City of God 11.1–11.9

Chapter 1. Of that part of the work in which the beginnings and ends of the two cities, the heavenly and the earthly, begin to be set out.

We speak of the city of God, to which that Scripture bears witness which, not by chance movements of minds but plainly by the arrangement of the highest providence, surpassing by its divine authority all the writings of all nations, has brought every kind of human genius under its sway. For there it is written: “Glorious things are spoken of you, city of God”; and in another psalm we read: “Great is the Lord and greatly to be praised in the city of our God, on his holy mountain, spreading the rejoicing of the whole earth”; and a little later in the same psalm: “As we have heard, so we have seen, in the city of the Lord of hosts, in the city of our God; God has founded it forever”; and again in another: “The rush of the river gladdens the city of God; the Most High has sanctified his tabernacle; God is in the midst of her, she shall not be moved.” From these and similar testimonies, which it would take too long to recall in full, we have learned that there is a certain city of God, whose citizens we long to be, with that love which its founder has breathed into us. To this founder of the holy city the citizens of the earthly city prefer their own gods, not knowing that he is the God of gods: not of false gods, that is, of the impious and proud, who, deprived of his unchangeable light that is common to all, and so reduced to a kind of needy power, pursue what are, in a manner, private powers of their own and seek divine honors from their deceived subjects; but of pious and holy gods, who delight rather to submit themselves to the One than to have many submit to them, and rather to worship God than to be worshipped instead of God. But to the enemies of this holy city we have replied in the ten preceding books, as far as we could, with the help of our Lord and King. Now, recognizing what is expected of me, and not forgetful of my debt, I shall undertake, relying everywhere on the aid of the same Lord and King, to discuss as well as I can the rise, the progress, and the appointed ends of the two cities, the earthly and the heavenly, which, as we have said, are in this present age in some way entangled and mixed with one another. And first I shall say how the beginnings of these two cities arose earlier, in the difference among the angels.

Chapter 2. Of knowing God, to the knowledge of whom no one among men attains except through the Mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.

It is a great and very rare thing to go beyond the whole of creation, bodily and incorporeal, by the effort of the mind, having considered it and found it changeable, and to arrive at the unchangeable substance of God, and there to learn from God himself that all nature which is not what he is was made by none but him. For in this way God speaks with man, not through some bodily creature, sounding in bodily ears so that the spaces of air between the speaker and the hearer are struck; nor through a spiritual creature of the kind that is shaped in the likenesses of bodies, as in dreams or in some other such way (for so also he speaks as if to the ears of the body, since he speaks as if through a body and as if across an interval of bodily places; for such visions are very like bodies); but he speaks by the truth itself, if anyone is fit to hear with the mind and not with the body. For he speaks to that part of man which is better than the other parts of which man consists, and than which God himself alone is better. For since man is most rightly understood, or, if this is not possible, at least believed, to have been made in the image of God, he is surely nearer to the God above him by that part of himself in which he surpasses his lower parts, which he has in common even with the beasts. But because the mind itself, in which reason and understanding are naturally present, is weakened by certain dark and long-standing vices, not only for cleaving to the unchangeable light in enjoyment but even for bearing it, until, renewed and healed from day to day, it becomes capable of so great a happiness, it first had to be steeped in faith and purified. That it might walk more confidently toward the truth in this faith, the Truth himself, God the Son of God, taking on man without consuming God, established and founded this same faith, so that there might be a way for man to man's God through the man who is God. For this is “the mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.” For he is mediator by this, that he is man; by this he is also the way. For if there is a way between the one who strives and that to which he strives, there is hope of arriving; but if it is lacking, or it is not known by which way one must go, what use is it to know where one must go? And the only way that is fully protected against all errors is that the same one be both God and man: God where one goes, man by which one goes.

Chapter 3. Of the authority of the canonical Scripture, composed by the divine Spirit.

This Mediator, having spoken first through the prophets, then through himself, afterward through the apostles, as much as he judged sufficient, also produced the Scripture which is called canonical, of the most eminent authority, which we believe concerning those things which it is not good for us to be ignorant of and which we are not able to know by ourselves. For if those things can be known by our own witness which are not remote from our senses, whether inner or outer (hence they are also called “present,” because we say they are before the senses [prae sensibus], as things are before the eyes which are at hand to the eyes), then certainly with regard to things remote from our senses, since we cannot know them by our own testimony, we look for other witnesses and believe them, from whose senses we do not believe these things to be or to have been remote. So then, just as concerning visible things which we have not seen we believe those who have seen them, and so also concerning the other things that belong to each bodily sense, so concerning the things perceived by the soul and mind (for this too is most rightly called a sense, whence also the word sententia, “judgment,” takes its name), that is, concerning invisible things which are remote from our inner sense, we must believe those who have learned them as arranged in that incorporeal light, or who behold them as they abide.

Chapter 4. Of the creation of the world, which is neither timeless nor ordered by a new decision of God, as if he afterward willed what he had not willed before.

Of all visible things the world is the greatest; of all invisible things the greatest is God. But that the world exists we see; that God exists we believe. And that God made the world we believe no one more safely than God himself. Where have we heard him? Nowhere, so far, better than in the holy Scriptures, where his prophet said: “In the beginning God made heaven and earth.” Was this prophet there when God made heaven and earth? No; but the wisdom of God was there, through which all things were made, which also, passing into holy souls, makes them friends of God and prophets, and tells them his works inwardly, without noise. The angels of God also speak to them, who always see the face of the Father and announce his will to those to whom it is fitting. This prophet was one of these, who said and wrote: “In the beginning God made heaven and earth.” And he is so fit a witness, through whom we should believe God, that by the same Spirit of God by which he knew that these things had been revealed to him, he also foretold, so long before, this very faith of ours that was to come.

But why did it please the eternal God to make heaven and earth then, when he had not made them before? Those who say this, if they want the world to be thought eternal, without any beginning, and therefore not made by God, are far turned away from the truth and rave with the deadly disease of impiety. For, setting aside the prophetic voices, the world itself, by its perfectly ordered changeableness and motion and by the most beautiful form of all visible things, silently in a way proclaims both that it was made and that it could not have been made except by God, who is ineffably and invisibly great and ineffably and invisibly beautiful. But those who admit that it was made by God, yet want it to have a beginning not of time but of its creation, so that in some scarcely intelligible way it has always been made, do indeed say something by which they seem to themselves to defend God from, as it were, a chance impulse, lest it be believed that there suddenly came into his mind what had never come into it before, to make the world, and that a new will befell him, though he is in no way changeable at all. But I do not see how this reasoning of theirs can stand in other matters, and especially in the case of the soul. If they contend that it is coeternal with God, they will be quite unable to explain whence there befell it a new misery, which had never before befallen it through all eternity. For if they say that its misery and happiness have always alternated, they must also say that they will always alternate; and from this that absurdity will follow them, that even when it is called happy it is surely not happy in this, if it foresees its future misery and shame; but if it does not foresee it, and does not think it will be shameful and wretched but always happy, then it is happy by a false opinion; and nothing more foolish can be said. But if they think that the soul's misery alternated with happiness through infinite ages past, but that now for the future, once it has been set free, it will not return to misery, they are nonetheless convicted of saying that it was never truly happy, but begins from now on to enjoy a new and undeceived happiness; and so they will admit that something new befalls it, and this great and glorious, which had never befallen it through all eternity before. If they deny that God had the cause of this newness in his eternal counsel, they will at the same time deny that he is the author of its happiness, which is an abominable impiety. But if they say that he too devised by a new counsel that the soul should henceforth be happy forever, how will they show that he is free from that changeableness which they too reject? Further, if they admit that it was created in time, but will perish at no later time, like number, having a beginning but not an end, and that therefore, having once experienced miseries, if it is freed from them, it will never afterward be wretched, they will certainly not doubt that this happens while the counsel of God remains unchangeable. Let them therefore believe in the same way that the world could have been made in time without God's having changed his eternal counsel and will in making it.

Chapter 5. That we ought no more to think of infinite spaces of time before the world than of infinite spaces of place outside the world; for just as there are no times before it, so there are no places outside it.

Next it must be seen what those who agree that God is the maker of the world, and yet ask us what we answer about the time of the world, themselves answer about the place of the world. For to ask why it was made then and not earlier is like asking why it is here, where it is, and not elsewhere. For if they imagine infinite spaces of time before the world, in which it does not seem to them that God could have been idle from work, let them likewise imagine infinite spaces of place outside the world; and if anyone says that the Almighty could not have been inactive in these, will it not follow that they are forced to dream of innumerable worlds with Epicurus? (With this difference only, that he asserts that they come into being and are dissolved by chance movements of atoms, while these will say they were made by the work of God.) That is, if they will not have him idle through the boundless immensity of places lying open all around outside the world; and they will say that these worlds, as they also hold of this one, cannot be dissolved by any cause. For we are dealing with those who agree with us that God is incorporeal and the creator of all natures which are not what he is; as for others, it is too unworthy to admit them to this discussion of religion, especially since among those who think that the service of sacred rites must be offered to many gods, these men surpassed the other philosophers in renown and authority, for no other reason than that, though at a great distance, they are nevertheless nearer to the truth than the rest. Or will they perhaps say that the substance of God, which they neither enclose nor bound nor extend in place, but confess, as is worthy to think of God, to be wholly present everywhere by an incorporeal presence, is absent from such great spaces of place outside the world, and occupied in only one place, so small in comparison with that infinity, in which the world is? I do not think they will go so far into such empty talk. Since, then, they say that the one world, of vast bodily mass but finite and bounded by its place, was made by God's working, whatever they answer about the infinite places outside the world, why God ceases from working in them, let them give themselves the same answer about the infinite times before the world, why God ceased from working in them. And just as it does not follow that it was by chance rather than by divine reason that God established the world in this place where it is and not in another, since, with infinite places lying equally open everywhere, this one could be chosen for no greater merit, although no human reason can comprehend the divine reason by which it was done; so it does not follow that we should think that something by chance befell God because he founded the world at that time rather than an earlier one, since earlier times had equally passed through an infinite space backward, and there was no difference by which one time should be preferred to another in choosing. But if they say that the thoughts of men by which they imagine infinite places are empty, since there is no place besides the world, they are answered in the same way: men think emptily of past times of God's inactivity, since there is no time before the world.

Chapter 6. That the creation of the world and of times has one beginning, and that one does not precede the other.

For if eternity and time are rightly distinguished in this, that time does not exist without some motion and change, while in eternity there is no change, who does not see that there would have been no times had no creature been made that might change something by some motion; and that from this motion and change, as one thing and then another, which cannot exist at once, gives way and succeeds, in longer or shorter intervals of duration, time would follow? Since, then, God, in whose eternity there is no change at all, is the creator and ordainer of times, I do not see how it can be said that he created the world after spaces of time, unless it is said that before the world there was already some creature by whose motions times ran. Further, if the sacred and most truthful writings say that in the beginning God made heaven and earth in such a way that he is understood to have made nothing before (since it would rather have been said that he made in the beginning whatever he had made before all the other things he made), then beyond doubt the world was made not in time but with time. For what is made in time is made both after some time and before some time: after that which is past, before that which is future; but there could be no past, because there was no creature by whose changing motions it could be brought about. But the world was made with time, if in its creation changing motion was made, as that order of the first six or seven days also seems to show, in which both morning and evening are named, until all the things which God made in these days were completed on the sixth day, and on the seventh God's resting is set forth as a great mystery. What kind of days these are is very difficult or even impossible for us to conceive, how much more to express.

Chapter 7. Of the nature of the first days, which are said to have had evening and morning even before the sun was made.

For we see that these days we know have no evening except from the setting of the sun, and no morning except from its rising; but the first three of those days passed without the sun, which is reported to have been made on the fourth day. And first, indeed, light is said to have been made by the word of God, and God to have divided between it and the darkness, and to have called this light day and the darkness night; but what that light was, and by what alternating motion, and what kind of evening and morning it made, is remote from our senses, nor can it be understood by us as it is; yet it must be believed without any hesitation. For either it is some bodily light, whether in the upper parts of the world far from our sight or whence the sun was afterward kindled; or by the name of light is signified the holy city in the holy angels and blessed spirits, of which the apostle says: “The Jerusalem above, our eternal mother in the heavens”; for he says also in another place: “For you are all children of light and children of the day; we are not of the night nor of darkness”; if, that is, we can in some measure fittingly understand the evening and morning of this day too. For the knowledge of the creature, in comparison with the knowledge of the Creator, in a way grows dusk, and likewise it dawns and becomes morning when it too is referred to the praise and love of the Creator; nor does it sink into night where the Creator is not forsaken by the love of the creature. And indeed Scripture, when it numbered those days in order, nowhere inserted the word “night.” For it nowhere says, “There was night,” but, “There was evening and there was morning, one day.” So also the second day and the rest. For the knowledge of the creature in itself is, so to speak, more faded than when it is known in the wisdom of God, as in the art by which it was made. Therefore it can more fittingly be called evening than night; which, however, as I said, returns into morning when it is referred to praising and loving the Creator. And when it does this in the knowledge of itself, it is one day; when in the knowledge of the firmament, which was called heaven between the lower and the upper waters, the second day; when in the knowledge of earth and sea and all growing things which are joined by their roots to the earth, the third day; when in the knowledge of the greater and lesser lights and all the stars, the fourth day; when in the knowledge of all the animals from the waters that swim and fly, the fifth day; when in the knowledge of all land animals and of man himself, the sixth day.

Chapter 8. What God's rest is to be understood to be, and of what kind, by which he rested on the seventh day after the works of the six days.

When God rests on the seventh day from all his works and sanctifies it, this is by no means to be taken childishly, as if God had toiled in working, who “spoke and they were made” by an intelligible and eternal word, not a sounding and temporal one. But God's rest signifies the rest of those who rest in God, just as the joy of a house signifies the joy of those who rejoice in the house, even if it is not the house itself but something else that makes them joyful. How much more if the house itself by its beauty makes its inhabitants joyful, so that it is called joyful not only in that manner of speaking by which we signify what is contained by what contains it (as when theaters applaud and meadows low, when people applaud in the one and oxen low in the other), but also in that by which what is effected is signified by what effects it, as a letter is called joyful, signifying the joy of those whom it makes joyful as they read it. Most fittingly, then, when the prophetic authority tells that God rested, there is signified the rest of those who rest in him and whom he himself makes to rest. The prophecy also promises this to the men to whom it speaks and for whose sake it was certainly written: that they too, after the good works which God works in them and through them, if they have first in this life in some way drawn near to him by faith, will have everlasting rest in him. For this was prefigured also in the ancient people of God by the rest of the sabbath according to the precept of the law, of which I think I must speak more carefully in its place.

Chapter 9. What we are to believe about the creation of the angels according to the divine testimonies.

Now, since I have set out to speak of the rise of the holy city, and have thought I should speak first of what concerns the holy angels, who are a great part of this city, and the more blessed in that they have never been pilgrims, I shall take care, with God's gift, to explain what divine testimonies are available on this, as far as seems sufficient. Where the sacred writings speak of the establishment of the world, it is not clearly said whether, or in what order, the angels were created; but if they are not passed over, they are signified either by the name “heaven,” where it is said, “In the beginning God made heaven and earth,” or rather by this “light” of which I am speaking. That they are not passed over I judge from this, that it is written that God rested on the seventh day from all his works which he made, while the book itself begins thus: “In the beginning God made heaven and earth,” so that he seems to have made nothing else before heaven and earth. Since, then, he began with heaven and earth, and the earth itself which he made first was, as Scripture goes on to say, invisible and unformed, and, since light was not yet made, darkness was certainly upon the abyss, that is, upon a kind of undistinguished confusion of earth and water (for where there is no light there must be darkness); and then, if all things were set in order by creating which are told as completed in six days, how would the angels be passed over, as though they were not among the works of God, from which he rested on the seventh day? That the angels are God's work, however, though not passed over here, is not clearly expressed; but elsewhere Holy Scripture testifies to it in the clearest voice. For in the hymn of the three men in the furnace, after it had been said first, “Bless the Lord, all you works of the Lord,” in the listing of those works the angels too are named; and in the psalm it is sung: “Praise the Lord from the heavens, praise him in the heights; praise him, all his angels, praise him, all his hosts; praise him, sun and moon, praise him, all you stars and light; praise him, heavens of heavens, and the waters that are above the heavens; let them praise the name of the Lord; for he spoke and they were made, he commanded and they were created.” Here too it is divinely said most plainly that the angels were made by God, since, after they had been mentioned among the other heavenly things, it is added of them all, “He spoke and they were made.” Who, further, will dare to suppose that the angels were made after all the things enumerated in the six days? But even if anyone is so foolish, that scripture of equal authority refutes this vanity, where God says: “When the stars were made, all my angels praised me with a loud voice.” So the angels already existed when the stars were made. But the stars were made on the fourth day. Shall we then say that they were made on the third day? Far from it. For what was made on that day is plain: the earth was separated from the waters, and these two elements took on their distinct forms after their kind, and the earth brought forth whatever clings to it by roots. On the second day, then? Not this either. For then the firmament was made between the upper and lower waters and called heaven; and in this firmament the stars were made on the fourth day. Clearly, then, if the angels belong to the works of God of these days, they are that light which received the name of “day”; and to commend its unity it was not called “the first day” but “one day.” Nor is the second or third or any other day a different day; but the same one day was repeated to complete the number six or seven, because of a sixfold or sevenfold knowledge: sixfold of the works which God made, and sevenfold of God's rest. For when God said, “Let there be light, and there was light,” if the creation of the angels is rightly understood in this light, they were certainly made partakers of the eternal light, which is the unchangeable wisdom of God itself, through which all things were made, whom we call the only-begotten Son of God; so that, enlightened by the light by which they were created, they became light and were called day by participation in the unchangeable light and day, which is the Word of God, through whom both they and all things were made. For “the true light, which enlightens every man coming into this world,” also enlightens every pure angel, so that he is light not in himself but in God; and if an angel turns away from him, he becomes impure, as are all those who are called unclean spirits, no longer “light in the Lord” but darkness in themselves, deprived of participation in the eternal light. For evil has no nature; but the loss of good has received the name of evil.