Read City of God (Penguin Classics) Online
Authors: Saint Augustine
Those whose high deserts
Made others mindful of them.
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He means those who have deserved well of others, and by so doing have made those others ‘mindful of them’. It is, in fact, just as if these people had said the words frequently on the lips of a Christian when he commends himself to some saint, and says, ‘Remember me’, and seeks to ensure this remembrance by deserving well of that holy man.)
But what that kind of life may be is a question most difficult to answer; and it would be most perilous to define what those sins are which in themselves prevent attainment to the kingdom of God while admitting of pardon through the merits of holy friends. I myself, at least, have given much thought to the latter question without having been able to reach a conclusion. And it may well be that the answer is kept a secret for fear that the knowledge might blunt men’s zeal to make progress towards the avoidance of all kinds of sin. For if it were known what those sins were, or at any rate what kind of sins they were, for whose forgiveness the intercession of the righteous should be sought and hoped for, even while the sins still continued, and while they were not removed in an advance to a higher standard of life, then human beings in their sloth would allow themselves to be involved in them with supposed impunity, and they would not be concerned to free themselves from such entanglements by any virtuous endeavour. Their sole quest would be to gain freedom from punishment through the merits of others, whose friendship they had won by generous acts of charity, made possible by ‘the worldly wealth of unrighteousness’. As it is, however, so long as men do not know the limits within which wrong-doing is venial, even if persevered in, then, beyond dispute, more active zeal is shown for improvement of life by means of prayer and effort, and there is no slackening in concern to ‘win friends by the use of the worldly wealth of unrighteousness’.
But whether this liberation is attained through a man’s own prayers or through the intercession of saints, its effect is that the person
concerned is not consigned to eternal fire; it is not that after being consigned there he is released after a long or a short period. Now there are some people who suppose that the scriptural passage about the ‘thirty-fold, sixty-fold, a hundred-fold’
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crop from a good soil is to be taken as meaning that the saints liberate others according to their different merits, some giving freedom to thirty, some to sixty, some to a hundred; but even those people generally assume that this will happen at the day of judgement, not after the judgement. Apropos of this speculation, someone made a very shrewd remark when he observed how people most perversely assured themselves of impunity, on the assumption that everyone could in this way be included among those exempt from damnation. He is said to have remarked, ‘We should be better employed in taking care to lead good lives, so as to join the number of the future intercessors for others’ salvation.’ For otherwise there may be so few of them that they will soon have used up their thirty, or sixty, or a hundred, and a great many will be left unredeemed, without the possibility of rescue from punishment by the intercession of the saints; and among the disappointed may be found any of those people who are so rashly and irresponsibly promising themselves the prospect of benefiting by some other person’s ‘crop’.
This may suffice for my reply to those who while not slighting the authority of the sacred Scriptures, which we have as our common possession, nevertheless interpret them wrongly and suppose that what is to happen will be not what the Scriptures speak of, but what they themselves would like to happen. Well, we have given this reply; and now, as we promised, we bring this book to an end.
1.
The creation of angels and men
As I promised in the last book, this final book of the whole work will contain a discussion of the eternal bliss of the City of God. This City is not called ‘eternal’ in the sense that it continues its life throughout many ages, and yet is to come to an end at last, but in the sense of the scriptural saying, that ‘his kingdom will have no end.’
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Nor will this City present a mere semblance of perpetuity by generations arising to succeed generations as they die; as happens in a tree clothed with perennial foliage, where the same greenness seems to persist, the appearance of thick growth being preserved as leaves decay and fall to be replaced by new. But in this City all the citizens will be immortal, for human beings also will obtain that which the angels have never lost. This will be effected by God, the founder of that City; for he has promised it, and he cannot he; and to confirm his promise he has done many things that he has promised, and many that he has not promised.
For it is he who made the world, filled with all good things, things accessible to sense, and those perceived by the understanding; and in the world his greatest work was the creation of spirits, to whom he gave intelligence, making them capable of contemplating him, able to apprehend him; and he bound them together in one fellowship, which we call the Holy and Heavenly City, in which God himself is for those spirits the means of their life and their felicity, is, as it were, their common life and food. He has bestowed on these intellectual natures the power of free choice, which enabled them, if they so chose, to desert God, that is, to abandon their felicity, with misery to follow immediately. He foreknew that some of the angels, in their pride, would wish to be self-sufficient for their own felicity, and hence would forsake their true good; and yet he did not deprive them of this power, judging it an act of greater power and greater goodness to bring good even out of evil than to exclude the existence of evil. There would not, in fact, have been any evil at all, had not that nature which was capable of change (although good and created by the supreme God
who is also the changeless good, who made all things good) produced evil for itself by sinning. This sin is itself the evidence that proves that the nature was created good; for if it had not itself been a great good, although not equal to the Creator, then assuredly this apostasy from God, as from their light, could not have been their evil. We may find an analogy in blindness. Blindness is a defect of the eye, and that in itself indicates that the eye was created for seeing; and thus even by its own defect it is shown to be more excellent than the other parts of the body as being capable of perceiving light, since that is why it is a defect in the eye to be deprived of light. In the same way the nature which enjoyed God proves that it was created excellent by that very defect, by the fact that it is wretched simply because it does not enjoy God.
Now God inflicted on the apostate angels, for their self-chosen fall, the just punishment of everlasting misery, while to the others, who continued in that highest good, he gave the certainty of their endless continuance therein, as the reward for that continuance. And God made man also upright, with the same power of free choice, an animal of earth, yet worthy of heaven if he adhered to the author of his being, but, by the same token, destined, if he abandoned God, for a misery appropriate to his kind of nature. Now God foreknew that man would sin by breaking God’s Law through his apostasy from God; and yet, as in the case of the angels, God did not deprive man of the power of free choice, foreseeing, at the same time, the good that he was to bring out of man’s evil. For out of this mortal progeny, so rightly and justly condemned, God by his grace is gathering a people so great that from them he may fill the place of the fallen angels and restore their number. And thus that beloved Heavenly City will not be deprived of its full number of citizens; it may perhaps rejoice in a still more abundant population.
2.
The eternal and unchangeable will of God
Evil men do many things contrary to the will of God; but so great is his wisdom, and so great his power, that all things which seem to oppose his will tend towards those results or ends which he himself has foreknown as good and just. For this reason, when God is said to ‘change his will’, as, for example, when ‘he becomes angry’ with those people to whom ‘he was lenient’, it is the people who change, rather than God; and they find him, in a sense, ‘changed’ in their experience. Similarly, to people with inflammation of the eyes the sun ‘changes’
and turns, in a sense, from mild to harsh, from a source of pleasure to a cause of irritation, whereas in fact the sun remains in itself exactly as it was before. God’s activity in the heart of those who obey his commandments is also called God’s will, the activity of which the Apostle speaks when he says, ‘It is God who produces in you both the will…’;
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in the same way, the ‘righteousness of God’ means not only the quality whereby God himself is righteous, but also the quality that God produces in a man who is justified by him. So also we speak of ‘God’s Law’ when it is really the Law for mankind, given by God. For Jesus was certainly speaking to men when he said, ‘It is written in your Law’, whereas in another place we read that ‘the Law of God is in his heart.’
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Thus in accordance with this will which God is said to produce in men, God also is said to will what he does not will himself but makes his followers will; just as God is said to know what he makes the ignorant know. For instance, when the Apostle says, ‘Now that you have come to know God, or rather, now that you have become known to him’,
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it is utterly wrong to suppose that God came to know them at that time; they were known to him before the foundation of the world.
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God is said to have come to know them at that time because it was then that he brought it about that he should be known by them. I remember having discussed those turns of speech before, in previous books.
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It is in accordance with this use of the phrase ‘God’s will’, whereby we say that God wills what he causes others to will, who are ignorant of the future, that God ‘wills’ many things which he himself does not effect.
God’s saints, for example, with a holy will inspired by him, will that many things should happen, which do not in fact happen; as when they pray for others with holy devotion, and God does not give effect to their prayers, although he has produced in them, by his Holy Spirit, this will to pray. For this reason, when holy men will and pray, according to God’s teaching, that a particular person may be saved, we may say, by this mode of speech, that ‘God wills it and does not effect it’, in the sense that we say that God wills something when he makes others will it. But according to his own will, which, along with his foreknowledge, is eternal, God assuredly made all things in heaven and earth; he has made whatever he willed to make, and not only things past and things present. He has already made things that are yet to be. However, before the time comes when he has willed that something should come to be which he has foreknown and planned before all time began, we
say, ‘It will happen when God wills.’ This does not mean that God will then have a new will which he did not have before; but that something will then come about which has been prepared from all eternity in his unchanging will.
3.
The promise of eternal bliss for the saints and perpetual punishment for the wicked
Therefore (to omit many other points) as we now see fulfilled in Christ the promise given to Abraham, ‘In your posterity all nations will be blessed’;
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so there will be fulfilment of what God promised to the same posterity, when he says through the mouth of the prophet, ‘Those who were in the tombs will rise again’, and
There will be a new heaven, and a new earth; and men will not remember the past, and it will not come to their minds. But they will find gladness and exultation in her. See, I shall make Jerusalem to be exultation and her people to be gladness; and I shall exult in Jerusalem and I shall be glad in my people. No more will the sound of weeping be heard in her.
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And by the lips of another prophet we are told what God said to him: ‘At that time all your people will be saved, all who will be found recorded in the book. And many of those who sleep in the dust’ (or, in another translation, ‘the mound’) ‘of the earth will rise up, some to go to eternal life, while the others go to reproach and eternal shame.’ And in another place we have this message from the same prophet, ‘The saints of God Most High will receive the kingdom; and they will possess it for ever and ever’; and, a little later: ‘His kingdom is an everlasting kingdom.’
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There are other passages on the same subject which I quoted in the twentieth book,
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and other prophecies, found in the Holy Scriptures, which I have not quoted. All those will come about, just as those things have already come about which the unbelievers thought would never happen. For it is the same God who promised both the latter and the former; and he is the God before whom the pagan divinities shrink in terror, on the witness of Porphyry,
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the most renowned of the pagan philosophers.
4. A
reply to the worldly-wise, who suppose it impossible for earthly bodies to be transferred to heaven
Some scholars and philosophers, it is true, defy the force of this great authority which, in fulfilment of its own prediction, made so long ago, has converted all kinds of men to believe in this state of bliss and to hope for it; for they flatter themselves on presenting a shrewd argument against the resurrection of the body when they quote a passage from the third book of Cicero’s
On the Commonwealth
. For while asserting that Hercules and Romulus were deified human beings, he has this to say: ‘Their bodies were not taken up into heaven, indeed Nature would not allow what comes of the earth to dwell anywhere but on the earth.’
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