City of God 19.23–20.2

Chapter 23. What Porphyry says were the answers given by the oracles of the gods about Christ.

For in the books which he calls Philosophy from Oracles, in which he pursues and writes down what are, as it were, divine answers on things pertaining to philosophy, to give his very words as they have been translated from the Greek language into Latin, he says: “To one who asked what god he could propitiate in order to recall his wife from Christianity, Apollo said this in verse.” Then the words, as of Apollo, are these: “Perhaps you will more easily be able to write in letters pressed on water, or, spreading light wings, fly through the air as a bird, than recall the mind of your polluted, impious wife. Let her go as she will, singing with empty deceits a dead God, whom, condemned by judges of right mind, the worst of deaths, bound with iron amid fair show, killed.” Then, after these verses of Apollo, which have been translated into Latin without keeping the metre, he added and said: “In these he made manifest the incurable character of their opinion, saying that the Jews uphold God more than these do.” See how, disparaging Christ, he preferred the Jews to the Christians, confessing that the Jews uphold God. For so he explained the verses of Apollo in which he says that Christ was killed by judges of right mind, as though, since they judged justly, he was deservedly punished. Let me leave aside what the lying seer of Apollo said about Christ and what this man believed, or whether perhaps he himself invented that the seer said what he did not say. How consistent he is with himself, or how he makes the oracles themselves agree with each other, we shall see later; here, however, he says that the Jews, as upholders of God, judged rightly of Christ in deciding that he should be tortured with the worst death. The God of the Jews, then, to whom he bears witness, should have been heard when he says: “He who sacrifices to gods shall be rooted out, except to the Lord only.”

But let us come to plainer things, and hear how great he says the God of the Jews is. Likewise, to his question of Apollo which is better, the word, or reason, or the law: “He answered,” he says, “saying this in verse.” And then he adds verses of Apollo, among which are these, so that I may pluck out as much as suffices: “But in God, the begetter and king before all things, before whom heaven and earth and sea and the hidden places of the underworld tremble, and the very divinities shudder; whose law is the Father, whom the holy Hebrews greatly honour.” By such an oracle of his god Apollo, Porphyry declared the God of the Hebrews so great that even the divinities themselves shudder before him. Since, then, this God has said, “He who sacrifices to gods shall be rooted out,” I wonder that Porphyry himself did not shudder and fear to be rooted out for sacrificing to gods.

This philosopher also says good things of Christ, as though he had forgotten that insult of his of which we spoke a little before; or as though his gods had cursed Christ in their sleep and, when they awoke, recognized him to be good and praised him worthily. Finally, as though he were about to bring out something wonderful and incredible, he says: “What we are going to say will certainly seem to some contrary to expectation. For the gods have declared Christ most pious and made immortal, and remember him with good report; but the Christians, he says, they call polluted and contaminated and entangled in error, and they use many such blasphemies against them.” Then he adds, as it were, oracles of the gods blaspheming the Christians, and after these: “But to those who asked about Christ whether he is God,” he says, “Hecate says: ‘You know that the immortal soul goes on after the body; but when cut off from wisdom it always wanders. That soul is of a man most excellent in piety; they worship it because truth is foreign to them.’” Then after the words of this so-called oracle he weaves in his own: “She said, then, that he was a most pious man, and that his soul, like the souls of other pious men, was granted immortality after death, and that the Christians in their ignorance worship it. But to those who asked,” he says, “‘Why, then, was he condemned?’ the goddess answered by oracle: ‘The body indeed is always exposed to weakening torments; but the soul of the pious sits in the heavenly seat. But that soul fatally gave to other souls, to whom the fates did not grant to obtain the gifts of the gods nor to have knowledge of immortal Jupiter, to be entangled in error. Therefore they are hateful to the gods, because to those to whom it was not fated to know God nor to receive gifts from the gods, this man fatally gave to be entangled in error. But he himself was pious, and passed into heaven, as the pious do. So you shall not blaspheme him, but you shall pity the madness of men, from which comes for them an easy and headlong danger.’”

Who is so foolish as not to understand that these oracles were either invented by a cunning man, most hostile to the Christians, or given in reply by impure demons with a similar design; namely, that because they praise Christ, they may therefore be believed to blame the Christians truthfully, and so, if they can, close the way of eternal salvation, in which one becomes a Christian? For they feel that it is not contrary to their thousand-formed cunning in harming, if they are believed when they praise Christ, provided they are also believed when they blame the Christians; so that they may make him who believes both such a praiser of Christ that he does not wish to be a Christian, and so, though praised by him, Christ does not free him from the dominion of these demons; especially since they so praise Christ that whoever believes in him as such a one as they proclaim is not a true Christian but a Photinian heretic, who knows Christ only as man, not also as God, and therefore cannot be saved through him nor avoid or loose the snares of these lying demons. But we can approve neither Apollo blaming Christ nor Hecate praising him. For he wishes Christ to be believed unjust, since he says he was killed by judges of right mind; she, a most pious man, but a man only. Yet the intention of both is one, that men should not wish to be Christians, because unless they are Christians they cannot be rescued from their power. But let this philosopher, or rather those who believe in such so-called oracles against the Christians, first bring it about, if they can, that Hecate and Apollo agree with each other about Christ himself, and that both either condemn or praise him. Even if they could do this, we would nonetheless avoid the lying demons, both those who blame and those who praise Christ. But since their god and goddess disagree with each other about Christ, he blaming, she praising, surely men do not believe them when they blaspheme the Christians, if they themselves think rightly.

Indeed, when either Porphyry or Hecate, praising Christ, says that he himself fatally gave to the Christians to be entangled in error, he nevertheless sets out the causes, as he thinks, of that error. Before I set them out from his words, I first ask: if Christ fatally gave the Christians entanglement in error, did he give it willingly or unwillingly? If willingly, how is he just? If unwillingly, how is he happy? But now let us hear the causes of this error. “There are,” he says, “very small earthly spirits in a certain place, subject to the power of evil demons. The wise men of the Hebrews (of whom this Jesus too was one, as you have heard from the divine words of Apollo spoken above) — from these most evil demons and lesser spirits, then, the Hebrews forbade religious men and prohibited them from giving their time to them; but taught them rather to venerate the heavenly gods, and still more to venerate God the Father. This,” he says, “the gods also command, and we have shown above how they admonish men to turn their mind to God and command them to worship him everywhere. But the unlearned and impious natures, to whom fate truly did not grant to obtain gifts from the gods nor to have the notion of immortal Jupiter, not listening to the gods and the divine men, refused all the gods, and the forbidden demons they not only did not hate but revered. But, pretending to worship God, they do not do the only things by which God is worshipped. For God indeed, as the Father of all, needs nothing; but it is well for us when we worship him by justice and chastity and the other virtues, making our very life a prayer to him by imitation and inquiry about him. For inquiry purifies,” he says, “and imitation deifies the affection by working towards him.”

He has indeed proclaimed God the Father well, and said by what manner of life he should be worshipped; with such precepts the prophetic books of the Hebrews are full, when the life of the saints is either commanded or praised. But about the Christians he errs, or slanders, as much as the demons wish whom he thinks gods; as though it were difficult for anyone to recall what base and shameful things were done in theatres and temples in homage to the gods, and to attend to what is read, said, and heard in the churches, or what is offered to the true God, and from this to understand where there is the building up and where the ruin of morals. Who told or inspired him but a devilish spirit with so empty and manifest a lie, that the Christians revere rather than hate the demons whose worship was forbidden by the Hebrews? But that God whom the wise men of the Hebrews worshipped forbids sacrifice even to the holy angels of heaven and the powers of God, whom we venerate and love as most blessed fellow citizens in this mortal pilgrimage of ours, thundering in his law which he gave to his Hebrew people, and saying very threateningly: “He who sacrifices to gods shall be rooted out.” And lest anyone should think that the command was that sacrifice should not be offered to the most evil demons and earthly spirits, whom this man calls very small or lesser (because they too are called gods in the holy Scriptures, not of the Hebrews but of the nations, as the seventy translators plainly put it in the psalm, saying, “For the gods of the nations are demons”), lest anyone, then, should think that it was forbidden to sacrifice to these demons but permitted to sacrifice to the heavenly ones, either all or some, he immediately added: “except to the Lord alone,” that is, “except to the Lord only”; lest perhaps anyone should think, from his saying Domino soli, that the Lord Sun (Dominum solem) is meant, to whom one should sacrifice; which is very easily found in the Greek Scriptures not to be the way to understand it.

The God of the Hebrews, then, to whom even this great philosopher bears such great testimony, gave his Hebrew people a law written in the Hebrew language, not obscure and unknown, but now spread abroad among all nations, in which law it is written: “He who sacrifices to gods shall be rooted out, except to the Lord only.” What need is there to search out much on this matter in his law and his prophets; or rather not to search out, for these things are not hidden or rare, but to gather what is plain and frequent and set it down in this discussion of mine, by which it appears clearer than light that the true and supreme God willed sacrifice to be offered to no one at all except to himself alone? See, this one thing, said briefly, or rather grandly, threateningly, but truly, by that God whom their most learned men proclaim so excellently: let it be heard, feared, fulfilled, lest rooting out follow the disobedient. “He who sacrifices to gods,” he says, “shall be rooted out, except to the Lord only”; not that he needs anything, but because it is good for us to be his possession. For to him it is sung in the sacred writings of the Hebrews: “I said to the Lord, You are my God, for you have no need of my goods.” And his most excellent and best sacrifice is we ourselves, that is, his city, the mystery of which we celebrate in our offerings, which are known to the faithful, as we discussed in the preceding books. For the divine oracles through the Hebrew prophets thundered that the victims which the Jews offered in shadow of the future would cease, and that the nations from the rising of the sun to its setting would offer one sacrifice, as we now see done; of these we have brought forward some, as many as seemed sufficient, and have already scattered them through this work. Therefore, where there is not this justice, that the one supreme God rules according to his grace over an obedient city, so that it sacrifices to no one but him alone, and by this in all men who belong to that same city and obey God the mind faithfully rules the body and reason the vices in lawful order; so that, as the one just man, so the assembly and people of the just lives by faith, which works through love, by which man loves God as God is to be loved, and his neighbour as himself — where, then, there is not this justice, there is certainly no assembly of men associated by agreement about right and by community of interest. And if there is not this, there is certainly no people, if this definition of a people is true. Therefore neither is there a commonwealth, because there is no affair of a people where there is no people itself.

Chapter 24. By what definition it is established that not only the Romans but also other kingdoms rightly claim for themselves the name of people and commonwealth.

But if a people is defined not in this way but in another, as if it were said: “A people is an assembly of a rational multitude associated by harmonious sharing in the things it loves,” then surely, to see what kind each people is, we must look at the things it loves. Yet whatever it loves, if it is an assembly of a multitude not of beasts but of rational creatures, and is associated by harmonious sharing in the things it loves, it is not absurdly called a people; certainly the better the better the things in which it is in harmony, and the worse the worse the things in which it is in harmony. According to this definition of ours the Roman people is a people and its affair without doubt a commonwealth. But what that people loved in its first times and what in later ones, and by what morals, coming to most bloody seditions and from there to social and civil wars, it broke and corrupted that very concord which is in a way the health of a people, history testifies; of which we have set down much in the preceding books. Yet I would not therefore say either that it is not a people or that its affair is not a commonwealth, as long as there remains an assembly, of whatever kind, of a rational multitude associated by harmonious sharing in the things it loves. And what I have said of this people and of this commonwealth, I must be understood to have said and meant of that of the Athenians or of any Greeks, of that of the Egyptians, of that earlier Babylon of the Assyrians, when in their commonwealths they held empires either small or great, and of any other of other nations. For in general the city of the ungodly, over which God does not rule so that it obeys him and offers sacrifice to no one but him alone, and in which therefore the mind does not rightly and faithfully rule the body nor reason the vices, lacks the truth of justice.

Chapter 25. That there cannot be true virtues where there is no true religion.

For however praiseworthily the mind may seem to rule the body and reason the vices, if the mind and reason themselves do not serve God, as God himself has commanded that he be served, they in no way rule the body and the vices rightly. For what kind of mistress of the body and the vices can a mind be that is ignorant of the true God and not subjected to his rule, but prostituted to the most vicious corrupting demons? Accordingly the virtues which it seems to itself to have, by which it rules the body and the vices, if it refers them to obtaining or keeping anything whatever other than God, are themselves vices rather than virtues. For although some think that virtues are true and honourable when they are referred to themselves and not sought for the sake of anything else, even then they are puffed up and proud, and therefore are to be judged not virtues but vices. For as that which makes the flesh live is not from the flesh but above the flesh, so that which makes man live happily is not from man but above man; and not only man, but any heavenly power and virtue whatever.

Chapter 26. On the peace of the people estranged from God, which the people of God uses for piety while it is a pilgrim in this world.

Therefore, as the soul is the life of the flesh, so God is the happy life of man, of whom the sacred writings of the Hebrews say: “Happy is the people whose God is the Lord.” Wretched, then, is the people estranged from that God. Yet even it loves a certain peace of its own, not to be disapproved, which it will not indeed have at the end, because it does not use it well before the end. But that it should have it meanwhile in this life is in our interest too; since, as long as the two cities are mingled, we too use the peace of Babylon; from which the people of God is so freed through faith that meanwhile it is a pilgrim alongside it. For this reason the apostle too admonished the church to pray for its kings and those in high places, adding and saying: “that we may lead a quiet and tranquil life in all piety and love”; and the prophet Jeremiah, when he foretold captivity to the ancient people of God and by divine command bade them go obediently into Babylonia, serving their God even by this patience, himself also admonished them to pray for it, saying: “For in its peace is your peace”; certainly the temporal peace for the meantime, which is common to good and bad.

Chapter 27. On the peace of those who serve God, whose perfect tranquillity cannot be attained in this temporal life.

But our own peace is both here with God through faith and will be for eternity with him through sight. But here, whether that common peace or our own, it is such a peace as to be a solace of misery rather than the joy of happiness. Our very righteousness too, though it is true because of the true end of good to which it is referred, is yet so small in this life that it consists rather in the forgiveness of sins than in the perfection of virtues. The prayer of the whole city of God, which is a pilgrim on earth, is witness. For through all its members it cries to God: “Forgive us our debts, as we also forgive our debtors.” Nor is this prayer effective for those whose faith is dead without works, but for those whose faith works through love. For because reason, though subject to God, yet in this mortal condition and in the corruptible body, which weighs down the soul, does not perfectly rule the vices, therefore such a prayer is necessary for the righteous. For certainly, though they are ruled, the vices are by no means ruled without conflict; and indeed in this place of weakness something creeps in even on him who fights well, or who rules over such enemies when they are conquered and subdued, by which, if not by easy deed, then certainly by a slip of speech or a fleeting thought, one sins. And therefore, as long as the vices are being ruled, there is no full peace, because both those that resist are conquered in a dangerous battle, and those that have been conquered are not yet triumphed over in secure leisure, but are still held down by an anxious rule. In these temptations, then, of all of which it is briefly said in the divine words, “Is not human life on earth a temptation?” who would presume to live so that he has no need to say to God, “Forgive us our debts,” except a proud man? Not a great man, but one puffed up and swollen, whom he justly resists who gives grace to the humble. For this reason it is written: “God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble.”

Here, then, righteousness in each one is this: that God rules the obedient man, the mind the body, and reason the vices, even when they resist, either by subduing or by resisting them; and that from God himself are sought both the grace of merits and the pardon of offences, and thanks are rendered for the goods received. But in that final peace, to which this righteousness is to be referred and for the attaining of which it is to be had, since our nature, healed by immortality and incorruption, will have no vices, and nothing will resist any of us either from another or from himself, there will be no need for reason to rule the vices, which will not exist; but God will rule man, the mind the body, and there will be as great a sweetness and ease in obeying as happiness in living and reigning. And this will be eternal there in all and in each, and it will be certain that it is eternal; and therefore the peace of this happiness, or the happiness of this peace, will be the supreme good.

Chapter 28. To what end the outcome of the ungodly will come.

But for those who do not belong to this city of God there will be, on the contrary, everlasting misery, which is also called the second death, because neither can the soul be said to live there, which will be estranged from the life of God, nor the body, which will be subject to eternal pains; and therefore this second death will be the harder because it cannot be ended by death. But since, as misery is contrary to happiness and death to life, so war seems to be contrary to peace, it is rightly asked, as peace has been proclaimed and praised as the end of the good, what war, or what kind of war, can be understood on the contrary as the end of the evil. But let him who asks this consider what is harmful and destructive in war, and he will see that it is nothing other than the opposition and conflict of things with one another. What war, then, can be thought more grievous and bitter than where the will is so opposed to passion and passion to the will that their hostility is ended by the victory of neither, and where the force of pain so conflicts with the very nature of the body that neither yields to the other? For here, when this conflict happens, either pain conquers and death takes away feeling, or nature conquers and health removes the pain. But there pain remains to afflict, and nature endures to feel; for neither fails, lest the punishment fail. But these ends of goods and evils, the former to be sought and the latter to be avoided, since through judgment the good will pass to the former and the evil to the latter, I shall discuss this judgment, as far as God grants, in the following book.

Chapter 1. That, although God judges at all times, in this book the discussion is to be properly about his last judgment.

Since I am about to speak, so far as he himself grants, of the day of God's final judgment, and to assert it against the ungodly and the unbelieving, we must first lay down the divine testimonies, as the foundation of a building. Those who refuse to believe them try to oppose them with false and deceitful little human arguments, either contending that a testimony brought from the sacred writings means something else, or denying altogether that it was spoken by God. For I do not think there is any mortal who, having understood these testimonies as they were spoken and believed that they were spoken by the supreme and true God through holy souls, does not yield and assent to them, whether he also confesses it with his mouth, or is ashamed or afraid to confess it through some fault, or even, with a stubbornness very like madness, strives most contentiously to defend what he knows or believes to be false. What, then, the whole church of the true God holds in its confession and profession, that Christ will come from heaven to judge the living and the dead, this we call the last day of divine judgment, that is, the last time. For over how many days this judgment extends is uncertain; but no one who has read the holy Scriptures, however carelessly, is unaware that in their usage “day” is commonly put for “time.” And when we speak of the day of God's judgment, we add “last” or “final” because he judges now as well, and has judged from the beginning of the human race, when he sent the first human beings, the perpetrators of a great sin, out of paradise and cut them off from the tree of life. Indeed, when he did not spare the angels who sinned, whose prince, overthrown by himself, overthrew human beings out of envy, he undoubtedly judged; and it is not without his deep and just judgment that the life both of demons and of human beings, in this lower heaven of the air and on earth, is most wretched and full of errors and troubles. Yet even if no one had sinned, it would not have been without a good and right judgment that he kept the whole rational creation in eternal blessedness, cleaving most steadfastly to him as its Lord. He judges, moreover, not only the race of demons and of human beings as a whole, so that they are wretched because of the guilt of the first sins, but also the particular works of each, which they do by the choice of the will. For the demons too beg not to be tormented, and it is certainly not unjust either that they are spared or that each is tormented for his own wickedness; and human beings pay the penalty for their deeds by God's hand, often openly and always secretly, whether in this life or after death; although no human being acts rightly unless helped by divine aid, and no demon or human being acts wickedly unless permitted by the divine and likewise most just judgment. For, as the apostle says, “There is no injustice with God”; and as he says elsewhere, “His judgments are unsearchable and his ways past finding out.” In this book, then, I shall discuss, as far as he grants, neither those first judgments of God nor these intermediate ones, but the last one itself, when Christ is to come from heaven to judge the living and the dead. That day is properly called the day of judgment, because there will be no room there for the ignorant complaint why this unjust man is happy and why that just man is unhappy. For then the true and full happiness of none but the good, and the deserved and extreme unhappiness of none but the wicked, will be made plain.

Chapter 2. On the variety of human affairs, in which God's judgment cannot be said to be lacking, although it cannot be traced.

At present, however, we learn to bear with equanimity the evils that the good also suffer, and not to set great store by the goods that the wicked also obtain; and so even in those matters in which divine justice does not appear, divine teaching is salutary. For we do not know by what judgment of God this good man is poor and that bad man rich; why this man rejoices, whom we think ought to have been tormented with griefs for his depraved conduct, and that man is saddened, whose praiseworthy life convinces us he ought to have rejoiced; why an innocent man leaves the court not only unavenged but even condemned, either crushed by the injustice of the judge or overwhelmed by false testimony, while on the other hand his wicked adversary exults not only unpunished but even vindicated; why the ungodly man enjoys excellent health and the godly wastes away in sickness; why young men in the best of health turn to robbery, and infants who could not injure anyone even with a word are afflicted with all kinds of cruel diseases; why a man useful to human affairs is carried off by an untimely death, and one who seems not even to have deserved to be born lives on for a very long time besides; why a man full of crimes is raised to honors, and the darkness of obscurity hides a man without reproach; and other things of this kind, which no one can gather or count. If these things had even a consistency in their very absurdity, so that in this life, in which, as the holy psalm says, “man has become like vanity, and his days pass away like a shadow,” none but the wicked obtained these passing and earthly goods, and none but the good suffered such evils, this could be referred to God's just, or even kindly, judgment: those who were not going to attain the eternal goods that make people blessed would be either deceived by temporal goods because of their malice or consoled by them through God's mercy; and those who were not going to suffer eternal torments would be either afflicted with temporal evils for their sins, whatever and however small, or exercised by them in order to perfect their virtues. But as it is, since not only are the good in evil circumstances and the wicked in good ones, which seems unjust, but very often evil befalls the wicked and good comes to the good, God's judgments become all the more unsearchable and his ways past finding out. Although, then, we do not know by what judgment God does these things or allows them to be done, God with whom is supreme power and supreme wisdom and supreme justice, no weakness, no rashness, no injustice, yet we learn for our salvation not to set great store by the goods or the evils which we see to be common to good and bad alike, and to seek those goods which belong to the good, and above all to flee those evils which are proper to the wicked. But when we come to that judgment of God, whose time is now properly called the day of judgment and sometimes the day of the Lord, not only whatever will be judged then, but also whatever has been judged from the beginning and whatever is still to be judged until that time, will be seen to be most just. There this too will be made plain: by how just a judgment of God it comes about that now so many, indeed almost all, of God's just judgments are hidden from the senses and minds of mortals, although in this matter it is not hidden from the faith of the godly that what is hidden is just.