City of God 12.24–13.9

Chapter 24. Of the nature of the human soul, created in the image of God.

God therefore made man in his own image. For he created for him such a soul that by reason and understanding he would be more excellent than all the animals of land and water and air, which did not have a mind of this kind. And when he had formed the man from the dust of the earth, and had put into him a soul such as I have described, either one he had already made, by breathing, or rather made by breathing, and willed that breath which he made by breathing (for what else is to breathe than to make breath?) to be the soul of man, he also made him a wife, to help in generation, from a bone taken from his side, doing it as God. For these things are not to be thought of in a fleshly way, as we are used to seeing craftsmen fashioning, from whatever earthly material, with bodily limbs, what they can by the skill of their art. The hand of God is the power of God, who works even visible things invisibly. But those who measure the power and wisdom of God, by which he knows how and is able to make even seeds themselves without seeds, by these usual and everyday works think these things fabulous rather than true; and the things that were first established, since they do not know them, they think of without faith; as if these very things which they know about human conceptions and births would not seem even more incredible if they were told to the inexperienced; although even these very things most people ascribe more to the bodily causes of nature than to the works of the divine mind.

Chapter 25. Whether angels can be called creators of any creature, even the least.

But in these books we have no business with those who do not believe that the divine mind makes or cares for these things. As for those who believe their Plato, that all mortal living things, among which man held the chief place and one akin to the gods themselves, were made not by that supreme God who fashioned the world but by other lesser gods whom he indeed created, by his permission or command: if they are free of the superstition by which they seek a way to seem justified in offering rites and sacrifices to these as their makers, they will easily be free also of the error of this opinion. For it is not lawful to believe and say that anyone but God is the creator of any nature, however small and mortal, even before it can be understood. And the angels, whom they more willingly call gods, even if, by command or permission, they apply their activity to the things that are born in the world, we no more call creators of living things than we call farmers creators of crops and trees.

Chapter 26. That every nature and every form of the whole creation is made and formed only by the work of God.

For there is one kind of form which is applied from outside to any bodily matter, as potters and smiths and craftsmen of that kind work, who also paint and mold forms like the bodies of living creatures; and there is another which has its efficient causes from within, from the secret and hidden decision of a living and understanding nature, which, itself not made, makes not only the natural forms of bodies but even the very souls of living things. Let the first-named form be attributed to any craftsmen; but this other only to one craftsman, God, the creator and founder, who made the world itself and the angels without any world and without any angels. For by the same divine and, so to speak, effective power, which knows not how to be made but only to make, by which the roundness of the heaven and the roundness of the sun received their form when the world was made, by that same divine and effective power, which knows not how to be made but only to make, the roundness of the eye and the roundness of an apple and the other natural shapes received their form, which we see in all things that are born, not applied from outside, but by the inmost power of the Creator, who said, “I fill heaven and earth,” and whose wisdom it is that “reaches mightily from end to end and orders all things sweetly.” What service, therefore, the angels, made first, gave to the Creator as he made the rest, I do not know; nor do I dare to attribute to them what perhaps they cannot do, nor ought I to take away from them what they can do. But the creation and establishment of all natures, by which it comes about that they are natures at all, I attribute, with their own approval, to that God to whom they themselves know with thanksgiving that they owe their being.

We do not, then, call farmers the creators of any fruits, since we read: “Neither he who plants is anything, nor he who waters, but God who gives the growth”; nor even the earth itself, though it seems the fruitful mother of all, which pushes forward what bursts out in sprouts and holds what is fixed by roots, since we likewise read: “God gives it a body as he wills, and to each of the seeds its own body.” So too we ought not to call a woman the creator of her offspring, but rather him who said to one of his servants: “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you.” And although the soul of a pregnant woman, affected in this way or that, can as it were clothe the fetus with certain qualities, as Jacob did with the peeled rods, so that the flocks were born varied in color, yet she no more made the nature that is born than she made herself. Whatever bodily or seminal causes, then, are applied to the generation of things, whether by the operations of angels or of men or of any animals, or by the unions of males and females; whatever desires or emotions of the mother's soul can sprinkle some features or colors on the tender and soft conceptions: the natures themselves, which are affected this way or that in their own kind, are made by none but the supreme God, whose hidden power, penetrating all things with undefilable presence, makes to be whatever in any way is, in so far as it is; for without his making it, it would not be of this kind or that, but could not be at all. Therefore, if in the case of that form which craftsmen impose from outside on bodily things, we say that the city of Rome and the city of Alexandria had as founders not the smiths and architects but the kings by whose will, counsel, and command they were built, the one Romulus, the other Alexander, how much more ought we to call none but God the founder of natures, who neither makes anything from a matter which he has not himself made, nor has workmen except those he himself has created; and if he were to withdraw from things his, so to speak, constructive power, they would not exist, just as they did not exist before they were made. But I say “before” in eternity, not in time. For who else is the creator of times but he who made those things by whose motions times run?

Chapter 27. Of the opinion of the Platonists, who thought that the angels were indeed created by God, but were themselves the creators of human bodies.

Plato indeed held that the lesser gods, made by the supreme God, were the makers of the other living things, so that these received the immortal part from him, while they themselves wove on the mortal part. So he held them to be the creators not of our souls but of our bodies. Hence, since Porphyry says that for the purification of the soul every body must be fled, and holds with his Plato and other Platonists that those who have lived immoderately and dishonorably return to mortal bodies to pay their penalties (Plato even to the bodies of beasts, Porphyry only to those of men), it follows for them to say that these gods, whom they want us to worship as our parents and founders, are nothing else than the smiths of our fetters or prisons, not our makers but those who shut us up and bind us in wretched workhouses and very heavy chains. Either, then, let the Platonists stop threatening souls with punishments from these bodies, or let them not preach to us that those gods are to be worshipped whose work in us they urge us to flee and escape as much as we can; while both are in fact utterly false. For souls do not pay penalties in this way when they are rolled back again into this life, and of all living things, whether in heaven or on earth, there is no founder but him by whom heaven and earth were made. For if there is no reason for living in this body except to pay penalties, how does the same Plato say that the world could not have been made most beautiful and best unless it were filled with all kinds of living things, that is, both immortal and mortal? But if our creation, by which we were founded even as mortals, is a divine gift, how is it a punishment to return to these bodies, that is, to divine benefits? And if God, as Plato constantly recalls, contained in his eternal intelligence the forms of all living things, as of the whole world, how did he not himself found them all? Or would he be unwilling to be the maker of some, the art of making which his ineffable and ineffably praiseworthy mind possessed?

Chapter 28. That the whole fullness of the human race arose in the first man, in whom God foresaw what part was to be honored with reward and what part condemned to punishment.

Rightly, therefore, true religion acknowledges and proclaims the same founder of the whole world as of all living things, that is, of both souls and bodies. Among these earthly things man, the chief of them, was made by him in his image, one, for the reason I have given, and perhaps some other greater one that lies hidden; but he was not left alone. For there is nothing so quarrelsome by fault, so social by nature, as this race. Nor could human nature speak more fittingly against the fault of discord, whether to prevent its arising or to heal it once it had arisen, than by the remembrance of that parent whom God willed to create one for this reason, that a multitude might be propagated from him, so that by this reminder a concordant unity might be preserved even among many. And that the woman was made for him from his side, here too it is sufficiently signified how dear the union of husband and wife ought to be. These works of God are unusual precisely because they are the first. But those who do not believe them ought not to believe any prodigies that have occurred; for these too would not be called prodigies if they were produced in the usual course of nature. But what, under so great a government of divine providence, is produced in vain, though its cause may be hidden? A sacred psalm says: “Come and see the works of the Lord, what prodigies he has set upon the earth.” Why, then, the woman was made from the man's side, and what this first prodigy, as it were, prefigured, will be said in another place, as far as God helps me. Now, since this book must be closed, let us consider that in this man who was made first there arose in the human race, not yet indeed in evident fact but already in God's foreknowledge, societies like two cities. For from him were to come men, some to be joined with the evil angels in punishment, others with the good in reward, by the hidden judgment of God, but a just one. For since it is written, “All the ways of the Lord are mercy and truth,” his grace cannot be unjust nor his justice cruel.

Chapter 1. Of the fall of the first human beings, through which mortality was contracted.

The most difficult questions about the rise of our world and the beginning of the human race having been dealt with, the order of things now requires us to undertake a discussion of the fall of the first man, or rather of the first human beings, and of the origin and propagation of human death. For God had not made men in the same way as the angels, so that even if they sinned they could not die at all; but so that, if they fulfilled the duty of obedience, angelic immortality and a blessed eternity would follow without the intervention of death, but if they were disobedient, death would punish them by a most just condemnation; as we have also said in the preceding book.

Chapter 2. Of the death which can befall the soul, which will in some way always live, and of that to which the body is subject.

But I see that I must discuss the very kind of death a little more carefully. For although the human soul is truly said to be immortal, it too has a certain death of its own. For it is called immortal because in some manner, however slight, it does not cease to live and feel; but the body is called mortal because it can be forsaken by all life and does not live at all by itself. The death of the soul, then, occurs when God forsakes it, as the death of the body when the soul forsakes it. The death of both, therefore, that is, of the whole man, is when the soul, forsaken by God, forsakes the body. For then neither does it live from God nor the body from it. And such a death of the whole man is followed by that which the authority of the divine oracles calls the second death. The Savior signified this when he said: “Fear him who has power to destroy both body and soul in Gehenna.” Since this does not happen before the soul has been so joined to the body that they are separated by no severance, it may seem strange how the body is said to be killed by that death in which it is not forsaken by the soul but, animated and sensate, is tormented. For in that final and everlasting punishment, of which we must speak more carefully in its place, it is rightly called the death of the soul, because it does not live from God; but how is it the death of the body, when it lives from the soul? For otherwise it cannot feel the bodily torments that will be after the resurrection. Or is it because life of any kind is some good, and pain an evil, that the body must not be said to live, in which the soul is the cause not of living but of suffering?

The soul lives from God, then, when it lives well; for it cannot live well unless God works in it what is good; but the body lives from the soul when the soul lives in the body, whether or not the soul itself lives from God. For the life of the wicked in their bodies is the life not of their souls but of their bodies, which their souls can give them even when dead, that is, forsaken by God, since their own life, however slight, from which they are also immortal, does not cease. But in the final condemnation, although man does not cease to feel, yet because the feeling itself is neither sweet with pleasure nor wholesome with rest, but penal with pain, it is not undeservedly called death rather than life. And it is called second because it comes after that first, in which there is a severance of natures that cohere, whether of God and the soul or of the soul and the body. Of the first death of the body, then, it can be said that it is good to the good and evil to the evil; but the second, beyond doubt, as it belongs to none of the good, so is good to none.

Chapter 3. Whether death, which through the sin of the first human beings passed to all men, is the penalty of sin even in the saints.

A question arises which must not be passed over: whether in truth death, by which soul and body are separated, is good to the good; for if so, how can it be maintained that it is also the penalty of sin? For the first human beings would certainly not have suffered it had they not sinned. How then can that be good to the good which could happen only to the evil? And again, if it could happen only to the evil, it ought not to be good to the good but not exist for them. For why would there be any penalty for those in whom there was nothing to punish? Therefore it must be confessed that the first human beings were indeed so established that, had they not sinned, they would have experienced no kind of death; but that these same first sinners were so punished with death that whatever sprang from their stock would also be held liable to the same penalty. For nothing else would be born of them than what they themselves had been. For according to the greatness of that guilt, the condemnation changed their nature for the worse, so that what came first as a penalty in the first human beings who sinned followed as nature in the rest who are born. For man is not from man as man was from dust. For dust was the material for making man, but man is the parent for begetting man. Hence what earth is, flesh is not, although flesh was made from earth; but what man the parent is, man the offspring is too. In the first man, then, the whole human race was present, to pass through the woman into its progeny, when that union of the couple received the divine sentence of its condemnation; and what man became, not when he was created but when he sinned and was punished, that he begot, so far as concerns the origin of sin and death.

For he was not reduced by sin or punishment to that infantile dullness and weakness of mind and body which we see in little children (God willed these to be, as it were, the beginnings of whelps, whose parents he had cast down into a bestial life and death, as it is written: “Man, when he was in honor, did not understand; he has been compared to the senseless cattle and has become like them”; except that we see infants weaker even in the use and movement of their limbs and in the sense of seeking and avoiding than the tenderest young of other animals; as if human strength would rise so much more excellently above the other living things the more it has held back its impetus, like an arrow drawn back when the bow is stretched). Not, then, to these infantile rudiments was the first man brought down or driven by his unlawful presumption and just condemnation; but human nature was vitiated and changed in him so far that he suffered in his members a rebellious disobedience of concupiscence and was bound by the necessity of dying; and so he begot, as what he had become by fault and punishment, offspring liable to sin and death. If infants are loosed from this bond of sin through the grace of Christ the Mediator, they can suffer only this death which separates the soul from the body; but, freed from the obligation of sin, they do not pass into that second, endlessly penal one.

Chapter 4. Why death, the penalty of sin, is not taken away from those who have been absolved from sin by the grace of regeneration.

If anyone is troubled why those whose guilt is abolished by grace should suffer even this death, if it too is the penalty of sin, this question has already been treated and resolved in another work of ours, which we wrote On the Baptism of Infants. There it was said that the experience of separation from the body is left to the soul, although the bond of guilt has already been removed, because, if the immortality of the body immediately followed the sacrament of regeneration, faith itself would be weakened, which is faith only when what is not yet seen in reality is awaited in hope. And by the strength and struggle of faith, at least in those of older years, even the fear of death had to be overcome, which was most conspicuous in the holy martyrs. Of that struggle there would certainly be no victory, no glory (since there could be no struggle at all), if after the washing of regeneration the saints could no longer suffer bodily death. With little children to be baptized, who would not rather run to the grace of Christ in order not to be released from the body? And so faith would not be tested by an invisible reward, but would no longer even be faith, seeking and taking at once the reward of its work.

But now, by a greater and more wonderful grace of the Savior, the penalty of sin has been turned to the uses of righteousness. For then it was said to man, “You will die if you sin”; now it is said to the martyr, “Die, lest you sin.” Then it was said, “If you transgress the commandment, you will die the death”; now it is said, “If you refuse death, you will transgress the commandment.” What had then to be feared so as not to sin must now be undertaken lest one sin. Thus, by the ineffable mercy of God, even the penalty of faults passes into the weapons of virtue, and even the punishment of the sinner becomes the merit of the righteous. For then death was acquired by sinning; now righteousness is fulfilled by dying. But this is in the holy martyrs, to whom one of two things is offered by the persecutor, either to forsake the faith or to endure death. For the righteous prefer to suffer by believing what the first wicked ones suffered by not believing. For unless those had sinned, they would not have died; but these will sin unless they die. Those, then, died because they sinned; these do not sin because they die. By the guilt of those it came about that they came into punishment; by the punishment of these it comes about that they do not come into guilt; not because death, which was formerly an evil, has become some good, but because God has granted so great a grace to faith that death, which is plainly contrary to life, has become the instrument by which one passes to life.

Chapter 5. That as the wicked make bad use of the law, which is good, so the righteous make good use of death, which is evil.

The apostle, wishing to show how much power sin has to harm when grace does not come to the rescue, did not hesitate to call even the law itself, by which sin is forbidden, the power of sin. “The sting of death,” he says, “is sin, and the power of sin is the law.” Most truly indeed. For prohibition increases the desire for the unlawful deed when righteousness is not so loved that the desire to sin is overcome by delight in it. And that true righteousness may be loved and delight, only divine grace comes to the rescue. But lest the law should be thought evil because it was called the power of sin, he himself, turning over a question of this kind in another place, says: “So the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and just and good. Did that which is good, then, become death to me? By no means. But sin, that it might appear as sin, worked death in me through what is good, so that the sinner or sin might become beyond measure sinful through the commandment.” He said “beyond measure” because transgression is added too, when, the lust for sinning having increased, even the law itself is despised. Why did we think this worth mentioning? Because, just as the law is not evil when it increases the concupiscence of sinners, so death is not good when it increases the glory of those who suffer it, when either the law is forsaken for iniquity and makes transgressors, or death is undertaken for the truth and makes martyrs. And so the law indeed is good, because it is the prohibition of sin; but death is evil, because it is the wages of sin; but as injustice makes bad use not only of evil things but also of good ones, so justice makes good use not only of good things but also of evil ones. Hence it comes about that the evil make bad use of the law, although the law is a good, and the good die well, although death is an evil.

Chapter 6. Of the general evil of death, by which the fellowship of soul and body is severed.

Therefore, as far as the death of the body is concerned, that is, the separation of the soul from the body, when those who are called dying suffer it, it is good to no one. For the very force by which the two are torn apart, which had been joined and bound together in the living being, has a harsh feeling contrary to nature, as long as it lasts, until all the feeling is taken away which was present from the very embrace of soul and flesh. Sometimes a single blow to the body or a snatching away of the soul cuts off all this distress and, by its speed, does not allow it to be felt. Yet whatever that is in the dying which, with painful feeling, takes away feeling, it increases the merit of patience when it is borne piously and faithfully; it does not take away the name of punishment. So, while death, from the perpetuated propagation of the first man, is beyond doubt the punishment of the one who is born, yet if it is paid for piety and righteousness, it becomes the glory of the one who is reborn; and though death is the retribution of sin, it sometimes obtains that nothing is paid in retribution to sin.

Chapter 7. Of the death which some who are not regenerated undergo for confessing Christ.

For whoever die for confessing Christ, even without having received the washing of regeneration, it avails them as much for the forgiveness of sins as if they were washed in the sacred font of baptism. For he who said, “If anyone is not reborn of water and the Spirit, he will not enter the kingdom of heaven,” made an exception for these in another saying, where he says no less generally: “Whoever confesses me before men, I will confess him before my Father who is in heaven”; and in another place: “Whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” Hence it is written: “Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints.” For what is more precious than a death by which it comes about that all offenses are forgiven and merits are more abundantly increased? For those who, when they could not put off death, were baptized and departed this life with all their sins blotted out, are not of such great merit as those who, when they could, did not put off death, because they preferred to end their life by confessing Christ than to come to his baptism by denying him. Had they done this, even this, that they had denied Christ for fear of death, would have been forgiven them in that washing, in which even so monstrous a crime was forgiven to those who had killed Christ. But without the abundance of the grace of that Spirit who “breathes where he wills,” how could they love Christ so much that in so great a peril of life, with so great a hope of pardon, they could not deny him? The precious death of the saints, then, to whom the death of Christ was sent before and granted in advance with such great grace that they did not hesitate to spend their own to gain him, has shown that what was formerly appointed for the punishment of sin has been turned to such uses that from it a richer fruit of righteousness is born. Death, then, ought not to seem a good for this reason, that it has been turned to so great a benefit, not by its own force but by divine help; so that what was then set before us to be feared, lest sin be committed, is now set before us to be undertaken, that sin may not be committed, and that committed sin may be blotted out, and the palm due to righteousness be rendered for a great victory.

Chapter 8. That in the saints the acceptance of the first death for the truth is the abolition of the second death.

For if we consider more carefully, even when anyone dies faithfully and laudably for the truth, it is death that is guarded against. For some part of it is accepted precisely so that the whole of it may not befall, and the second besides, which never ends, may not come. For the separation of the soul from the body is accepted, lest, God being separated from the soul, it too should be separated from the body, and so, the first death of the whole man being completed, the everlasting second should follow. Therefore death indeed, as I have said, when the dying suffer it and when it works in them to make them die, is good to no one, but it is laudably endured for the sake of keeping or obtaining good; but when those are in it who are already called dead, it is not absurdly said to be evil to the evil and good to the good. For the souls of the godly, separated from the body, are at rest, while those of the ungodly pay penalties, until the bodies of the former come to life again to eternal life, and those of the latter to eternal death, which is called the second.

Chapter 9. Whether the time of death, in which the sense of life is taken away, should be said to be in the dying or in the dead.

But that time in which souls, separated from the body, are either in good or in evil, is it to be said to be after death rather than in death? For if it is after death, then it is not death itself, which is completed and past, but the present life of the soul after it that is good or bad. But death was evil to them when it existed, that is, when they suffered it while dying, since a heavy and distressing feeling of it was present; and the good make good use of this evil. But death once completed, how is it good or evil, when it no longer exists? Further, if we attend still more carefully, it will appear that not even that is death whose heavy and distressing feeling we said is in the dying. For as long as they feel, they certainly still live; and if they still live, they should be said to be before death rather than in death; since death, when it comes, takes away all bodily feeling, which is distressing as it draws near. And therefore it is hard to explain how we call dying those who are not yet dead, but, with death imminent, are tossed in the last and mortal affliction; although they are rightly called dying, because, when the death that now threatens has come, they are called not dying but dead. No one, then, is dying except the living, since, when he is at so great an extremity of life as those whom we say are breathing their last, surely he who has not yet lost his soul still lives. The same man, then, is at once both dying and living, but approaching death and departing from life; still in life, however, because the soul is in the body; not yet in death, because it has not yet gone from the body. But if, when it has gone, he will not even then be in death but rather after death, who can say when he is in death? For no one will be dying either, if no one can be dying and living at once. For as long as the soul is in the body, we cannot deny that he is living. Or if he should rather be called dying in whose body the work of dying is already going on, and no one can be at once living and dying, I do not know when he is living.