City of God 21.5–21.9

Chapter 5. How many things there are whose reason cannot be known, and yet it is not doubtful that they are true.

But unbelievers who, when we proclaim divine miracles, either past or future, which we cannot show them to experience, demand from us an account of these things, and, because we cannot give it (for they surpass the powers of the human mind), think that what we say is false: they themselves ought to give an account of so many wonderful things which we either can see or do see. And if they see clearly that this cannot be done by man, they must admit that something has not failed to be, or will not fail to be, just because no account of it can be given, since there are these things of which likewise none can be given. So I do not go through the very many things committed to writing, not events done and past, but things that remain in particular places, where, if anyone wishes and is able to go, he may find out whether they are true; I mention only a few. They say that the salt of Agrigentum in Sicily, when brought near fire, melts as if in water, but when brought to water, crackles as if in fire. Among the Garamantes, they say, there is a certain spring so cold by day that it cannot be drunk, so hot by night that it cannot be touched. In Epirus there is another spring in which lighted torches are put out, as in others, but, unlike others, extinguished torches are lit. The Arcadian stone asbestos is so called because, once lit, it can no longer be put out. The wood of a certain Egyptian fig does not float in water like other wood, but sinks; and, what is more wonderful, when it has been at the bottom for some time it rises again from there to the surface of the water, when, being soaked, it ought to be weighed down by the weight of the moisture. Fruit grows in the land of Sodom and reaches the look of ripeness; but when tried by a bite or a squeeze, the skin bursts and it vanishes into smoke and ash. The Persian stone pyrites burns the hand of one who holds it if it is squeezed too hard, which is why it takes its name from fire. In the same Persia is found also the stone selenite, whose inner whiteness waxes and wanes with the moon. In Cappadocia mares conceive by the wind, and their foals live no longer than three years. Tylos, an island of India, is preferred to other lands because every tree that grows on it is never stripped of its covering of leaves.

Of these and innumerable other wonders, which history records not of deeds done and past but of places that remain, and which it would take me too long to pursue, since I am about something else, let these unbelievers who refuse to believe the divine writings give an account, if they can; for what else is their refusal but thinking that these writings are not divine because they contain incredible things, such as this which we are now dealing with? “For no reason,” they say, “admits that flesh should burn and not be consumed, feel pain and not die.” Great reasoners, to be sure, who can give an account of all the things known to be wonderful! Let them give an account, then, of these few that we have set down, which, no doubt, if they did not know them to exist and we said they would come to be, they would believe much less than what they now refuse to believe when we say it will come some day. For which of them would believe us if, just as we say that there will be living human bodies which will burn and feel pain for ever and yet never die, we said that in the world to come there would be salt which fire would make melt as if in water, and which water would make crackle as if in fire; or a spring whose water in the cool of night would be so hot that it could not be touched, but in the heat of the day so cold that it could not be drunk; or a stone which would burn the hand of one gripping it by its own heat, or one which, lit from any part, could not be put out at all, and the other things which, passing over countless others, I have thought meanwhile worth mentioning? If, then, we said that these things would exist in that world to come, and the unbelievers answered us, “If you want us to believe them, give an account of each one,” we would confess that we could not, because the weak reasoning of mortals is overcome by these and similar wonderful works of God; but that we hold firmly this reason, that the Almighty does not act without reason in things of which the weak human mind cannot give an account; and that, though in many things it is uncertain to us what he wills, this is most certain, that none of these things is impossible to him, whatever he wills; and that we believe him when he foretells, whom we can believe to be neither powerless nor lying. Yet what do these critics of faith and exactors of reasons answer about these things, of which no account can be given by man, and yet they exist, and seem contrary to the very reason of nature? If we said that they would come to be, an account would be demanded of us by unbelievers just as it is for the things we say will come to be. And so, since in such works of God the reasoning of the human heart and speech fails, just as these things do not fail to exist on that account, so neither will those things fail to exist on that account, because no account of either can be given by man.

Chapter 6. That not all marvels are natural, but that many are contrived by human ingenuity and many put together by the art of demons.

Here perhaps they may answer: “These things do not exist at all, and we do not believe them; what is said of them is false, what is written of them is false.” And they may add, reasoning and saying: “If such things are to be believed, then you too believe what is related in the same writings, that there was, or is, a certain shrine of Venus, and there a lampstand, and on it a lamp burning in the open air in such a way that no storm, no rain could put it out; hence, like that stone, it was named lychnos asbestos, that is, the inextinguishable lamp.” They may say this in order to push us into a tight corner in answering; because if we say it is not to be believed, we shall weaken those writings about marvels; but if we grant that it is to be believed, we shall strengthen the deities of the pagans. But, as I have already said in the eighteenth book of this work, we are not obliged to believe everything that the history of the nations contains, since, as Varro says, the historians themselves disagree among themselves on many points, as if on purpose and deliberately; but we believe, if we wish, those things which are not opposed to the books which we do not doubt we ought to believe. As for these marvels of places, for the things to come of which we wish to persuade unbelievers those suffice which we too can test, and for which it is not hard to find suitable witnesses. But as for that shrine of Venus and the inextinguishable lamp, not only are we not pushed into any tight corner, but a broad field is opened to us. For to this inextinguishable lamp we add many marvels of human and magical arts, that is, of demonic arts worked through human beings, and of demons themselves by themselves; and if we wished to deny these, we should be opposing the very truth of the sacred writings which we believe. Either, then, human art contrived something mechanical in that lamp from the stone asbestos, or it was done by magic art so that people might marvel in that temple, or some demon under the name of Venus presented himself with such effect that this prodigy both appeared to people there and lasted a long time.

Demons are enticed to dwell in places by means of creatures, which not they but God created, by various delights suited to their various natures, not as animals are by food but as spirits are by signs which suit the delight of each, through various kinds of stones, herbs, woods, animals, charms, and rites. But in order to be enticed by human beings, they first seduce them with most subtle cunning, either by breathing a hidden poison into their hearts or even by appearing to them in deceitful friendships, and they make a few of them their disciples and the teachers of very many. For it could not have been learned, unless they themselves first taught it, what each of them desires, what each shrinks from, by what name each is invited, by what name compelled; hence the magic arts and their practitioners arose. But above all they possess the hearts of mortals, a possession in which they chiefly glory, when they transform themselves into angels of light. So there are very many deeds of theirs which, the more wonderful we admit them to be, the more carefully we ought to avoid; but for what we are now dealing with they are even useful to us. For if unclean demons can do these things, how much more powerful are the holy angels, how much more powerful than all these is God, who made the angels themselves the workers of such great miracles!

Therefore, if so many and such marvelous things, which they call mechanemata, “contrivances,” are done by using God's creation with human arts, that those who do not know about them think them divine (so it came about that in a certain temple, with magnets placed in the floor and in the ceiling in proportion to their size, an iron image hung in the middle of the air between the two stones, as if by the power of the deity, to people who did not know what was above and below; something of this kind, as we have already said, could also have been done by a craftsman with the stone asbestos in that lamp of Venus); if the works of magicians, whom our Scripture calls sorcerers and enchanters, could exalt demons so much that a noble poet thought it agreeable to people's sense of things to say of a certain woman who was powerful in that art: “She promises by her charms to free the minds of whom she will, but to send hard cares on others, to stop the water in rivers and turn the stars backward; and she summons the ghosts of night: you will see the earth bellow under your feet and the ash trees come down from the mountains”: how much more is God able to do what is incredible to unbelievers but easy to his power, since he himself created the power of stones and other things, and the ingenuity of human beings who use them in wonderful ways, and the natures of angels, more powerful than all earthly living things; his wonderful power surpassing all wonders, and his wisdom in working, commanding, and permitting, using all things as wonderfully as he created them.

Chapter 7. That in marvelous things the highest reason for belief is the omnipotence of the Creator.

Why, then, should God not be able to make both the bodies of the dead rise and the bodies of the damned be tormented in eternal fire, he who made the world full of innumerable marvels in heaven, on earth, in the air, and in the waters, when the world itself is without doubt a marvel greater and more excellent than all the things with which it is filled? But these people with whom, or against whom, we are dealing, who both believe that there is a God by whom the world was made, and gods made by him through whom the world is administered by him, and who do not deny, but even proclaim, worldly powers that produce marvels, whether spontaneous, or obtained by some worship and rite, or even magical: when we set before them the marvelous power of other things, which are neither rational animals nor spirits endowed with any reason, such as those of which we have mentioned a few, they usually answer: “That is a power of nature; their nature is such; these are the effects proper to their natures.” So the whole reason why the salt of Agrigentum is made to melt by flame and to crackle in water is that this is its nature. And yet this seems rather to be against nature, which has given to water, not to fire, the power of dissolving salt, and to fire, not water, the power of roasting it. “But this,” they say, “is the natural power of this salt, that it undergoes the contrary of these.” This reason, then, is given also for that spring of the Garamantes, where one vein is cold by day and hot by night, troublesome to the touch either way; this also for that other spring, which, though cold to those who handle it and though it puts out a lighted torch like other springs, yet, unlike them and wonderfully, the same spring lights an extinguished one; this also for the stone asbestos, which, though it has no fire of its own, yet when it has received fire from elsewhere burns so that it cannot be put out; this for the rest, which it is tedious to go through again, in which, although an unaccustomed power against nature seems to be present, no other reason is given for them except to say that this is their nature.

A brief reason indeed, I admit, and a sufficient answer. But since God is the author of all natures, why do they refuse to let us give a stronger reason when they will not believe something as impossible, and, when they demand an account, we answer that this is the will of almighty God? He is certainly called almighty for no other reason than that he can do whatever he wills, he who was able to create so many things which, unless they were shown or were told even today by witnesses to be believed, would surely be thought impossible; not only the things I have set down which are very little known among us, but also those very well known. For as to those which have no witness besides those whose books about them we read, and which were written by men who were not divinely taught and, being human, may perhaps have been deceived, anyone may, without just reproach, not believe them. For I do not wish all the things I have set down to be believed rashly, since I do not believe them myself as if there were no doubt about them in my mind, except those which I have tested myself and which anyone can easily test: such as that lime boils in water and is cold in oil; that the magnet, by some imperceptible attraction, does not move a straw but snatches iron; that the flesh of the peacock does not decay, when even Plato's has decayed; that straw is so cold that it does not let snow melt, and so warm that it forces fruit to ripen; that bright fire, in keeping with its brightness, whitens stones by baking them, and against that same brightness darkens very many things by burning them. Of the same kind is the fact that black stains are spread by bright oil, and likewise black lines are drawn by white silver; and about coals, that when the fire kindles them they are turned into the contrary, so that from the most beautiful wood they become ugly, brittle from hard, incorruptible from corruptible. Some of these I know myself with many others, some with everyone, and many other things which it would have been lengthy to insert in this book.

But of those which I have set down not as tested but as read, except for that spring where burning torches are put out and extinguished ones lit, and for the fruits of the land of Sodom, ripe as it were outside and smoky inside, I have not been able to find any suitable witnesses from whom I might hear whether they were true. And indeed I did not find anyone who said he had seen that spring in Epirus, but I found people who knew a similar one in Gaul not far from the city of Grenoble. As for the fruits of the trees of Sodom, not only do trustworthy writings report it, but so many people say they have tested it that I cannot doubt it. The rest I hold in such a way that I have decided they are neither to be denied nor affirmed; but I set them down too because I read them in the historians of those against whom we are arguing, to show what kind of things, and how many, many of them believe written in the writings of their learned men without any reason given, who do not deign to believe us even when a reason is given, when we say that almighty God will do something which surpasses their experience and sense. For what better and stronger reason is given for such things than when the Almighty is declared able to do them and is said to be going to do what we read he foretold there where he foretold many other things which he is shown to have done? For he will do the things that are thought impossible, because he foretold that he would do them, he who promised and brought it about that incredible things should be believed by unbelieving nations.

Chapter 8. That it is not against nature when, in some thing whose nature has become known, something begins to be different from what was known.

But suppose they answer that they do not believe what we say about human bodies that will always burn and never die because we know the nature of human bodies to be constituted far otherwise; so that the reason that was given for those marvelous natures cannot be given here, namely, that it can be said, “This is a natural power, this is the nature of this thing,” since we know that this is not the nature of human flesh. We have indeed an answer from the sacred writings: that this very human flesh was constituted otherwise before sin, namely, so that it could never suffer death, and otherwise after sin, such as it has become known in the troubles of this mortality, so that it cannot keep a perpetual life; so, then, it will be constituted otherwise than it is known to us in the resurrection of the dead. But since they do not believe these writings, where we read how man lived in paradise and how far he was from the necessity of death (and certainly, if they believed them, we would not be dealing at such pains with them about the punishment of the damned that is to come), something must be brought forward from the writings of those who were most learned among them, by which it may appear that it can happen that a thing is otherwise than it was previously known to be, among things, by the determination of its nature.

In the books of Marcus Varro entitled On the Race of the Roman People there is a passage which I will set down here in the same words in which it is read there: “In the sky,” he says, “a wonderful portent occurred: for Castor writes that in the most renowned star of Venus, which Plautus calls Vesperugo and Homer Hesperos, calling it most beautiful, so great a portent occurred that it changed its color, size, shape, and course; which has never happened thus before or since. Adrastus of Cyzicus and Dion of Naples, famous mathematicians, said that this happened in the reign of King Ogyges.” So great an authority as Varro would certainly not call this a portent unless it seemed to be against nature. For we say that all portents are against nature; but they are not. For how is that against nature which happens by the will of God, since the will of so great a Creator is certainly the nature of each created thing? A portent, then, happens not against nature, but against what is known of nature. And who can count the multitude of portents contained in the history of the nations? But let us now attend to this one, which bears on the matter we are dealing with. What has been so arranged by the author of the nature of heaven and earth as the most orderly course of the stars? What has been so firmly established by fixed and settled laws? And yet, when he willed who rules with supreme command and power what he created, a star, the best known of all for its size and brightness, changed its color, size, shape, and (what is more wonderful) the order and law of its course. Surely it then upset the tables of the astrologers, if there were any yet, which they keep as written with unerring computation about the past and future motions of the stars, following which tables they have dared to say that what happened to Lucifer never happened before or since. But we read in the divine books that the sun itself both stood still, when the holy man Joshua son of Nun had asked this of the Lord God, until he should finish with victory the battle he had begun, and went back, so that the fifteen years added to King Hezekiah's life might be signified by this prodigy too, joined to God's promise. But these miracles too, granted to the merits of the saints, when these people believe they happened, they attribute to magic arts. Hence what I mentioned above that Virgil said: “to stop the water in rivers and turn the stars backward.” For we read in the sacred writings both that a river stood still above and flowed on below, when the people of God were making their way under the leader mentioned above, Joshua son of Nun, and that this was done when the prophet Elijah crossed, and afterwards his disciple Elisha; and we have just mentioned that the greatest star turned back in the reign of Hezekiah. But what Varro wrote about Lucifer does not say there that it was granted to any man who asked for it.

Let unbelievers not make a fog for themselves out of their knowledge of natures, as though something other could not happen by God's power in some thing, since they have come to know its nature by their human experience; although the very things that are known to all in the nature of things are no less wonderful, and would be astonishing to all who considered them, if people were accustomed to wonder at wonders other than rare ones. For who, on reflection, does not see that in the innumerable multitude of human beings, with so great a likeness of nature, each one very wonderfully has his own face, so that, if they were not like one another, their species would not be distinguished from the other animals, and again, if they were not unlike one another, individuals would not be distinguished from other human beings? Those whom we acknowledge to be alike, then, we find to be unlike. But the consideration of unlikeness is the more wonderful, since a common nature seems more rightly to demand likeness. And yet, since rare things are the wonderful ones, we marvel much more when we find two so alike that we always or often make mistakes in telling them apart.

But what I said was written by Varro, though he is their historian and the most learned of them, perhaps they do not believe actually happened; or, because the different course of that star did not last long, but it returned to its usual one, they are less moved by this example. They have, then, another, which can be shown even now and which I think ought to be enough for them, to remind them that when they have noticed something in some constitution of nature and have come to know it very well, they ought not on that account to lay down the law to God, as if he could not turn and change it into something far other than what is known to them. The land of Sodom was certainly not as it is now, but lay with a face like the rest and flourished with the same or even richer fertility; for in the divine words it is compared to the paradise of God. After it was struck from heaven, as their history too testifies and as is now seen by those who come to those places, it is a horror with its prodigious soot, and its fruits enclose ash within under a lying surface of ripeness. See, it was not such, and it is such. See, its nature was turned by the Creator of natures, by a wonderful change, into this most foul difference; and what happened after so long a time has persisted for so long a time. As, then, it was not impossible for God to establish the natures he willed, so it is not impossible for him to change the natures he established into whatever he wills.

Hence too the multitude of those miracles grows like a forest which are called monsters, signs, portents, and prodigies; if I wished to recall and mention them, what end would there be to this work? They say that monsters (monstra) are so called from “showing” (monstrare), because they show something by signifying it; and signs (ostenta) from “displaying” (ostendere); and portents (portenta) from “portending” (portendere), that is, showing beforehand; and prodigies (prodigia) because they “speak forth” (porro dicere), that is, foretell things to come. But let their interpreters see how by them they are either deceived, or even foretell true things by the prompting of spirits whose concern is to entangle human minds deserving such a penalty in the nets of harmful curiosity, or by saying many things sometimes stumble on some truth. For us, however, these things which happen as if against nature and are said to happen against nature (in which human way of speaking the apostle too spoke, when he said that the wild olive grafted against nature into the olive became a sharer of the olive's richness), and which are called monsters, signs, portents, and prodigies, ought to show this, display or show beforehand this, foretell this: that God will do what he foretold he would do with the bodies of human beings, no difficulty hindering, no law of nature prescribing to him. How he foretold it I think I have shown sufficiently in the previous book, by gathering from the holy Scriptures, both new and old, not indeed everything pertaining to this, but what I judged enough for this work.

Chapter 9. On Gehenna and the nature of the eternal punishments.

What God said, then, through his prophet about the everlasting punishment of the damned will come to pass, will certainly come to pass: “Their worm will not die, and their fire will not be quenched.” For to impress this more forcefully, the Lord Jesus too, when he set the members that cause a person to stumble for those persons whom one loves as one's own right-hand members, and commanded that they be cut off, said: “It is better for you to enter into life maimed than having two hands to go into Gehenna, into the unquenchable fire, where their worm will not die and the fire will not be quenched.” Likewise of the foot: “It is better for you,” he says, “to enter lame into eternal life than having two feet to be cast into the Gehenna of unquenchable fire, where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched.” He speaks no differently of the eye: “It is better for you to enter one-eyed into the kingdom of God than having two eyes to be cast into the Gehenna of fire, where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched.” He was not reluctant to say the same words three times in one place. Whom would this repetition not terrify, and so forceful a warning of that punishment from the divine mouth?

Those who want both of these, the fire and the worm, to belong to the punishments of the mind and not of the body, say that those who have been separated from the kingdom of God are burned by the pain of a mind that repents too late and fruitlessly, and so they contend that fire could not unfittingly have been put for this burning pain; hence the apostle's saying: “Who is made to stumble, and I do not burn?” They think the worm too is to be understood the same way. “For it is written,” they say, “As the moth a garment and the worm wood, so grief torments the heart of a man.” But those who do not doubt that there will be punishments of both mind and body in that torment affirm that the body is burned by fire, while the mind is in a way gnawed by the worm of grief. Although this is said more credibly, since it is certainly absurd that pain of either body or mind should be absent there, yet I would more readily say that both belong to the body than that neither does; and that the pain of the mind is not mentioned in those words of divine Scripture because it is understood to follow, even if it is not said, that while the body is in such pain the mind too is tormented by a barren repentance. For we read in the old Scriptures too: “The vengeance on the flesh of the ungodly is fire and worm.” It could have been said more briefly: “The vengeance on the ungodly.” Why, then, was it said “on the flesh of the ungodly,” unless because both, that is, the fire and the worm, will be a punishment of the flesh? Or if he wished to say “vengeance on the flesh” because what will be avenged in man is that he lived according to the flesh (for this is why he will come into the second death, which the apostle signified when he said, “For if you live according to the flesh, you will die”), let each choose what he pleases: either to assign the fire to the body and the worm to the mind, the one literally and the other figuratively, or both literally to the body. For I have already argued sufficiently above that animals can live even in fires, in burning without being consumed, in pain without death, by a miracle of the most almighty Creator; and whoever denies that this is possible for him does not know from whom comes whatever he marvels at in all natures. For it is God himself who made all the miracles in this world, great and small, which we have mentioned, and incomparably more which we have not mentioned, and enclosed them in the world itself, the one and greatest miracle of all. Let each, then, choose one of the two as he pleases, whether he thinks that the worm too belongs literally to the body, or to the mind, by a word transferred from bodily to incorporeal things. Which of these is true, the reality itself will show more readily, when the knowledge of the saints will be so great that they will not need experience to know those punishments, but their wisdom, which will then be full and perfect, will suffice by itself to know this too (for now we know in part, until what is perfect comes); provided that we in no way believe that those bodies will be such as to be affected by no pains from the fire.