City of God 13.10–13.18

Chapter 10. Whether the life of mortals should be called death rather than life.

For from the moment anyone begins to exist in this body that is to die, the work of bringing death never ceases in it. For its changeableness brings this about through the whole time of this life (if indeed it is to be called life), that it comes to death. For there is no one who is not nearer to it after a year than a year before, and tomorrow than today, and today than yesterday, and a little later than now, and now than a little before; since whatever time is lived is taken from the span of living, and every day what remains becomes less and less, so that the time of this life is nothing else at all than a race to death, in which no one is allowed to stand still even a little or to go somewhat more slowly; but all are pressed on with equal motion and driven by no different approach. For he whose life was shorter did not pass his day more quickly than he whose life was longer; but, since equal moments were snatched equally from both, one had nearer, the other farther off, the goal to which both were running with no unequal speed. It is one thing to have covered more of the road, another to have walked more slowly. He, then, who passes longer spans of time until death does not go more slowly, but completes more of the journey. Further, if each begins to die, that is, to be in death, from the moment death itself, that is, the subtraction of life, begins to work in him (since, when the subtraction is finished, he will then be after death, not in death), then surely from the moment he begins to exist in this body he is in death. For what else is done in each day, hour, and moment, until, these being used up, the death that was being worked is fulfilled, and the time begins that is after death, which, while life was being subtracted, was in death? Never, then, is man in life from the moment he is in this body, which is dying rather than living, if he cannot be in life and death at once. Or is he rather in life and death at once: in life, namely, in which he lives until it is all taken away; but in death, because he is already dying when life is being taken away? For if he is not in life, what is it that is taken away until its consumption is complete? But if he is not in death, what is this very subtraction of life? For it is not in vain that, when life has been wholly taken away from the body, it is then said to be after death, unless because it was death while it was being taken away. For if, when it has been taken away, man is not in death but after death, when, if not while it is being taken away, will he be in death?

Chapter 11. Whether anyone can be at once living and dead.

But if it is absurd for us to say that a man is already in death before he reaches death (for what does he approach in passing the times of his life, if he is already in it?), especially since it is very unusual to say that he is at once living and dying, since he cannot be at once waking and sleeping, we must ask when he will be dying. For before death comes, he is not dying but living; but when death has come, he will be dead, not dying. The one, then, is still before death, the other already after death. When, then, is he in death? For then he is dying; so that, as there are three things when we say before death, in death, after death, so to the three correspond the three, living, dying, and dead. When, then, he is dying, that is, in death, where he is neither living, which is before death, nor dead, which is after death, but dying, that is, in death, is most difficult to define. For as long as the soul is in the body, especially if feeling is present too, beyond doubt the man, who consists of soul and body, lives, and so must be said to be still before death, not in death; but when the soul has departed and taken away all feeling of the body, he is then said to be after death and dead. There perishes, then, between the two, the time in which he would be dying or in death; since, if he still lives, he is before death; if he has ceased to live, he is already after death. He is never, then, found to be dying, that is, in death. So also in the passage of times the present is sought and not found, because it is without any extent through which one passes from future to past. Must we not beware, then, lest by this reasoning it be said that there is no death of the body? For if it exists, when does it exist, which can be in no one and in which no one can be? Since, if one is living, it is not yet, because this is before death, not in death; but if living has already ceased, it no longer is, because this too is after death, not in death. But again, if there is no death, what is it that is called before death or after death? For this too is said in vain if there is no death. And would that by living well in paradise we had brought it about that there were really no death! But as it is, it not only exists but is so distressing that it can neither be explained by any form of speech nor avoided by any reasoning.

Let us speak, then, according to custom (for we ought not to do otherwise), and say “before death,” before death happens, as it is written: “Praise no man before his death.” Let us say too, when it has happened: “After the death of this or that man, this or that was done.” Let us speak also of the present time as we can, as when we say: “That man, when dying, made his will,” and, “When dying he left this and that to these and those,” although he could not do this at all unless living, and did it rather before death, not in death. Let us speak also as the divine Scripture speaks, which does not hesitate to say that even the dead are not after death but in death. Hence is that saying: “For in death there is no one who remembers you.” For until they come to life again, they are rightly said to be in death, as anyone is said to be in sleep until he wakes; although we call those who are in sleep sleeping, yet we cannot in the same way call those who are already dead dying. For they are no longer dying who, as far as concerns the death of the body, of which we are now speaking, are already separated from their bodies. But this is what I said cannot be explained by any form of speech: how either the dying are said to live, or those already dead are said to be still in death even after death. For how are they after death if they are still in death? Especially since we do not call them dying, as we call those who are in sleep sleeping, and those in languor languishing, and those in pain certainly suffering, and those in life living; but the dead, before they rise again, are said to be in death, and yet cannot be called dying.

Hence I think it has come about not unfittingly or incongruously, though not by human effort, perhaps by divine judgment, that the grammarians could not decline this verb moritur (“he dies”) in the Latin language by the rule by which others of the kind are declined. For from oritur (“he rises”) comes the past-tense verb ortus est; and any similar verbs are declined by their past participles. But from moritur, if we ask for the past-tense verb, the usual answer is mortuus est, with the letter u doubled. For mortuus is said in the same way as fatuus, arduus, conspicuus, and similar words, which are not of past time but, since they are nouns, are declined without tense. But that word, as if to decline what cannot be declined, is put as a noun in place of the past participle. It has come about fittingly, then, that as the thing it signifies cannot be declined (avoided) by acting, so the word itself could not be declined in speaking. Yet it can be brought about, with the help of the grace of our Redeemer, that we may at least decline (avoid) the second death. For that is heavier and the worst of all evils, which comes not by the separation of soul and body but rather by the embrace of both in eternal punishment. There, on the contrary, men will not be before death and after death, but always in death; and therefore never living, never dead, but dying without end. For never will it be worse for man in death than where death itself will be without death.

Chapter 12. What death God threatened to the first human beings if they transgressed his command.

When, then, it is asked what death God threatened to the first human beings if they transgressed the command they had received from him and did not keep obedience, whether that of the soul, or of the body, or of the whole man, or that which is called the second, the answer must be: all. For the first consists of two; the whole consists of all. For as the whole earth consists of many lands, and the whole church of many churches, so the whole of death consists of all deaths. For the first consists of two, one of the soul, the other of the body; so that the first is the death of the whole man, when the soul, without God and without the body, pays penalties for a time; but the second when the soul, without God but with the body, pays eternal penalties. When, therefore, God said to that first man, whom he had placed in paradise, about the forbidden food, “On whatever day you eat of it, you will die the death,” that threat embraced not only the former part of the first death, where the soul is deprived of God, nor only the latter, where the body is deprived of the soul, nor only the whole first death itself, where the soul, separated both from God and from the body, is punished; but whatever there is of death, up to the last, which is called the second, after which there is none.

Chapter 13. What was the first penalty that the transgression of the first human beings felt.

For after the transgression of the command had taken place, as soon as divine grace forsook them, they were confounded at the nakedness of their bodies. Hence they covered their shameful parts with fig leaves, which were perhaps the first found by them in their confusion; these were the same members before, but they were not shameful. They felt, then, a new motion of their disobedient flesh, as a punishment answering to their own disobedience. For now the soul, delighting in its own freedom to do perversely and disdaining to serve God, was stripped of the former service of the body; and because it had of its own will forsaken the higher Lord, it did not hold the lower servant to its own will, nor did it have the flesh subject in every way, as it could always have had it had it itself remained subject to God. Then, therefore, the flesh began to lust against the spirit, and with this conflict we are born, drawing the origin of death, and bearing in our members and vitiated nature its contest, or its victory, from the first transgression.

Chapter 14. In what state man was made by God, and into what lot he fell by the choice of his own will.

For God, the author of natures, not of faults, created man upright; but he, depraved of his own accord and justly condemned, begot the depraved and condemned. For we were all in that one man, since we all were that one man who fell into sin through the woman, who was made from him before sin. The form in which each of us would live had not yet been created and distributed to us individually; but there already was the seminal nature from which we would be propagated; and when this was vitiated because of sin, bound by the chain of death, and justly condemned, man would not be born of man in any other condition. And so from the bad use of free will arose the series of this calamity, which leads the human race, depraved in its origin as from a corrupted root, by a chain of miseries to the destruction of the second death, which has no end, excepting only those who are freed by the grace of God.

Chapter 15. That Adam, when about to sin, first forsook God before he was forsaken by God, and that the first death of the soul was to depart from God.

Therefore, even if in the words, “You will die the death,” since it was not said “deaths,” we understand only that death which occurs when the soul is forsaken by its life, which God is to it (for it was not forsaken in order that it should forsake, but it forsook in order to be forsaken; for in its evil its own will comes first, but in its good the will of its Creator comes first, whether to make it when it did not exist, or to remake it because it had fallen and perished); even if, I say, we understand that God announced this death when he said, “On the day you eat of it, you will die the death,” as if he said, “On the day you forsake me by disobedience, I will forsake you by justice,” yet certainly in that death the others too were announced, which were beyond doubt to follow. For in that a disobedient motion arose in the flesh of the disobedient soul, because of which they covered their shameful parts, one death was felt, that in which God forsook the soul. This was signified by his words when he said to the man hiding himself in senseless fear: “Adam, where are you?” not asking out of ignorance, but reproving and admonishing him to consider where he was, in whom God was not. But when the soul itself forsook the body, worn out by age and exhausted by old age, the other death came into experience, of which God, still punishing sin, had said to man: “You are earth, and to earth you will go”; so that from these two that first death, which is of the whole man, might be completed, which the second follows at the last, unless man is freed by grace. For the body, which is from earth, would not return to earth except by its own death, which befalls it when it is forsaken by its life, that is, the soul. Hence it is agreed among Christians who truly hold the catholic faith that even the death of the body itself was inflicted on us not by a law of nature, by which God made no death for man, but as the desert of sin; since God, punishing sin, said to the man in whom we all then were: “You are earth, and to earth you will go.”

Chapter 16. Of the philosophers who do not think that the separation of the soul from the body is penal, though Plato represents the supreme god as promising the lesser gods that they will never be stripped of their bodies.

But the philosophers, against whose slanders we are defending the city of God, that is, his church, think they wisely mock our saying that the separation of the soul from the body is to be counted among its penalties, since they think that its perfect happiness comes about when, stripped of every body whatever, it returns to God simple and alone and, as it were, naked. If I found nothing in their writings by which this opinion could be refuted, I would have to argue more laboriously to show that it is not the body as such but the corruptible body that is burdensome to the soul. Hence that saying from our Scriptures which we recalled in the preceding book: “For the corruptible body weighs down the soul.” By adding “corruptible,” he surely declared that the soul is weighed down not by any body whatever, but by such as it has become from sin, the punishment following. And even if he had not added it, we ought to understand nothing else.

But since Plato most plainly declares that the gods made by the supreme God have immortal bodies, and represents God himself, by whom they were made, promising them as a great benefit that they will remain forever with their bodies and will not be loosed from them by any death, why do these men, to harass the Christian faith, pretend not to know what they know, or even, contradicting themselves, prefer to speak against themselves, provided they do not cease to contradict us? These are certainly the words of Plato, as Cicero translated them into Latin, in which he represents the supreme god addressing the gods whom he made and saying: “You who are sprung from the seed of gods, attend: those works of which I am the parent and maker are indissoluble against my will, although everything that has been bound together can be loosed; but it is by no means good to wish to dissolve what has been joined by reason. But since you have been born, you cannot indeed be immortal and indissoluble; yet you will by no means be dissolved, nor will any fates of death destroy you, nor will they be stronger than my counsel, which is a greater bond for your perpetuity than those by which you were bound together.” See, Plato says that the gods are mortal by the binding together of body and soul, and yet immortal by the will and counsel of the god by whom they were made. If, then, it is a punishment for the soul to be bound in any body whatever, why does the god, addressing them as though anxious lest they should die, that is, be dissolved from the body, make them secure of their immortality, not because of their nature, which is compound, not simple, but because of his own most invincible will, by which he is able to bring it about that things born do not perish and things joined are not loosed, but endure incorruptibly?

Whether Plato says this truly of the stars is another question. For it is not to be granted him at once that those globes of lights, or little orbs shining with bodily light over the earth by day or by night, live by certain souls of their own, and these intellectual and happy, which he also insistently affirms of the whole world itself, as of one very great living being in which all other living beings are contained. But this, as I said, is another question, which we have not undertaken to discuss now. I thought only this should be mentioned against these men who glory in being called or being Platonists, through pride in which name they are ashamed to be Christians, lest a name shared with the common people should cheapen the cloaked few, who are the more puffed up the fewer they are; and who, seeking something to find fault with in Christian doctrine, attack the eternity of bodies, as if these things were contrary to one another, that we should both seek the soul's happiness and wish it always to be in the body, bound as it were by a wretched chain; whereas their author and master Plato says that it was granted as a gift by the supreme god to the gods made by him, that they should never die, that is, be separated from the bodies to which he joined them.

Chapter 17. Against those who assert that earthly bodies cannot become incorruptible and eternal.

These men also contend that earthly bodies cannot be everlasting, although they do not doubt that the whole earth itself, placed in the middle as a member of their god, not the supreme one indeed but still a great one, that is, of this whole world, is everlasting. Since, then, that supreme god made for them another whom they think a god, namely this world, to be ranked above the other gods below him, and they think it a living being, with a soul, namely, as they assert, rational or intellectual, enclosed in so great a mass of its body; and since he set in their places and arranged as members of that body the four elements, whose joining they want to be indissoluble and everlasting, lest their god, so great, should ever die: what reason is there that in the body of the greater living being the earth, as its middle member, should be eternal, and the bodies of other earthly living beings could not be eternal if God willed it as he wills that? But earth, they say, must be returned to earth, from which the earthly bodies of animals were taken; and hence, they say, it happens that these must be dissolved and die and in this way be restored to the stable and everlasting earth from which they were taken. If someone asserts the same of fire and says that the bodies which were taken from it to become heavenly living beings must be returned to the universal fire, will not the immortality which Plato promised to such gods, as though the supreme god were speaking, perish by the violence, as it were, of this argument? Or does it not happen there because God does not will it, whose will, as Plato says, no force overcomes? What then prevents God from being able to bring this about in earthly bodies too, since Plato confesses that God can bring it about that things born do not perish, and things bound are not loosed, and things taken from the elements are not returned, and that souls placed in bodies never forsake them and enjoy with them immortality and everlasting happiness? Why, then, can he not bring it about that earthly things too do not die? Or is God not powerful as far as Christians believe, but only as far as Platonists wish? No doubt the philosophers could know the counsel and power of God, and the prophets could not! Whereas on the contrary his Spirit taught the prophets of God to declare his will, as far as he deigned, while human conjecture deceived the philosophers in coming to know it.

But they ought not to have been so far deceived, not only by ignorance but also by obstinacy, as to contradict themselves most openly, asserting with great force of argument that the soul, in order to be happy, must flee not only the earthly body but every body, and again saying that the gods have most happy souls and yet are bound to eternal bodies, the heavenly ones to fiery bodies, and the soul of Jupiter himself, whom they take to be this world, enclosed in all the bodily elements altogether, by which this whole mass rises from earth to heaven. For Plato thinks that this soul is spread from the innermost middle of the earth, which geometers call the center, through all its parts up to the highest and furthest reaches of heaven, and extended by musical numbers, so that this world is a living being, very great, most happy, and everlasting, whose soul both holds the perfect felicity of wisdom and does not leave its own body, and whose body both lives forever from it and, though not simple but compounded of so many and such great bodies, cannot dull and slow it. Since, then, they allow these things to their own conjectures, why will they not believe that by the divine will and power earthly bodies can be made immortal, in which souls, separated from them by no death, weighed down by no burdens of theirs, may live everlastingly and happily, as they assert their gods can in fiery bodies, and Jupiter himself, their king, in all the bodily elements? For if, for the soul to be happy, every body must be fled, let their gods flee from the globes of the stars, let Jupiter flee from heaven and earth; or if they cannot, let them be judged wretched. But these men want neither: they neither dare to grant their gods separation from bodies, lest they seem to worship mortals, nor deprivation of happiness, lest they confess them unhappy. It is not, then, all bodies that must be fled for the attainment of happiness, but corruptible, troublesome, heavy, dying ones; not such as the goodness of God made for the first human beings, but such as the penalty of sin compelled them to be.

Chapter 18. Of earthly bodies, which the philosophers affirm cannot be in heavenly places, because what is earthly is drawn back to the earth by its natural weight.

But, they say, the natural weight of earthly bodies must either keep them on earth or force them to earth, and therefore they cannot be in heaven. The first human beings, indeed, were on an earth, wooded and fruitful, which received the name of paradise; but since this too must be answered, whether because of the body of Christ, with which he ascended into heaven, or because of those of the saints, such as they will be in the resurrection, let them look a little more attentively at these earthly weights. For if human art brings it about that from metals which sink at once when placed in water, vessels made in certain ways can even float, how much more credibly and effectively can some hidden mode of God's working, by whose most omnipotent will, Plato says, neither can things born perish nor things bound together be loosed (since incorporeal things are joined to corporeal far more wonderfully than any bodies to any bodies), grant to earthly masses that they be pressed down to the depths by no weight, and grant to the souls themselves, perfectly happy, that they place their bodies, though earthly yet now incorruptible, wherever they will and move them where they will, with the easiest position and motion! Or if angels do this, and snatch up any earthly animals from wherever they please and set them wherever they please, are we to believe either that they cannot, or that they feel burdened? Why then should we not believe that the spirits of the saints, made perfect and happy by divine gift, can without any difficulty carry their bodies where they will and set them where they will? For though with earthly bodies, as we are used to feeling loads when carrying them, the greater the quantity, the greater the weight, so that more pounds press more than fewer, yet the soul carries the members of its own flesh more lightly when they are robust in health than when they are thin in sickness. And though to others who carry him a healthy and strong man is heavier than a thin and sickly one, yet he himself is more agile in moving and carrying his own body when in good health he has more bulk than when in plague or famine he has very little strength. So much does it count, even in having earthly bodies, still corruptible and mortal, not the weight of quantity but the manner of balance. And who can express in words how great the distance is between what we call health at present and the immortality to come? The philosophers, then, do not refute our faith by the weights of bodies. For I do not wish to ask why they do not believe that an earthly body can be in heaven, when the whole earth is balanced on nothing. For perhaps from the very middle place of the world, since all heavier things converge on it, a more plausible argument could be made. This I say: if the lesser gods, to whom Plato entrusted the making of man among the other earthly living beings, were able, as he says, to remove from fire the quality of burning and leave that of shining, which would flash out through the eyes, shall we then hesitate to grant to the supreme God, to whose will and power Plato granted that things born should not die, and that things so diverse, so unlike, that is, bodily and incorporeal, joined to one another, could be separated by no dissolution, that from the flesh of man, to whom he gives immortality, he should take away corruption, leave its nature, keep the harmony of its shape and members, and remove the sluggishness of weight? But of the faith in the resurrection of the dead and of their immortal bodies we must speak more carefully, if God wills, at the end of this work.