There are good and bad angels, but even the bad angels do not have an essence which is contrary to God. God’s enemies are not so by nature, but by will. The vicious will has no efficient cause, but only a deficient one; it is not an effect, but a defect.
The world is less than six thousand years old. History is not cyclic, as some philosophers
suppose: «Christ died once for our sins.» *
If our first parents had not sinned, they would not have died, but, because they sinned, all their posterity die. Eating the apple brought not only natural death, but eternal death, i.e., damnation.
Prophyry is wrong in refusing bodies to saints in heaven. They will have better bodies than Adam’s before the fall; their bodies will be spiritual, but not spirits, and will not have weight. Men will have male bodies, and women female bodies, and those who have died in infancy will rise again with adult bodies.
Adam’s sins would have brought all mankind to eternal death (i.e., damnation), but that God’s grace has freed many from it. Sin came from the soul, not from the flesh. Platonists and Manichæans both err in ascribing sin to the nature of the flesh, though Platonists are not so bad as Manichæans. The punishment of all mankind for Adam’s sin was just; for, as a result of this
sin, man, that might have been spiritual in body, became carnal in mind. â€
This leads to a long and minute discussion of sexual lust, to which we are subject as part of our punishment for Adam’s sin. This discussion is very important as revealing the psychology of asceticism; we must therefore go into it, although the Saint confesses that the theme is immodest. The theory advanced is as follows.
It must be admitted that sexual intercourse in marriage is not sinful, provided the intention is to beget offspring. Yet even in marriage a virtuous man will wish that he could manage without lust. Even in
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* Romans VI.
€ The City of God, XIV, 15.
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marriage, as the desire for privacy shows, people are ashamed of sexual intercourse, because «this lawful act of nature is (from our first parents) accompanied with our penal shame.» The cynics thought that one should be without shame, and Diogenes would have none of it, wishing to be in all things like a dog; yet even he, after one attempt, abandoned, in practice, this extreme of shamelessness. What is shameful about lust is its independence of the will. Adam and Eve, before the fall, could have had sexual intercourse without lust, though in fact they did not. Handicraftsmen, in the pursuit of their trade, move their hands without lust; similarly Adam, if only he had kept away from the apple-tree, could have performed the business of sex without the emotions that it now demands. The sexual members, like the rest of the body, would have obeyed the will. The need of lust in sexual intercourse is a punishment for Adam’s sin, but for which sex might have been divorced from pleasure. Omitting some physiological details which the translator has very properly left in the decent obscurity of the original Latin, the above is Saint Augustine’s theory as regards sex.
It is evident from the above that what makes the ascetic dislike sex is its independence of the will. Virtue, it is held, demands a complete control of the will over the body, but such control does not suffice to make the sexual act possible. The sexual act, therefore, seems inconsistent with a perfectly virtuous life.
Ever since the Fall, the world has been divided into two cities, of which one shall reign eternally with God, the other shall be in eternal torment with Satan. Cain belongs to the city of the Devil, Abel to the City of God. Abel, by grace, and in virtue of predestination, was a pilgrim on earth and a citizen of heaven. The patriarchs belonged to the City of God. Discussion of the death of Methuselah brings Saint Augustine to the vexed question of the comparison of the Septuagint with the Vulgate. The data, as given in the Septuagint, lead to the conclusion that Methuselah survived the flood by fourteen years, which is impossible, since he was not in the Ark. The Vulgate, following the Hebrew manuscript, gives data from which it follows that he died the year of the flood. On this point, Saint Augustine holds that Saint Jerome and the Hebrew manuscript must be right. Some people maintained that the Jews had deliberately falsified the Hebrew
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manuscript, out of malice towards the Christians; this hypothesis is rejected. On the other hand, the Septuagint must have been divinely inspired. The only conclusion is that Ptolemy’s copyists made mistakes in transcribing the Septuagint. Speaking of the translations of the Old Testament, he says: «The Church has received that of the Seventy, as if there were no other, as many of the Greek Christians, using this wholly, know not whether there be or no. Our Latin translation is from this also, although one Jerome, a learned priest, and a great linguist, has translated the same Scriptures from the Hebrew into Latin. But although the Jews affirm his learned labour to be all truth, and avouch the Seventy to have oftentimes erred, yet the Churches of Christ hold no one man to be preferred before so many, especially being selected by the High Priest, for this work.» He accepts the story of the miraculous agreement of the seventy independent translations, and considers this a proof that the Septuagint is divinely inspired. The Hebrew, however, is equally inspired. This conclusion leaves undecided the question as to the authority of Jerome’s translation. Perhaps he might have been more decidedly on Jerome’s side
if the two Saints had not had a quarrel about Saint Peter’s time-serving propensities. *
He gives a synchronism of sacred and profane history. We learn that Æneas came to Italy when Abdon †was judge in Israel, and that the last persecution will be under Antichrist, but its date is unknown.
After an admirable chapter against judicial torture, Saint Augustine proceeds to combat the new Academicians, who hold all things to be doubtful. «The Church of Christ detests these doubts as madness, having a most certain knowledge of the things it apprehends.» We should believe in the truth of the Scriptures. He goes on to explain that there is no true virtue apart from true religion. Pagan virtue is «prostituted with the influence of obscene and filthy devils.» What would be virtues in a Christian are vices in a pagan. «Those things which she [the soul] seems to account virtues, and thereby to sway her affections, if they be not all referred unto God, are indeed vices rather than virtues.» They that are not of this society (the Church)
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* Galatians II, 11-14.
â Of Abdon we know only that he had forty sons and thirty nephews, and that all these € seventy rode donkeys ( Judges XII, 14).
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shall suffer eternal misery. «In our conflicts here on earth, either the pain is victor, and so death expels the sense of it, or nature conquers, and expels the pain. But there, pain shall afflict eternally, and nature shall suffer eternally, both enduring to the continuance of the inflicted punishment» (Ch. 28).
There are two resurrections, that of the soul at death, and that of the body at the Last Judgement. After a discussion of various difficulties concerning the millennium, and the subsequent doings of Gog and Magog, he comes to a text in II Thessalonians ( II, 11, 12): «God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie, that all they might be damned who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness.» Some people might think it unjust that the Omnipotent should first deceive them, and then punish them for being deceived; but to Saint Augustine this seems quite in order. «Being condemned, they are seduced, and, being seduced, condemned. But their seducement is by the secret judgement of God, justly secret, and secretly just; even His that hath judged continually, ever since the world began.» St. Augustine holds that God divided mankind into the elect and the reprobate, not because of their merits or demerits, but arbitrarily. All alike deserve damnation, and therefore the reprobate have no ground of complaint. From the above passage of Saint Paul, it appears that they are wicked because they are reprobate, not reprobate because they are wicked.
After the resurrection of the body, the bodies of the damned will burn eternally without being consumed. In this there is nothing strange; it happens to the salamander and Mount Etna. Devils, though incorporeal, can be burnt by corporeal fire. Hell’s torments are not purifying, and will not be lessened by the intercessions of saints. Origen erred in thinking hell not eternal. Heretics, and sinful Catholics, will be damned.
The book ends with a description of the Saints’ vision of God in heaven, and of the eternal felicity of the City of God.
From the above summary, the importance of the work may not be clear. What was influential was the separation of Church and State, with the clear implication that the State could only be part of the City of God by being submissive towards the Church in all religious matters. This has been the doctrine of the Church ever since. All
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through the Middle Ages, during the gradual rise of the papal power, and throughout the conflict between Pope and Emperor, Saint Augustine supplied the Western Church with the
