City of God 20.3–20.7

Chapter 3. What Solomon discussed in the book of Ecclesiastes about the things that are common to the good and the wicked in this life.

Solomon, the wisest king of Israel, who reigned in Jerusalem, began the book called Ecclesiastes, which the Jews too hold in the canon of the sacred writings, thus: “Vanity of vanities, said the Preacher; vanity of vanities, all is vanity. What advantage has a man in all his toil at which he toils under the sun?” And when he had joined the rest to this statement, recalling the troubles and errors of this life and the vanishing passage of time, in which nothing solid, nothing stable is held fast, among this vanity of things under the sun he also laments, in a way, that although wisdom has the advantage over folly as light has the advantage over darkness, and the wise man's eyes are in his head while the fool walks in darkness, yet one event befalls them all, namely in this life which is lived under the sun; meaning, of course, those evils which we see to be common to the good and the wicked. He says also that the good suffer evils as if they were wicked, and the wicked obtain goods as if they were good, speaking thus: “There is a vanity,” he says, “which is done upon the earth: that there are righteous men upon whom it comes as though according to the deeds of the ungodly, and there are ungodly men upon whom it comes as though according to the deeds of the righteous. I said that this also is vanity.” To make this vanity known, as far as seemed enough, this wisest of men devoted this whole book (certainly for no other reason than that we should long for that life which has no vanity under this sun, but truth under him who made this sun). In this vanity, then, would man, having become like that same vanity, be vanishing away, except by the just and right judgment of God? Yet in the days of his vanity it makes a very great difference whether he resists the truth or obeys it, and whether he is without true godliness or shares in it; not for the sake of gaining the goods or avoiding the evils of this life, which vanish as they pass, but for the sake of the future judgment, through which good things will remain for the good and evil things for the wicked without end. Finally, this wise man concluded this book by saying: “Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole man; for God will bring every work into judgment, with everything that is despised, whether good or evil.” What could be said more briefly, more truly, more salutarily? “Fear God,” he says, “and keep his commandments, for this is the whole man.” For whoever exists, this is what he is: a keeper of God's commandments; since whoever is not this is nothing, for he is not re-formed to the image of the truth but remains in the likeness of vanity. “For every work,” that is, whatever is done by man in this life, “whether good or evil, God will bring into judgment, with everything that is despised,” that is, even with every one who seems contemptible here and therefore is not even noticed; because God both sees him and does not despise him, nor passes him over when he judges.

Chapter 4. That, in discussing God's last judgment, he will bring forward testimonies first from the New Testament and then from the Old.

The testimonies from the holy Scriptures concerning this last judgment of God, which I have undertaken to set down, are to be chosen first from the books of the New Testament and afterwards from those of the Old. For although the old come first in time, the new are to be put first in dignity, since the old are heralds of the new. The new, then, will be set down first, and to prove them more firmly the old will be brought in as well. In the old are the law and the prophets; in the new the gospel and the apostolic letters. Now the apostle says: “For through the law comes knowledge of sin. But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, attested by the law and the prophets; the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe.” This righteousness of God belongs to the New Testament and has testimony from the old books, that is, from the law and the prophets. First, then, the case itself must be stated, and afterwards the witnesses brought in. Christ Jesus himself showed that this order is to be kept when he said: “A scribe learned in the kingdom of God is like a householder who brings out of his treasure things new and old.” He did not say “old and new,” as he certainly would have said had he not preferred to keep the order of worth rather than of time.

Chapter 5. By which sayings of the Lord the Savior the divine judgment to come at the end of the world is declared.

The Savior himself, then, when he was rebuking the cities in which he had done great miracles and which had not believed, and was preferring foreigners to them, said: “But I tell you, it will be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon on the day of judgment than for you”; and a little later, to another city: “Truly I tell you, it will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom on the day of judgment than for you.” Here he most plainly foretells that the day of judgment is to come. And in another place he says: “The men of Nineveh will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, because they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and behold, something greater than Jonah is here. The queen of the South will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, because she came from the ends of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon, and behold, something greater than Solomon is here.” We learn two things in this passage: that the judgment will come, and that it will come with the resurrection of the dead. For when he said this of the Ninevites and the queen of the South, he was without doubt speaking of the dead, and yet he foretold that they would rise on the day of judgment. Nor did he say “they will condemn” because they will themselves judge, but because by comparison with them these will deservedly be condemned. Again, in another place, when he was speaking of the present mixture of good and bad people and their later separation, which will certainly take place on the day of judgment, he used the comparison of the wheat that was sown and the weeds sown on top of it, and explained it to his disciples: “He who sows the good seed is the Son of Man; the field is the world; the good seed are the sons of the kingdom; the weeds are the sons of the evil one; the enemy who sowed them is the devil; the harvest is the end of the age, and the reapers are angels. As the weeds, then, are gathered and burned with fire, so it will be at the end of the age. The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will gather out of his kingdom all causes of sin and those who do iniquity, and throw them into the furnace of fire; there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. He who has ears, let him hear.” Here he did not name the judgment or the day of judgment, but he expressed it much more clearly by the facts themselves, and foretold that it would be at the end of the age. Likewise he said to his disciples: “Truly I tell you, that you who have followed me, in the regeneration, when the Son of Man sits on the throne of his majesty, you also will sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.” Here we learn that Jesus will judge together with his disciples. Hence he said elsewhere to the Jews: “If I cast out demons by Beelzebul, by whom do your sons cast them out? Therefore they will be your judges.” Nor, because he says they will sit on twelve thrones, should we think that only twelve men will judge with him. By the number twelve is signified the whole multitude, as it were, of those who judge, because of the two parts of the number seven, by which totality is generally signified; these two parts, three and four, multiplied one by the other, make twelve, for four threes and three fours are twelve; and there may be some other reason for this number twelve that serves the purpose. Otherwise, since we read that the apostle Matthias was ordained in place of Judas the betrayer, the apostle Paul, who labored more than all of them, will have nowhere to sit to judge; yet he plainly shows that he belongs with the other saints to the number of the judges when he says: “Do you not know that we shall judge angels?” There is a similar reason for this number twelve with respect to those who are to be judged. For it does not follow, because it was said “judging the twelve tribes of Israel,” that the tribe of Levi, which is the thirteenth, will not be judged by them, or that they will judge only that people and not the other nations as well. And by “in the regeneration” he undoubtedly meant the resurrection of the dead to be understood under the name of regeneration. For so our flesh will be regenerated through incorruption, just as our soul has been regenerated through faith.

I pass over many things which seem to be said of the last judgment in such a way that, on careful consideration, they are found to be ambiguous or rather to refer to something else: either to that coming of the Savior by which he comes throughout this whole time in his church, that is, in his members, bit by bit and little by little, since the whole church is his body; or to the destruction of the earthly Jerusalem. For when he speaks of that too, he often speaks as if he were speaking of the end of the world and that last and great day of judgment, so that it cannot be distinguished at all unless everything said in similar terms on this subject by the three evangelists, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, is compared together. For one of them says some things more obscurely, another explains them more plainly, so that what is said about one subject may be seen to refer to what it does. I took some pains to do this in a letter which I wrote in reply to Hesychius of blessed memory, bishop of the city of Salona; the title of that letter is On the End of the World. So here I shall now give what is read in the Gospel according to Matthew about the separation of the good and the wicked through the most immediate and last judgment of Christ: “When the Son of Man comes in his majesty,” he says, “and all the angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his majesty, and all nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate them from one another, as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, and he will set the sheep at his right hand and the goats at his left. Then the King will say to those at his right: ‘Come, you blessed of my Father, possess the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me to eat; I was thirsty and you gave me to drink; I was a stranger and you took me in; naked, and you clothed me; I was in prison and you came to me.’ Then the righteous will answer him, saying: ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and fed you, thirsty and gave you drink? And when did we see you a stranger and took you in, or naked and clothed you? Or when did we see you sick or in prison and came to you?’ And the King will answer and say to them: ‘Truly I tell you, as long as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’ Then he will say,” he says, “also to those who will be on the left: ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire which has been prepared for the devil and his angels.’” Then he likewise lists to these that they did not do the things he recalled the ones on the right had done; and likewise, when they ask when they saw him in need of these things, he answers that what was not done to his least ones was not done to him; and, concluding his discourse, he says: “And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.” John the evangelist, however, relates most openly that he foretold that the judgment would take place at the resurrection of the dead. For when he had said: “For the Father judges no one, but has given all judgment to the Son, that all may honor the Son as they honor the Father; he who does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent him,” he immediately added: “Truly, truly I tell you, he who hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life, and does not come into judgment, but has passed from death into life.” See, here he said that his faithful do not come into judgment. How, then, will they be separated from the wicked by the judgment and stand at his right hand, unless in this place he used “judgment” for condemnation? For those who hear his word and believe him who sent him will not come into that kind of judgment.

Chapter 6. What the first resurrection is, and what the second.

Then he goes on and says: “Truly, truly I tell you, the hour is coming and now is, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live. For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself.” He is not yet speaking of the second resurrection, that is, of bodies, which will be at the end, but of the first, which is now. To distinguish it he says: “The hour is coming, and now is.” This resurrection is not of bodies but of souls. For souls too have their own death, in ungodliness and sins; according to this death those were dead of whom the same Lord says: “Let the dead bury their own dead,” that is, let those who are dead in soul bury those who are dead in body. It is for these, then, who are dead in soul through ungodliness and iniquity, that he says: “The hour is coming, and now is, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live.” “Those who hear” he said, meaning those who obey, who believe, and who persevere to the end. Nor did he make any difference here between the good and the wicked. For it is good for all to hear his voice and to live, passing from the death of ungodliness to the life of godliness. Of this death the apostle Paul says: “Therefore all have died, and he died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and rose again.” All, then, have died in sins, with absolutely no one excepted, whether in original sins or in sins added by the will as well, whether through ignorance or through knowing and not doing what is right; and for all the dead one living man died, that is, one who had no sin at all; so that those who live through the forgiveness of sins might no longer live for themselves but for him who died for all because of our sins and rose again for our justification, so that we, believing in him who justifies the ungodly, justified from ungodliness as if brought to life from death, may be able to belong to the first resurrection, which is now. For none belong to this first resurrection except those who will be blessed for ever; but to the second, of which he will speak presently, he will teach that both the blessed and the wretched belong. The one is of mercy, the other of judgment. That is why it is written in the psalm: “Of mercy and judgment I will sing to you, O Lord.” Of this judgment he went on to say: “And he has given him authority to execute judgment, because he is the Son of Man.” Here he shows that he will come to judge in the flesh in which he had come to be judged. For that is why he says: “Because he is the Son of Man.” And then, adding what we are dealing with, he says: “Do not marvel at this, for the hour is coming in which all who are in the tombs will hear his voice and come forth, those who have done good to the resurrection of life, but those who have done evil to the resurrection of judgment.” This is the judgment which a little before, as now, he had used for condemnation, saying: “He who hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and does not come into judgment, but has passed from death into life”; that is, by belonging to the first resurrection, by which one now passes from death to life, he will not come into condemnation, which he signified by the name of judgment, as also in this place where he says: “Those who have done evil to the resurrection of judgment,” that is, of condemnation. Let him rise, then, in the first resurrection who does not wish to be condemned in the second. For “the hour is coming, and now is, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live,” that is, they will not come into condemnation, which is called the second death; into this death, after the second resurrection, which will be of bodies, those will be hurled who do not rise in the first, which is of souls. For “the hour is coming” (here he does not say “and now is,” because it will be at the end of the world, that is, in God's last and greatest judgment) “when all who are in the tombs will hear his voice and come forth.” He did not say, as of the first, “and those who hear will live.” For not all will live, with that life, that is, which alone deserves to be called life because it is blessed. For they certainly could not hear and come forth from the tombs with their flesh rising without some kind of life. Why not all will live he teaches in what follows: “Those who have done good to the resurrection of life”: these are those who will live; “but those who have done evil to the resurrection of judgment”: these are those who will not live, because they will die the second death. They have done evil because they have lived evilly; and they have lived evilly because they did not come to life again in the first resurrection, the resurrection of souls, which is now, or did not remain to the end in the life to which they had come again. As, then, there are two regenerations, of which I spoke above, one according to faith, which takes place now through baptism, the other according to the flesh, which takes place in its incorruption and immortality through the great and last judgment, so there are also two resurrections: the first, which is now and is of souls, and which does not allow one to come into the second death; the other, the second, which is not now but will be at the end of the world, and is not of souls but of bodies, and which through the last judgment will send some into the second death and others into that life which has no death.

Chapter 7. What is written in the Apocalypse of John about the two resurrections and the thousand years, and what may reasonably be thought about them.

The same John the evangelist, in the book called the Apocalypse, spoke of these two resurrections in such a way that the first of them, not being understood by some of our own people, has even been turned into certain ridiculous fables. For the apostle John says in the book just mentioned: “And I saw an angel coming down from heaven, holding the key of the abyss and a chain in his hand. And he seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is called the devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years, and cast him into the abyss, and shut it and sealed it over him, so that he should no longer deceive the nations until the thousand years are ended; after this he must be loosed for a short time. And I saw thrones, and those who sat on them, and judgment was given. And the souls of those who were slain for the testimony of Jesus and for the word of God, and any who had not worshiped the beast or its image, nor received its mark on their forehead or on their hand, reigned with Jesus for a thousand years; the rest of them did not live until the thousand years are ended. This is the first resurrection. Blessed and holy is he who has a share in this first resurrection. Over these the second death has no power; but they will be priests of God and of Christ, and will reign with him for a thousand years.”

Those who, because of these words of this book, have supposed that the first resurrection will be bodily have been moved above all by the number of a thousand years, as though there ought to be in the saints a kind of sabbath rest of that length, a holy leisure, that is, after the labors of the six thousand years since man was created and, for the guilt of that great sin, sent out of the happiness of paradise into the troubles of this mortality; so that, since it is written, “One day with the Lord is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day,” when six thousand years have been completed like six days, there should follow, as it were, the seventh day of sabbath in the last thousand years, the saints rising to celebrate this sabbath. This opinion would be tolerable in some measure if it were believed that some spiritual delights would be present to the saints in that sabbath through the Lord's presence. For we too once held this opinion. But since they say that those who have then risen will spend their leisure in the most immoderate carnal feasts, in which there will be so much food and drink that they not only keep no restraint but exceed the measure even of what is credible, these things can by no means be believed except by carnal people. Those who are spiritual call the people who believe these things chiliasts, with a Greek word; translating it word for word we could call them millenarians. It would take long to refute them point by point; rather, we must now show how this passage of Scripture is to be taken.

The Lord Jesus Christ himself says: “No one can enter a strong man's house and seize his goods unless he first binds the strong man,” meaning by the strong man the devil, because he was able to hold the human race captive, and by his goods, which he was going to seize, his own future faithful, whom the devil possessed in various sins and ungodliness. So that this strong man might be bound, therefore, this apostle saw in the Apocalypse an angel coming down from heaven, holding the key of the abyss and a chain in his hand. “And he seized,” he says, “the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is called the devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years”; that is, he restrained and curbed his power to deceive and possess those who were to be set free.

The thousand years, so far as occurs to me, can be understood in two ways. Either this takes place in the last thousand years, that is, in the sixth millennium as in a sixth day, whose later stretches are now passing, to be followed by the sabbath which has no evening, namely the rest of the saints which has no end; so that he called the last part of this millennium, as of a day, the part which remained until the end of the world, “a thousand years,” by the manner of speaking in which the part is signified by the whole. Or else he put a thousand years for all the years of this world, so that the very fullness of time is marked by a perfect number. For the number a thousand is the solid square of the number ten. Ten times ten make a hundred, which is already a square figure, but a plane one; and for it to rise in height and become solid, a hundred is again multiplied ten times, and there are a thousand. Now if a hundred itself is sometimes put for the whole, as in what the Lord promised to one who leaves all he has and follows him, saying, “He will receive a hundredfold in this age,” which the apostle in a way explains when he says, “As having nothing, and yet possessing all things,” because it had already been said before, “The whole world of riches belongs to the faithful man”: how much more is a thousand put for the whole, where there is the solidity of the square of ten itself! Hence too there is no better way to understand what we read in the psalm: “He has been mindful for ever of his covenant, the word which he commanded for a thousand generations,” that is, for all.

“And he cast him,” he says, “into the abyss.” That is, he cast the devil into the abyss, by which name is signified the innumerable multitude of the ungodly, whose hearts are very deep in malice against the church of God; not that the devil was not there before, but he is said to be cast there because, shut out from believers, he began to possess the ungodly more. For he is more possessed by the devil who is not only estranged from God but even hates without cause those who serve God. “And he shut it,” he says, “and sealed it over him, so that he should no longer deceive the nations until the thousand years are ended.” “He shut it over him” means that he forbade him to be able to go out, that is, to cross what was forbidden. And “he sealed it,” which he added, seems to me to signify that he willed it to be hidden who belong to the devil's side and who do not. For in this world this is wholly hidden, since it is uncertain both whether he who seems to stand will fall and whether he who seems to lie fallen will rise. By the chain and prison of this prohibition the devil is prevented and restrained from deceiving those nations which belong to Christ, whom he used to deceive or hold before. For these God chose before the foundation of the world to rescue from the power of darkness and to transfer into the kingdom of the Son of his love, as the apostle says. For what believer does not know that the devil deceives nations even now and draws them with him into eternal punishment, but not those predestined to eternal life? Nor should it trouble anyone that the devil often deceives even those who, already regenerated in Christ, are walking in the ways of God. For “the Lord knows those who are his”; of these the devil deceives none into eternal damnation. For the Lord knows them as God, from whom nothing is hidden, even of things to come; not as a man, who sees a man at present (if indeed he sees one whose heart he does not see), but does not see even himself, what he will be afterwards. The devil, then, was bound and shut in the abyss for this purpose, that he should no longer deceive the nations of which the church consists, which he held deceived before they were the church. For it is not said “that he should not deceive anyone,” but “that he should no longer deceive,” he says, “the nations,” by which he undoubtedly meant the church to be understood, “until,” he says, “the thousand years are ended,” that is, either what remains of the sixth day, which consists of a thousand years, or all the years in which this world is henceforth to run its course.

Nor is his saying, “that he should not deceive the nations until the thousand years are ended,” to be taken as though afterwards he will deceive those very nations of which the predestined church consists, from deceiving whom he was prevented by that chain and prison. Rather, either it is said in that manner of speech which is found now and then in the Scriptures, as in the psalm: “So our eyes are on the Lord our God, until he has mercy on us”; for when he has had mercy, the eyes of his servants will not cease to be on the Lord their God; or else this is the order of the words: “And he shut and sealed it over him until the thousand years are ended”; and what he put in between, “so that he should no longer deceive the nations,” stands free of this connected order and is to be understood separately, as if it were added afterwards, so that the whole sentence would run: “And he shut and sealed it over him until the thousand years are ended, so that he should no longer deceive the nations”; that is, he shut it until the thousand years are ended for this reason, that he should no longer deceive the nations.