City of God 17.18–18.2

Chapter 18. On the third, fortieth, fifteenth, and sixty-seventh psalms, in which the death and resurrection of the Lord are prophesied.

Nor were the oracles of the psalms silent about his resurrection. For what else is sung in his person in the third psalm: “I lay down and slept; I rose up, for the Lord upheld me”? Or is anyone so foolish as to believe that the prophet wished to indicate to us, as something great, that he had slept and risen, unless that sleep were death and that waking resurrection, which it was fitting to be prophesied thus of Christ? For in the fortieth too this is shown much more plainly, where in the person of the same Mediator, in the usual way, things are narrated as past which were being prophesied as future; since what was to come had already, in God's predestination and foreknowledge, as it were been done. “My enemies,” he says, “have spoken evil against me: When will he die, and his name perish? And if one came in to see, his heart spoke vanity; he gathered iniquity to himself. He went out and they spoke together as one. All my enemies whispered against me; against me they devised evils for me. They set an unjust word against me: Shall he who sleeps not rise again?” Here certainly these words are so placed that he is understood to have said nothing other than if he had said: “Shall he who dies not live again?” For what precedes shows that his enemies had plotted and planned his death, and that this was carried out through him who came in to see and went out to betray. And to whom does Judas, the disciple turned traitor, not occur here? Since, then, they were going to do what they were plotting, that is, going to kill him, he added this verse, showing that they would kill in vain, with empty malice, one who would rise again; as if he said: What are you doing, you vain men? What will be your crime will be my sleep: “Shall he who sleeps not rise again?” And yet he indicates in the following verses that they will not commit so great a crime with impunity, saying: “For even the man of my peace, in whom I hoped, who ate my bread, has lifted up his heel against me”, that is, has trampled on me. “But you, Lord,” he says, “have mercy on me and raise me up, and I will repay them.” Who will now deny this, who sees the Jews, after the passion and resurrection of Christ, uprooted from their homes by the slaughter of war and utter destruction? For, killed by them, he rose again and has repaid them in the meantime with a temporal discipline, apart from what he reserves for the uncorrected when he will judge the living and the dead. For the Lord Jesus himself, pointing out this very traitor of his to the apostles by the bread he handed him, also quoted this verse of this psalm and said it was fulfilled in him: “He who ate my bread has lifted up his heel against me.” But the words “in whom I hoped” do not fit the head but the body. For the Savior himself was not ignorant of the man of whom he had already said: “One of you is a devil.” But he is accustomed to transfer to himself the person of his members and to ascribe to himself what belonged to them, because head and body are one Christ; hence the saying in the Gospel, “I was hungry and you gave me food to eat”, which he explains by saying, “When you did it to one of the least of mine, you did it to me.” So he said that he had hoped what his disciples had then hoped of Judas, when he was numbered among the apostles. But the Jews do not hope that the Christ whom they hope for will die. That is why they do not think that the one whom the law and the prophets announced is ours, but some one of their own, whom they imagine for themselves as exempt from suffering death. So with wonderful vanity and blindness they contend that the words we have quoted signified not death and resurrection, but sleep and waking.

But the fifteenth psalm too cries out to them: “Therefore my heart was glad and my tongue rejoiced; moreover my flesh also shall rest in hope; for you will not abandon my soul in hell, nor let your holy one see corruption.” Who would say that his flesh had rested in such hope that, his soul not being abandoned in hell but quickly returning to it, it would live again, so as not to decay as corpses usually decay, but he who rose on the third day? This they certainly cannot say of the prophet and king David. The sixty-seventh cries out too: “Our God is the God of saving, and the Lord's are the issues of death.” What could be said more plainly? For the God of saving is the Lord Jesus, which means “savior” or “saving.” For the reason for this name was given when, before he was born of the virgin, it was said: “She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. For he will save his people from their sins.” Since his blood was shed for the remission of those sins, it was certainly not fitting for him to have other issues from this life than those of death. So when it had been said, “Our God is the God of saving”, there was immediately added, “and the Lord's are the issues of death”, to show that he would save by dying. But it was said with wonder, “and the Lord's”; as if it were said: “Such is this life of mortals that not even the Lord himself would go out of it otherwise than by death.”

Chapter 19. On the sixty-eighth psalm, in which the unbelief and obstinacy of the Jews is declared.

But that the Jews do not yield at all to such manifest testimonies of this prophecy, even when the facts have been brought to so clear and certain an outcome, is surely the fulfilment in them of what is written in the psalm that follows this one. For when there too the things pertaining to Christ's passion were being prophetically spoken in his person, what was made plain in the Gospel was recalled: “They gave me gall for my food, and in my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink.” And as if after such a banquet and feast served to him, he at once went on: “Let their table become a snare before them, and a retribution, and a stumbling block; let their eyes be darkened so that they do not see, and bend their back always”, and the rest, which were not said as a wish but, in the form of a wish, foretold by prophecy. What wonder, then, if those whose eyes are darkened so that they do not see do not see these manifest things? What wonder if those do not look up to heavenly things whose back is always bent, so that they are bowed toward earthly things? For by these words, transferred from the body, vices of the mind are signified. Let this suffice concerning the psalms, that is, the prophecy of King David, so that there may be some limit. And let those who read these things and know all of them pardon me, and not complain about the things, perhaps stronger, which they understand or think I have passed over.

Chapter 20. On the reign and merit of David and on his son Solomon, and on the prophecy pertaining to Christ that is found either in the books joined to his writings or in those which are undoubtedly his.

David, then, reigned in the earthly Jerusalem, a son of the heavenly Jerusalem, much commended by divine testimony, because even his offences were overcome by such godliness, through the most wholesome humility of repentance, that he is altogether among those of whom he himself says: “Blessed are those whose iniquities are forgiven and whose sins are covered.” After him Solomon his son reigned over the same whole people; he, as was said above, began to reign while his father was still living. He had good beginnings and bad endings. For prosperity, which wearies the minds of the wise, harmed him more than his very wisdom helped him, a wisdom memorable even now and hereafter, and then praised far and wide. He himself too is found to have prophesied in his books, three of which have been received into canonical authority: Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Songs. But custom has prevailed that two others, one called Wisdom and the other Ecclesiasticus, be called Solomon's because of some likeness of style; yet the more learned do not doubt that they are not his; the Church, however, especially in the West, received them from ancient times into authority. In one of these, which is called the Wisdom of Solomon, the passion of Christ is most openly prophesied. For his ungodly killers are recorded as saying: “Let us lie in wait for the righteous man, because he is disagreeable to us and opposed to our works, and reproaches us with sins against the law, and charges against us the sins of our training. He professes to have knowledge of God, and names himself the son of God. He has become to us a reproof of our thoughts. He is grievous to us even to behold, because his life is unlike others', and his ways are different. We are counted by him as triflers, and he keeps himself from our ways as from uncleanness; he extols the last end of the righteous and boasts that he has God for his father. Let us see, then, whether his words are true, and let us test what will happen to him, and we shall know what his end will be. For if the righteous man is the son of God, he will uphold him and deliver him from the hand of his adversaries. Let us examine him with insult and torture, that we may know his reverence and prove his patience. Let us condemn him to a most shameful death; for he will be looked after, according to his words. These things they thought, and they went astray; for their own malice blinded them.” And in Ecclesiasticus the future faith of the nations is foretold in this way: “Have mercy on us, O Lord God of all, and send your fear upon all the nations; lift up your hand over the foreign nations, and let them see your power. As you have been sanctified in us before them, so be magnified in them before us; and let them know you as we also have known you, that there is no God but you, O Lord.” This prophecy, in the form of a wish and a prayer, we see fulfilled through Jesus Christ. But what is not written in the canon of the Jews is not brought forward against opponents with such strength.

In those three, however, which it is agreed are Solomon's and which the Jews hold canonical, to show that what is found of this kind in them pertains to Christ and the Church a laborious discussion is necessary, which would extend us further than is fitting if it were undertaken now. Yet what we read in Proverbs, that ungodly men say, “Let us hide the righteous man unjustly in the earth; let us swallow him alive like hell, and take away his memory from the earth; let us seize his precious possession”, is not so obscure that it cannot be understood without laborious exposition of Christ and his possession, the Church. For the Lord Jesus himself too showed through a parable of the Gospel that the wicked tenants said something of the kind: “This is the heir; come, let us kill him, and the inheritance will be ours.” Likewise what is in the same book, which we have already touched on when we were treating of the barren woman who bore seven, is usually understood, as soon as it is uttered, of nothing but Christ and the Church, by those who know that Christ is the wisdom of God: “Wisdom has built herself a house and set up seven pillars; she has sacrificed her victims, mixed her wine in the bowl, and prepared her table. She has sent her servants, calling with a lofty proclamation to the bowl, saying: Who is foolish? Let him turn aside to me. And to those lacking sense she said: Come, eat of my bread and drink the wine which I have mixed for you.” Here certainly we recognize that the wisdom of God, that is, the Word coeternal with the Father, built himself a house, a human body, in the virgin's womb; joined the Church to it as members to a head; sacrificed the victims of the martyrs; prepared a table with wine and bread, where the priesthood according to the order of Melchizedek also appears; and called the foolish and those lacking sense, because, as the apostle says, he has chosen the weak things of this world to confound the strong. Yet to these weak ones he says what follows: “Forsake folly, that you may live, and seek prudence, that you may have life.” To become a sharer in that table is itself to begin to have life. For in another book too, which is called Ecclesiastes, where he says, “There is no good for a man but what he will eat and drink”, what is he more credibly understood to say than what pertains to the sharing of this table, which the priest himself, the Mediator of the new covenant, provides according to the order of Melchizedek from his body and blood? For that sacrifice has succeeded all those sacrifices of the old covenant, which were offered in the shadow of the future; for which reason we also recognize that voice in the thirty-ninth psalm of the same Mediator speaking through prophecy: “Sacrifice and offering you did not want, but a body you have perfected for me”; because instead of all those sacrifices and offerings his body is offered and administered to those who partake. For that this Ecclesiastes, in this saying about eating and drinking which he often repeats and much commends, does not savor of feasts of carnal pleasure, is shown sufficiently where he says, “It is better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of drinking”; and a little later: “The heart of the wise,” he says, “is in the house of mourning, and the heart of fools in the house of feasting.”

But I think what should rather be recalled from this book is what pertains to the two cities, one of the devil, the other of Christ, and to their kings, the devil and Christ: “Woe to you, O land,” he says, “whose king is a youth, and whose princes eat in the morning. Blessed are you, O land, whose king is the son of the free-born, and whose princes eat in due season, in strength, and not in confusion.” He called the devil a youth because of the folly, pride, rashness, wantonness, and other vices that usually abound in that age; but Christ the son of the free-born, that is, of the holy patriarchs belonging to the free city, from whom he was begotten in the flesh. The princes of that city eat in the morning, that is, before the fitting hour, because they do not await the timely happiness, which is the true one, in the age to come, desiring hastily to be made happy by the celebrity of this age; but the princes of the city of Christ patiently await the time of a happiness that does not deceive. This is what he means by “in strength, and not in confusion”, because the hope does not deceive them of which the apostle says, “But hope does not confound”; and the psalm too says, “For those who wait for you shall not be confounded.” As for the Song of Songs, it is a kind of spiritual delight of holy minds in the marriage of that king and queen of the city, that is, Christ and the Church. But this delight is wrapped in allegorical coverings, so that it may be desired more ardently and uncovered more joyfully, and the bridegroom may appear, to whom it is said in the same Song, “Equity has loved you”, and the bride, who hears there, “Love in your delights.” We pass over much in silence, in our care to finish this work.

Chapter 21. On the kings after Solomon, whether in Judah or in Israel.

The other kings of the Hebrews after Solomon, whether in Judah or in Israel, are hardly found to have prophesied through any enigmas of their words or deeds anything that pertains to Christ and the Church. For so were the parts of that people called, from the time when, because of Solomon's offence, in the time of his son Rehoboam, who succeeded his father in the kingdom, it was divided by God's punishment. So the ten tribes which Jeroboam, Solomon's servant, received when he was made their king in Samaria, were properly called Israel, although this was the name of that whole people. But the two tribes, namely Judah and Benjamin, which had remained subject to the city of Jerusalem for David's sake, so that the kingdom of his stock should not be entirely uprooted, had the name of Judah, because that was the tribe from which David came. Benjamin, the other tribe belonging to the same kingdom, as I said, was the one from which Saul came, the king before David. But these two tribes together, as has been said, were called Judah, and by this name were distinguished from Israel, which was the proper name of the ten tribes having their own king. For the tribe of Levi, since it was priestly, dedicated to the service of God, not of kings, was counted as the thirteenth. For Joseph, one of the twelve sons of Israel, formed not one tribe, as the others each did, but two, Ephraim and Manasseh. Nevertheless the tribe of Levi too belonged rather to the kingdom of Jerusalem, where the temple of God was, which it served. When the people was divided, then, the first to reign in Jerusalem was Rehoboam, king of Judah, son of Solomon, and in Samaria Jeroboam, king of Israel, Solomon's servant. And when Rehoboam wished to pursue with war that divided part as a tyranny, the people was forbidden to fight with its brothers, God saying through a prophet that he had done this. From this it appeared that there was no sin in the matter either of the king of Israel or of the people, but that the will of God in punishment had been fulfilled. When this was known, both parts rested at peace with each other; for the division that had been made was one not of religion but of the kingdom.

Chapter 22. On Jeroboam, who profaned the people subject to him with the ungodliness of idolatry; among whom God nevertheless did not cease to inspire prophets and to keep many from the crime of idolatry.

But Jeroboam, king of Israel, with a perverse mind, not believing God, whom he had proved truthful when the kingdom was promised and given to him, feared that by coming to the temple of God which was in Jerusalem, to which by divine law that whole nation had to come to sacrifice, the people might be drawn away from him and returned to the stock of David as the royal seed; and he established idolatry in his kingdom, and with abominable ungodliness deceived the people of God, binding them with himself to the worship of images. Yet God did not altogether cease to rebuke through prophets not only that king but also his successors and imitators in ungodliness, and the people itself. For there arose there those great and famous prophets who also did many wonders, Elijah and Elisha his disciple; there too, when Elijah said, “Lord, they have killed your prophets, they have dug up your altars, and I alone am left, and they seek my life”, the answer was given that there were there seven thousand men who had not bowed the knee before Baal.

Chapter 23. On the varied state of both kingdoms of the Hebrews, until both peoples were led into captivity at different times; Judah was later recalled to its kingdom, which at last passed into the power of the Romans.

Likewise in the kingdom of Judah, belonging to Jerusalem, prophets were not lacking in the times of the succeeding kings either, as it pleased God to send them, whether to foretell what was needed or to rebuke sins and enjoin righteousness. For there too, though far less than in Israel, there arose kings who gravely offended God by their ungodliness and were punished, together with a people like them, with moderate scourges. The considerable merits of godly kings are indeed praised there; but in Israel we read that the kings, some more and some less, were all reprobate. So both parts, as divine providence commanded or permitted, were both raised up by various prosperities and pressed down by adversities, and were afflicted not only by foreign wars but also by civil wars among themselves, so that for definite causes the mercy or the anger of God might be made manifest; until, as his indignation grew, that whole nation was not only overthrown in its dwellings by the conquering Chaldeans but also, for the greatest part, carried away into the lands of the Assyrians: first the part called Israel, in ten tribes; afterwards Judah too, when Jerusalem and that most famous temple were overthrown; and in those lands it spent seventy years of captive leisure. After these years, released from there, it restored the temple that had been overthrown; and though very many of them lived in foreign lands, it did not thereafter have two parts of a kingdom and two different kings in each part, but in Jerusalem there was one ruler of them, and all from everywhere, wherever they were and from wherever they could, came at fixed times to the temple of God that was there. But not even then were they without enemies and conquerors from other nations; for Christ found them already tributaries of the Romans.

Chapter 24. On the prophets who were the last among the Jews, or whom the Gospel history makes known around the time of Christ's birth.

In the whole of that time since they returned from Babylon, after Malachi, Haggai, and Zechariah, who prophesied then, and Ezra, they had no prophets until the Savior's coming, except another Zechariah, the father of John, and Elizabeth his wife, when Christ's birth was already near; and after he was born, the old man Simeon and Anna, a widow already of great age, and John himself, the last; who, as a young man, did not indeed foretell the young Christ as one to come, but pointed him out, unknown as he was, by prophetic knowledge; for which reason the Lord himself says: “The law and the prophets were until John.” But the prophecy of these five is known to us from the Gospel, where the virgin mother of the Lord herself is also found to have prophesied before John. But the reprobate Jews do not accept this prophecy of these persons; those, however, accepted it who, innumerable among them, believed the Gospel. For then Israel was truly divided in two, by that division which was foretold as unchangeable to King Saul through the prophet Samuel. But Malachi, Haggai, Zechariah, and Ezra even the reprobate Jews hold as the last received into canonical authority. For there are also writings of theirs, as of others who, out of a great multitude of prophets, were very few who wrote what would obtain the authority of the canon. Of their predictions that pertain to Christ and his Church I see that I must set down some in this work; which will be done more fittingly, with the Lord's help, in the next book, so as not to burden this one, already so long, any further.

Chapter 1. On the matters discussed in the seventeen books down to the times of the Saviour.

I promised to write of the rise, the progress, and the appointed ends of the two cities, of which one is God's and the other this world's, in which the former too, so far as the human race is concerned, is now a pilgrim; but first, so far as his grace should help me, to refute the enemies of the city of God, who prefer their gods to Christ its founder and with an envy most ruinous to themselves bitterly begrudge the Christians. This I did in the first ten books. Of this threefold promise of mine, which I have just recalled, the rise of both cities was set out in the four books that follow the tenth; then their progress from the first man down to the flood in one book, which is the fifteenth of this work; and from there down to Abraham both again ran their course, in my writing as in time. But from father Abraham down to the time of the kings of the Israelites, where we completed the sixteenth volume, and from there down to the coming of the Saviour himself in the flesh, to which the seventeenth book extends, the city of God alone seems to have run its course in my pen; although in this world it did not run alone, but both, as from the beginning, certainly passed through the ages together in their course within the human race. I did this, however, so that from the time when God's promises began to be clearer, down to his birth from the virgin, in whom the things first promised were to be fulfilled, this city, which is God's, might appear more distinctly as it ran its course, without interruption from the opposing city; though until the revelation of the New Testament it ran not in light but in shadow. Now, then, I see that I must do what I had left aside, and touch, as far as seems sufficient, on how that other city too ran its course from the times of Abraham, so that the two may be compared with one another by the reader's reflection.

Chapter 2. On the kings and times of the earthly city with which the times of the saints, reckoned from the birth of Abraham, correspond.

The society of mortals, then, spread everywhere over the earth, and in however great diversities of place, yet bound together by a certain fellowship of one and the same nature, while each pursues its own interests and desires, and what is sought is sufficient either for no one or not for all, because it is not the thing itself, is for the most part divided against itself, and the part that prevails oppresses the other. For the conquered submits to the victor, preferring any sort of peace and safety to dominion, or even to liberty, so that those who have preferred to perish rather than serve have been greatly admired. For in almost all nations this voice of nature has in some way sounded, that those whose lot it was to be conquered should prefer to be subjected to the victors than to be destroyed by the utter devastation of war. Hence it has come about, not without the providence of God, in whose power it lies whether anyone in war is subjugated or subjugates, that some have been endowed with kingdoms and others made subject to those who reign. But among the very many kingdoms of the earth into which the society of earthly interest or desire has been divided (which we call by the general name of the city of this world), we see two kingdoms that have far surpassed the rest in renown: first that of the Assyrians, then that of the Romans, ordered and distinguished from one another in place as in time. For as the one was earlier and the other later, so the one arose in the East and the other in the West; and in fact the beginning of the one came immediately upon the end of the other. The other kingdoms and other kings I would call appendages, as it were, of these.

Ninus, then, was already the second king of the Assyrians, having succeeded his father Belus, the first king of that realm, when Abraham was born in the land of the Chaldeans. There was also at that time the very small kingdom of the Sicyonians, with which that man learned in every field, Marcus Varro, began, as with an ancient time, when he wrote on the race of the Roman people. For from these kings of the Sicyonians he came to the Athenians, from them to the Latins, and thence to the Romans. But before the founding of Rome the things recorded of these are very slight in comparison with the kingdom of the Assyrians; although even Sallust, the Roman historian, admits that the Athenians were very illustrious in Greece, more, however, in fame than in reality. For speaking of them he says: “The deeds of the Athenians, as I judge, were ample and magnificent enough, but somewhat less, nevertheless, than they are reported by fame. But because writers of great talent arose there, the deeds of the Athenians are celebrated throughout the world as the greatest. So the valour of those who did them is held to be as great as brilliant talents have been able to extol it in words.” This city also has no small glory from letters and philosophers, because such studies flourished there above all. But as regards dominion, none in the earliest times was greater than that of the Assyrians, nor so widely spread; for there King Ninus, the son of Belus, is said to have subdued the whole of Asia as far as the borders of Libya, Asia being called a third part of the whole world in the number of its parts, but found to be half of it in size. In the parts of the East only the Indians were not under his rule; and yet after his death his wife Semiramis attacked them in war. So it came about that whatever peoples or kings there were in those lands obeyed the kingdom and dominion of the Assyrians and did whatever they were commanded.

Abraham, therefore, was born in that kingdom, among the Chaldeans, in the times of Ninus. But since Greek history is much better known to us than Assyrian, and those who have searched out the race of the Roman people in the antiquity of its origin have drawn the sequence of times through the Greeks to the Latins and then to the Romans, who are themselves Latins too, we ought for this reason to mention the Assyrian kings where it is needed, so that it may appear how Babylon, a first Rome as it were, runs its course alongside the city of God, a pilgrim in this world; but the matters which must be inserted in this work for the comparison of both cities, the earthly, that is, and the heavenly, we ought rather to take from the Greeks and Latins, where Rome itself is a second Babylon, as it were.

When, then, Abraham was born, the second kings were Ninus among the Assyrians and Europs among the Sicyonians; the first had been Belus there and Aegialeus here. But when, after Abraham had gone out from Babylonia, God promised him that a great nation would come from him and that in his seed would be the blessing of all nations, the Assyrians had their fourth king and the Sicyonians their fifth; for among the former reigned the son of Ninus, after his mother Semiramis, who is said to have been killed by him when, as his mother, she dared to defile her son with incestuous intercourse. Some think that she founded Babylon, which she may indeed have restored. But when or how it was founded we said in the sixteenth book. The son of Ninus and Semiramis, who succeeded his mother in the kingdom, some also call Ninus, while others call him Ninyas, a name derived from his father's. At that time the kingdom of the Sicyonians was held by Telxion. In his reign the times there were so mild and happy that after his death they worshipped him as a god by offering sacrifices and celebrating games, which they say were first instituted for him.