City of God

Contents

Reading pages: 1.1–1.11 · 1.12–1.22 · 1.23–2.1 · 2.2–2.15 · 2.16–2.23 · 2.24–3.6 · 3.7–3.15 · 3.16–3.24 · 3.25–4.6 · 4.7–4.19 · 4.20–4.29 · 4.30–5.6 · 5.7–5.11 · 5.12–5.17 · 5.18–5.25 · 5.26–6.5 · 6.6–6.11 · 6.12–7.9 · 7.10–7.22 · 7.23–7.33 · 7.34–8.7 · 8.8–8.17 · 8.18–8.25 · 8.26–9.7 · 9.8–9.19 · 9.20–10.5 · 10.6–10.15 · 10.16–10.25 · 10.26–10.31 · 10.32 · 11.1–11.9 · 11.10–11.21 · 11.22–11.30 · 11.31–12.5 · 12.6–12.15 · 12.16–12.23 · 12.24–13.9 · 13.10–13.18 · 13.19–13.23 · 13.24–14.4 · 14.5–14.10 · 14.11–14.19 · 14.20–15.1 · 15.2–15.9 · 15.10–15.15 · 15.16–15.21 · 15.22–16.1 · 16.2–16.8 · 16.9–16.16 · 16.17–16.26 · 16.27–16.37 · 16.38–17.2 · 17.3–17.4 · 17.5–17.8 · 17.9–17.17 · 17.18–18.2 · 18.3–18.15 · 18.16–18.27 · 18.28–18.34 · 18.35–18.42 · 18.43–18.50 · 18.51–19.1 · 19.2–19.6 · 19.7–19.14 · 19.15–19.22 · 19.23–20.2 · 20.3–20.7 · 20.8–20.13 · 20.14–20.19 · 20.20–20.23 · 20.24–20.29 · 20.30–21.4 · 21.5–21.9 · 21.10–21.21 · 21.22–21.25 · 21.26–22.1 · 22.2–22.7 · 22.8 · 22.9–22.18 · 22.19–22.23 · 22.24–22.28 · 22.29–22.30

1. 1.1Augustine introduces the pagan enemies of the city of God, many of whom survived the sack of Rome only by taking refuge in Christian churches, yet now blame Christ for the disaster.
2. 1.2Augustine argues from Virgil's account of Troy that conquerors never spared the defeated for the sake of the defeated people's gods, whose images could not even protect themselves.
3. 1.3Augustine mocks the belief that Rome depended on the conquered household gods of Troy, since Virgil himself shows those gods needing human protection.
4. 1.4Augustine contrasts Juno's sanctuary at Troy, used by the Greeks to hold captives and plunder, with the basilicas of the apostles, where the Goths spared refugees and restored property.
5. 1.5Augustine cites Cato's speech in Sallust, which lists the plundering of shrines among the ordinary horrors of a captured city.
6. 1.6Augustine shows from the examples of Marcellus at Syracuse and Fabius at Tarentum that even the most restrained Roman conquerors never granted asylum in temples.
7. 1.7Augustine argues that the cruelty of the sack came from the custom of war, but the unprecedented mercy of the barbarians must be credited to Christ.
8. 1.8Augustine explains that temporal goods and evils fall on good and bad alike, but the same suffering purifies the good and destroys the wicked.
9. 1.9Augustine gives reasons why good Christians suffered with the wicked: their own lesser sins, their failure to rebuke sinners out of attachment to temporal things, and the testing of their love for God.
10. 1.10Augustine argues that Christians who lost property, were tortured, or starved in the sack lost nothing essential, and that those who had stored their treasure in heaven were not harmed.
11. 1.11Augustine argues that the manner of death does not matter to those who have lived well, since only what follows death makes it evil.
12. 1.12Augustine argues that lack of burial does no harm to Christians, since funerals comfort the living and God will raise every body wherever its remains have gone.
13. 1.13Augustine explains that the bodies of the righteous deserve honorable burial, as Scripture shows, but that lack of burial does not harm the dead.
14. 1.14Augustine consoles Christian captives with the examples of the three young men, Daniel, and Jonah, and contrasts pagan belief in the legend of Arion.
15. 1.15Augustine argues from the story of Regulus, tortured to death by the Carthaginians after keeping his oath to the gods, that worship of the gods does not secure temporal happiness.
16. 1.16Augustine begins to answer pagan taunts about women, including consecrated virgins, raped during the sack, holding that chastity is a virtue of the will which another's violence cannot take away.
17. 1.17Augustine holds that suicide is homicide, forbidden even to avoid rape, and illustrates this with the despairing suicide of Judas.
18. 1.18Augustine argues that chastity, as a virtue of the mind, is not lost when the body is violated against the will, so a raped woman has nothing to punish in herself by suicide.
19. 1.19Augustine uses the story of Lucretia to show that a woman raped against her will is not guilty, and that Lucretia's suicide came from shame rather than love of chastity, unlike Christian women who chose to live.
20. 1.20Augustine argues that the commandment “You shall not kill” forbids suicide, since it applies to human beings and makes no exception for oneself.
21. 1.21Augustine names the exceptions to the prohibition of killing, namely killing commanded by God or by just public authority, and concludes that any other killing, including of oneself, is homicide.
22. 1.22Augustine argues that suicide shows weakness rather than greatness of soul, citing the man who killed himself after reading Plato, and notes that Christ told his disciples to flee persecution, not to kill themselves.
23. 1.23Augustine argues that Cato's suicide at Utica came from weakness or envy of Caesar's glory, since Cato told his own son to hope for Caesar's mercy.
24. 1.24Augustine prefers Regulus, who endured captivity rather than kill himself, to Cato, and argues that Christians should all the more refrain from suicide when subjected to enemies.
25. 1.25Augustine rejects suicide as a way to avoid possible consent to sin, since a certain homicide is worse than an uncertain adultery that could be repented of.
26. 1.26Augustine declines to judge holy women honored as martyrs who drowned themselves to escape violation, allowing that God may have commanded them, but concludes that no one may kill himself for any ordinary reason.
27. 1.27Augustine reduces to absurdity the argument that suicide is right to avoid sin, since it would require urging the newly baptized to kill themselves.
28. 1.28Augustine consoles Christian women who were raped, suggesting that God permitted it to humble hidden pride or to correct the error that chastity belongs to the body rather than the will.
29. 1.29Augustine gives the Christian answer to the taunt “Where is your God?”: God is everywhere, and uses adversity to test or correct his people.
30. 1.30Augustine recalls Scipio Nasica's opposition to destroying Carthage for fear that security would corrupt Rome, a fear borne out by the civil wars that followed.
31. 1.31Augustine traces the Roman lust for power to avarice and luxury born of prosperity, and recalls Nasica's success in stopping the building of a theater in Rome.
32. 1.32Augustine notes that the gods themselves ordered stage plays to end a plague, while the pontiff Scipio forbade theaters to protect morals, and that Roman refugees at Carthage still flocked to the theaters.
33. 1.33Augustine rebukes the Roman refugees who crowded the theaters while the whole world mourned Rome's fall, showing that calamity had not corrected them.
34. 1.34Augustine compares the asylum of Romulus and Remus with the sanctuary the Goths granted in Christian churches, which preserved the lives of Rome's pagans.
35. 1.35Augustine notes that future citizens of the city of God are hidden among its enemies and false members within the church, since the two cities are mixed until the last judgment, and announces his plan to treat their origin, progress, and ends.
36. 1.36Augustine outlines the plan of the following books: Rome's calamities before Christ, the true God's role in Rome's rise, and a refutation of the philosophers who worship gods for the life after death.
37. 2.1Augustine explains that he must argue at length against obstinate opponents but will not answer every contradiction, and asks Marcellinus and his readers not to demand endless replies.
38. 2.2Augustine summarizes Book 1 and announces that Book 2 will recount the evils Rome suffered before Christianity.
39. 2.3Augustine sets out to recall Rome's calamities before Christ, against the popular claim that Christians cause disasters.
40. 2.4Augustine argues that the pagan gods gave their worshippers no moral teaching, recalling from his youth the obscene songs performed before the Mother of the gods at her festival of washing.
41. 2.5Augustine argues that Scipio Nasica would never have wanted his own mother honored with the obscenities offered to the Mother of the gods, and that her choice of him as the best man was a deception.
42. 2.6Augustine challenges pagans to show any place where their gods taught moral precepts, as churches do wherever Christianity spreads.
43. 2.7Augustine argues that philosophy is human discovery, not divine precept, and that pagans imitate the immoral deeds of their gods, as in Terence's young man who cites Jupiter's example.
44. 2.8Augustine argues that the gods themselves demanded the stage plays that portrayed their vices, so they cannot be excused by blaming the poets.
45. 2.9Augustine quotes Cicero's Republic on the Roman law against defamatory verse, contrasting it with Greek comedy's license, which followed the gods' own pleasure in being ridiculed.
46. 2.10Augustine explains that demons welcome both true and false tales of divine vice because such tales lend heavenly authority to human wickedness.
47. 2.11Augustine notes that the Greeks, consistently with their gods' tastes, honored actors and even made them statesmen and envoys.
48. 2.12Augustine criticizes the Romans for protecting their own reputation from poets by law while allowing the poets to defame their gods.
49. 2.13Augustine sets Greek and Roman attitudes to actors against each other in a syllogism concluding that gods who demand stage plays should not be worshipped.
50. 2.14Augustine argues that Plato, who banished poets from his ideal city, was better than the gods who demanded plays, and that the Romans' own laws condemned their gods.
51. 2.15Augustine notes that the Romans gave Plato no shrine but made Romulus a god with his own flamen, a sign of flattery rather than reason.
52. 2.16Augustine observes that the Romans borrowed their laws from Solon's Athens and from their own kings, not from their gods, who took no care for their morals.
53. 2.17Augustine ironically tests Sallust's claim that the early Romans were just by nature against the rape of the Sabine women, the expulsion of Collatinus, and the exile of Camillus.
54. 2.18Augustine quotes Sallust's own History to show that Rome suffered oppression and discord even in its best period and sank into utter corruption after Carthage fell, long before Christ.
55. 2.19Augustine contrasts the silence of the gods on morals with the Christian Scriptures' constant teaching against avarice and luxury, and says Christians must bear even a corrupt state while aiming at the heavenly commonwealth.
56. 2.20Augustine satirizes the kind of state his opponents want, one devoted to wealth, pleasure, and license so long as it is safe, and compares it to the house of Sardanapalus.
57. 2.21Augustine summarizes Cicero's argument in the Republic that without justice there is no true state, and Cicero's own admission that Rome had lost its state through vice before Christ, concluding that true justice exists only in the city of God.
58. 2.22Augustine argues that the gods gave no moral laws to prevent the civil strife of the Gracchi, Marius, and Sulla, and ridicules the claim that they had abandoned Rome, recalling that the geese, not the gods, saved the Capitol.
59. 2.23Augustine argues from the careers of Marius, Regulus, Metellus, and Catiline that temporal good fortune does not depend on the gods but on the hidden providence of the true God.
60. 2.24Augustine recounts the omens and prophecies that promised Sulla victory, and notes that the gods foretold his success but never warned him against his crimes.
61. 2.25Augustine describes a vision of gods fighting on a Campanian plain before the civil wars, arguing that demons staged such sights to give divine sanction to civil war.
62. 2.26Augustine argues that any secret moral teaching in pagan mysteries was a demonic disguise, while the public festivals, like those of Caelestis he watched at Carthage, openly taught vice.
63. 2.27Augustine cites Cicero's own references to appeasing the gods with games, and argues that such obscene rites taught the whole city vice while any secret moral teaching remained hidden.
64. 2.28Augustine contrasts pagan festivals with Christian worship, where the sexes are separated and Scripture and moral teaching are proclaimed to all.
65. 2.29Augustine exhorts the Roman character, noble by nature, to abandon demon worship and seek citizenship in the heavenly city, whose empire has no end.
66. 3.1Augustine turns from moral evils to the external calamities, such as war and famine, which Rome suffered while it worshipped the gods before Christ.
67. 3.2Augustine mocks the claim that Troy fell for Laomedon's perjury, pointing out that gods who could not foresee it were poor diviners and that Rome was full of perjury without being punished.
68. 3.3Augustine argues that gods who themselves committed adultery, as Venus did with Anchises and Mars with Romulus's mother, could not have abandoned Troy to punish Paris.
69. 3.4Augustine reports Varro's view that it is useful for great men to believe themselves descended from gods even if it is false, and notes how much room this leaves for religious fictions.
70. 3.5Augustine argues that if Romulus's mother, a Vestal, was not with Mars, her unchastity was a sacrilege the gods should have punished in Rome more than Paris's adultery in Troy.
71. 3.6Augustine argues that Romulus's murder of his brother should have provoked the gods against Rome more than Paris's adultery against Troy.
72. 3.7Augustine recounts how the Marian general Fimbria destroyed Ilium for its loyalty to Sulla, showing that the gods neither protected their kin city nor had truly departed.
73. 3.8Augustine mocks the idea that the gods of Troy protected Rome, suggesting they were always in the wrong place.
74. 3.9Augustine argues that Numa's long peace was a gift of the true God, not of the gods whose rites he founded, since after those rites were established Rome was almost never at peace.
75. 3.10Augustine argues that Rome would have been better off small and peaceful, like Numa's Rome, than enlarged by endless wars, and that peace depended on God's higher power, not the demons.
76. 3.11Augustine recounts the weeping statue of Apollo at Cumae, interpreted as grief for Greek defeats, and suggests Numa added new gods because the Trojan gods had proved powerless.
77. 3.12Augustine notes how Rome kept adding gods, from Jupiter's Capitol to Aesculapius and the Mother of the gods, yet suffered great disasters under their protection.
78. 3.13Augustine describes the rape of the Sabine women and the war it caused between Romans and their fathers-in-law, and Romulus's elimination of his co-ruler Tatius.
79. 3.14Augustine condemns Rome's war with Alba, its mother city, including the fight of the Horatii and Curiatii and the killing of the Horatian sister, as the fruit of the lust for domination.
80. 3.15Augustine reviews the violent ends of most of Rome's kings and doubts Romulus's deification, noting Cicero's own skepticism and contrasting the eclipse at Romulus's death with the miraculous darkness at Christ's crucifixion.
81. 3.16Augustine describes the disastrous first year of the Republic, in which Brutus expelled his innocent colleague Collatinus, executed his own sons, and died in battle, and five consuls held office.
82. 3.17Augustine lists the calamities of the early Republic, from social strife, famine, and plague to the Gallic sack, the Caudine Forks, and the war with Pyrrhus, asking where the gods were.
83. 3.18Augustine recalls the devastation of the Punic wars, the capture of Regulus, and a flood and fire at Rome in which the pontiff Metellus had to rescue the sacred objects of Vesta, showing their powerlessness.
84. 3.19Augustine describes the disasters of the second Punic war, especially Cannae, after which Rome armed slaves with weapons from the temples and the senate gave up its gold.
85. 3.20Augustine recounts the destruction of Saguntum, Rome's faithful ally, by Hannibal, and argues that the gods who witnessed its treaty did nothing to save it.
86. 3.21Augustine recalls Rome's ingratitude to Scipio Africanus, the arrival of Asiatic luxury, the unjust Voconian law, and the disasters that followed Carthage's destruction, including the disgrace at Numantia.
87. 3.22Augustine describes Mithridates' massacre of all Romans in Asia on a single day and asks what use the auguries and gods were to the victims.
88. 3.23Augustine introduces Rome's internal wars, preceded by a portent in which domestic animals went wild.
89. 3.24Augustine recounts the killings of the Gracchi and the mass executions that followed under the consul Opimius.
90. 3.25Augustine mocks the building of a temple of Concord on the site of the Gracchan massacres, asking why Discord, who caused Troy's fall, received no temple.
91. 3.26Augustine lists the seditions, Social War, slave revolts including that of Spartacus, and pirate wars that followed the temple of Concord.
92. 3.27Augustine describes the massacres after Marius's return from exile and cites Cicero and Lucan on the civil war of Marius and Sulla.
93. 3.28Augustine describes the atrocities of Sulla's victory, including the massacre of surrendered prisoners and the proscriptions, arguing that his peace was crueler than war.
94. 3.29Augustine argues that the civil wars of Marius and Sulla were far more destructive to Rome than the invasions of the Gauls or the Goths, who spared many senators.
95. 3.30Augustine traces the chain of civil wars from Marius and Sulla to Augustus, in whose reign Christ was born, noting how Cicero was betrayed by the young Octavian.
96. 3.31Augustine concludes Book 3 by arguing that the many wars, prodigies, eruptions, and plagues of pagan times would all have been blamed on Christianity had it existed then.
97. 4.1Augustine summarizes the purpose of Book 1: to answer those who blame Christianity for present evils and to expose the gods as demons who delight in their own crimes.
98. 4.2Augustine reviews Books 2 and 3 on moral and external evils, and announces that he will now show why the true God allowed the Roman empire to grow.
99. 4.3Augustine compares a vast empire won by war to a rich man tormented by anxieties, and argues that the reign of the good benefits their subjects while the wicked ruler is himself a slave to his vices.
100. 4.4Augustine argues that kingdoms without justice are simply large robber bands, illustrating with the pirate's reply to Alexander the Great.
101. 4.5Augustine uses the example of the gladiators' revolt under Spartacus to ask which god helped them to power, and argues that brief power is no real benefit.
102. 4.6Augustine quotes Justin's history on Ninus of Assyria, the first king to make war on his neighbors for the sake of empire, and calls such conquest great robbery.
103. 4.7Augustine argues that if the gods moved from Assyria to the Medes and Persians, they were faithless or weak, and that Rome's present affliction, like earlier ones, need not be permanent.
104. 4.8Augustine ridicules the multitude of petty Roman deities, each confined to a single tiny function, as incapable of building an empire.
105. 4.9Augustine turns to Jupiter as the supposed author of Rome's greatness, noting Varro's view that the one God worshipped without images is Jupiter under another name, and Varro's criticism of images.
106. 4.10Augustine exposes the contradictions in the physical allegories that assign gods to the elements, from Jupiter and Juno to the confusions of Vesta and Venus.
107. 4.11Augustine lists the host of deities that learned pagans identify with Jupiter as the world soul, and argues that on this view it would be simpler to worship the one God alone.
108. 4.12Augustine argues that if God is the soul of the world, every creature would be part of God, so that treading on or killing anything would be treading on or killing a part of God.
109. 4.13Augustine rejects the view that rational beings are parts of God, since then parts of God would be beaten and sin, and turns to the claim that Jupiter as king of the gods enlarged the Roman empire.
110. 4.14Augustine asks why Jupiter is needed for conquest if Victory is a goddess, and notes that good men should dislike unprovoked wars of expansion.
111. 4.15Augustine argues that good men prefer peaceful neighbors to conquest, that Rome's just wars were made possible by others' iniquity, and that victory is the gift of the true King of kings, not of Jupiter.
112. 4.16Augustine notes that the Romans worshipped deities of action and exertion publicly but kept the temple of Quiet outside the city, and contrasts the rest Christ offers.
113. 4.17Augustine argues that it is the true King of the ages who gives victory through his angels, and that if Victory obeys Jupiter, Jupiter alone should be worshipped.
114. 4.18Augustine exposes the confusion between the goddesses Felicity and Fortune, arguing that a blind Fortune is not worth worshipping and a discerning one is not fortune.
115. 4.19Augustine mocks the report that the statue of Fortuna Muliebris spoke twice, attributing it to demonic deception.
116. 4.20Augustine argues that Virtue and Faith are gifts of God, not goddesses, and asks why, if they are deities, the Romans did not also deify temperance, fortitude, and prudence.
117. 4.21Augustine argues that if Virtue and Felicity were goddesses, all the other petty deities would be superfluous, and that both are in truth gifts of God.
118. 4.22Augustine ridicules Varro's boast that his catalogue of the gods' functions helps the Romans know whom to ask for what.
119. 4.23Augustine argues that if Felicity were a goddess she alone should have been worshipped in the highest temple, recalls how Terminus, Mars, and Juventas refused to yield to Jupiter, and concludes that felicity must be sought from the true God who gives it.
120. 4.24Augustine reports the pagan defense that their ancestors named gods after the gifts they gave, not meaning the gifts themselves to be divine.
121. 4.25Augustine argues that by naming the giver of felicity after felicity itself, the pagans showed they sought an unknown God distinct from Jupiter, and this God alone should be worshipped.
122. 4.26Augustine recounts how the gods compelled the Roman senate, through the dreams of Titus Latinius, to renew the games in which Jupiter's crimes were acted, showing that they were demons, not givers of felicity.
123. 4.27Augustine reports Scaevola's division of gods into poetic, philosophical, and civil kinds, and criticizes the pontiff's view that it is expedient for states to be deceived in religion.
124. 4.28Augustine argues that the false gods could not have given Rome its empire, which depended on the will of the one true God.
125. 4.29Augustine shows that the augury promising Rome unshaken boundaries was proved false by defeats and by the cessions of Hadrian and Jovian.
126. 4.30Augustine cites Cicero's Balbus, who condemns the fables and images of the gods yet cannot separate Rome's ancestral religion from superstition.
127. 4.31Augustine shows that Varro privately rejected the popular gods, thought religion purer without images, and came near to believing in one God governing the world.
128. 4.32Augustine argues that Rome's rulers, like the demons, deliberately kept the people in religious error in order to control them.
129. 4.33Augustine teaches that God gives earthly kingdoms to good and bad alike according to his hidden order, but gives true happiness only to the good.
130. 4.34Augustine shows that God gave Israel every earthly good without the Roman gods, and that the dispersion of the Jews serves as a witness to prophecy.
131. 5.1Augustine rejects fate and astrology as the cause of Rome's greatness, attributes kingdoms to divine providence, and raises the problem of twins.
132. 5.2Augustine prefers Hippocrates' medical explanation of twins falling ill together to Posidonius' astrological one, and shows that the horoscope cannot account for twins.
133. 5.3Augustine rejects Nigidius Figulus' potter's-wheel argument for the different fortunes of twins.
134. 5.4Augustine cites Esau and Jacob, twins utterly different in life and fortune, against astrology.
135. 5.5Augustine presses the astrologers with the contradictions between fates fixed at conception and at birth, using the case of twins who fell ill together.
136. 5.6Augustine cites twins of different sex, one married and one a consecrated virgin, against the claim that the stars determine human lives.
137. 5.7Augustine ridicules the choosing of lucky days and attributes astrologers' correct predictions to evil spirits rather than any real art.
138. 5.8Augustine accepts that fate may mean the order of causes dependent on God's will, citing Seneca's verses and the Stoics' use of Homer.
139. 5.9Augustine answers Cicero's claim that divine foreknowledge destroys free will, affirming both God's foreknowledge and human choice, since our wills are themselves among the causes God foreknows.
140. 5.10Augustine argues that the necessity implied by God's foreknowledge does not take away the freedom of the human will, so laws, prayers, rewards, and punishments are not in vain.
141. 5.11Augustine affirms that the triune God, whose providence orders even the smallest creatures, also governs human kingdoms.
142. 5.12Augustine describes the Romans' love of liberty, domination, and glory, from Sallust and Virgil, and argues that true virtue seeks the testimony of conscience, not human praise.
143. 5.13Augustine explains that God gave the Western empire to Romans whose love of praise, itself a vice, restrained worse vices.
144. 5.14Augustine urges that the love of human praise be overcome by love of righteousness, as the apostles and martyrs sought God's glory rather than their own.
145. 5.15Augustine argues that God rewarded the Romans' virtues with earthly glory, since they did not seek eternal life.
146. 5.16Augustine contrasts the Romans' reward with the eternal city of the saints, for whom Roman examples serve as a spur to greater love of the heavenly country.
147. 5.17Augustine argues that Roman conquest brought the conquered little real harm or benefit, and that Christians should not boast of sacrifices for a far greater city.
148. 5.18Augustine sets famous Roman sacrifices for earthly glory (Brutus, Torquatus, Camillus, Mucius, Curtius, the Decii, Regulus, Cincinnatus, Fabricius) against the Christian's duty, so that believers may neither boast nor fall short.
149. 5.19Augustine distinguishes love of glory from lust for domination, teaches that even tyrants rule by God's permission, and holds that true virtue requires true piety.
150. 5.20Augustine argues that virtues made to serve human glory are as degraded as the Epicurean picture of virtues serving Pleasure.
151. 5.21Augustine attributes all earthly kingdoms, given to good and bad rulers alike, to the one true God's just though hidden providence.
152. 5.22Augustine shows from Roman history that wars were long and disastrous before Christian times, so the length of present wars cannot be blamed on Christianity.
153. 5.23Augustine recounts the sudden defeat of the pagan Goth Radagaisus near Rome (406) and the sparing of refugees in churches at Alaric's sack (410) as signs of God's merciful providence.
154. 5.24Augustine defines the true happiness of Christian emperors as just, humble, and merciful rule directed to God and eternal life, not earthly success.
155. 5.25Augustine notes the great earthly prosperity God gave Constantine, but also the short reigns of Jovian and Gratian, so that no one would be a Christian for earthly reward.
156. 5.26Augustine praises Theodosius' faithfulness, prayer, clemency, support of the church, and public penance, and closes the first five books with a warning to pagan critics.
157. 6.1Augustine turns from those who worship the gods for this life to those who worship them for the life after death, and argues that gods too petty even for earthly goods cannot give eternal life.
158. 6.2Augustine praises Varro's unequalled learning and argues that, though Varro worshipped the gods, the way he exposed their rites shows a man bound by his city's custom.
159. 6.3Augustine describes how Varro's forty-one books of Antiquities were arranged, with the sixteen books on divine things ending with the gods themselves.
160. 6.4Augustine argues that Varro, by putting human institutions before divine things, tacitly admitted that the civil gods were human inventions rather than realities.
161. 6.5Augustine sets out Varro's three theologies — mythical for the theater, natural for philosophers, civil for the city — and argues that the civil cannot be separated from the fabulous.
162. 6.6Addressing Varro directly, Augustine argues that fabulous and civil theology honor the same gods with the same shameful things and cannot lead to eternal life.
163. 6.7Augustine argues that civil religion contains the same indecencies as the stage — the sacristan who diced with Hercules, the rites of Attis and the castrated Galli — so the two theologies cannot be separated.
164. 6.8Augustine rejects the claim that allegorical 'natural' interpretations excuse the civil rites, since the same method would excuse the poets' fables that the pagans themselves condemn.
165. 6.9Augustine ridicules the minute division of divine functions — the gods of childbirth and of the wedding night — and concludes that Varro, by exposing civil theology, meant to leave room only for natural theology.
166. 6.10Augustine quotes Seneca's lost treatise Against Superstitions, which mocked the civil cults more boldly than Varro, but faults Seneca for still practicing what he condemned.
167. 6.11Augustine reports Seneca's scorn for the Jewish sabbath and his grudging admission that the Jews knew the reasons for their rites, and defers the question of the Jewish rites to another place.
168. 6.12Augustine concludes that since the gods of civil theology cannot give happiness, they cannot give eternal life, which is happiness without end.
169. 7.1Augustine turns to Varro's 'select gods' to see whether they, unlike the lesser gods of civil theology, can give eternal life.
170. 7.2Augustine lists Varro's twenty select gods and notes that they are found busy at the same petty tasks as the obscure gods, some of whom give more important gifts.
171. 7.3Augustine argues that the select gods were not chosen for greater functions, since obscure gods give life and sense while the select ones share petty tasks, so their selection seems a matter of mere fortune.
172. 7.4Augustine observes that the obscure gods escaped the scandalous stories told of the select gods, and that even blameless Janus was given a monstrous two- or four-faced image.
173. 7.5Augustine reports Varro's claim that the images of the gods symbolize the world-soul and its parts, and argues that even this natural theology reaches only the soul, not the God who made the soul.
174. 7.6Augustine summarizes Varro's natural theology: God is the world-soul, and the parts of the world are full of souls — stars as gods, and aerial heroes, lares, and genii.
175. 7.7Augustine argues that if Janus is the world, he should have ends as well as beginnings, making a separate god Terminus absurd.
176. 7.8Augustine mocks the interpretation of two-faced Janus as the open mouth and of four-faced Janus as the four quarters, ending with Christ's word 'I am the door.'
177. 7.9Augustine examines Varro's claim that Jupiter holds the causes of things and is the world, and shows that this conflicts with Janus also being the world.
178. 7.10Augustine asks why Janus and Jupiter are two gods if both are the one world, since one being with two powers is not two beings.
179. 7.11Augustine lists Jupiter's many surnames, noting that one god with many functions is not thereby many gods, and mocks the overlapping of Jupiter and Rumina.
180. 7.12Augustine ridicules the naming of Jupiter as 'Money' and contrasts money with true riches, which are virtue and wisdom.
181. 7.13Augustine shows that Varro's definitions make Saturn and Genius identical with Jupiter, the world-soul.
182. 7.14Augustine argues that Mercury and Mars, as the gods of speech and war, are either absorbed into Jupiter or are mere human activities and no gods at all.
183. 7.15Augustine shows the confusion of identifying the gods with the planets and asks why the constellations of the zodiac received no worship.
184. 7.16Augustine surveys how the select gods are identified with the world or its parts, so that one god becomes many things and one thing many gods.
185. 7.17Augustine shows that Varro himself declared his accounts of the uncertain, certain, and select gods to be matters of doubtful opinion.
186. 7.18Augustine judges it more credible that the gods were deified men than that their myths are allegories of nature, as Varro's reading of Saturn and Jupiter shows.
187. 7.19Augustine picks apart Varro's agricultural allegories of Saturn — the devoured children, the clod, the sickle, the castration of Heaven — showing that they contradict themselves and point only to bodily things.
188. 7.20Augustine reports that Varro interprets the Eleusinian mysteries only as a story about grain and the fertility of seeds.
189. 7.21Augustine describes, from Varro, the phallic processions of Liber at the Italian crossroads and at Lavinium as proof of the uncleanness of the civil rites.
190. 7.22Augustine mocks Varro's making two goddesses, Venilia and Salacia, out of the incoming and outgoing wave.
191. 7.23Augustine examines Varro's three grades of the world-soul and shows the confusion of making the one earth into Tellus, Dis, Proserpina, Tellumo, Altor, and Rusor.
192. 7.24Augustine argues that the many names of Tellus should not make many gods, and denounces the castration of the Galli in the cult of the Great Mother as worse than the other obscene rites.
193. 7.25Augustine rejects Porphyry's interpretation of the castrated Attis as the spring flowers that fall before the fruit.
194. 7.26Augustine denounces the castrated priests of the Great Mother, still seen recently in Carthage, as a disgrace worse than all the other myths of the gods.
195. 7.27Augustine argues that the physical allegories point only to changeable creatures, and that worshipping a creature, or worshipping God with shameful rites, is sin — and doing both is a double sin.
196. 7.28Augustine shows that Varro's scheme of referring gods to heaven and goddesses to earth contradicts itself, as Minerva, Neptune, and Dis show.
197. 7.29Augustine states that Christians worship not heaven, earth, or a world-soul, but the God who made them all.
198. 7.30Augustine lists the works that Varro divided among many gods and ascribes them all to the one true God, present everywhere, from whom alone eternal life is hoped.
199. 7.31Augustine gives thanks for the special gift to the faithful: the incarnation and unique sacrifice of the Son, and the love poured out by the Spirit.
200. 7.32Augustine explains that the mystery of redemption in Christ was always proclaimed by signs, and that the whole worship of Israel foretold what is fulfilled in Christ.
201. 7.33Augustine says that only the Christian religion reveals the pagan gods as demons, from whom Christ's humility sets people free, and that Varro's natural explanations cannot excuse their rites.
202. 7.34Augustine recounts from Varro how Numa's books explaining the causes of the Roman rites were unearthed and burned by the senate as too shameful to be known.
203. 7.35Augustine explains that Numa learned the Roman rites by hydromancy from demons, and argues that the burning of his books shows how shameful their real causes were.
204. 8.1Augustine turns to natural theology and chooses the Platonists, who acknowledge one God above all souls, as the philosophers most worth debating.
205. 8.2Augustine sketches the Italian school of Pythagoras and the Ionian succession from Thales to Archelaus, the teacher of Socrates.
206. 8.3Augustine describes how Socrates turned philosophy to ethics, and how his followers, such as Aristippus and Antisthenes, disagreed about the supreme good.
207. 8.4Augustine praises Plato for uniting the active and contemplative parts of philosophy in a threefold division, and suggests that in God are found the cause of being, the light of knowing, and the rule of living.
208. 8.5Augustine asks all the theologies and all the materialist philosophers to yield to the Platonists, and argues that since the mind is not a body, neither is God, its creator.
209. 8.6Augustine explains how the Platonists rose above bodies and changeable souls to the unchangeable, simple God from whom all form comes, as Paul says in Romans 1.
210. 8.7Augustine prefers the Platonists' logic to that of the Epicureans and Stoics, who founded knowledge on the senses, because the Platonists held that God is the light of the mind.
211. 8.8Augustine sets the Platonists above other moralists because they placed happiness not in body or mind but in the enjoyment of God, the supreme good.
212. 8.9Augustine prefers any philosophers, of whatever school or nation, who hold God to be the source of being, knowledge, and happiness.
213. 8.10Augustine explains that a Christian, warned by Paul against worldly philosophy yet told that some knew God from creation, rightly prefers the Platonists for what they grasped of the one God.
214. 8.11Augustine corrects his earlier view that Plato met Jeremiah, but suggests Plato may have learned of the Scriptures through an interpreter, citing likenesses to Genesis 1 and to God's name 'I am who am.'
215. 8.12Augustine explains why he debates the Platonists — Plotinus, Iamblichus, Porphyry, Apuleius — and notes that they all nevertheless offered sacrifice to many gods.
216. 8.13Augustine argues that since Plato held all gods to be good and banished the poets, the beings who demand obscene plays and punished Titus Latinius cannot be good gods.
217. 8.14Augustine reports the Platonist scheme of gods, demons, and men, and uses Apuleius' On the God of Socrates to argue that demons, not gods, demand obscene rites.
218. 8.15Augustine argues that the demons' finer bodies and airy dwelling do not make them better than men, just as the strength of beasts or the flight of birds does not.
219. 8.16Augustine analyzes Apuleius' definition of demons and concludes that their eternity, reason, and airy bodies, joined to passion, only make them eternally wretched and unworthy of worship.
220. 8.17Augustine argues that demons, being subject to passions from which the true religion frees us, cannot rightly be worshipped, since religion means imitating what one worships.
221. 8.18Augustine mocks the idea that the chaste and innocent must reach the good gods through demons who love the very vices they avoid.
222. 8.19Augustine argues from Roman law, Virgil, and Apuleius' own defense against a charge of magic that magic is wicked, and that the demons behind it cannot be mediators of prayer.
223. 8.20Augustine mocks the maxim that 'no god mingles with man,' since it implies that the gods mingle with deceiving demons rather than with penitent men.
224. 8.21Augustine traps the Platonists in a fourfold dilemma: whatever the demons report to the gods about Plato and the stage, the good gods are made ignorant, dishonored, or deceived.
225. 8.22Augustine concludes that demons are not mediators but fallen spirits, confined to the air, who deceive people into worshipping them as gods or go-betweens.
226. 8.23Augustine quotes Hermes Trismegistus on men 'making gods' by joining spirits to statues and on the coming end of Egyptian religion, and contrasts his lament with the joy of the prophets who foretold the fall of idols.
227. 8.24Augustine seizes on Hermes' admission that idol-making arose from his ancestors' error and unbelief, and sets his lament beside the psalm's joyful 'new song' of the church built in all the earth.
228. 8.25Augustine teaches that we come near the good angels not through demons but by likeness of will and faith in the God who makes both them and us happy.
229. 8.26Augustine shows from Hermes' own words that the gods of Egypt were dead men, so that the pagans, not the Christians honoring the martyrs, are the worshippers of the dead.
230. 8.27Augustine explains that Christians honor the martyrs' memorials but offer sacrifice only to God, whose one sacrifice is celebrated even at the martyrs' shrines.
231. 9.1Augustine recalls that Book 8 showed demons who love vice cannot reconcile good men to the good gods.
232. 9.2Augustine announces that Book 9 will ask whether some demons are good and could lead souls to happiness.
233. 9.3Augustine quotes Apuleius to show that the demons' very minds are storm-tossed by passions, so that they are worse than wise men.
234. 9.4Augustine argues that Stoics and Platonists differ in words rather than substance about the passions, citing Aulus Gellius' story of the Stoic who turned pale in a storm at sea.
235. 9.5Augustine teaches that Christian discipline asks not whether one feels anger, sadness, or fear but why, praises mercy as a virtue against the Stoics, and explains that God's 'anger' describes his punishment, not a passion.
236. 9.6Augustine argues that since the demons' very minds are ruled by passions, they have no free and wise part by which to help men toward the gods.
237. 9.7Augustine shows that Apuleius makes the partisan 'gods' of Homer into demons, since he holds the true gods far from such passions.
238. 9.8Augustine notes that Apuleius' definitions give demons nothing good in common with gods or wise men, but only eternal bodies and minds tossed by passion like foolish men.
239. 9.9Augustine argues that demons, with eternal bodies but vicious souls, are mediators hung upside down, their bodies not a vehicle of honor but a chain of condemnation.
240. 9.10Augustine cites Plotinus, who called the mortality of the human body a mercy of the Father, to show that demons with eternal bodies are more wretched than men.
241. 9.11Augustine rejects the Platonist view that human souls become demons — lares, larvae, or Manes — after death, as an encouragement to wickedness.
242. 9.12Augustine sets out Apuleius' three contrasts between gods and men: lofty place, eternity, and happiness against lowly place, mortality, and misery.
243. 9.13Augustine argues that a true middle between happy immortal gods and wretched mortal men must be either mortal and happy or immortal and wretched — and the demons are the latter.
244. 9.14Augustine asks why, if some wise mortals are happy, they should not be the mediators, since the happy envy no one and would help others to happiness.
245. 9.15Augustine presents Christ, mortal for a time yet ever happy, as the one true mediator who brings men to happy immortality, against the immortal and wretched demons who separate them from God.
246. 9.16Augustine ridicules the claim that gods avoid men to escape contamination, since the supreme God touches wise minds and the sun's rays touch filth without being defiled.
247. 9.17Augustine argues, citing Plotinus' 'flight to the fatherland' by likeness to God, that we need a mediator who is mortal with us yet just and divine — Christ, uncontaminated by the flesh he took.
248. 9.18Augustine argues that the demons' 'way' of bodily heights leads away from God, whereas the true way is spiritual likeness, by which the uncontaminable God cleanses men.
249. 9.19Augustine notes that Scripture and common usage speak of good and bad angels but never of good demons, so he will use the name 'angels' for the good spirits.
250. 9.20Augustine explains that 'demon' derives from knowledge, and that knowledge without love puffs up, making demons proud; against their pride stands the humility of God in Christ.
251. 9.21Augustine explains that Christ made himself known to the demons not as eternal light but by signs of power, enough to terrify them, and that Satan tempted him because he was not sure who he was.
252. 9.22Augustine contrasts the demons' conjectural knowledge of temporal things with the angels' sure knowledge of all things in the Word of God, whom they enjoy in love.
253. 9.23Augustine allows the Platonists to call the blessed immortals 'gods' as Scripture calls angels and even men gods, but insists that such beings are not mediators and want worship given only to the one God.
254. 10.1Augustine opens Book 10 by asking whether the blessed immortals wish worship and sacrifice for themselves or only for God, and defines the worship owed to God alone (latreia).
255. 10.2Augustine notes that Plotinus, like the Gospel of John, teaches that souls and blessed beings are happy only by the light of God, not their own.
256. 10.3Augustine describes the true worship of God as the offering of the heart, love, and oneself, and argues that blessed spirits who love us would not wish to be worshipped in God's place.
257. 10.4Augustine argues that sacrifice, unlike other honors, has always been offered only to one held to be God, as with Cain and Abel.
258. 10.5Augustine teaches that God needs no sacrifices, and that the visible sacrifices of the old law were signs of the invisible sacrifice of a contrite heart, praise, and mercy.
259. 10.6Augustine defines true sacrifice as every work that unites us to God, and teaches that the whole redeemed city is offered to God through Christ the priest, as the church shows in the sacrament of the altar.
260. 10.7Augustine teaches that the holy angels, fellow citizens of the one city of God, wish us to sacrifice only to God, as the law they ministered commands.
261. 10.8Augustine recalls the miracles that confirmed God's promises and law, from Abraham and Lot to the Exodus and the wilderness, as witness that worship belongs to the one God.
262. 10.9Augustine shows that Porphyry wavered on theurgy, granting it a limited purification of the soul while admitting that it cannot lead to God and involves envious powers.
263. 10.10Augustine ridicules Porphyry's account of gods frightened by an envious theurgist and identifies theurgic visions with Satan's disguise as an angel of light.
264. 10.11Augustine reviews Porphyry's letter to Anebo, whose questions about compelled gods, threats, and magic expose these powers as deceiving demons.
265. 10.12Augustine distinguishes demonic wonders from true miracles, which commend the worship of the one God, and notes that creation itself is a greater miracle.
266. 10.13Augustine explains that the invisible God appeared in visible forms that were not himself, and that the giving of the law at Sinai was confirmed by public wonders.
267. 10.14Augustine teaches that God educated his people from temporal to eternal goods, and that even temporal benefits should be sought only from the one God, whose providence reaches the lilies of the field.
268. 10.15Augustine explains that the law commanding worship of the one God was delivered by angels, through whom the invisible God spoke in visible signs and human words.
269. 10.16Augustine argues that the angels who command sacrifice to the one God, and confirm it with greater miracles, must be believed rather than those who demand worship for themselves.
270. 10.17Augustine recounts the miracles connected with the ark of the testimony, which commended the law of worship of the one God.
271. 10.18Augustine defends the reliability of the scriptural miracles and teaches, from Psalm 73, that the good of man is to cleave to God.
272. 10.19Augustine explains that visible sacrifices are signs of the invisible sacrifice of ourselves, and that holy angels and apostles refused the honor due to God.
273. 10.20Augustine teaches that Christ, the Mediator, is both priest and offering, and that the church's daily sacrifice is the sacrament of this one sacrifice, prefigured by all the ancient ones.
274. 10.21Augustine explains that God permits demons to persecute the church so that the martyrs may be glorified, and that the martyrs conquer the powers of the air by virtue, not by appeasing them.
275. 10.22Augustine teaches that the saints overcome demons by prayer to God, and that purification from sin comes only by grace through Christ the Mediator.
276. 10.23Augustine notes that Porphyry, citing an oracle, held that only the “principles” purify, and compares his Father, paternal Mind, and intermediate principle with the Christian Trinity.
277. 10.24Augustine confesses one God in three persons against Sabellianism and teaches that Christ, the Word made flesh, is the one Principle who purifies human nature, which Porphyry's pride would not accept.
278. 10.25Augustine teaches that the righteous of old were justified by faith in the mystery of Christ, and expounds Psalm 73 to show that man's good is to cleave to God and hope in him with the angels.
279. 10.26Augustine presses Porphyry, who distinguished angels announcing the Father's will from those serving theurgists, to admit openly that the latter are demons.
280. 10.27Augustine accuses Porphyry of placing human vices in the heavenly gods and sending the unlearned to theurgists, while Christ, whom even Porphyry's oracles called holy and immortal, purifies the whole man.
281. 10.28Augustine argues that Porphyry, who held that only the paternal Mind purifies, rejected Christ, the Wisdom of God, out of pride at the incarnation and the cross.
282. 10.29Augustine urges the Platonists, who glimpse the Trinity and even confess grace, to accept the incarnation, virgin birth, and bodily resurrection of Christ, rejected only out of pride.
283. 10.30Augustine commends Porphyry for correcting Plato by rejecting transmigration into beasts and the endless cycle of souls, and holds that souls return once to their own bodies in the resurrection.
284. 10.31Augustine refutes the Platonist argument that the soul must be coeternal with God, since even Porphyry admits a happiness of the soul that begins in time and never ends.
285. 10.32Augustine answers Porphyry's search for a universal way of liberating the soul by presenting the Christian religion, promised to Abraham and foretold by the prophets, as that way, and closes the first ten books.
286. 11.1Augustine opens the second part of the work: the origin, course, and ends of the two cities, beginning with the angels.
287. 11.2Knowledge of the unchangeable God is reached only through faith in Christ the mediator, who as man is the way and as God the goal.
288. 11.3The canonical Scripture, given through prophets, Christ, and apostles, is the witness we must believe about things beyond our own perception.
289. 11.4The world's beauty and order proclaim that God made it; its beginning in time implies no change in God's eternal will, as the Platonists themselves must grant regarding the soul's new happiness.
290. 11.5Asking why God made the world at one time rather than earlier is as empty as asking why it is in one place rather than another; there is neither time before nor place outside the world.
291. 11.6Since time is the measure of change in creatures, the world was made not in time but with time.
292. 11.7The light and the evenings and mornings of the first days may signify the angels' knowledge of creatures, dim in itself and bright when referred to the Creator.
293. 11.8God's rest on the seventh day signifies the rest of those who rest in him, promised to the faithful and prefigured by the sabbath.
294. 11.9The angels were created as the light of the first day, enlightened by the eternal Word; those who turned away became darkness, for evil is only the loss of good.
295. 11.10God, the Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is simple because he is what he has; creatures, even incorruptible ones, differ from their qualities.
296. 11.11The angels who fell cannot have shared the holy angels' full happiness, which includes certainty of its eternity.
297. 11.12Adam in paradise had greater present delight, but the righteous now, though suffering, have the surer hope of eternal happiness.
298. 11.13The holy angels are certain of their eternal happiness; the fallen ones never had that certainty, and the devil fell from the truth rather than being evil by nature, against the Manichees.
299. 11.14“There is no truth in him” gives the sign, not the cause, of the devil's not standing in the truth, as in a similar psalm expression.
300. 11.15Isaiah and Ezekiel show the devil was once without sin; “from the beginning” means from the beginning of sin, and his nature is God's good creation.
301. 11.16Creatures are ranked by nature above one another, but human valuation follows use, and in rational beings the will decides: good men rank above evil angels.
302. 11.17Vice is contrary to nature and proves the goodness of the nature it harms; God uses even the devil's evil will for the good of the saints.
303. 11.18God orders even evil beings into the beauty of history as a poem is adorned by antitheses, as Paul's rhetoric and Sirach show.
304. 11.19God's dividing of light from darkness on the first day may signify his separation of the holy from the fallen angels, whose fall he foreknew.
305. 11.20Scripture approves the light before the division on the first day but not after, so that the angelic darkness is not called good.
306. 11.21God knows all times in one unchanging present; “God saw that it was good” teaches that God, through his Word, made things for no cause but his goodness, as even Plato saw.
307. 11.22Things harmful to us are good in their place; evil is only the privation of good, and the Manichees err in making evil a nature and the soul a part of God.
308. 11.23Augustine rejects Origen's view that the world was made to imprison souls fallen from God, since Scripture calls creation very good and bodies do not match the deserts of souls.
309. 11.24Augustine states the faith in the Trinity and suggests that the Father, the Word, and the Spirit as goodness are signified in every work of creation and in the holy city's being, wisdom, and joy.
310. 11.25The philosophers' division into physics, logic, and ethics mirrors our dependence on God for being, wisdom, and happiness; Augustine distinguishes enjoying from using.
311. 11.26The human mind bears an image of the Trinity in being, knowing, and loving, of which it is certain even against the skeptics: if I am deceived, I am.
312. 11.27All creatures cling to being, and the human mind loves knowledge more than happiness in delusion; by an inner sense it judges justice and knows that it is, knows, and loves.
313. 11.28We also love the love by which we love; all things seek their place as by a love, and man, as God's image, should return like the prodigal son to God, in whom being, knowing, and loving will be perfected.
314. 11.29The holy angels know God and all creatures in the Word as in a “day” knowledge, more clearly than in the creatures themselves, their “evening” knowledge.
315. 11.30The six days signify perfection, since six is the first number equal to the sum of its divisors.
316. 11.31The seventh day's rest, which has no evening, signifies fullness; seven stands for the whole and for the Holy Spirit, and rest belongs to perfect knowledge, as the angels enjoy it.
317. 11.32If some place the angels' creation before heaven and earth, Augustine will not dispute it, gladly noting the Trinity in Genesis 1:1–2, provided the angels' secure happiness is held.
318. 11.33The holy and fallen angels form two contrary societies, fittingly called light and darkness, whether or not Moses meant this in Genesis 1.
319. 11.34Augustine notes views that the waters above the firmament are angels, rejects the claim that the waters were uncreated, and closes the book on the two angelic societies.
320. 12.1Good and evil angels share one good nature; they differ only by will, the good cleaving to God and the evil turning from him, and their fault itself shows how good that nature is.
321. 12.2Since God is supreme being, the only thing contrary to him is non-being; no being or nature is contrary to God.
322. 12.3God's enemies are so by fault, not nature; fault harms only a good nature, so evil can exist only in something good.
323. 12.4The decay of irrational things is part of the order of the universe; natures that harm us are good in themselves, as fire is both useful and destructive.
324. 12.5Every nature, having measure, form, and peace, is good and serves the order of providence; God is to be praised for all natures and blamed for no fault.
325. 12.6The good angels are happy by cleaving to God, the evil wretched through pride; an evil will has no efficient cause, and arises not from nature but from a nature's having been made from nothing.
326. 12.7An evil will has no efficient cause but only a deficient one; its origin, like darkness or silence, is known only as a privation.
327. 12.8The will sins not by turning to evil things but by turning evilly, out of order, to lesser goods: avarice, lust, boasting, and pride lie in the soul's perverse love, not in their objects.
328. 12.9The good angels' good will was made by God with them, by grace; the fallen either received less grace or the good were helped further; both angels and saints form one city of God, whose human part begins from one man.
329. 12.10Some pagans held that the human race is everlasting, explaining recorded origins by periodic floods and fires; Augustine calls this opinion, not knowledge.
330. 12.11Egyptian chronologies of many thousands of years, as in Alexander's letter to Olympias, disagree even with Greek history and deserve no credit against Scripture's reckoning of under six thousand years.
331. 12.12Those who hold that there are many worlds, or that the world perishes and is reborn, must admit that the first humans arose without human parents.
332. 12.13Any finite span of human history, however long, is nothing beside eternity, so the complaint that man was created late could be raised at any time.
333. 12.14Augustine rejects the philosophers' doctrine of eternal recurrence, which denies the soul true happiness and misreads Ecclesiastes, since Christ died once and the saints will be with the Lord forever.
334. 12.15God created man in time by an eternal and unchanging counsel, a depth beyond human search, as the psalm says: “According to your depth you have multiplied the sons of men.”
335. 12.16Augustine tentatively discusses how God can always have been Lord without any creature being coeternal with him, concluding that such questions exceed his powers and counseling sober restraint.
336. 12.17Paul's “eternal times” past were not coeternal with God; God's promise of eternal life before them was fixed in his eternal predestination and fulfilled in his Word.
337. 12.18Against philosophers who argue that God's infinite knowledge and unceasing goodness require eternal cycles, Augustine answers that God's unchangeable will created in time without any change in himself, out of sheer goodness.
338. 12.19God knows even the infinite series of numbers, so he needs no repeating cycles in order to know or foreknow his works.
339. 12.20Whatever “ages of ages” means, it gives no support to cyclical recurrence, which the eternal life of the saints refutes.
340. 12.21The doctrine that the blessed must return to misery in endless cycles is impious and destroys love and hope; even Porphyry rejected it, and the souls' final freedom shows that genuinely new things happen, such as man's creation.
341. 12.22God created the human race from one man, intermediate between angels and beasts, so that all humans would be bound by kinship as well as nature, and even Eve was made from Adam.
342. 12.23God foresaw man's sin and violence, and also the people he would call by grace to adoption and eternal peace with the angels, to whom the single origin of mankind commends unity.
343. 12.24God made man in his image with a rational soul, formed Adam from dust and gave him a soul, and made Eve from his side, not with hands but by his power.
344. 12.25Against Plato's lesser gods as makers of mortal creatures, Augustine holds that only God creates any nature; angels who assist are no more creators than farmers are of crops.
345. 12.26Only God gives natures and their inner forms; angels, farmers, the earth, and mothers are not creators, as Rome and Alexandria are credited to their kings rather than their builders.
346. 12.27The Platonist view that lesser gods made our bodies as prisons for punishment is self-contradictory, since Plato also calls the world with its mortal creatures most good, and God's mind contains the forms of all.
347. 12.28Man was created one so that the social human race might remember its unity, and woman from his side to show the dearness of marriage; in Adam the two cities already existed in God's foreknowledge.
348. 13.1Augustine turns to the fall of the first humans, who, unlike the angels, would have passed to immortality without death had they obeyed, but were justly condemned to death for disobedience.
349. 13.2The soul dies when God forsakes it, the body when the soul leaves it; the second death is the eternal punishment of body and soul, good to no one.
350. 13.3Death is the penalty of the first sin, passed to all Adam's descendants because human nature was changed in him; he did not become infantile, but suffered rebellious concupiscence and mortality, from which grace frees infants as to the second death.
351. 13.4The baptized still die so that faith may remain faith and martyrs may conquer the fear of death; by grace the penalty of sin becomes the martyr's weapon of righteousness.
352. 13.5As sinners abuse the good law, so the righteous use evil death well; death remains an evil, the wages of sin, even when it crowns martyrs.
353. 13.6Bodily death is an unnatural tearing apart, good to no one; borne faithfully it gains merit and may even win forgiveness, but it remains a punishment.
354. 13.7Martyrdom for Christ avails the unbaptized for forgiveness as baptism does, by grace, and exceeds the merit of deathbed baptism, though death itself remains no good.
355. 13.8The martyr accepts the first death to escape the second; after death the souls of the godly rest and those of the wicked are punished until the resurrection.
356. 13.9Augustine probes the puzzle of when one is “in death”: the dying still live, and the dead are already past death.
357. 13.10Mortal life is a race toward death in which all run at equal speed; from birth one is in a sense already in death.
358. 13.11The moment of death cannot be located, and even Latin cannot properly “decline” the verb to die; but by Christ's grace we can “decline” the second death, an endless dying.
359. 13.12The death threatened to Adam included every kind: the soul's loss of God, the body's loss of the soul, and the eternal second death.
360. 13.13The first penalty of sin was shame at the new, disobedient motion of the flesh: having deserted God, the soul lost its command over the body, and the flesh began to lust against the spirit.
361. 13.14God made man upright, but Adam's free sin corrupted the seminal nature in which all were present, so that all are born depraved and bound for the second death unless freed by grace.
362. 13.15Adam forsook God before God forsook him; the soul's death was felt at once in the disobedient flesh, and bodily death followed as the penalty of sin, not a law of nature.
363. 13.16The Platonists mock the Christian view that the soul's separation from the body is a punishment, yet Plato himself has the supreme god promise the lesser gods that they will never lose their bodies.
364. 13.17Platonists who hold the world-soul and the star-gods happy in eternal bodies cannot consistently deny that God can make human bodies immortal; only corruptible bodies, the result of sin, burden the soul.
365. 13.18The weight of earthly bodies is no objection to their being in heaven: God can make them light and incorruptible, as even art makes metal float and Plato's gods kept fire's light without its heat.
366. 13.19Had the first humans not sinned, they would never have died; the Platonists, who give their gods everlasting bodies and even let the wise return to bodies, cannot reasonably scorn Christian faith in the resurrection of incorruptible bodies.
367. 13.20The saints' bodies will rise spiritual, better even than Adam's before sin, which needed food and was kept from aging by the tree of life, a sacrament of God's wisdom; the forbidden tree was not evil but a test of obedience.
368. 13.21Paradise may be read spiritually, of virtues or of the church and Christ, but only while its literal history as a real place is also believed, as with Hagar and Sarah or the rock that was Christ.
369. 13.22Risen bodies will need no food but may eat, as the angels did with Abraham and Tobit and as the risen Christ did; they will be spiritual yet remain true bodies.
370. 13.23Adam was created with an animal body, mortal only through sin, not a spiritual one; the spiritual body is Christ's risen body, which believers receive now in sacrament and hope and fully at the resurrection.
371. 13.24God's breath at Adam's creation gave him his soul, not the Holy Spirit, as the Greek pnoē shows; Christ's breathing on the disciples signified the Spirit of both Father and Son; the question how the unfallen would have procreated is deferred to Book 14.
372. 14.1Because of Adam's sin all would perish in the second death but for grace; beneath all human diversity there are only two societies, those living according to the flesh and according to the spirit.
373. 14.2In Scripture “flesh” often means the whole man, so living according to the flesh includes vices of the mind, such as idolatry, enmity, and heresy, as well as bodily pleasures; Stoics as well as Epicureans live according to the flesh.
374. 14.3The corruptible body burdens the soul, but it is the punishment of sin, not its cause; the devil, who has no flesh, commits “works of the flesh” like pride and envy, so living according to the flesh means living according to oneself.
375. 14.4To live according to the flesh is to live according to man rather than God, which is a lie, since man was made to live by God's will; Paul's “carnal,” “animal,” and “men” all mean this.
376. 14.5The Platonists, less wrongly than the Manichees, still blame the body for the passions; yet their own teaching, as in Virgil, has purified souls desiring bodies, so the passions arise from the soul itself.
377. 14.6The emotions are acts of the will, good or bad according to the will; one who lives according to God hates the fault but loves the person.
378. 14.7Scripture uses amor and dilectio alike for good and bad love, as Christ's questions to Peter show; love is the root of desire, joy, fear, and sadness, which are good or bad as the love is.
379. 14.8Augustine examines the Stoic doctrine of three good feelings in the sage and no sadness, showing that Scripture and classical authors use will, gladness, and even sadness in both good and bad senses, as with godly sorrow.
380. 14.9Citizens of God's city rightly fear, desire, grieve, and rejoice out of charity, as Paul and Christ himself did; Stoic apatheia belongs not to this life but, as freedom from fear and grief, to the life to come, where love and joy remain.
381. 14.10Before sin, Adam and Eve had no disturbing passions but untroubled love and joy; had none sinned, the race would have multiplied to the full number of the saints and passed without death into the angels' secure happiness.
382. 14.11God foreknew the fall and his good use of it; man was made upright with a good will, lost true freedom by sin and can regain it only through the Son; the devil through the serpent deceived Eve, while Adam sinned knowingly out of attachment to her.
383. 14.12The first sin, though about food, was grave because it violated obedience, the mother of virtues, in a command that was supremely easy to keep before desire resisted the will.
384. 14.13The evil deed was preceded by an evil will, whose beginning was pride, a self-pleasing turning from God; humility lifts up and pride casts down, and love of God and love of self distinguish the two cities.
385. 14.14Worse than the sin was Adam's and Eve's proud excuse-making, blaming the serpent and the woman instead of seeking pardon.
386. 14.15The just penalty of disobedience was disobedience: man, given over to himself, cannot command his own mind and flesh; pains and pleasures of the flesh belong to the soul, and “lust” (libido) is the general name for every craving, though used chiefly of sexual desire.
387. 14.16Lust, in its narrow sense of sexual arousal, overwhelms the mind and does not obey the will, so that a wise married person would prefer to beget children without it if he could.
388. 14.17Adam and Eve were not blind before the fall; their eyes were opened to the shame of the flesh's new disobedience, a penalty in kind, so they covered their genitals, as all nations still do.
389. 14.18Even lawful marital intercourse, though honorable and publicly known, is hidden from every eye, a sign that shame accompanies it as a punishment while the act itself is natural and fitting.
390. 14.19The philosophers rightly saw anger and lust as vicious parts of the soul needing reason's rule, but this disorder is the sickness of sin; lust alone moves the genitals apart from the will, which is why its acts are hidden.
391. 14.20The Cynics' teaching that marital intercourse may be done in public was defeated by natural shame; the shame of lust shows the penalty of the first disobedience, borne in the very organs of generation and removed only by grace.
392. 14.21The blessing “Increase and multiply” was given before sin, so procreation belongs to the glory of marriage, not to sin's punishment; it would not have needed lust, whatever some interpreters hold.
393. 14.22Marriage and procreation, blessed by God before sin, belong to the real, bodily difference of male and female, as Christ taught when asked about divorce: “What God has joined, let man not separate.”
394. 14.23Had there been no sin, the full number of the saints would have been begotten in paradise without shameful lust, the genital members obeying the will as hands and feet do; Augustine asks pardon for treating the subject.
395. 14.24Unfallen humans would have moved the genital members by will, as some people now control unusual bodily functions, like the presbyter Restitutus of Calama who could make himself insensible; man, forsaking God, cannot even obey himself.
396. 14.25No one lives as he wills unless he is happy and righteous and secure from death, deception, and harm; resignation to what one can have is not happiness, which must be loved above all and willed to be eternal.
397. 14.26In paradise Adam and Eve would have begotten children by a calm act of will without lust or loss of the woman's integrity; God, foreseeing sin, still created them, to fill his city's predestined number by grace from the condemned mass.
398. 14.27God, foreknowing the fall, allowed the devil to tempt man, compelling no one, to show the power of pride and of grace; two loves, of self and of God, have made the two cities.
399. 15.1Augustine begins the history of the two cities, noting that Cain, citizen of the earthly city, was born before Abel, the pilgrim citizen of the city of God.
400. 15.2Using Paul's allegory of Hagar and Sarah, Augustine explains that part of the earthly city served as an image of the heavenly city.
401. 15.3Isaac, born of barren Sarah through God's promise, signifies the children of grace, who are given what nature could not provide.
402. 15.4The earthly city seeks earthly peace through war; its goods are real gifts of God, but loving them above heavenly goods brings misery.
403. 15.5Cain the fratricide founded the earthly city, as Romulus, killing Remus, founded Rome; the good, if perfect, cannot fight each other.
404. 15.6The citizens of God's city, still weak from sin, are healed by mutual correction and forgiveness, but only as the Holy Spirit works within.
405. 15.7Augustine interprets God's warning to Cain (Gen 4:6–7, in its Old Latin form), arguing that Cain's sin was envy and that man must rule over sin as the mind rules the flesh.
406. 15.8Augustine defends the credibility of Cain's founding a city: Scripture names only the persons its purpose requires, and long lives allowed great populations.
407. 15.9Augustine defends the long lives and great size of the people before the flood, citing Virgil, Pliny, and a giant tooth he saw at Utica.
408. 15.10Augustine sets out how the figures of Genesis 5 differ between the Hebrew and the Greek-based Latin manuscripts, while the lifespans largely agree.
409. 15.11Augustine discusses the famous problem that the Septuagint figures make Methuselah outlive the flood by fourteen years, which the Hebrew figures do not.
410. 15.12Augustine rejects the theory that antediluvian 'years' were a tenth of ours, pointing out that the Hebrew figures would make fathers of children seven to eleven years old.
411. 15.13Augustine attributes the systematic hundred-year differences in Genesis 5 to an early copyist of the Septuagint and concludes that, on historical figures, the original Hebrew should be preferred.
412. 15.14Augustine proves from the dated months of the flood narrative that the years of the patriarchs were as long as ours, and holds that the Septuagint's differences may be prophetic rather than errors.
413. 15.15Augustine argues that the sons named in Genesis 5 need not have been firstborn, just as Matthew's genealogy names only those in the line to David.
414. 15.16Augustine explains that brother–sister marriage was necessary at first but became wicked, since spreading kinship ties widely strengthens social love; he approves the prohibition of cousin marriage.
415. 15.17Augustine interprets the names Cain (possession), Enoch (dedication), Seth (resurrection), and Enosh (man) as signs of the two cities, and notes that only Cain's line names women.
416. 15.18Seth's son Enosh, who 'hoped to call on the name of the Lord', prefigures the city of God, which lives by hope in the resurrection of Christ.
417. 15.19Enoch, seventh from Adam and translated to God, prefigures the future 'dedication' of the whole house of God at the resurrection, already accomplished in Christ the head.
418. 15.20Augustine explains why Cain's line is shorter than Seth's, perhaps as a line of kings, and finds in its eleven members a sign of sin and in Seth's ten a sign of the law.
419. 15.21The genealogy of Seth restarts from Adam (Gen 5:1) because only the heavenly city's times are reckoned; the city of God must learn to hope in God, not in its own free choice.
420. 15.22The sons of God (Seth's line) fell by loving the beautiful daughters of men, a disorder of love; Augustine defines virtue as 'the order of love'.
421. 15.23Augustine argues that the 'angels of God' who married the daughters of men (Gen 6) were men of Seth's line, not spirits, and rejects the Enoch literature's account of giants as apocryphal.
422. 15.24The 'hundred and twenty years' of Gen 6:3 are the time remaining before the flood, not a new limit on human life.
423. 15.25God's 'anger' and 'repentance' in Scripture are figures of speech for his unchanging judgment, used to reach all kinds of readers.
424. 15.26The ark, with its human proportions, its side door, and its three stories, is a figure of Christ and of the Church saved through the wood of the cross.
425. 15.27Augustine insists that the flood narrative is both true history and a figure of the Church, answering objections about Mount Olympus, the ark's capacity, and the animals' food.
426. 16.1Scripture records no one's godliness between Noah and Abraham except Noah's prophetic blessing of Shem and Japheth and curse on Canaan.
427. 16.2Augustine reads Noah's drunkenness and nakedness as a figure of Christ's passion: Shem and Japheth (Jews and Gentiles in the Church) honor it, while Ham figures heretics and bad Christians.
428. 16.3Augustine surveys the Table of Nations (Gen 10), counting seventy-three (or seventy-two) nations, discussing Nimrod and Nineveh, and deriving the name 'Hebrews' from Eber.
429. 16.4The tower of Babel, built by Nimrod's proud city Babylon ('confusion'), was punished by the confusion of tongues; humility, not pride, builds the way to heaven.
430. 16.5God's 'coming down' to Babel means a visible act of his presence, perhaps through angels, who work as his fellow workers.
431. 16.6God speaks to angels not with sound but by his unchangeable reason; 'Let us make man' refers to the Trinity, and Gen 11:6 is a threatening question.
432. 16.7Animals may have reached distant islands by swimming, by human transport, by angels, or by arising from the earth; the ark's animals then signified the nations in the Church.
433. 16.8Whatever strange races may exist, if they are rational mortal animals they descend from Adam; God knows how each part fits the beauty of the whole.
434. 16.9Augustine rejects belief in inhabited antipodes as unsupported and contrary to Scripture's account of one human race, and turns to seek the city of God among the 72 nations.
435. 16.10Augustine traces Shem's line to Abraham (1,072 years in the Septuagint) and argues that both godly and ungodly people always existed after the flood.
436. 16.11Hebrew was the original common language, kept in the family of Eber, which escaped the punishment of Babel; the list of nations is not in birth order.
437. 16.12With Abraham, born among the idolatrous Chaldeans, the city of God enters a clearer period; the house of Terah alone preserved true worship.
438. 16.13Nahor is omitted from Terah's migration perhaps because he had lapsed into Chaldean idolatry; Judith shows that Terah's house was persecuted for worshipping the true God.
439. 16.14Terah's 205 years (Gen 11:32) are his whole lifespan, completed in Haran, since every member of this line has his years recorded.
440. 16.15Augustine reconciles Abraham's departure from Haran at 75 with Terah's death at 205, taking the narrative as a recapitulation and following Stephen's speech in Acts 7.
441. 16.16God's promise to Abraham (Gen 12:1–3) has two parts: the land for his carnal seed, and the blessing of all nations through his spiritual seed.
442. 16.17In Abraham's time the Sicyonian, Egyptian, and Assyrian kingdoms flourished, the Assyrian under Ninus being the greatest seat of the earthly city.
443. 16.18At Shechem God promised the land of Canaan to Abraham's carnal seed, the nation of Israel.
444. 16.19Abraham, calling Sarah his sister, did not lie, and trusted God to protect her chastity, which God did by afflicting Pharaoh.
445. 16.20Abraham and Lot parted peacefully, Abraham giving Lot the choice of land.
446. 16.21God's third promise gives Canaan to Abraham's seed 'for ever' and compares his offspring to the sand, a hyperbole that may include his spiritual seed.
447. 16.22Abraham rescued Lot and was blessed by Melchizedek, whose offering first showed the sacrifice now offered by Christians, fulfilled in Christ, priest for ever after his order.
448. 16.23God promised Abraham descendants like the stars; Abraham believed and was justified by faith before circumcision, as Paul argues.
449. 16.24Augustine interprets Abraham's covenant sacrifice (Gen 15) as a figure of Israel, the undivided spiritual faithful, the end-time tribulation, and the fire of judgment.
450. 16.25Abraham took Hagar only for offspring at Sarah's request, not from lust, and showed his fidelity to Sarah by returning Hagar to her authority.
451. 16.26In Gen 17 God promises Isaac, renames Abraham and Sarah, and institutes circumcision, which signifies regeneration, and the eighth day Christ's resurrection.
452. 16.27An uncircumcised infant 'perishes' not for his own fault but because all broke God's first covenant in Adam; circumcision signified the regeneration that frees from original sin.
453. 16.28Abraham and Sarah received new names and, beyond nature, the power to have a son; Abraham's later children by Keturah are explained by the long lives of that time.
454. 16.29The three visitors at Mamre were angels in whom Abraham recognized the Lord, as Lot did in the two at Sodom; they renewed the twofold promise.
455. 16.30Sodom's destruction by fire prefigures the final judgment, and Lot's wife warns against looking back; at Gerar God again protected Sarah.
456. 16.31Isaac, named 'laughter' from his parents' joyful laughter, was born; Hagar's expulsion signifies the two covenants.
457. 16.32Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac, trusting in resurrection, prefigures God's giving of his Son; the ram caught in thorns figures Christ, and God confirms the promise by oath.
458. 16.33Abraham's oath 'under the thigh' when seeking Rebecca for Isaac foreshadowed the Lord's coming in flesh descended from Abraham.
459. 16.34Abraham's marriage to Keturah may signify carnal people who claim the new covenant, but it also shows that remarriage after a spouse's death is no sin.
460. 16.35The oracle about Rebecca's twins, 'the elder shall serve the younger', shows grace choosing without merit and is fulfilled in Jews and Christians.
461. 16.36Isaac received the promise for Abraham's sake; though monogamous, he was not greater than Abraham, and virtues must be weighed as a whole.
462. 16.37Jacob's obtaining Isaac's blessing was not fraud but a mystery: the blessing proclaims Christ among the nations, Isaac figuring the law and prophets.
463. 16.38Jacob, blessed as heir of Abraham's promise, saw the ladder to heaven, which Christ applied to himself; he took four women for offspring, not from lust.
464. 16.39Jacob's wrestling with the angel figures Christ's passion; blessed and lame, he represents Israel's believers and unbelievers.
465. 16.40The seventy-five who 'entered Egypt' with Jacob include descendants born later, since his entry covers the whole of Joseph's lifetime.
466. 16.41Jacob's blessing of Judah (Gen 49:8–12) foretells Christ from the tribe of Judah: his death as a lion's sleep, his resurrection by his own power, and the Church washed in his blood.
467. 16.42Jacob's crossing of his hands to bless Ephraim above Manasseh figures the younger Christian people preferred to the elder Jewish people.
468. 16.43Augustine surveys the exodus, the law, Joshua, the judges, and the kings to David, dividing the history into ages like the stages of a human life.
469. 17.1Book 17 covers the age of the prophets from Samuel to the return from exile, whose writings foretell Christ and the city of God more than they record history.
470. 17.2The promise of the land was fulfilled under David and Solomon; Israel's later punishments served to train the faithful and warn the nations.
471. 17.3Prophecies refer to the earthly Jerusalem, the heavenly Jerusalem, or both; Augustine rejects both purely literal and wholly allegorical reading.
472. 17.4Hannah's song (1 Sam 2:1–10) goes beyond thanks for Samuel: it prophesies the Church, the humbling of the proud, Christ's death and resurrection, his ascension and judgment, and the new priesthood.
473. 17.5The prophecy to Eli (1 Sam 2:27–36) foretold the end of Aaron's priesthood and the faithful priest Christ, whose Christian sacrifice of bread the remnant of Israel would share.
474. 17.6The 'eternal' priesthood and kingdom promised to Eli's house and Saul were shadows; their eternity belongs to what they figured, Christ's priesthood and kingdom.
475. 17.7Samuel's saying that the kingdom was torn from Israel and Israel divided in two prefigures the permanent division between Israel that clings to Christ and Israel that rejects him.
476. 17.8God's promise to David of an eternal house and kingdom for his son (2 Sam 7) was not fulfilled in Solomon, who fell into idolatry, but in Christ, who builds God's house of people.
477. 17.9Psalm 89 repeats the promises to David, which apply to Christ, while the sins to be punished belong to his body, the Church.
478. 17.10Psalm 89's lament over the fall of David's kingdom shows that the promise was 'deferred' to Christ, the one true Anointed.
479. 17.11The psalmist's prayer points to Christ as the 'substance' of Israel, who alone died and rescued his own soul from hell.
480. 17.12The psalm's plea over the 'reproach' of God's servants fits Christians persecuted for Christ, who await the eternal house of David, built of people by God.
481. 17.13The promised secure peace was not Solomon's, since the judges' times had longer peace; it is the eternal peace of the heavenly Jerusalem.
482. 17.14David's psalms are almost all his prophecy; Augustine holds that David wrote all 150, some headed with other names for figurative reasons.
483. 17.15Augustine declines to list all the psalms' prophecies of Christ, since each should be read in its whole context, and refers readers to fuller expositions of the psalms.
484. 17.16Psalm 45 plainly sings of Christ the anointed king and of his bride the Church, gathered from all nations, the true city of God.
485. 17.17Psalm 110 proclaims Christ's eternal priesthood after Melchizedek, and Psalm 22 foretells his crucifixion and the conversion of the nations.
486. 17.18Psalms 3, 41, 16, and 68 foretell Christ's death as 'sleep', his betrayal by Judas, his resurrection without corruption, and salvation through his death.
487. 17.19Psalm 69's prophecy of gall and vinegar and of darkened eyes explains why many Jews did not accept the fulfilled prophecies.
488. 17.20Augustine praises David's repentance, notes Solomon's fall, and finds prophecies of Christ and the Church in Wisdom, Sirach, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Songs.
489. 17.21After Solomon the kingdom divided into Israel (ten tribes) and Judah (Judah and Benjamin) by God's will, a political, not religious, division.
490. 17.22Jeroboam led Israel into idolatry, yet God sent prophets like Elijah and Elisha and kept seven thousand faithful.
491. 17.23The divided kingdoms, alternately blessed and punished, went into captivity; after the return, prophecy ceased with Malachi, Haggai, Zechariah, and Ezra until the prophets of the Gospel and John the Baptist.
492. 18.1Augustine recalls the plan of the work and announces that he will now trace the earthly city from Abraham onward, so that the two cities can be compared.
493. 18.2Augustine explains that the earthly city is marked chiefly by the Assyrian and Roman empires, and begins to synchronize the kings of Assyria and Sicyon with the life of Abraham.
494. 18.3Augustine dates the births of Isaac, Esau, and Jacob by the Assyrian, Sicyonian, and Argive kings, and notes how early kings such as Phegous and Io came to be worshipped as gods.
495. 18.4Augustine sets the death of Isaac, Joseph's rise in Egypt, and Jacob's descent into Egypt against the kings of Assyria, Sicyon, and Argos.
496. 18.5Augustine reports Varro's explanation that the Argive king Apis, dying in Egypt, became the god Serapis, and explains the Apis bull as a demonic deception.
497. 18.6Augustine dates Jacob's death and his prophecy of Christ in the blessing of Judah to the reign of Argus, who with others was later worshipped as a god.
498. 18.7Augustine dates the death of Joseph and describes Israel's growth and oppression in Egypt.
499. 18.8Augustine dates the birth of Moses and argues that figures such as Prometheus, Atlas, Mercury, Hercules, and Minerva were human beings later honoured as gods.
500. 18.9Augustine relates Varro's account of how Athens was named after Minerva by the women's vote, and how the women were punished to appease Neptune.
501. 18.10Augustine notes that Varro rejects the myth that Mars was tried on the Areopagus yet reports the contest of Neptune and Minerva as history, and dates Deucalion's flood.
502. 18.11Augustine dates the exodus, the giving of the law, and the deaths of Moses and Joshua, explaining why the Old Testament of earthly promises came before the New.
503. 18.12Augustine lists the rites and games instituted by Greek kings between the exodus and the death of Joshua and argues that the gods who delight in fabulous crimes are guilty of real ones.
504. 18.13Augustine lists the Greek fables invented in the period of the judges and blames the worshippers of Jupiter for accepting and staging the shameful stories told of him.
505. 18.14Augustine describes the “theological poets” such as Orpheus, who sang of the gods but did not rightly serve the one God, and mentions men such as Ino and Castor and Pollux who were deified.
506. 18.15Augustine dates the end of the Argive kingdom and the beginning of the Laurentine kings to the judgeship of Deborah, and shows that Saturn, Picus, and Faunus were men deified by the Latins.
507. 18.16Augustine reports the story that Diomede was deified after the Trojan War and that his companions became birds that guard his temple.
508. 18.17Augustine reports Varro's stories of Circe and of Arcadians turned into wolves, from which Varro derives the names Lycaeus and the Roman Luperci.
509. 18.18Augustine explains reports of men turned into animals as demonic illusions acting on the human imagination, permitted by God, and not as real changes of body or soul.
510. 18.19Augustine dates the arrival of Aeneas in Italy to the judge Abdon and notes the deification of Aeneas, Sancus, and Codrus, and the end of the Sicyonian kingdom under Eli.
511. 18.20Augustine sets the Israelite monarchy from Saul to the division under Rehoboam alongside the Silvian kings of Latium and the end of kingship at Athens.
512. 18.21Augustine traces the Latin kings from Aeneas to Numitor, dates the end of the Assyrian empire to the reign of Procas, and discusses the stories of Romulus's birth and the she-wolf.
513. 18.22Augustine presents Rome as a second Babylon through which God subdued and pacified the world, and dates its founding against the history of Israel and Judah.
514. 18.23Augustine gives a Latin version of the Erythraean Sibyl's acrostic poem on the judgment, whose Greek initials spell “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour” and form the word ichthys (“fish”), and gathers the Sibylline prophecies of Christ's passion quoted by Lactantius.
515. 18.24Augustine dates Thales and the fall of the northern kingdom to the reign of Romulus, notes Cicero's praise of Romulus's deification, and dates the Samian Sibyl to the reign of Numa and Manasseh.
516. 18.25Augustine dates the Babylonian captivity to the reign of Tarquinius Priscus and lists the seven sages and early Greek philosophers of that period.
517. 18.26Augustine dates the return under Cyrus, the delayed rebuilding of the temple until Darius, and the end of the seventy years to the expulsion of the Roman kings, and introduces the writing prophets.
518. 18.27Augustine dates Hosea, Amos, Isaiah, Micah, Jonah, and Joel to the time when the Assyrian empire ended and Rome began, so that written prophecy for the nations arose with the city that would rule them.
519. 18.28Augustine reads Hosea's prophecies of the calling of the nations, the later conversion of Israel, and the third-day resurrection, and Amos's prophecies, as foretelling Christ and the church.
520. 18.29Augustine quotes Isaiah's song of the suffering servant as prophecy of Christ and Isaiah 54 as prophecy of the church.
521. 18.30Augustine reads Micah's mountain of the Lord and Bethlehem prophecy, the sign of Jonah, and Joel's promise of the Spirit as prophecies fulfilled in Christ and the church.
522. 18.31Augustine interprets Obadiah's saved ones going up from Zion, Nahum's messenger of peace and the one who breathes into Judah's face, and Habakkuk's vision as prophecies of Christ and the gospel.
523. 18.32Augustine interprets Habakkuk's prayer, verse by verse, as a prophecy of Christ's coming, passion, preaching, ascension, and the church's tribulations, ending with “I will rejoice in God my Jesus.”
524. 18.33Augustine dates Jeremiah and Zephaniah and quotes their prophecies of Christ's passion, incarnation, righteous reign, rejection by the Jews, and the calling of the nations.
525. 18.34Augustine cites Daniel's vision of the Son of Man and Ezekiel's prophecy of one shepherd, “my servant David,” as prophecies of Christ and his kingdom.
526. 18.35Augustine reads Haggai's shaking of the nations, Zechariah's humble king and the blood of the covenant, and Malachi's pure offering among the nations, the angel of the covenant, and the day of judgment as prophecies of Christ and the church.
527. 18.36Augustine treats Ezra and Esther as historical books, reads the contest of the three young men as pointing to Christ the truth, and notes that the church, not the Jews, holds the books of the Maccabees as canonical because of their martyrs.
528. 18.37Augustine argues that the Hebrew prophets, and above all Moses, are older than every Greek philosopher and even than the wisdom of Egypt.
529. 18.38Augustine explains that writings attributed to Noah, Enoch, and other early prophets were excluded from the canon because their authenticity could not be trusted, and distinguishes prophets' historical writing from inspired Scripture.
530. 18.39Augustine argues that Hebrew with its letters was preserved from the patriarchs, and that Egyptian learning and Hermes Trismegistus came after Abraham and Moses.
531. 18.40Augustine rejects the Egyptian claim of a hundred thousand years of astronomy, citing Varro and the biblical chronology of fewer than six thousand years since Adam.
532. 18.41Augustine contrasts the endless disagreements of the philosophers, all tolerated by the earthly city, “Babylon,” with the concord of the canonical Scriptures, through which God himself taught Israel.
533. 18.42Augustine recounts how Ptolemy Philadelphus obtained the Hebrew Scriptures and had them translated by seventy-two elders whose separate translations miraculously agreed, a gift of God for the future faith of the nations.
534. 18.43Augustine defends the church's preference for the Septuagint, holding that the same Spirit spoke through the Hebrew prophets and the seventy translators, so that differences between the Hebrew and the Greek are both inspired.
535. 18.44Augustine explains the Hebrew “forty days” and the Septuagint “three days” of Jonah's warning to Nineveh as both pointing to Christ's resurrection and ascension, and resolves to use both the Hebrew and the Septuagint as authoritative.
536. 18.45Augustine traces the afflictions of the Jews from the rebuilding of the temple to Herod, arguing that the greater glory promised by Haggai belongs to the church, and that Jacob's prophecy was fulfilled when a foreign king ruled at Christ's birth.
537. 18.46Augustine dates Christ's birth to the reign of Herod and Augustus and argues that the Jews, dispersed among the nations with their Scriptures, bear unwilling witness that the prophecies of Christ were not invented by Christians.
538. 18.47Augustine allows that people outside Israel, like Job, belonged to the heavenly city through faith in the one Mediator, but holds that prophecies preserved by the Jews are the strongest evidence for Christ.
539. 18.48Augustine argues that Haggai's promised greater glory belongs to the church built of living stones, which will appear fully when only the chosen remain.
540. 18.49Augustine describes the church in this age as a net holding good and bad until the final separation, and recounts Christ's preaching, choice of apostles, passion, resurrection, ascension, and gift of the Spirit at Pentecost.
541. 18.50Augustine describes the spread of the church from Jerusalem through the apostles and their successors amid persecutions, until the persecuting kings themselves submitted to Christ.
542. 18.51Augustine argues that heretics and bad Christians, like outward persecutors, serve to exercise the church's patience, wisdom, and love, which runs its course between the world's persecutions and God's consolations from Abel to the end.
543. 18.52Augustine rejects the scheme of exactly ten persecutions matching the ten plagues of Egypt, pointing to persecutions under Herod, Julian, Valens, the Goths, and the Persians, and leaves the number of future persecutions undecided.
544. 18.53Augustine warns against calculating the date of the last persecution and Christ's return, and ridicules a pagan oracle claiming that Peter's sorcery had fixed the duration of Christianity at 365 years.
545. 18.54Augustine refutes the pagan oracle by dating the 365 years from Pentecost to the consulship of Honorius and Eutychianus (AD 398), noting that the next year the temples of Carthage were overthrown and the church grew, and concludes Book 18.
546. 19.1Augustine sets out Varro's scheme by which philosophical views of the supreme good could be multiplied to 288 possible sects, and explains Varro's removal of the distinctions that do not concern the end of good.
547. 19.2Augustine explains how Varro strips away the distinctions of social life, certainty, Cynic dress, and kind of life, and reduces the question of the supreme good to three possible views about virtue and the primary goods of nature.
548. 19.3Augustine reports Varro's argument, following Antiochus of Ascalon, that man is soul and body together, so that the supreme good consists of virtue and the goods of both, in a social life that mixes leisure and action.
549. 19.4Augustine answers that eternal life is the supreme good and eternal death the supreme evil, and argues that the miseries of this life, the constant war of virtue against vice, and even the Stoic defence of suicide show that happiness here can only be held in hope.
550. 19.5Augustine agrees that the wise man's life should be social, since the city of God is itself a society, but shows how households and cities are full of betrayals, quarrels, and dangers.
551. 19.6Augustine shows the misery of human judgment, in which judges, unable to see consciences, torture and condemn the innocent, and says the wise judge must serve but should lament this necessity before God.
552. 19.7Augustine describes how differences of language divide the human race and how the peace of empire was bought with terrible wars, and says that even the wise man who wages just wars must grieve over their necessity.
553. 19.8Augustine says that the faithful love of friends is the chief comfort of human society, yet it brings constant fear for their safety and virtue, and grief at their death, which is nevertheless consoled because they have escaped the evils of this life.
554. 19.9Augustine says that friendship with the holy angels, though free from death and corruption, is obscured in this life by demons who disguise themselves as angels of light, into whose power the pagan philosophers fell.
555. 19.10Augustine says that the saints' struggle with temptation makes them long for the final peace, in which body and soul will be perfected and virtue will no longer fight, and that true virtue refers everything to that end.
556. 19.11Augustine explains that the end of the city of God may be called peace as well as eternal life, and best “peace in eternal life” or “eternal life in peace,” since Jerusalem means “vision of peace.”
557. 19.12Augustine argues that all beings desire peace: warriors, robbers, and even the monster Cacus seek it in their own way, pride perversely imitates God's peace, and even a corpse is governed by the peace of natural order.
558. 19.13Augustine defines the peace of body, soul, household, city, and the heavenly city, and of all things as “the tranquillity of order,” showing that even the wretched and the devil remain within God's order, and that temporal peace, rightly used, leads to eternal peace.
559. 19.14Augustine explains that the earthly city uses temporal things for earthly peace and the heavenly for eternal peace, and that love of God and neighbour produces an ordered household in which those who command actually serve.
560. 19.15Augustine teaches that God made man to rule over beasts, not over other men, that slavery entered as a penalty of sin, and that slaves should serve faithfully until all human rule ends and God is all in all.
561. 19.16Augustine says that righteous fathers cared equally for children and slaves in regard to God, that household discipline serves the good of the one corrected, and that domestic peace is ordered to the peace of the city.
562. 19.17Augustine explains that the heavenly city, while a pilgrim on earth, shares the use of temporal goods and obeys the laws of the earthly city for the sake of peace, but must dissent from it in religion, since it worships the one God alone.
563. 19.18Augustine rejects the universal doubt of the New Academy, affirming the certainty of reason, the senses, and the canonical Scriptures, while allowing reasonable doubt about matters none of these establishes.
564. 19.19Augustine says that the Christian city is indifferent to dress and manner of life so long as they do not conflict with God's law, and that leisure should serve the search for truth and action the good of others, as the office of bishop is a work, not an honour.
565. 19.20Augustine says that the citizens of the heavenly city may be called happy now only in hope, since all present goods without that hope are false happiness.
566. 19.21Augustine argues that by Scipio's definition in Cicero's Republic, a commonwealth requires true justice, and since justice gives each his due and the Romans withheld worship from the true God, Rome was never a true commonwealth.
567. 19.22Augustine identifies the God of the Christians as the God of the prophets and of Abraham, whom even Varro took for the supreme god and Porphyry's oracles called great.
568. 19.23Augustine examines oracles quoted by Porphyry, in which Apollo condemns Christ while praising the God of the Hebrews and Hecate praises Christ as a pious man while cursing Christians, and argues that the demons' aim is to keep men from becoming Christians and that justice, and so a true people, exists only where the one God alone receives sacrifice.
569. 19.24Augustine proposes his own definition of a people as a rational multitude united by agreement about the things it loves, by which Rome and other states are peoples and commonwealths, though without true justice.
570. 19.25Augustine argues that virtues not referred to God, even those valued for their own sake, are really proud vices, since what makes man live happily is above man.
571. 19.26Augustine says that the earthly city's peace, though not its final good, benefits the pilgrim people of God, who are therefore told to pray for rulers and for the peace of Babylon.
572. 19.27Augustine says that in this life the peace and righteousness of the saints consist more in the forgiveness of sins than in perfect virtue, as the Lord's Prayer shows, while in the final peace God will rule the whole person without conflict.
573. 19.28Augustine describes the end of the wicked as the second death, an unending war between will and passion and between pain and bodily nature, and announces that the next book will treat the last judgment.
574. 20.1Augustine explains that God always judges, but this book concerns the final judgment, when Christ comes to judge the living and the dead.
575. 20.2Although in this life good and evil fall on good and bad people without visible order, God's judgment is present and will be shown to be just on the last day.
576. 20.3Ecclesiastes laments that the same things befall good and bad in this life, and ends by pointing to God's judgment of every work.
577. 20.4Augustine will cite the New Testament first and then the Old, since the new come first in dignity.
578. 20.5Augustine gathers Christ's sayings in the Gospels that foretell a judgment at the end of the age, with the resurrection of the dead and the separation of good and bad.
579. 20.6The first resurrection is the present raising of souls from sin through faith; the second is the raising of bodies at the end, to life or to condemnation.
580. 20.7Augustine rejects a literal, carnal reading of the thousand years of Revelation 20 and explains the binding of the devil as the restraint of his power over the church during the present age.
581. 20.8The binding of the devil restrains his power to tempt during the church's age; at the end he will be loosed for three and a half years, yet the church will endure and even grow.
582. 20.9The reign of the saints for a thousand years is the present reign of the church, living and dead, with Christ; the thrones are its leaders, the beast the ungodly city, and the first resurrection the rising of souls from sin.
583. 20.10Resurrection can be spoken of souls as well as bodies, since souls also fall; and all believers, not only clergy, are the priests who reign with Christ.
584. 20.11Gog and Magog are not particular barbarian peoples but the ungodly throughout the world, who in the last persecution will besiege the church everywhere.
585. 20.12The fire from heaven in Revelation 20:9 is either the saints' firmness that torments their persecutors or Christ's blow at his coming, not the final punishment.
586. 20.13Augustine argues that the saints reign with Christ even during Antichrist's three-and-a-half-year persecution, so the thousand years either measure the devil's binding only or round off that short span.
587. 20.14Augustine explains Revelation 20:10–13: the devil's condemnation, the passing of the world's form, the books opened at judgment, and the book of life as God's power recalling each person's deeds.
588. 20.15The sea that gives up its dead is this world, giving up those still alive at Christ's coming; death and hell give back the departed; the book of life is God's infallible foreknowledge of the predestined.
589. 20.16After the judgment the present world will be transformed by fire into a new heaven and earth fitted to immortal bodies; the vanished sea may figure the stormy life of this world.
590. 20.17The new Jerusalem without tears or death belongs to the world to come, not to the present reign of the church, whose saints still weep and sin.
591. 20.18Peter's second letter foretells that the present heavens and earth, restored after the flood, will be destroyed by fire at the judgment; the saints, immortal, will be untouched by that fire.
592. 20.19Augustine reads 2 Thessalonians 2 as foretelling Antichrist before the day of the Lord, confesses he does not know what “holds him back”, and reports without endorsing the views that it is the Roman empire or hidden evil within the church.
593. 20.20Commenting on 1 Thessalonians 4, Augustine suggests that those alive at Christ's coming will die and rise in an instant as they are caught up, so that all die and rise; how it will happen is known only then.
594. 20.21Augustine reads Isaiah 26 and 65–66 as foretelling the resurrection of good and wicked, the comfort of the heavenly Jerusalem, the gathering of the nations into the church, and eternal punishment.
595. 20.22The saints will “go out” to see the punishment of the wicked not by moving bodily but by knowledge; Augustine notes different views on the fire and the worm and defers the question.
596. 20.23Daniel foretells Antichrist's short and savage reign of three and a half years before the judgment and the saints' everlasting kingdom, and the resurrection of many to life or to shame.
597. 20.24Psalm 102 foretells the perishing of the heavens, against Porphyry's mockery of the Christian belief in the world's end; Psalm 50 foretells Christ's open coming to judge and gather the righteous.
598. 20.25Malachi 3 foretells the last judgment and seems to indicate purifying punishments for some, which will cleanse the church so that it offers itself to God in perfect righteousness; Augustine defers the question.
599. 20.26The sacrifices “as in the days of old” that the purified saints will offer are themselves, sinless as in paradise before the Fall, not a return to the animal sacrifices of the Law; the Lord will be a swift witness against the wicked.
600. 20.27Malachi's day burning like an oven, when the sun of righteousness rises on those who fear God, shows the final separation of the righteous and the wicked.
601. 20.28Those who read the law of Moses carnally murmured that serving God was useless; the last judgment will openly show the misery of the wicked and the happiness of the righteous.
602. 20.29Elijah, who is still living, will come before the judgment and, by expounding the law spiritually, will bring the Jews to believe in Christ.
603. 20.30Old Testament passages where the Lord God speaks as judge are shown, from Isaiah and Zechariah, to refer to Christ; Augustine lists the events of the end: Elijah, the Jews' faith, Antichrist, Christ's judgment, resurrection, separation, and the world's burning and renewal.
604. 21.1Augustine explains that he will treat the eternal punishment of the wicked before the happiness of the saints, since bodily endurance in torment seems harder to believe.
605. 21.2To unbelievers who demand examples, Augustine points to creatures that live in fire and hot springs: if living in fire without pain is believed, living in pain is not harder to believe.
606. 21.3Pain is a sign of life, not proof of death: the soul feels pain yet is immortal, and so the risen bodies of the damned can suffer without dying.
607. 21.4Augustine gathers natural wonders, the salamander, Etna, incorruptible peacock flesh, fire, charcoal, quicklime, the diamond and the magnet, to show that what seems impossible can be true.
608. 21.5Unbelievers who demand reasons for the eternal punishment cannot explain the many marvels of nature recorded by writers; God's power and truthfulness are reason enough to believe what he foretells.
609. 21.6Some marvels, such as the inextinguishable lamp of Venus, may be human contrivance, magic, or the work of demons; if demons and human art can do such things, God can do far more.
610. 21.7Unbelievers explain marvels simply as “nature”; Augustine answers that God's will and omnipotence is the stronger reason, and he distinguishes the marvels he has tested himself from those he only read.
611. 21.8A portent is not against nature but against what is known of nature; God, who changed the course of Venus, stopped the sun, and turned Sodom into a waste, can change the nature of human bodies as he has foretold.
612. 21.9The unquenchable fire and undying worm of Gehenna may both be bodily, or the fire bodily and the worm the mind's grief; Augustine leaves the choice open but insists that the bodies of the damned will truly feel the fire.
613. 21.10The bodily fire of Gehenna can torment demons, whether they have airy bodies or are incorporeal spirits bound to the fire in a wonderful way, just as souls are bound to bodies.
614. 21.11Punishments in human law are not measured by the time a crime took but by its gravity, so eternal punishment for sins done in time is not unjust; “the same measure” means requital, not equal duration.
615. 21.12Eternal punishment seems unjust only because we cannot perceive how great the first sin was; the whole human race is a condemned mass, from which some are freed by undeserved grace to show both mercy and justice.
616. 21.13Against the Platonist view that all punishment after death purifies, Augustine holds that some punishments purify and others do not, that some suffer temporary punishments after death before the judgment, and that not all of these come to eternal punishment.
617. 21.14The whole of human life is a trial and punishment, from the infant's first cry and the child's schooling onward; even baptized infants suffer, though this does not harm them if they die.
618. 21.15The trials of this life teach that all the grace of the New Testament looks to the world to come; the present war of spirit against flesh is better than surrender to vice.
619. 21.16Baptized children who die before the age of reason suffer no punishment after death; older believers must fight their vices by grace; purifying punishments occur only before the last judgment, and eternal fire varies with deserts.
620. 21.17Augustine turns to “tender-hearted” Christians who think the punishment of the damned will end; he notes that the church rejected Origen's view that even the devil would be restored and that souls cycle endlessly between bliss and misery.
621. 21.18Augustine reports the view of some that at the judgment the saints' intercession will obtain mercy for all human beings, with their arguments from Psalm 77, Nineveh, Psalm 31, and Romans 11, and notes that they are pleading their own case.
622. 21.19Augustine reports the view that all the baptized who have received Christ's body, even heretics, will eventually be saved.
623. 21.20Augustine reports the view that those baptized in the catholic church, even if they later fall into heresy or idolatry, will eventually be saved.
624. 21.21Augustine reports the view that catholics who persevere in the church, however wicked their lives, will be saved “through fire” because they have Christ as their foundation.
625. 21.22Augustine reports the view that those who give alms and forgive others, however wicked their lives, will escape eternal punishment, relying on James 2:13, Matthew 25, and the Lord's Prayer.
626. 21.23The church rejected the restoration of the devil because Scripture calls his punishment eternal and “for ever and ever”; the same word “eternal” in Matthew 25:46 must mean the same for punishment as for life.
627. 21.24The saints will not pray for the damned at the judgment, as the church does not pray for the devil or for the ungodly dead; some of the regenerate dead are helped by prayer, but the threat of eternal punishment is true, and Psalm 77, Nineveh, Psalm 31, and Romans 11 do not teach otherwise.
628. 21.25Neither heretics nor lapsed catholics nor catholics living wickedly will be saved by the sacraments alone: those who do the works of the flesh will not inherit the kingdom, and only those who abide in Christ truly eat his body.
629. 21.26To have Christ as foundation is to put nothing before him; those who love lawful earthly things without preferring them to Christ are saved “through fire,” the fire of tribulation, while those who live wickedly have no such foundation; Augustine does not rule out a purifying fire for some spirits between death and judgment.
630. 21.27Almsgiving and the Lord's Prayer forgive daily sins of those who are changing their lives, but cannot buy impunity for continued crimes; there is a hidden class of lesser sins pardoned through the intercession of holy friends, but deliverance keeps one from eternal fire, never releases one from it.
631. 22.1Augustine introduces the last book on the eternal blessedness of the city of God, founded by God, who allowed angels and men free choice and gathers a people by grace to restore the number of the fallen angels.
632. 22.2God's will is eternal and unchangeable; when he is said to change or to will what does not happen, the change lies in creatures or refers to the will he produces in his saints.
633. 22.3As God's promise to Abraham is now seen fulfilled in Christ, so his prophetic promises of resurrection, a new heaven and earth, and the everlasting kingdom will also be fulfilled.
634. 22.4Against Cicero's claim that earthly bodies cannot be in heaven, Augustine argues that the union of incorporeal souls with earthly bodies is a greater wonder than the raising of earthly bodies to heaven.
635. 22.5Augustine argues from three “incredible” facts, Christ's bodily resurrection and ascension, the world's belief in it, and its persuasion by a few unlearned fishermen, backed by the apostles' miracles, that the promised resurrection of the flesh is credible.
636. 22.6Contrasting Rome's belief in Romulus with the church's faith in Christ, Augustine argues that Rome made its founder a god by love, while the church, persuaded by miracles and prophecy, loved Christ by believing him God, and its martyrs died rather than deny him.
637. 22.7In more educated times than Romulus's, the world could have come to believe Christ's bodily resurrection and ascension only through divine power, prophecy, and miracles, despite persecution.
638. 22.8Augustine argues that miracles attested Christ's resurrection and ascension and still occur, and he recounts healings and raisings he witnessed or verified in Milan, Carthage, Hippo, Calama, and Uzalis, many at shrines holding relics of Stephen.
639. 22.9The miracles done through the martyrs, however God works them, bear witness to the faith for which they died, the faith in Christ's bodily resurrection and ours.
640. 22.10The martyrs are not gods; Christians build memorials, not temples, for them and offer the sacrifice, which is the body of Christ, to the one God at their shrines, whereas the demons work wonders to be worshipped.
641. 22.11Augustine answers the Platonist argument from the natural order and weights of the elements, showing from birds, the soul's union with the body, Varro's story of the Vestal's sieve, and fire on earth that God can make risen bodies fit to dwell in heaven.
642. 22.12Augustine sets out the pagans' mocking questions about the resurrection of the flesh: aborted fetuses, infants, stature, hair and nails, fatness, dissolved bodies, deformities, and flesh eaten by others.
643. 22.13Augustine neither affirms nor denies that fetuses who died in the womb will rise, though he cannot see why they would be excluded from the resurrection of the dead.
644. 22.14Infants will rise with the full stature they would have reached, since the measure of each body is present in principle from conception and God can supply whatever is lacking.
645. 22.15The dead will not all rise to the size of Christ's body; each will receive the stature of his own youth, and Paul's “measure of the age of Christ's fullness” refers either to the whole church or to the age of about thirty.
646. 22.16Being “conformed to the image of the Son” refers to inner renewal or to immortality, and if to the risen body, to the age of youth, though Augustine will not contend with those who think each rises at the age of death.
647. 22.17Against the view that all will rise male, Augustine holds that both sexes will rise, without lust, marriage, or childbearing, since woman is God's creature and Christ denied marriage, not women, in the resurrection.
648. 22.18From the context of Eph 4, the “perfect man” is Christ with his body the church, whose fullness is completed in its members; even if it referred to the resurrection, “man” would include women.
649. 22.19In the resurrection deformities will be removed without loss of substance, all bodies will have beauty of proportion and radiance, and the martyrs may bear their scars as marks of honour, with lost members restored.
650. 22.20God can recall all scattered matter of dead bodies; flesh eaten by another will be restored to its first owner, and all will rise with the proportions of youth, free of every deformity and corruption.
651. 22.21The risen flesh will be spiritual, wholly subject to the spirit yet still flesh; to glimpse its glory Augustine proposes to consider God's gifts even in this troubled life.
652. 22.22The countless evils of this life, from ignorance and vice to accidents, diseases, demons, and famine, show that the human race is condemned through the first sin, and only the grace of Christ frees from it.
653. 22.23Besides the common evils, the righteous must fight constantly against their own vices by God's grace, and still pray for forgiveness, until in the kingdom there will be neither battles nor debts.
654. 22.24Even in condemned humanity God preserves fruitfulness, forms each body, and endows the mind and body with gifts and the world with beauty; if these console the condemned, the rewards of the blessed will be far greater.
655. 22.25The world has believed the resurrection of the flesh as God foretold; since God cannot lie, what he promised will happen, and nothing in it is evil or unworthy of him.
656. 22.26Against Porphyry's demand that the blessed soul flee all bodies, Augustine cites Plato's Timaeus, where the supreme God promises the created gods an impossible immortality in their bodies, so God can likewise raise incorruptible flesh.
657. 22.27If Plato's view that souls return to bodies were combined with Porphyry's that purified souls never return to evils, both would reach the Christian faith in the eternal, evil-free resurrection body.
658. 22.28Augustine notes Plato's myth of a man returned to life, Labeo's tale of two revived men, and Varro's report of a rebirth of the same body and soul after 440 years, and argues that combining these pagan views yields the Christian resurrection.
659. 22.29Augustine discusses how the saints will see God: certainly with the spirit, and perhaps also through their spiritual bodies, which may see God present in all things as we now see life in living bodies.
660. 22.30Augustine concludes the work with the eternal happiness of the city of God: the praise of God who is all in all, a freedom that can no longer sin, and the final seventh-day Sabbath and eternal eighth day of rest, vision, love, and praise.