City of God 15.22–16.1

Chapter 22. On the fall of the sons of God, captivated by love of foreign women, for which all, except eight persons, deserved to perish in the flood.

As the human race advanced and grew by this free choice of the will, there came about a mingling and, through shared iniquity, a kind of confusion of the two cities. This evil again found its cause in the female sex; not indeed in the way it did at the beginning (for those women were not then seduced by anyone's deceit and did not persuade the men to sin); but women who from the beginning had been of depraved morals in the earthly city, that is, in the society of the earth-born, were loved by the sons of God, the citizens, that is, of the other city on pilgrimage in this age, for the beauty of their bodies. This good is indeed a gift of God; but he bestows it even on the wicked for this reason, that it may not seem a great good to the good. So, the great good proper to the good being abandoned, there was a fall to the least good, not proper to the good but common to good and wicked; and so the sons of God were captivated by love of the daughters of men, and in order to enjoy them as wives they slid into the ways of the earth-born society, abandoning the godliness they kept in the holy society. For so bodily beauty, a good made by God indeed, but temporal, carnal, and lowest, is wrongly loved when God, the eternal, inward, everlasting good, is put after it; just as, when justice is abandoned, gold too is loved by the greedy, through no sin of the gold, but of the man. So it is with every creature. For since it is good, it can be loved both well and badly: well, that is, when order is kept; badly, when order is disturbed. This I expressed briefly in verse in a certain praise of the Easter candle: “These are yours, they are good, because you, the good one, created them. Nothing of ours is in them, except that we sin in loving, with order neglected, what is created by you instead of you.” But if the Creator is truly loved, that is, if he himself is loved and not something else in his place which is not he, he cannot be loved badly. For love itself must be loved in an ordered way, the love by which what ought to be loved is loved well, so that there may be in us the virtue by which one lives well. Hence it seems to me that a brief and true definition of virtue is “the order of love”; which is why in the holy Song of Songs the bride of Christ, the city of God, sings: “Order love in me.” So, the order of this charity, that is, of affection and love, being disturbed, the sons of God neglected God and loved the daughters of men. By these two names the two cities are sufficiently distinguished. For those men too were sons of men by nature; but they had begun to have another name by grace. For in the same Scripture, where the sons of God are said to have loved the daughters of men, they are also called angels of God. Hence many think they were not men but angels.

Chapter 23. Whether it is to be believed that angels, being of spiritual substance, were captivated by love of beautiful women and entered into marriage with them, from whom giants were born.

In the third book of this work we mentioned in passing and left unsolved the question whether angels, since they are spirits, can have bodily intercourse with women. For it is written: “Who makes his angels spirits”; that is, those who are spirits by nature he makes his angels, by laying on them the office of bearing messages. For the one called in Greek ἄγγελος, a name which in Latin inflection becomes angelus, is rendered in the Latin tongue nuntius, “messenger.” But whether he went on to add their bodies when he said, “and his ministers a burning fire”, or meant that his ministers ought to burn with love as with a spiritual fire, is uncertain. That angels have appeared to men in such bodies that they could be not only seen but also touched, the same most truthful Scripture testifies. And there is a very widespread report, and many confirm that they have experienced it or heard it from those who had experienced it, whose good faith was not to be doubted, that Silvani and Pans, whom people commonly call incubi, have often behaved shamelessly toward women and sought and achieved intercourse with them; and that certain demons, whom the Gauls call Dusii, constantly attempt and accomplish this impurity: so many and such people assert it that it would seem impudent to deny it. From this I do not dare to decide whether some spirits embodied in the element of air (for this element, when stirred by a fan, is perceived by the bodily sense of touch) can also undergo this lust, so as to unite, in whatever way they can, with women who feel it. Yet I would by no means believe that God's holy angels could have fallen in this way at that time; nor that it was of them that the apostle Peter said: “For if God did not spare the angels who sinned, but thrust them down into the prisons of the darkness of hell and handed them over to be kept for punishment in the judgment”; but rather of those who first fell away from God along with the devil, their prince, who out of envy cast down the first man by the serpent's deceit.

That men of God too have been called angels, the same holy Scripture is a very rich witness. For of John it is written: “Behold, I send my angel before your face, who will prepare your way”; and the prophet Malachi was called an angel by a certain special grace, that is, one bestowed specially on him. But some are troubled by the fact that from those who were called angels of God and from the women they loved we read that not men of our kind, as it were, but giants were born. As though bodies of men far exceeding our measure, as I also mentioned above, have not been born even in our own times! Was there not at Rome a few years ago, when the destruction of the city of Rome by the Goths was approaching, a woman with her father and mother who in a kind of gigantic body far surpassed everyone else? A wonderful crowd flocked from everywhere to see her. And what caused the greatest amazement was that neither of her parents was even as tall as the tallest people we usually see. Giants, then, could have been born even before the sons of God, who were also called angels of God, united with the daughters of men, that is, of those living according to man; that is, the sons of Seth with the daughters of Cain. For the canonical Scripture too speaks thus, in the book in which we read these things, whose words are these: “And it came to pass, after men began to become many on the earth and daughters were born to them, that the angels of God, seeing that the daughters of men were good, took for themselves wives of all whom they chose. And the Lord God said: My spirit shall not remain in these men for ever, because they are flesh. But their days shall be a hundred and twenty years. Now there were giants on the earth in those days and after that, when the sons of God went in to the daughters of men, and they begot for themselves; those were the giants, men renowned from of old.” These words of the divine book show sufficiently that there were already giants on the earth in those days when the sons of God took as wives the daughters of men, since they loved them as good, that is, beautiful. For it is the custom of this Scripture to call those who are beautiful in body “good.” But giants were born also after this happened. For so it says: “Now there were giants on the earth in those days and after that, when the sons of God went in to the daughters of men.” So both before, in those days, and after that. And the words “and they begot for themselves” show sufficiently that before the sons of God fell in this way they begot for God, not for themselves, that is, not under the domination of the lust for intercourse but in service to the duty of propagation; not a household for their own pride, but citizens of the city of God, whom they, as angels of God, might instruct to place their hope in God, like the one born of Seth, the son of the resurrection, who hoped to call upon the name of the Lord God; so that in this hope they might be, with their descendants, co-heirs of eternal goods and, under God the Father, brothers of their sons.

But that they were not angels of God in such a way as not to be men, as some think, but were beyond doubt men, the Scripture itself declares without any ambiguity. For when it had first said that the angels of God, seeing that the daughters of men were good, took for themselves wives of all whom they chose, it immediately added: “And the Lord God said: My spirit shall not remain in these men for ever, because they are flesh.” For by the Spirit of God they had been made angels of God and sons of God; but by turning aside to lower things they are called men, a name of nature, not of grace; and they are called flesh, deserters of the spirit, and, by deserting, deserted. The Seventy translators, indeed, called them both angels of God and sons of God; though not all manuscripts have this, for some have only “sons of God.” But Aquila, the translator whom the Jews prefer to the others, rendered it neither “angels of God” nor “sons of God” but “sons of gods.” Both are true. For they were sons of God, under whom as father they were also brothers of their fathers; and they were sons of gods, since they were begotten of gods, together with whom they themselves too were gods, according to that saying of the psalm: “I said, You are gods, and all of you sons of the Most High.” For the Seventy translators are rightly believed to have received the prophetic Spirit, so that if they changed anything by its authority and said otherwise than was in what they were translating, it should not be doubted that this too was divinely spoken. Although this is said to be ambiguous in the Hebrew, so that it could be translated both “sons of God” and “sons of gods.”

Let us leave aside, then, the fables of those writings which are called apocryphal, because their hidden origin was not clear to the fathers, from whom the authority of the true Scriptures has come down to us by a most certain and well-known succession. In these apocrypha, although some truth is found, yet because of many falsehoods they have no canonical authority. We cannot deny that Enoch, the seventh from Adam, wrote some things by divine inspiration, since the apostle Jude says so in a canonical epistle. But it is not without reason that they are not in that canon of the Scriptures which was preserved in the temple of the Hebrew people by the diligence of successive priests: they were judged to be of doubtful credit because of their antiquity, and it could not be ascertained whether these were what he had written, since they were not brought forward by such people as were found to have kept them properly through a line of succession. Hence the writings that are put forward under his name, and contain these fables about giants, that they did not have human fathers, are rightly judged by the prudent not to be believed to be his; just as many writings are put forward by heretics under the names of other prophets, and more recent ones under the names of apostles, all of which, under the name of apocrypha, have been excluded from canonical authority after careful examination. According to the canonical Scriptures, Hebrew and Christian, then, there is no doubt that there were many giants before the flood, and that they were citizens of the earth-born society of men; and that the sons of God, who were descended according to the flesh from Seth, abandoned righteousness and sank into this society. Nor is it surprising that giants too could be born of them. For not all were giants, but there were certainly many more then than in the other times after the flood. It pleased the Creator to create them so that it might be shown by this too that not only beauty but also size and strength of body are not to be highly valued by the wise man, who is made happy by spiritual and immortal goods, far better and firmer, and proper to the good, not common to good and wicked. Another prophet, commending this, says: “There were those famous giants, who were from the beginning, of great stature, skilled in war. The Lord did not choose these, nor did he give them the way of knowledge; but they perished because they had no wisdom; they perished through their thoughtlessness.”

Chapter 24. How the Lord's words about those who were to perish in the flood, “Their days shall be a hundred and twenty years”, are to be understood.

The saying of God, “Their days shall be a hundred and twenty years”, is not to be taken as though it foretold that men after this would not live beyond a hundred and twenty years, since we find that even after the flood some exceeded five hundred. Rather, it is to be understood that God said this when Noah was near the end of five hundred years, that is, was in the four hundred and eightieth year of his life, which Scripture in its usual way calls five hundred, often signifying the greater part by the name of the whole. For the flood came in the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month; and so a hundred and twenty years were foretold as the remaining life of the men who were to perish, at the end of which they would be destroyed by the flood. And it is not without reason believed that the flood came when there were no longer found on earth any who did not deserve to die such a death as was inflicted in punishment on the ungodly; not that such a kind of death does anything to the good, who must die at some time, that could harm them after death; but in fact none of those whom holy Scripture records as descended from the seed of Seth died in the flood. The cause of the flood is related as divinely given in these words: “The Lord God, seeing,” it says, “that the wickedness of men was multiplied upon the earth, and that everyone was diligently thinking in his heart on evil things all his days, God thought that he had made man upon the earth, and he thought again, and God said: I will blot out man whom I have made from the face of the earth, from man to beast, and from the creeping things to the birds of heaven, for I am angry that I made them.”

Chapter 25. On the anger of God, which disturbs his unchangeable tranquillity by no heat of passion.

The anger of God is not a disturbance of his mind, but the judgment by which punishment is inflicted on sin. His thinking and thinking again is the unchangeable plan concerning things that are to be changed. For God does not repent of any deed of his as a man does; his decision about all things whatever is as fixed as his foreknowledge is certain. But if Scripture did not use such words, it would not, so to speak, make itself more familiar to every kind of human being, for whom it wishes to provide: to terrify the proud, arouse the careless, exercise those who seek, and nourish those who understand; which it would not do if it did not first bend down and, as it were, come down to those who lie low. And its announcing the destruction of all land animals and birds as well declares the greatness of the coming disaster; it does not threaten death to animals without reason as though they too had sinned.

Chapter 26. That the ark which Noah was commanded to make signifies Christ and the Church in every respect.

Now as to God's commanding Noah, a righteous man and, as truthful Scripture says of him, perfect in his generation (not indeed as the citizens of the city of God are to be made perfect in that immortality in which they will be equal to the angels of God, but as they can be perfect in this pilgrimage), to make an ark in which he might be saved from the devastation of the flood with his family, that is, his wife, sons, and daughters-in-law, and with the animals that went into the ark to him at God's command: this is beyond doubt a figure of the city of God on pilgrimage in this age, that is, of the Church, which is saved through the wood on which hung the mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus. For the very measurements of its length, height, and breadth signify the human body, in the reality of which he was foretold to men as coming, and came. For the length of the human body, from the top of the head to the soles of the feet, is six times its breadth, from one side to the other, and ten times its height, the measure of which is taken at the side, from the back to the belly; as if you measured a man lying on his back or face down, he is six times as long from head to feet as he is broad from right to left or left to right, and ten times as long as he is high from the ground. So the ark was made three hundred cubits in length, fifty in breadth, and thirty in height. And its having a door in the side is certainly that wound when the side of the crucified one was pierced by the spear; for by this those who come to him enter, because from there flowed the sacraments by which believers are initiated. And its being commanded to be made of squared timbers signifies the life of the saints, stable on every side; for whichever way you turn a square, it will stand. And the other things said in the construction of this ark are signs of things in the Church.

But it would take long to pursue them now; and we have already done so in the work we wrote against Faustus the Manichaean, who denied that anything was prophesied about Christ in the books of the Hebrews. It may well be that someone explains these things more fittingly than we do, and another more fittingly than he, provided that everything said is referred to this city of God of which we are speaking, on pilgrimage in this evil age as in a flood, if the interpreter does not wish to stray far from the meaning of the one who wrote them. For example, if someone does not want the words written here, “You shall make it with lower rooms, with two stories and three stories”, to be understood as I said in that work, that because the Church is gathered from all nations it is said to have two stories on account of the two kinds of men, namely the circumcision and the uncircumcision, whom the apostle also calls in another way Jews and Greeks, and three stories because all nations were restored after the flood from the three sons of Noah, but says something else that is not foreign to the rule of faith: for since God wished the ark to have dwellings not only on the lower level but also on the upper (and these he called two-storied), and on the upper of the upper (and these he called three-storied), so that a third dwelling rose from the bottom upward, then those three things which the apostle commends, faith, hope, and love, can be understood here; or, much more fittingly, those three harvests of the Gospel, thirtyfold, sixtyfold, and a hundredfold, so that conjugal chastity dwells on the lowest level, widowed chastity above it, and virginal chastity higher still; or anything better that can be understood and said according to the faith of this city. This I would say also of the other things that are to be explained here: though they are not discussed in one way only, they must all be brought back to the one harmony of the catholic faith.

Chapter 27. On the ark and the flood: that we should agree neither with those who accept only the history without allegorical meaning, nor with those who defend only figures and reject the historical truth.

No one ought to think, however, either that these things were written for nothing, or that only the historical truth of events is to be sought here without any allegorical meanings, or, on the contrary, that these things did not happen at all but are only figures of speech, or that whatever they are they have nothing to do with prophecy of the Church. For who but a perverse mind would contend that books kept through thousands of years with such reverence and such careful observance of an ordered succession were written to no purpose, or that only the events are to be considered in them? In them, to omit other things, if the number of animals required the ark to be made so large, what required unclean animals to be brought in by twos and clean animals by sevens, when both could have been preserved in equal numbers? Or was God, who commanded that they be preserved to restore the race, unable to restore them in the way he had first established them?

Those who contend that these things did not happen, but are only figures of things to be signified, think in the first place that so great a flood could not have happened, that the water by rising should overtop the highest mountains by fifteen cubits, because of the summit of Mount Olympus, above which, they say, clouds cannot gather, because the sky there is already so high that there is none of this thicker air in which winds, mists, and rains are produced; and they do not notice that earth, the densest of all the elements, could be there. Or do they perhaps deny that the summit of a mountain is earth? Why, then, do they contend that earth was allowed to be raised up to those regions of the sky but water was not, when these measurers and weighers of the elements declare that waters are higher and lighter than earth? What reason, then, do they bring why the heavier and lower earth should have occupied the place of the calmer sky through the revolutions of so many years, and the lighter and higher water should not have been permitted to do so even for a short time?

They also say that the size of that ark could not have held so many kinds of animals of both sexes, two of the unclean and seven of the clean. These seem to me to count only the three hundred cubits of length and fifty of breadth, and not to consider that there was as much again on the upper level and as much again on the upper of the upper, and that therefore those cubits multiplied by three make nine hundred by one hundred and fifty. But if we consider what Origen argued not inelegantly, that Moses, the man of God, “learned,” as it is written, “in all the wisdom of the Egyptians”, who loved geometry, could have meant geometrical cubits, one of which, they assert, is equal to six of ours, who does not see how much that size could have held? As for their argument that an ark so large could not have been built, their slander is most foolish, since they know that immense cities have been constructed, and they do not consider the hundred years in which that ark was built; unless perhaps stone can cling to stone joined only by lime, so that a wall may run round for so many miles, and timber cannot cling to timber by dovetails, bolts, nails, and the glue of pitch, so that an ark may be built stretching far and wide, not in curved but in straight lines, which no human effort was to launch into the sea, but which the wave would lift when it came, by the natural order of weights, and which divine providence rather than human skill would steer as it floated, so that it should not run anywhere into shipwreck.

As for the very scrupulous question commonly raised about the tiniest creatures, not only such as mice and lizards, but also such as locusts, beetles, even flies and fleas, whether there were not more of them in that ark than the number fixed when God gave this command: those who are troubled by these things must first be reminded that the words “which creep upon the earth” are to be understood so that there was no need to preserve in the ark those that can live in the waters, not only those submerged, like fish, but also those that float on the surface, like many birds. Then, when it is said, “They shall be male and female”, it is surely understood as said with a view to restoring the race; and therefore there was no need for those to be there which can be born without intercourse from various things or from the decay of things; or if they were there, as they usually are in houses, they could have been there without any fixed number. Or if the most sacred mystery that was being enacted, and the figure of so great a matter, could not be fulfilled even in the reality of the event otherwise than by all those creatures being there in that fixed number which could not live in the water because nature forbade it, this was not the concern of that man or those men, but of God. For Noah did not catch them and bring them in, but allowed them in as they came and entered. That is the force of the words, “They shall come in to you”: not, that is, by man's action but by God's will; yet in such a way that those which lack sex are not to be believed to have been there. For it was prescribed and defined: “They shall be male and female.” For there are some creatures which are born from various things without intercourse, but afterwards mate and beget, like flies; and others in which there is nothing of male and female, like bees. As for those which have sex but not offspring, like mules and she-mules, it would be surprising if they were there, and not rather sufficient that their parents were there, namely the horse and the ass; and any others that produce some kind by the mixing of different kinds. But if this too pertained to the mystery, they were there; for this kind too has male and female.

Some are also troubled about the kinds of food which the animals could have there that are thought to eat nothing but flesh: whether, beyond the number, there were animals there, without transgression of the command, which the need to feed the others had compelled to be shut in; or whether, as is rather to be believed, there could have been some foods besides flesh suitable for all. For we know how many animals whose food is flesh eat grain and fruits, and especially figs and chestnuts. What wonder is it, then, if that wise and righteous man, divinely instructed besides as to what suited each, prepared and stored food fit for each kind without flesh? What is there that hunger would not compel them to eat? Or what could God not make pleasant and wholesome, who could have granted by divine ease that they live even without food, were it not that their being fed also suited the fulfilment of the figure of so great a mystery?

That so many manifold signs of events do not pertain to prefiguring the Church, no one is permitted to think, unless he is contentious. For the nations have now so filled the Church, and clean and unclean are so held together in the framework of its unity until a fixed end is reached, that from this one most evident point it is not right to doubt about the others either, which are said somewhat more obscurely and can be recognized with more difficulty. This being so, no one, however hard, will dare to think that these things were written to no purpose; nor can it plausibly be said that, though they happened, they signify nothing, or that only the words are significant and the things did not happen, or that what they signify has nothing to do with the Church. Rather it is to be believed that they were wisely committed to memory and writing, that they happened, that they signify something, and that this something pertains to prefiguring the Church. This book, brought to this point, must now be closed, so that the course of both cities, the earthly, living according to man, and the heavenly, living according to God, may be traced after the flood and in the events that followed.

Chapter 1. Whether after the flood, from Noah to Abraham, any families of those living according to God are to be found.

Whether, after the flood, the footsteps of the holy city running on its course were continuous, or were broken by intervening times of ungodliness, so that there was no human being who worshipped the one true God, is difficult to find out clearly from the words of Scripture. For in the canonical books, after Noah, who with his wife, his three sons, and as many daughters-in-law was found worthy to be saved from the devastation of the flood by the ark, we do not find, down to Abraham, anyone's godliness proclaimed by a clear divine word; except that Noah commends his two sons Shem and Japheth with a prophetic blessing, beholding and foreseeing what was to come long afterwards. That is also why he cursed his middle son, that is, the one younger than the firstborn and older than the last, who had sinned against his father, not in himself but in his son, Noah's grandson, in these words: “Cursed be the boy Canaan; he shall be a servant to his brothers.” Canaan had been born of Ham, who had not covered but rather exposed his sleeping father's nakedness. That is also why he then added the blessing of his two sons, the eldest and the youngest, saying: “Blessed be the Lord God of Shem, and Canaan shall be his servant; may God enlarge Japheth, and may he dwell in the houses of Shem.” Just as Noah's planting of the vineyard, his drunkenness from its fruit, his being uncovered as he slept, and the other things that were done and recorded there, are pregnant with prophetic meanings and covered with veils.