City of God 12.16–12.23

Chapter 16. Whether, so that God may be understood always to have been Lord, we must believe that there never lacked a creature over which he might be Lord; and how something can be said to have been always created which cannot be called coeternal.

For my part, just as I do not dare to say that the Lord God was at some time not Lord, so I ought not to doubt that man did not exist before and that at a certain time the first man was created. But when I think of what he was always Lord, if there was not always a creature, I am afraid to affirm anything, because I look at myself and remember that it is written: “What man can know the counsel of God, or who can think what the Lord wills? For the thoughts of mortals are timid and our devices uncertain. For the corruptible body weighs down the soul, and the earthly dwelling presses down the mind that thinks many things.” From these many things, then, which I think in this earthly dwelling (many, surely, because I cannot find the one among them, or beyond them, which I perhaps do not think, which is true): if I say that there was always a creature of which he who is always Lord and was never not Lord might be Lord, but now this one, now another, through different spans of time, so that we may not say that any is coeternal with the Creator, which faith and sound reason condemn, I must beware lest it be absurd and foreign to the light of truth that there has always been a mortal creature through the succession of times, one passing away, another succeeding, while an immortal one began to exist only when our age was reached, when the angels too were created, if that light first made signifies them rightly, or rather that heaven of which it was said, “In the beginning God made heaven and earth”; yet they did not exist before they were made, lest, if they are said always to have existed, they be believed coeternal with God as immortal.

But if I say that the angels were not created in time but existed before all times, and that God, who was never anything but Lord, was their Lord, I shall be asked also whether, if they were made before all times, those who were made could always have existed. Here perhaps the answer might seem to be: How not always, since what exists at all time is not unfittingly said to exist always? And these existed at all time to such an extent that they were made even before all times, if indeed times began from heaven, and they were already before heaven. But if time did not begin from heaven, but existed even before heaven, not indeed in hours and days and months and years (for it is plain that these measures of temporal spans, which are customarily and properly called times, began from the motion of the stars; hence God too, when he established them, said, “And let them be for signs and for times and for days and for years”), but in some changeable motion, of which one thing passes before and another after, since they cannot exist together; if, then, before heaven there was something of this kind in the movements of the angels, and so time already existed, and the angels, from the time they were made, moved in time, even so they existed at all time, since times were made with them. And who would say, “That did not always exist which existed at all time”? But if I give this answer, it will be said to me: How then are they not coeternal with the Creator, if he always existed and they always existed? How too are they to be called created, if they are understood always to have existed? What will be answered to this? Must it be said that they always existed, since they existed at all time, being made with time, or times being made with them, and yet that they were created? For we shall not deny that times themselves were created, although no one doubts that time existed at all time. For if time did not exist at all time, then there was a time when there was no time. Who would say this, however foolish? For we can rightly say: There was a time when Rome was not; there was a time when Jerusalem was not; there was a time when Abraham was not; there was a time when man was not, and so on; finally, if the world was made not with the beginning of time but after some time, we can say, There was a time when the world was not. But to say, There was a time when there was no time, is as unfitting as if one said, There was a man when there was no man, or, This world existed when this world did not exist. For if it is understood of different things, it can be said in some way, namely: There was another man when this man was not; so we can rightly say, There was another time when this time was not; but who, even the most foolish, would say, There was a time when there was no time? As, then, we say that time was created, although it is said always to have existed because time existed at all time, so it does not follow that, if the angels always existed, they were therefore not created; for they are said always to have existed because they existed at all time, and they existed at all time because times themselves could in no way exist without them. For where there is no creature by whose changeable motions times are carried on, there can be no times at all. And therefore, even if they always existed, they were created; nor, if they always existed, are they therefore coeternal with the Creator. For he always existed in unchangeable eternity; but they were made; and they are said always to have existed because they existed at all time, without which times could in no way exist; but time, since it runs on by changeableness, cannot be coeternal with unchangeable eternity. And therefore, even though the immortality of the angels does not pass in time, and is neither past as though it no longer were, nor future as though it were not yet, yet their movements, by which times are carried on, pass from future to past; and therefore they cannot be coeternal with the Creator, in whose movement it cannot be said that anything has been which no longer is, or will be which is not yet.

Therefore, if God was always Lord, he always had a creature serving his lordship; yet not begotten of him, but made by him from nothing, and not coeternal with him; for he was before it, though at no time without it; preceding it not by a span of passing time but by abiding perpetuity. But if I give this answer to those who ask how he was always Creator, always Lord, if a serving creature did not always exist, or how it was created and is not rather coeternal with the Creator if it always existed, I fear I may more readily be judged to be affirming what I do not know than teaching what I know. I return, then, to what our Creator wished us to know; and those things which he has allowed wiser men to know in this life, or reserved to be known by the altogether perfect in another life, I confess are beyond my powers. But I thought they should be discussed without affirmation, so that those who read these things may see from what dangerous questions they ought to refrain, and not think themselves fit for everything, but rather understand how the apostle is to be obeyed when he gives the wholesome command: “I say, through the grace of God that has been given to me, to all who are among you, not to think more highly than one ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, as God has distributed to each the measure of faith.” For if an infant is fed according to its strength, it will come about that by growing it takes in more; but if it goes beyond the strength of its capacity, it will fail before it grows.

Chapter 17. How the eternal life promised to man by God before eternal times is to be understood.

What ages passed before the human race was established I confess I do not know; yet I do not doubt that nothing at all of creation is coeternal with the Creator. The apostle too speaks of eternal times, and not future ones but, what is more to be wondered at, past ones. For he says: “In hope of eternal life, which God, who does not lie, promised before eternal times, but has manifested in his own times his Word.” See, he has said that there were eternal times in the past, which yet were not coeternal with God, since he not only existed before eternal times but also promised eternal life, which he manifested in his own times, that is, fitting times; and what else is this than his Word? For this is eternal life. But how did he promise, since he certainly promised it to men, who did not yet exist before eternal times, unless because in his eternity and in his Word, coeternal with him, what was to come to pass in its time was already fixed by predestination?

Chapter 18. What sound faith defends concerning the unchangeable counsel and will of God, against the reasonings of those who hold that the works of God, repeated from eternity, always return through the same cycles of ages.

This too I do not doubt: that before the first man was created there was never any man at all; neither this same man revolved I know not how many times in I know not what cycles, nor any other like him in nature. Nor do the arguments of the philosophers deter me from this faith, of which the sharpest is thought to be their saying that no infinite things can be comprehended by any knowledge. And therefore, they say, God has in himself finite reasons of all the finite things which he makes; but his goodness must never be believed to have been idle, lest his working be temporal, preceded by an eternal cessation, as if he repented of his former idleness without beginning and therefore began his work. And therefore, they say, the same things must always be repeated, and the same things always pass that are always to be repeated, either while the world remains, changeably (which, though it has never not existed and is without beginning in time, was nevertheless made), or with its rising and perishing also always repeated and always to be repeated in those cycles; lest, if God's works are said to have begun for the first time at some time, he should be believed in some way to have condemned his former idleness without beginning as inert and slothful and therefore displeasing to himself, and so to have changed; but if he is said always to have made temporal things, but different ones, and so at some time to have come also to making man, whom he had never made before, he would seem to have made what he made not by knowledge, by which they think no infinite things can be comprehended, but as it were on the spur of the moment, as it came into his mind, by a sort of chance inconstancy. But if those cycles are admitted, they say, by which the same temporal things are repeated, either while the world remains or with the world too inserting its own revolving risings and settings into the same cycles, neither slothful idleness, especially of so long a duration without beginning, is ascribed to God, nor improvident rashness in his works; since, if the same things are not repeated, things varied by infinite diversity cannot be comprehended by any knowledge or foreknowledge of his.

These arguments, by which the impious try to turn our simple piety from the right way so that we may walk in a circle with them, faith ought to laugh at, if reason could not refute them. But in addition, with the help of the Lord our God, clear reason shatters these revolving circles which opinion fashions. For these men err chiefly in this, and prefer to walk in a false circle rather than on the true and straight way, that they measure the divine mind, altogether unchangeable, capable of any infinity and numbering all innumerable things without alternation of thought, by their own human mind, changeable and narrow; and there happens to them what the apostle says: “For comparing themselves with themselves, they do not understand.” For because whatever new thing occurs to them to be done they do by a new counsel (for they have changeable minds), they surely think not of God, whom they cannot conceive, but of themselves in his place, and compare not him but themselves, not with him but with themselves. But it is not lawful for us to believe that God is affected one way when he is at rest and another when he works; for he must not even be said to be affected, as though something came to be in his nature which was not there before. For he who is affected undergoes something, and everything that undergoes something is changeable. So let no sloth, idleness, or inertness be thought of in his resting, as no toil, effort, or industry in his working. He knows how to act while resting and to rest while acting. He can apply to a new work a counsel not new but everlasting; nor did he begin to do what he had not done because he repented of having ceased before. But even if he first ceased and afterward worked (which I do not know how a man can understand), this “first” and “afterward” without doubt lay in the things, which first did not exist and afterward existed; but in him no subsequent will changed or removed a preceding one, but by one and the same everlasting and unchangeable will he brought it about with regard to the things he founded both that they should not exist earlier, as long as they did not exist, and that they should exist later, when they began to exist; thereby perhaps showing wonderfully to those who can see such things how he did not need them, but founded them by gratuitous goodness, since without them he remained from an eternity without beginning in no less happiness.

Chapter 19. Against those who say that infinite things cannot be comprehended even by God's knowledge.

As to their other saying, that infinite things cannot be comprehended even by God's knowledge, it remains for them to dare to say, and to plunge themselves into this deep abyss of impiety, that God does not know all numbers. For it is most certain that they are infinite; since at whatever number you think an end is to be made, that same number, I do not say can be increased by adding one, but however great it is and however vast a multitude it contains, can, by the very reason and science of numbers, be not only doubled but multiplied. And each number is so bounded by its own properties that none of them can be equal to any other. They are therefore unequal and different from one another, and each is finite, and all are infinite. Does God then not know all numbers because of their infinity, and does God's knowledge reach up to a certain sum of numbers and not know the rest? Who, even the most insane, would say this? Nor will these men dare to despise numbers and say they do not belong to God's knowledge, since among them Plato, with great authority, commends God as fashioning the world by numbers. And among us we read it said to God: “You have arranged all things in measure and number and weight”; of whom the prophet also says, “Who brings forth the world by number,” and the Savior in the Gospel, “The hairs of your head are all numbered.” Far be it, then, from us to doubt that every number is known to him “whose understanding,” as is sung in the psalm, “has no number.” The infinity of number, then, though there is no number of infinite numbers, is not incomprehensible to him whose understanding has no number. Therefore, if whatever is comprehended by knowledge is bounded by the comprehension of the knower, then surely every infinity is in some ineffable way finite to God, because it is not incomprehensible to his knowledge. Therefore, if the infinity of numbers cannot be infinite to the knowledge of God by which it is comprehended, who are we little men, that we should presume to fix limits to his knowledge, saying that, unless the same temporal things are repeated in the same cycles of times, God cannot either foreknow all that he makes in order to make it, or know it when he has made it? His wisdom, simply manifold and uniformly multiform, comprehends all incomprehensible things by so incomprehensible a comprehension that, if he always wished to make new things, unlike those that went before, he could not have them unordered and unforeseen, nor would he foresee them from the time just before, but would contain them in eternal foreknowledge.

Chapter 20. Of the ages of ages.

Whether he does this, and the so-called ages of ages are joined together in a continuous connection, yet running on one after another in ordered unlikeness, while only those who are freed from misery remain without end in their happy immortality; or whether they are called ages of ages in the sense that ages are understood which remain in God's wisdom with unshaken stability, as, it were, the efficient causes of those ages which pass with time, I do not dare to define. For perhaps “age” can be said of what are ages, so that “the age of the age” is declared to be nothing else than “ages of ages,” just as “the heaven of heaven” is said to be nothing else than “the heavens of heavens.” For God called the firmament heaven, above which are the waters; and yet the psalm says, “And let the waters that are above the heavens praise the name of the Lord.” Which of these two it is, or whether anything else besides these two can be understood of the ages of ages, is a very deep question; nor does it hinder what we are now doing if it is put off meanwhile undiscussed, whether we can define something in it or whether the very treatment of it, more carefully done, makes us more cautious not to dare to affirm anything rashly in so great an obscurity. For we are now arguing against the opinion by which those cycles are asserted, in which it is thought that the same things must always be repeated at intervals of time. But whichever of those views about the ages of ages is true, it has nothing to do with these cycles; since, whether the ages of ages are not the same things repeated but run on one from another in a most ordered connection, the happiness of the freed remaining most certain without any return of miseries, or whether the ages of ages are eternal, as it were ruling over temporal ones as their subjects, those cycles that bring back the same things have no place; and the eternal life of the saints refutes them above all.

Chapter 21. Of the impiety of those who assert that souls which share in the supreme and true happiness will return again and again, through cycles of time, to the same miseries and toils.

What pious ears could bear to hear that, after a life passed through so many and so great calamities (if indeed this is to be called life, which is rather a death, so heavy that the death which frees us from it is feared out of love for this death), after evils so great and so many and so dreadful have at last been expiated and ended through true religion and wisdom, one should so come to the sight of God, and so become happy by the contemplation of incorporeal light through participation in his unchangeable immortality, for love of attaining which we burn, that at some time it must be forsaken; and that those who forsake it, cast down from that eternity, truth, and felicity, are entangled in hellish mortality, shameful folly, and accursed miseries, where God is lost, where truth is hated, where happiness is sought through unclean wickedness; and that this has happened and will happen again and again without any end, at fixed intervals and measures of ages before and after; and this so that God, by these fixed cycles always going and returning through our false happinesses and true miseries, alternately indeed but everlasting by unceasing revolution, may know his own works, since he can neither rest from making nor by knowing trace out infinite things? Who could listen to this? Who could believe it? Who could bear it? If these things were true, it would be not only more prudent to keep silent about them, but even (to say what I mean as best I can) more learned not to know them. For if we shall not have them in memory there, and shall be happy for that reason, why is our misery here made heavier by knowledge of them? But if there we shall necessarily know them, let us at least not know them here, so that here the expectation of the supreme good may be happier than the attainment of it there; since here eternal life is expected to be attained, but there it is known to be happy but not eternal, to be lost at some time.

But if they say that no one can come to that happiness unless he has learned in the instruction of this life these cycles, in which happiness and misery alternate by turns, how then do they admit that the more anyone loves God, the more easily he will come to happiness, they who teach things by which love itself grows numb? For who would not love more slackly and lukewarmly one whom he thinks he must necessarily forsake and whose truth and wisdom he must oppose, and this when he has come to full knowledge of him, as far as his capacity allows, in the perfection of happiness? For no one can love faithfully even a human friend whose enemy he knows he will become. But far be it that those things should be true which threaten us with a true misery never to be ended, but often and endlessly to be broken by interludes of false happiness. For what is more false and deceitful than that happiness in which, in such a great light of truth, we either do not know that we shall be wretched, or, in the highest citadel of felicity, fear it? For if we are to be ignorant of the calamity to come, our misery here is wiser, where we know the happiness to come; but if the impending disaster will not be hidden from us there, the soul passes the time of its misery more happily, at the end of which it will be lifted up to happiness, than the time of its happiness, at the end of which it will be rolled back into misery. And so the hope of our unhappiness is happy, and that of our happiness unhappy. Hence it comes about that, since here we suffer present evils and there we fear impending ones, we could more truly be always wretched than at any time happy.

But since these things are false, as piety cries out and truth proves (for that true felicity is truly promised to us, whose sure security will always be kept and broken by no unhappiness), let us follow the straight way, which for us is Christ, and with him as our guide and savior turn away the path of our faith and our mind from the empty and foolish circuit of the impious. For if, concerning these cycles and the unceasingly alternating goings and returnings of souls, Porphyry the Platonist refused to follow the opinion of his own school, whether moved by the vanity of the thing itself or already in awe of Christian times, and preferred to say, as I mentioned in the tenth book, that the soul was given to the world in order to know evils, so that, freed and cleansed from them, when it has returned to the Father, it may suffer nothing of the kind again: how much more ought we to detest and avoid this falsehood, hostile to the Christian faith! And these cycles being emptied and frustrated, no necessity compels us to think that the human race has no beginning in time from which it began to exist, on the ground that through I know not what cycles there is nothing new in things which has not existed before at fixed intervals of time and will not exist afterward. For if the soul is freed not to return to miseries, as it was never freed before, something happens in it which never happened before, and this indeed something very great, namely eternal felicity that never ceases. But if in an immortal nature so great a newness occurs, repeated by no cycle and to be repeated by none, why is it contended that it cannot happen in mortal things? If they say that no newness of happiness occurs in the soul, since it returns to that in which it always was, at least the freeing itself is new, when it is freed from a misery in which it never was, and the very newness of misery came to be in it, which never was before. And if this newness did not come into the order of things governed by divine providence but rather happened by chance, where are those determined and measured cycles in which nothing new happens but the same things that were are repeated? But if this newness too is not excluded from the ordering of providence, whether the soul was given to the world or fell into it, then new things can happen which have not happened before and yet are not foreign to the order of things. And if the soul could by imprudence make for itself a new misery, which was not unforeseen by divine providence, so that it included this too in the order of things and not improvidently freed it from it, with what rashness of human vanity do we dare to deny that the Godhead can make things new, not to itself but to the world, which it neither made before nor ever had unforeseen?

But if they say that freed souls will indeed not return to misery, but that when this happens nothing new happens in things, since other and other souls always have been freed, are being freed, and will be freed, they certainly grant, if so, that new souls come to be, for whom there is both a new misery and a new freeing. For if they say that they are ancient and everlasting backward, from which new men come to be every day, from whose bodies, if they have lived wisely, they are so freed that they never return to miseries, they will have to say consequently that they are infinite. For however great a finite number of souls there had been, it could not have sufficed for infinite past ages, so that men might always come to be from it whose souls were always to be freed from this mortality, never to return to it thereafter. Nor will they in any way explain how there is an infinite number of souls among things which, so that they may be known to God, they will have to be finite. Therefore, since those cycles are now exploded by which the soul was thought necessarily to return to the same miseries, what remains more fitting to piety than to believe that it is not impossible for God both to make new things which he has never made, and, by his ineffable foreknowledge, not to have a changeable will? Further, whether the number of freed souls, never to return to miseries, can always be increased, let them see to it who argue so subtly about restricting the infinity of things; we for our part close our reasoning on either side. For if it can, what reason is there to deny that what had never before been created could be created, if the number of freed souls, which never existed before, has not only been made once but will never cease to be made? But if there must be some fixed number of freed souls who never return to misery, and this number is not further increased, it too, whatever it will be, certainly never existed before; and it certainly could not grow and reach the limit of its quantity without some beginning; and that beginning in this way never existed before. That this might exist, then, man was created, before whom there was none.

Chapter 22. Of the creation of the one first man, and of the human race in him.

This most difficult question, then, arising from the eternity of God creating new things without any newness of will, having been explained as far as we could, it is not hard to see that it was much better, as was done, that he should multiply the human race from the one man whom he first made than if he had begun it from several. For while he made some animals solitary and, so to speak, lone-wandering, that is, such as prefer solitude, like eagles, kites, lions, wolves, and all such, and others gregarious, which prefer to live together and in flocks, like doves, starlings, deer, fallow deer, and others of this kind, yet he did not propagate either kind from single individuals, but commanded several to come into being at once. But man, whose nature he was founding as in a way intermediate between angels and beasts, so that, if he remained subject to his Creator as his true Lord and kept his command with pious obedience, he might pass into the fellowship of the angels, attaining a happy immortality without end without death intervening; but if he offended the Lord his God, using his free will proudly and disobediently, he would be given over to death and live like a beast, a slave of lust, and destined after death to eternal punishment: man he created one and single, not, certainly, to be left alone without human society, but so that the unity of society itself and the bond of concord might be the more strongly commended to him, if men were bound together not only by likeness of nature but also by the affection of kinship; since it did not please him to create even the woman herself, who was to be joined to the man, as he created him, but from him, so that the human race might be spread entirely from one man.

Chapter 23. That God foreknew that the man whom he first made would sin, and at the same time foresaw how great a people of the godly from his race he would, by his grace, transfer into the fellowship of the angels.

God was not unaware that man would sin and that, now liable to death, he would propagate those who would die, and that mortals would go so far in the monstrousness of sin that beasts lacking a rational will would live more safely and peacefully among themselves, beasts of their own kind, whose beginnings sprang in larger numbers from the waters and the land, than men, whose race was propagated from one in order to commend concord. For never have lions among themselves, or serpents among themselves, waged such wars as men have. But he also foresaw that a people of the godly would be called by his grace to adoption, and, their sins forgiven and justified by the Holy Spirit, would be joined with the holy angels in eternal peace, when death, the last enemy, has been destroyed; and to this people the consideration of this would be of benefit, that God had established the human race from one man in order to commend to men how pleasing to him is unity even in many.