On the Trinity 13.5–13.13

Or perhaps this is what can rescue us from these straits: since we said that each placed the happy life in what most delighted him, as pleasure delighted Epicurus and virtue Zeno, and something else others, let us say that to live happily is nothing but to live according to one's own delight, and therefore that it is not false that all want to live happily, because all want to live as each is delighted? For if this too had been announced to the people in the theater, all would have found it in their own wills. But Cicero too, having set this against himself as an objection, refuted it in such a way that those who think so are put to shame. For he says: “But see, people who are not philosophers indeed, but ready to argue, all say that those are happy who live as they themselves wish”; this is what we have called “as each is delighted.” But he soon added: “That indeed is false. For to wish what is not fitting is itself most wretched; nor is it so wretched not to obtain what you wish as to wish to obtain what you ought not.” Most excellently, and most truly. For who is so blind of mind, so estranged from all light of seemliness and wrapped in the darkness of disgrace, as to call happy, because he lives as he wishes, one who lives wickedly and shamefully, and, with no one forbidding, no one punishing, no one even daring to reprove him, and, moreover, with very many praising him, since, as divine Scripture says, “The sinner is praised in the desires of his soul, and he who does wicked things is blessed,” fulfills all his most criminal and most shameful wishes; whereas certainly, although he would be wretched even so, he would yet be less so if he could have had none of the things he had wrongly wished? For anyone is made wretched even by an evil will alone; but more wretched by the power by which the desire of the evil will is fulfilled. Therefore, since it is true that all men want to be happy, and desire this one thing with the most ardent love, and for its sake whatever else they desire; and since no one can love what he does not know at all, what or of what kind it is, nor can he not know what it is that he knows he wants: it follows that all know the happy life. And all who are happy have what they want, although not all who have what they want are thereby happy; but those are thereby wretched who either do not have what they want or have what they do not rightly want. No one, then, is happy except one who both has all that he wants and wants nothing badly.

Since, then, the happy life consists of these two things, and is known to all and dear to all, what do we think is the reason why, of these two, when they cannot have both, men would rather choose to have all that they want than to want all things well even if they do not have them? Is it the very depravity of the human race that, although it is not hidden from them that neither he is happy who does not have what he wants, nor he who has what he wants badly, but he who both has whatever good things he wants and wants no evil ones, yet of these two by which the happy life is completed, when both are not granted, that is chosen rather by which one departs further from the happy life (for whoever obtains what he wickedly desired is further from it than one who does not obtain what he desired), whereas a good will ought rather to have been chosen and preferred, even when it has not obtained what it seeks? For he comes near to being happy who wills well whatever he wills, and wills things which, when he has obtained them, will make him happy. And certainly it is not evil things but good that make one happy, when they do; and of these goods he already has something, and that not to be lightly esteemed, namely that very good will which desires to rejoice in the goods of which human nature is capable, not in the committing or obtaining of any evil; and which pursues with a prudent, temperate, courageous, and just mind such goods as can exist even in this miserable life, and attains them as far as is granted; so that even among evils he is good, and when all evils are ended and all goods fulfilled he will be happy.

And for this reason, in this mortal life, so full of errors and troubles, faith is above all necessary, by which one believes in God. For it cannot be found from where else any good things, and especially those by which each becomes good and those by which he will become happy, come to man and are added to him, except from God. But when the one who is faithful and good amid these miseries has come from this life to the happy one, then there will truly be what now can in no way be, that he lives as he wills. For he will not will to live badly in that happiness, nor will he will anything that will be lacking, nor will anything be lacking that he wills. Whatever is loved will be present; nor will what is not present be desired. All that is there will be good, and the supreme God will be the supreme good, and will be at hand for those who love him to enjoy; and, what is most happy of all, it will be certain that it will always be so. But now the philosophers have indeed made for themselves their own happy lives, as each of them pleased, as if by their own virtue they could do what by the common condition of mortals they could not, namely live as they willed. For they felt that no one could be happy otherwise than by having what he willed and suffering nothing that he did not will. And who would not wish any life whatever in which he delights, and which he therefore calls happy, to be so in his own power that he could have it forever? And yet who is in that state? Who wants to suffer troubles which he may bear bravely, even though he wants and is able to bear them if he suffers them? Who would want to live in torments, even one who can live praiseworthily in them by holding to justice through patience? Those who have endured these evils thought of them as passing, whether by desiring to have or by fearing to lose what they loved, whether wickedly or praiseworthily. For many have bravely pressed on through passing evils to lasting goods. These are certainly happy in hope, even while they are in the passing evils through which they come to goods that will not pass. But he who is happy in hope is not yet happy; for he waits with patience for a happiness which he does not yet hold. But he who is tortured without any such hope, without any such reward, however much endurance he shows, is not truly happy but bravely wretched. For he is not therefore not wretched because he would be more wretched if he bore his wretchedness impatiently as well. Further, if he does not suffer the things he would not want to suffer in his body, not even then is he to be considered happy, since he does not live as he wills. For, to pass over other things, which concern injuries of the mind without harm to the body, which we would wish to live without, and which are innumerable, he would certainly wish, if he could, to have his body so safe and unharmed, and to suffer no troubles from it, as to have this in his power, or in the incorruption of the body itself; and since he does not have this, and hangs in uncertainty, he certainly does not live as he wills. For although by courage he is ready to receive and bear with an even mind whatever adversity befalls, yet he would rather it did not befall, and he acts so if he can; and so he is ready for both, in such a way that, as far as lies in him, he wishes for the one and avoids the other; and if he meets what he avoids, he bears it willingly because what he willed could not come about. He endures, then, so as not to be crushed; but he would not wish to be pressed at all. How, then, does he live as he wills? Because he is willingly brave in bearing what he would not wish to have brought upon him? He wills what he can, therefore, because he cannot do what he wills. This is the whole happiness, whether to be laughed at or rather pitied, of proud mortals who boast that they live as they will because they willingly bear with patience what they do not will to happen to them. For this, they say, is what Terence wisely said: “Since what you will cannot be done, will what you can.” Who denies that this was aptly said? But the advice was given to a wretched man, so that he might not be more wretched. To a happy man, such as all wish to be, it is not rightly or truly said, “What you will cannot be done.” For if he is happy, whatever he wills can be done, because he does not will what cannot be done. But this life does not belong to this mortality, nor will it exist except when immortality also exists. And if this could in no way be given to man, happiness too would be sought in vain, because it cannot exist without immortality.

Since, then, all men want to be happy, if they want it truly, they certainly want to be immortal as well; for otherwise they could not be happy. Finally, when asked about immortality, as about happiness, all answer that they want it. But some sort of happiness, which is called so rather than being so, is sought in this life, or rather is feigned, while immortality is despaired of, without which there can be no true happiness. For he lives happily, as we have already said above and sufficiently established by argument, who lives as he wills and wills nothing badly. But no one wills immortality badly, if human nature is capable of it by God's gift; and if it is not capable of it, neither is it capable of happiness. For in order that a man may live happily, he must live. And when life itself abandons him in dying, how can a happy life remain with him? And when it abandons him, it abandons him either unwilling, without doubt, or willing, or neither. If unwilling, how is it a happy life, which is so within his will that it is not within his power? And since no one is happy by willing something and not having it, how much less is he happy who is abandoned against his will, not by honor, not by possession, not by any other thing, but by the happy life itself, when he will have no life at all? Hence, even if no sense is left by which he may be wretched (for the happy life departs precisely because all life departs), he is nevertheless wretched as long as he perceives, because he knows that against his will that is being consumed for whose sake he loves all else and which he loves above all else. Life, then, cannot both be happy and abandon a man against his will; because no one becomes happy against his will; and so how much more does it make him wretched by abandoning him against his will, when, if it were present to him against his will, it would make him wretched? But if it abandons him willing, even so, how was it a happy life, which the one who had it willed to perish? It remains for them to say that neither is in the mind of the happy man; that is, that when he is abandoned by the happy life, when through death all life abandons him, he neither wills nor does not will it, for he stands ready for both with an even heart. But neither is that a happy life which is such that it is unworthy of the love of the one it makes happy. For how is it a happy life which the happy man does not love? Or how is that loved whose flourishing or perishing is received with indifference? Unless perhaps the virtues, which we love in this way only for the sake of happiness, dare to persuade us not to love happiness itself. But if they do this, we certainly cease to love them as well, when we do not love that for whose sake alone we loved them. Then, how will that opinion be true, so thoroughly seen, so examined, so sifted, so certain, that all men want to be happy, if those who are already happy neither do not want nor want to be happy? Or if they want it, as truth cries out, as nature compels, in which the supremely good and unchangeably happy Creator has implanted this; if, I say, those who are happy want to be happy, they certainly do not want not to be happy. And if they do not want not to be happy, without doubt they do not want that by which they are happy to be consumed and to perish. And they cannot be happy except as living; they do not want, then, their living to perish. All, then, who either truly are happy or desire to be, want to be immortal. But he does not live happily who does not have what he wants; in no way, then, could a life be truly happy unless it were everlasting.

Whether human nature can receive this, which it nevertheless confesses to be desirable, is no small question. But if faith is present, which is in those to whom Jesus gave power to become sons of God, there is no question. For of those who try to find these things by human arguments, scarcely a few, endowed with great ability, abounding in leisure, and trained in the subtlest learning, have been able to arrive at investigating the immortality of the soul alone. Yet for this soul they did not find a stable, that is, a true, happy life; for they said it returns to the miseries of this life even after happiness. And those of them who were ashamed of this opinion, and thought that the purified soul was to be placed in everlasting happiness without a body, hold such views about the eternity of the world in the past that they themselves refute this opinion of theirs about the soul: which it would be long to show here, but it has been explained sufficiently by us, I think, in the twelfth book of the City of God. But this faith promises, not by human argument but by divine authority, that the whole man, who certainly consists of soul and body, will be immortal, and for this reason truly happy. And so, when it had been said in the Gospel that Jesus gave power to become sons of God to those who received him, and what it is to have received him had been briefly explained by saying, “to those who believe in his name,” and it had been added in what way they would become sons of God, “who were born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God,” then, lest this weakness of men, which we see and bear, should despair of so great an excellence, it was at once joined, “And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us,” so that what seemed incredible might be made persuasive from its opposite. For if the Son of God by nature, out of mercy for the sons of men, was made the son of man (for this is “The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us” men), how much more credible is it that the sons of man by nature should by the grace of God become sons of God and dwell in God, in whom alone and from whom alone they can be happy, made partakers of his immortality; for the sake of persuading us of which the Son of God was made a partaker of our mortality?

As for those, then, who say, “Did God lack any other way of freeing men from the misery of this mortality, that he should will his only-begotten Son, God coeternal with himself, to become man by putting on a human soul and flesh, and, made mortal, to suffer death?”, it is too little to refute them by asserting that this way, by which God deigns to free us through the Mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, is good and befitting the divine dignity; we must also show, not that no other way was possible to God, to whose power all things are equally subject, but that there was no other way more fitting for healing our misery, nor ought there to have been. For what was so necessary for raising our hope, and for freeing the minds of mortals, cast down by the condition of mortality itself, from despair of immortality, as that it should be shown to us how much God valued us and how much he loved us? And what is more manifest and more glorious as a proof of this than that the Son of God, unchangeably good, remaining in himself what he was, and receiving from us and for us what he was not, deigning to enter into fellowship with our nature without loss of his own, should first bear our evils without any evil desert of his own; and so, to us who now believe how much God loves us, and now hope for what we despaired of, should confer his gifts upon us with an undeserved generosity, without any good deserts of ours, indeed with our evil deserts going before? For even the things that are called our merits are his gifts. For in order that faith may work through love, the love of God has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. And he was given when Jesus was glorified by the resurrection. For then he promised that he would send him, and he sent him; because then, as was written of him and foretold before, “He ascended on high, he led captivity captive, he gave gifts to men.” These gifts are our merits, by which we arrive at the supreme good of immortal happiness. “But God commends his love toward us,” says the apostle, “in that, while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Much more, then, being now justified by his blood, we shall be saved from wrath through him.” He adds further, and says, “For if, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved in his life.” Those whom he first called sinners he afterward called enemies of God; and those he first called justified in the blood of Jesus Christ he afterward called reconciled through the death of the Son of God; and those he first called saved from wrath through him he afterward called saved in his life. So before this grace we were not sinners in just any way, but in such sins that we were enemies of God. And a little earlier the same apostle called us sinners and enemies of God by two names, one as it were very mild, the other plainly very harsh, saying, “For if Christ, when we were still weak, at the right time died for the ungodly.” Those he called weak he likewise named ungodly. Weakness seems something slight; but sometimes it is such that it is called ungodliness. Yet unless it were weakness, it would not need a physician, who in Hebrew is Jesus, in Greek Σωτήρ, and in our speech Salvator (“Savior”). This word the Latin language did not have before, but it could have it, as it could when it wished. And this preceding sentence of the apostle, where he says, “When we were still weak, at the right time he died for the ungodly,” coheres with the two that follow, in one of which he said “sinners” and in the other “enemies of God,” as though he matched each to each, referring sinners to the weak and enemies of God to the ungodly.

But what is “justified in his blood”? What is the power of this blood, I ask, that believers are justified in it? And what is “reconciled through the death of his Son”? Is it really so, that when God the Father was angry with us, he saw the death of his Son for us and was appeased toward us? Was his Son, then, already so far appeased toward us that he even deigned to die for us, while the Father was still so far angry that unless the Son died for us he would not be appeased? And what of what the same teacher of the Gentiles says in another place: “What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how has he not also with him given us all things?” Unless the Father had already been appeased, would he, not sparing his own Son, have given him up for us? Does not this statement seem, as it were, contrary to that one? In that one the Son dies for us, and the Father is reconciled to us through his death; but in this one, as though the Father loved us first, he himself does not spare the Son for our sake, he himself gives him up to death for us. But I see that the Father loved us even before, not only before the Son died for us, but before he founded the world, as the apostle himself testifies, saying, “As he chose us in him before the foundation of the world.” Nor was the Son given up for us as though unwilling, the Father not sparing him; for it was said of him too, “Who loved me and gave himself up for me.” All things, then, the Father and the Son and the Spirit of both work together, equally and in harmony; yet we have been justified in the blood of Christ, and we have been reconciled to God through the death of his Son; and how that was done I will explain here too, as I can, as far as seems enough.

By a certain justice of God the human race was handed over into the power of the devil, the sin of the first man passing originally into all who are born through the union of the two sexes, and the debt of the first parents binding all their descendants. This handing over was first signified in Genesis, where, when it had been said to the serpent, “You shall eat earth,” it was said to the man, “You are earth, and to earth you shall go.” By what was said, “to earth you shall go,” the death of the body was foretold, because he would not have experienced even that if he had remained as he was made, upright; but what he said to him while still living, “You are earth,” shows that the whole man was changed for the worse. For “You are earth” is like this: “My Spirit shall not remain in these men, because they are flesh.” Then, therefore, he showed that he was handed over to the one to whom it had been said, “You shall eat earth.” But the apostle proclaims this more plainly, where he says: “And you, when you were dead in trespasses and sins, in which you once walked according to the age of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit who now works in the sons of unbelief, among whom we all also once lived in the desires of our flesh, doing the wishes of the flesh and of the affections; and we were by nature children of wrath, as the rest also.” The sons of unbelief are the unbelievers; and who is not this before he becomes a believer? Therefore all men from their origin are under the prince of the power of the air, who works in the sons of unbelief. And what I have said, “from their origin,” is what the apostle says, that he too was “by nature” as the rest: by nature, that is, as it has been depraved by sin, not as it was created upright from the beginning. But this manner in which man was handed over into the power of the devil ought not to be understood as though God did this or commanded it to be done, but that he only permitted it, yet justly. For when he forsook the sinner, the author of sin at once invaded. Nor indeed did God so forsake his creature as not to show himself to it as God creating and giving life, and, amid the penal evils, granting many good things even to the evil. For he did not shut up his compassions in his anger. Nor did he let man go from the law of his power when he permitted him to be in the devil's power; because not even the devil himself is outside the power of the Almighty, any more than outside his goodness. For by what means would even the evil angels subsist with any kind of life, except through him who gives life to all things? If, then, the committing of sins through the just anger of God subjected man to the devil, certainly the remission of sins through the kind reconciliation of God rescued man from the devil.

But the devil was to be overcome not by the power of God but by his justice. For what is more powerful than the Almighty? Or the power of what creature can be compared to the power of the Creator? But since the devil, by the fault of his own perversity, became a lover of power and a deserter and assailant of justice (for so men too imitate him the more, the more they neglect or even hate justice and pursue power, and either rejoice in obtaining it or are inflamed with desire for it), it pleased God that, in order to rescue man from the devil's power, the devil should be overcome not by power but by justice; and so that men too, imitating Christ, should seek to overcome the devil by justice, not by power. Not that power is to be shunned as something evil; but the order must be kept by which justice comes first. For how great can the power of mortals be? Let mortals, then, hold to justice; power will be given to the immortal. Compared with that, the power of those men who are called powerful on earth, however great, is found to be a ridiculous weakness; and there a pit is dug for the sinner where the wicked seem able to do most. But the righteous man sings and says: “Blessed is the man whom you instruct, O Lord, and teach him out of your law, so that you may give him rest from the evil days, until a pit is dug for the sinner. For the Lord will not cast off his people, nor will he forsake his inheritance, until justice is turned into judgment; and all who have it are upright in heart.” In this time, then, in which the power of the people of God is deferred, the Lord will not cast off his people, nor will he forsake his inheritance, however bitter and undeserved the things it suffers, humble and weak as it is, until the justice which the weakness of the godly now has is turned into judgment, that is, receives the power of judging; which is reserved for the just at the end, when power has followed in its order upon the justice that went before. For power joined to justice, or justice added to power, makes judicial power. And justice belongs to good will; whence it was said by the angels when Christ was born, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men of good will.” Power ought to follow justice, not go before it; and so it is placed among “second,” that is, prosperous, things; and “second” things are named from following. For since two things make one happy, as we argued above, to will well and to be able to do what you will, there ought not to be that perversity, which was noted in the same discussion, that of the two things that make one happy a man should choose to be able to do what he wills and neglect to will what he ought; since he ought first to have a good will, and great power afterward. Moreover, the good will must be cleansed from vices; and if a man is overcome by them, he is overcome so as to will badly, and how then will his will be good? It is to be wished, then, that power be given now, but against the vices, for the conquering of which men do not want to be powerful, though they want it for the conquering of men; and why this, unless so that, truly conquered, they may falsely conquer, and be conquerors not in truth but in opinion? Let a man will to be prudent, will to be brave, will to be temperate, will to be just; and so that he may truly be able to do these things, let him plainly wish for power, and seek to be powerful in himself, and, in a wonderful way, against himself for himself. But the other things which he wills well and yet cannot do, such as immortality and true and full happiness, let him not cease to desire, and let him wait for them with patience.