, and slavery, these are generally imposed without any prospect of pardon or relaxation; and in that case, do they not appear like eternal punishments by the standard of this mortal life? The only reason why they cannot be everlasting is that this life, in which this punishment is inflicted, is itself not extended
into eternity. Yet the offences which are punished by the longest possible retribution are committed in the shortest possible time; and no one has ever stood up to advance the proposal that the torments of the guilty should be limited to the time taken to commit homicide, adultery, sacrilege, or any of those crimes whose enormity is to be measured not by the length of time they take, but by the magnitude of their wickedness and impiety.
As for the criminal who suffers capital punishment for some grave offence, do the laws estimate his punishment according to the time that it takes to kill him, which is very short, and ignore the fact that he is removed for ever from the company of the living? Thus the removal of men from this mortal community by the punishment of the first death answers to their removal from that Immortal City by the punishment of the second death. For just as the laws of the former city have no power to recall to that community one who has been put to death, so, when a man has been condemned to the second death, the laws of that other City cannot call him back to life eternal. What becomes then, they ask, of the truth of Christ’s saying, ‘With whatever measure you deal out to others, it will be dealt to you in return’,
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if temporal sin is punished with eternal pains? But they do not observe that ‘the same measure’ has reference not to the equality of the
time
of the retribution, but to the equivalence of evil, in that one who does evil will have evil done to him; although the statement may be taken as referring directly to the subject about which the Lord was speaking at the time, the subject of judgement and condemnation. In that case if a man who judges unjustly and condemns unjustly is justly judged and condemned, he receives ‘in the same measure’ even though what he receives is not what he gave. He did something by a judicial act and it is by a judicial act that something is done to him; and yet what he did in condemning was an act of injustice, whereas it is an act of justice that he suffers by being condemned.
12.
The magnitude of the first transgression, making liable to eternal punishment all who are outside the Saviour’s grace
Now the reason why eternal punishment appears harsh and unjust to human sensibilities, is that in this feeble condition of those sensibilities under their condition of mortality man lacks the sensibility of the highest and purest wisdom, the sense which should enable him to feel the gravity of the wickedness in the first act of disobedience.
For the more intimate the first man’s enjoyment of God, the greater his impiety in abandoning God. By so doing he merited eternal evil, in that he destroyed in himself a good that might have been eternal. In consequence, the whole of mankind is a ‘condemned lump’; for he who committed the first sin was punished, and along with him all the stock which had its roots in him. The result is that there is no escape for anyone from this justly deserved punishment, except by merciful and undeserved grace; and mankind is divided between those in whom the power of merciful grace is demonstrated, and those in whom is shown the might of just retribution. Neither of those could be displayed in respect of all mankind; for if all had remained condemned to the punishment entailed by just condemnation, then God’s merciful grace would not have been seen at work in anyone; on the other hand, if all had been transferred from darkness into light, the truth of God’s vengeance would not have been made evident. Now there are many more condemned by vengeance than are released by mercy; and the reason for this is that it should in this way be made plain what was the due of all mankind. For if this due punishment were imposed on all, no one would have the right to criticize the justice of God in that retribution; but the fact that so many are released from it is the ground for heart-felt thanksgiving for the free bounty of our Deliverer.
13.
The false notion that punishment after death is merely for purification
Now the Platonists
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, while refusing to believe that any sins go unpunished, hold that all punishments are directed towards purification, whether they are punishments inflicted by human laws or those imposed by divine decree, and whether the latter are suffered in this life, or after death, when someone is spared in this life, or when his affliction does not result in his correction. This belief is expressed in the passage in Virgil, where he first speaks of earthly bodies and their mortal parts, and says of men’s souls that
Hence come desire and fear, gladness and sorrow,
They look not up to heaven, but lie confined
In darkness and the sightless dungeon’s gloom.
and then goes on immediately:
Yet at their last light, when the life departs,
(that is when this mortal life leaves them at their last day)
Even then they are not freed from woe and pain;
The body’s plagues do not vanish utterly.
For many evils, hardening deep within
Must needs grow rooted there in wondrous wise.
Therefore they suffer chastisement of pain,
Paying the price of ancient sin. And some
Are hung suspended in the idle winds;
Others are washed from guilt beneath the surge
Of the vast deep; in others the infection
Is burned away by fire.
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Those who hold this view will have it that the only punishments after death are those intended to purify, so that souls may be cleansed from any infection contracted by contact with the earth by purifying pains inflicted by one of the elements superior to the earth, which are air, fire and water. The air is meant by the phrase ‘suspended in the winds’, the water, by ‘the vast deep’, while the fire is expressly named in ‘is burned away by fire’. On our part we acknowledge that even in this mortal life there are indeed some purificatory punishments; but penalties inflicted on those whose life is not improved thereby or is even made worse, are not purificatory. Punishments are a means of purification only to those who are disciplined and corrected by them. All other punishments, whether temporal or eternal, are imposed on every person in accordance with the treatment he is to receive from God’s providence; they are imposed either in retribution for sins, whether past sins or sins in which the person so chastised is still living, or else they serve to exercise and to display the virtues of the good; and they are administered through the agency of men, or of angels, whether good or evil angels. It must be observed that when any man suffers any harm through the wickedness or the mistake of another, then that other human being commits a sin in doing some harm to another man either through ignorance or through ill-will; God commits no sin in allowing this wrong to happen by his decision, which is just, albeit inscrutable. As for temporal pains, some people suffer them in this life only, others after death, others both in this life and in the other;
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yet all this precedes that last and strictest judgement. However, not all men who endure temporal pains after death come into those eternal punishments, which are to come after that judgement. Some, in fact, will receive forgiveness in the world to come
for what is not forgiven in this, as I have said above, so that they may not be punished with the eternal chastisement of the world to come.
14.
The temporal pains of this life, to which the human condition is subject
But there are very few who undergo no punishments in this life, and suffer them only after death. However, I myself have known and heard of some who up to the decrepitude of old age never experienced as much as the mildest of fevers, whose whole life has been undisturbed; and yet the whole of man’s life is pain, because the whole of it is temptation, as the holy Scriptures proclaim. For Scripture says, ‘Is human life on the earth anything but temptation?’
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Folly and ignorance are in themselves no small punishment, and it is rightly considered that they should at all costs be avoided – so much so that children are compelled, by dint of painful punishments, either to learn a craft or to acquire a literary education. And the process of learning with its attendant punishment is so painful that children not infrequently prefer to endure the punishments designed to compel them to learn, rather than to submit to the process of learning. In fact is there anyone who, faced with the choice between death and a second childhood, would not shrink in dread from the latter prospect and elect to die? Infancy, indeed, starts this life not with smiles but with tears; and this is, in a way, an unconscious prophecy of the troubles on which it is entering. It is said that Zoroaster was the only human being who smiled when he was born,
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and yet that portent of a smile boded no good for him. For he was, so they say, the inventor of magic arts;
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and yet those arts did not avail him anything, not even in respect of the insubstantial felicity of this present life; for he was king of Bactria, but he was overcome in war by Ninus, king of Assyria.
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It is altogether inevitable that those words of Scripture should prove true, ‘A heavy yoke is laid on Adam’s sons, from the day they issue from their mother’s womb until the day when they go for burial to the mother of all things.’
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So true is this that even the infants who are set free, by the washing of rebirth, from the fetters of original sin (which was the only sin that bound them) still endure
many afflictions, and some of them even suffer from time to time the assaults of malignant spirits. And yet we must never think that these sufferings can do them real harm, even if they grow so severe as to cut off the soul from the body, so that they bring this life to an end at that tender age.