City of God 22.2–22.7

Chapter 2. On the eternal and unchangeable will of God.

Many things are indeed done by the wicked against God's will; but he is of such wisdom and such power that all things which seem opposed to his will tend toward those outcomes or ends which he himself foreknew as good and just. Accordingly, when God is said to change his will, so that, for example, he becomes angry with those to whom he was gentle, it is they rather than he who are changed, and they find him in a manner changed in what they suffer; just as the sun is changed for injured eyes and in a manner becomes harsh instead of mild, and painful instead of delightful, though in itself it remains the same as it was.

The name “will of God” is also given to the will he produces in the hearts of those who obey his commandments, of which the apostle says, “For it is God who works in you even to will.” Just as “the righteousness of God” is used not only of that by which he himself is righteous but also of that which he produces in the man who is justified by him, so also that is called his law which is rather men's, though given by him. For certainly they were men to whom Jesus said, “In your law it is written,” while in another place we read, “The law of his God is in his heart.” According to this will, which God works in men, he is also said to will what he does not himself will but makes his people will; just as he is said to have known what he caused to be known by those who did not know it. For when the apostle says, “But now that you know God, or rather are known by God,” it is not right for us to believe that God came to know them only then, when they were foreknown before the foundation of the world; he is said to have known them then because he then brought it about that he was known. I remember that these ways of speaking were discussed already in earlier books.

According to this will, then, by which we say that God wills what he makes others will, to whom the future is unknown, he wills many things and does not do them. For his saints, with a holy will inspired by him, will many things to be done which are not done; for example, they pray for certain people piously and holily, and he does not do what they pray for, although he himself has produced in them this will to pray by his Holy Spirit. And so, when the saints will and pray according to God that each person may be saved, we can say, in that manner of speaking, “God wills and does not do,” meaning that he wills who makes them will. But according to that will of his which is eternal together with his foreknowledge, he has certainly already done in heaven and on earth all things whatever he willed, not only things past or present, but also things to come. But before the time comes in which he willed that what he foreknew and arranged before all times should happen, we say, “It will happen when God wills.” And if we do not know not only the time when it will be but even whether it will be, we say, “It will happen, if God wills”; not because God will then have a new will which he did not have, but because what has been prepared from eternity in his unchangeable will shall then come to pass.

Chapter 3. On the promise of the eternal blessedness of the saints and the everlasting punishments of the wicked.

Therefore, to pass over so many other things: just as we now see fulfilled in Christ what he promised Abraham when he said, “In your seed all nations shall be blessed,” so what he promised to that same seed of his will be fulfilled, where he says through the prophet, “Those who were in the tombs shall rise again,” and where he says, “There shall be a new heaven and a new earth, and they shall not remember the former things, nor shall they come into their heart; but they shall find gladness and exultation in it. Behold, I will make Jerusalem an exultation, and my people a gladness; and I will exult in Jerusalem and be glad in my people, and the voice of weeping shall no more be heard in her”; and what he foretold through another prophet, saying to that prophet, “At that time your people shall be saved, every one who is found written in the book; and many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth” (or, as some have translated it, “in the mound”) “shall rise, some to eternal life and some to reproach and to eternal shame”; and in another place through the same prophet, “The saints of the Most High shall receive the kingdom and shall possess it for ever, and for ever and ever”; and a little later, “His kingdom,” he says, “is an everlasting kingdom.” These, and the other things belonging to this subject that I set down in the twentieth book, or that I did not set down and yet are written in the same Scriptures, will come as those things came which unbelievers thought would not come. For it is the same God who promised both and foretold that both would come, the God before whom the deities of the pagans tremble, as even Porphyry, the most renowned philosopher of the pagans, testifies.

Chapter 4. Against the wise men of the world, who think that the earthly bodies of human beings cannot be transferred to a heavenly dwelling.

But learned and wise men, forsooth, against the force of so great an authority, which, as it long ago foretold, has turned every kind of people to believe and hope for this, think they argue acutely against the resurrection of bodies, and cite what Cicero records in the third book of his Republic. For when he was asserting that Hercules and Romulus had been made gods from men, he said, “Their bodies were not borne up into heaven; for nature would not allow what came from the earth to remain anywhere but on the earth.” This is the great reasoning of the wise, whose thoughts the Lord knows, that they are futile.

For if we were souls only, that is, spirits without any body, and dwelt in heaven with no knowledge of earthly animals, and we were told that it would come about that we should be bound by a wonderful bond to animate earthly bodies, would we not argue much more strongly in refusing to believe it, and say that nature does not allow an incorporeal thing to be bound by a bodily tie? And yet the earth is full of souls giving life to these earthly members, connected and entwined with them in a wonderful way. Why, then, by the will of the same God who made this living creature, will an earthly body not be able to be raised up into a heavenly body, if a soul, more excellent than every body and therefore than a heavenly body too, could be bound to an earthly body? Could so small an earthly particle hold within it something better than a heavenly body, so as to have sensation and life, and will heaven disdain to receive it, sentient and living, or be unable to hold it once received, when it perceives and lives by this thing which is better than any heavenly body?

The reason it does not happen now is that the time has not yet come when he who willed it wishes it to happen, he who made this thing, which has grown cheap to us through being seen, far more wonderful than the thing they do not believe. For why do we not marvel more that incorporeal souls, which are superior to a heavenly body, are bound to earthly bodies, than that bodies, even though earthly, are raised to dwellings which, though heavenly, are still bodily, except that we are used to seeing the one, and are it, whereas the other we are not yet and have never yet seen? Surely, if sober reason is consulted, it is found to be a more wonderful divine work to weave bodily things in some fashion into incorporeal ones, than to join bodies to bodies, however different, the one heavenly and the other earthly, but bodies nonetheless.

Chapter 5. On the resurrection of the flesh, which some do not believe though the world believes it.

But suppose this was once incredible: see, the world has now believed that the earthly body of Christ was taken up into heaven. Learned and unlearned alike have now believed the resurrection of the flesh and its ascension to the heavenly seats, with very few, whether learned or unlearned, remaining in astonishment. If they believed something credible, let those who do not believe see how dull they are; but if an incredible thing has been believed, this too is certainly incredible, that what is incredible has been so believed. So the same God, before either of these happened, foretold that both would happen: these two incredible things, namely the resurrection of our body into eternity, and that the world would believe so incredible a thing. One of the two incredible things we already see accomplished, that the world should believe what was incredible. Why is the remaining one despaired of, that this too should come which the world believed though incredible, as that has already come which was likewise incredible, that the world should believe so incredible a thing? For both these incredible things, one of which we see and the other we believe, were foretold in the same writings through which the world believed.

And the very way in which the world believed is found, if it is considered, to be still more incredible. Christ sent out a very few fishermen with the nets of faith into the sea of this world, men untaught in the liberal disciplines and wholly unpolished as far as these people's learning is concerned, not skilled in grammar, not armed with dialectic, not puffed up with rhetoric; and so he caught fish of every kind, and so many, and the more wonderful the rarer they were, even the philosophers themselves. To those two incredible things let us, if you please, or rather because it ought to please, add this third. So there are now three incredible things which have nevertheless happened. It is incredible that Christ rose in the flesh and ascended into heaven with the flesh; it is incredible that the world believed so incredible a thing; it is incredible that obscure, lowly, very few and unskilled men could persuade the world, and the learned in it, of so incredible a thing so effectively. Of these three incredible things, the people we are dealing with refuse to believe the first; the second they are forced even to see, and they cannot find how it came about unless they believe the third.

Certainly the resurrection of Christ and his ascension into heaven with the flesh in which he rose is now preached and believed throughout the whole world. If it is not credible, how has it come to be believed throughout the whole world? If many noble, eminent, and learned men had said they saw it and had taken care to spread abroad what they saw, it would be no wonder that the world believed them, but it would be very hard that these people still refuse to believe. But if, as is true, the world believed a few obscure, very lowly, unlearned men who said and wrote that they had seen it, why do the few most obstinate people who remain still not believe the world itself, which now believes? The world believed a small number of obscure, lowly, unskilled men precisely because in such despised witnesses the divinity persuaded far more wonderfully on its own behalf. For the eloquence of those who persuaded, in what they said, consisted of wonderful deeds, not words. Those who had not seen Christ rise in the flesh and ascend into heaven with it believed those who told of having seen it, not because they only spoke but because they also did wonderful signs. For men whom they knew to have had one language or at most two they heard suddenly and wonderfully speaking in the languages of all nations; they saw a man lame from his mother's womb stand up whole at their word in the name of Christ after forty years; handkerchiefs taken from their bodies avail to heal the sick; countless people suffering from various diseases, laid in a row on the road by which they were to pass so that the shadow of the walkers might pass over them, regularly receive health at once; and many other astounding things done by them in the name of Christ; and finally they saw even the dead rise again. If these critics grant that these things were done as they are read, see, we add all these incredible things to those three incredible things, and to have one incredible thing believed, what is said of the resurrection of the flesh and its ascension into heaven, we amass such testimony from so many incredible things, and still we do not bend the unbelievers to belief from their dreadful hardness. But if they do not believe that these miracles too were done by Christ's apostles so that they would be believed when they preached Christ's resurrection and ascension, this one great miracle suffices us, that the whole earth believed it without any miracles.

Chapter 6. That Rome made its founder Romulus a god by loving him, whereas the church loved Christ by believing him to be God.

Let us recall here too what Tullius says in wonder about the belief in Romulus's divinity. I shall insert his words as they are written. “What is more to be wondered at in Romulus,” he says, “is that the others who are said to have been made gods from men lived in less educated ages of mankind, when there was a ready ground for invention, since the unskilled were easily moved to believe; but we see that Romulus's age was less than six hundred years ago, when letters and learning had already grown old and all the old error arising from the uncultivated life of men had been removed.” And a little later he speaks thus of the same Romulus, to this effect: “From this it can be understood,” he says, “that Homer lived very many years before Romulus, so that, as men were now learned and the times themselves educated, there was scarcely any room for invention. For antiquity accepted fables, sometimes even crudely invented; but this age, already cultivated, especially mocking everything that cannot happen, rejected them.” One of the most learned of men, and at the same time the most eloquent of all, Marcus Tullius Cicero, says that the divinity of Romulus was believed in a wonderful way because the times were already educated and would not accept the falsehood of fables.

But who believed Romulus a god except Rome, and that when it was small and just beginning? After that, later generations had to keep what they had received from their forefathers, so that, with this superstition drunk in, as it were, with its mother's milk, the city grew and came to so great an empire that from its summit, as from a higher place, it poured this opinion of its own over the other nations too that it ruled, so that they did not indeed believe, but still said, that Romulus was a god, so as not to offend the city they served by naming its founder otherwise than Rome did, which had believed it not indeed from love of this error, but still by the error of love. Christ, however, though he is the founder of the heavenly and everlasting city, was not believed God by it because it was founded by him; rather, it is to be founded because it believed. Rome, already built and dedicated, worshipped its founder as a god in a temple; but this Jerusalem set Christ its founder, God, in the foundation of faith, so that it could be built and dedicated. The one believed him a god by loving him; the other loved him by believing him God. As, then, there went before the one a reason for loving, so that it then gladly believed even a false good of the one it loved, so there went before the other a reason for believing, so that by right faith it might love not rashly what was false but what was true.

For apart from so many great miracles which persuaded men that Christ is God, divine prophecies too, most worthy of belief, went before, which in him are not believed as still to be fulfilled, as they were by the fathers, but are now shown to be fulfilled. Of Romulus, however, we hear or read that he founded Rome and reigned in it, which is what happened, not what was prophesied before it happened; but as for his being received among the gods, the records hold that it was believed, not that it happened. For by no signs of wonders is it shown that this truly befell him. That she-wolf, his nurse, which seems to have been a great portent of a sort, what or how much does it amount to for showing him a god? Certainly, even if that she-wolf was not a harlot but a beast, yet since she was common to both, his brother is not held to be a god. And who was ever forbidden to call Romulus or Hercules or other such men gods, and chose to die rather than not say it? Or would any of the nations worship Romulus among its gods unless fear of the Roman name compelled it? But who can count how many chose to be killed with any degree of cruel savagery rather than deny that Christ is God? So fear of indignation, however slight, which it was thought could arise in Roman minds if this were not done, drove certain cities under Roman rule to worship Romulus as a god; but from worshipping Christ as God, and even from confessing him, fear could not call back so great a multitude of martyrs among the peoples of the whole world, fear not of slight offence of minds but of immense and varied punishments and of death itself, which is dreaded more than the rest.

Nor did the city of Christ at that time, though it was still a pilgrim on earth and yet had hosts of great peoples, fight against its ungodly persecutors for its temporal safety; rather, to obtain eternal safety, it did not resist. They were bound, shut up, beaten, tortured, burned, torn, slaughtered, and they multiplied. For them to fight for their safety was nothing other than to despise safety for the Saviour. I know that in the third book of Cicero's Republic, unless I am mistaken, it is argued that no war is undertaken by the best city except either for good faith or for safety. What he means by “for safety,” or what safety he intends us to understand, he shows in another place: “But from these punishments,” he says, “which even the most foolish feel, poverty, exile, chains, and beatings, private persons often escape by the swiftness of death offered them; but for cities death itself is a punishment, though it seems to free individuals from punishment. For a city ought to be so established that it is eternal. So there is no natural death for a commonwealth, as there is for a man, in whom death is not only necessary but often even desirable. But when a city is destroyed, blotted out, extinguished, it is in a way as if (to compare small things with great) this whole world were to perish and collapse.” Cicero said this because he held with the Platonists that the world will not perish. It is clear, then, that he wished war to be undertaken by a city for that safety by which a city remains here, as he says, eternal, though individuals die and are born, just as the shade of an olive or laurel and other such trees is perennial through the falling and growing of individual leaves. For death, as he says, is the punishment not of individual men but of the whole city, and it often frees individuals from punishment.

Hence one may rightly ask whether the Saguntines acted rightly when they chose that their whole city should perish rather than break the faith by which they were bound to the Roman commonwealth itself, a deed for which they are praised by all the citizens of the earthly commonwealth. But I do not see how they could have obeyed this argument, in which it is said that no war should be undertaken except for good faith or for safety, and it is not said which should be preferred if the two meet in one danger at once, so that one cannot be kept without losing the other. For clearly, if the Saguntines chose safety, they would have had to abandon faith; if faith was to be kept, safety certainly had to be lost, as happened. But the safety of the city of God is such that it can be kept, or rather gained, with faith and through faith; once faith is lost, no one can come to it. It is this thought of a most steadfast and patient heart that made so many great martyrs, such as Romulus neither had nor could have had even one when he was believed to be a god.

Chapter 7. That the world's belief in Christ was the work of divine power, not of human persuasion.

But it is quite ridiculous to mention the false divinity of Romulus when we are speaking of Christ. Yet if Romulus lived almost six hundred years before Cicero, and that age is said to have been already so cultivated by learning that it rejected everything that cannot happen, how much more, six hundred years later, in Cicero's own time, and above all afterwards under Augustus and Tiberius, in times certainly more educated, would the human mind have been unable to bear the resurrection of Christ's flesh and its ascension into heaven, as something that cannot happen, and would have mocked it and rejected it from ears and hearts, had not the divinity of the truth itself, or the truth of the divinity, and the attesting signs of miracles shown that it could happen and had happened. So, while so many great persecutions terrified and opposed it, the resurrection and immortality of the flesh, first in Christ and afterwards to follow in the rest for the new age, was most faithfully believed and fearlessly preached, and was sown throughout the world with the blood of the martyrs, to spring up more fruitfully. For the foregoing proclamations of the prophets were read, displays of power concurred, and the truth persuaded, new to custom but not contrary to reason, until the world, which persecuted it in fury, followed it in faith.