Concerning the City of God Against the Pagans.
INTRODUCTION
vi 
St Augustine of Hippo
born AD 354
...epoch of importance and distinction for the
Christian Church, for it saw the transformation of the Roman emperor from
a pagan persecutor into a protector and moderator of Christianity
...development of monasticism in Egypt, Palestine,
Syria and Asia Minor.
Fathers of the Church in the golden age of patristic
theology. Basil the Great, Gregory Nazianzen, Gregory of Nyssa, John Chrysostom,
Ambrose, Jerome and Augustine.
born between 329 (Basil) and 354 (Augustine)
first and second generations to attain maturity
after the Empire had become officially Christian.
...widening of the gap already existing between East
and West. Henceforward the two halves...went each its own way.
viii
Greek civilization influenced more and more by the
manners and ways of thought of Anatolia, Persia and Syria...
...movement of men and ideas between East and West
in the fourth century, and in the West the ancient civilization still existed...
Africa...modern Tunisia and the coastal region
of eastern Algeria
...colonized by Rome...Third Punic War (146 BC)...
...destruction of Carthage had practically eliminated
the Punic population, but the native Berbers remained at the base of the
Roman Plantation...
...well planned cities and towns continuing all the
public buildings and amenities...
...ills that were afflicting the Roman West in General--excessive
taxation, despoliation by the central government, lack of domestic independence
and enterprise, shrinkage of population and the legal freezing of all
classes and occupations from the coloni and the proletariat to the
curiales,
the patricians who owned property round the city in which they lived.
...a few very large estates of Roman aristocrats,
a large number of villae, native villages in the hills and a number
of seaports along the coast, of which Hippo Regus was second only to
Carthage.
The Christian Church in Africa, of obscure origins,
had risen to the surface in the early third century...Tertullian...
...passed across the limits of orthodoxy into the
Montanist heresy
ix
[Tertullian] created a Latin vocabulary for Christian
theology...
Cyprian...first great theologian of Church order
...recognized the primacy of Rome as the unifying
principle...
Donatists, who refused to readmit to communion those
who had in any way lapsed during the Dioclitianic persecution
...regard themselves as the only pure and true Church.
Schism resulted and endured for a century, dividing the African Church...
Donatism became largely the Curch of the native population,
and it is still a matter of controversy whether economic causes and dislike
of the Roman dominion were behind the movement.
Augustine...At seventeen he went to Carthage and
studied rhetoric...
x
...education of the Roman Empire in the West was
entirely literary and rhetorical. It was the ghost of the education for
civic life originally devised by the Greek teacher Isocrates, the contemporary
of Plato...
...three stages. In the primary stages the child learnt
to read, write and cipher. In the second stage the boy absorbed the Greek
classics, in particular Homer, together with the rules of grammar and composition.
In the third stage he studied geometry (Euclid), numbers and their proportions,
and harmony and the relationship of sounds. At this stage also he took
courses of general knowledge...
Science and higher mathematics, in particular astronomy,
were reserved for a few specialists. Philosophy was studied mainly at Athens,
Rhodes and Alexadria. Medicine and law were taught separately to those
who adopted them as professional subjects.
Cicero--advocate, consul, politician, man of letters
and diffuser of Greek thougth--and Julius Caesar--advocate, literary critic,
historian, general and statesman--cannot be despised. But almost immediately
after the death of the two great men just mentioned Roman education underwent
a significant change...
...flowering of Latin literature in the late republic
and early Empire caused the substitution of Latin for Greek in the discipline
of grammar and rhetoric...
...bureaux of the imperial government replaced the
forum and the offices of the old Roman career (the cursa honorum)
as focus of administration. Oratory ceased to mould policy...
Education became increasingly bookish and rhetorical.
The Roman genius never favoured abstract thought, and philosophy was either,
as with Cicero, a popular simplification of Greek thought, or as with the
Stoics, a quasi-religious background to a normal life.
By Augustine’s day...Greek...was an optional subject
xi
Virgil (usually represented by the Aeneid) was
in a class by himself. Horace was rarely quoted, and Catullus never. Cicero’s
philosophical works were a private discovery of Augustine when a young
man.
In philosophy and theology alike he was to be an autodidact
Nothing in Augustine’s life is stranger than his
acceptance of Manicheism, a dualistic religion, mythical and spiritual,
in which the powers of good and evil were co-eternal and independent.
...rhetorical education had been to prejudice him
against the Christian Scriptures as being stylistically mediocre...
...cultural twilight of pagan Africa...
Athenian supremacy to the early Roman Empire, had,
at its highest levels and in eminent individuals, a rational outlook and
a civilized security that rejected instincctively a mythical or a preternatural
explantion of life’s problems. But in Augustine’s Africa the security was
not so apparent...
...primitive population was still there in the
background. The opulence and seeming eternity of the Roman Empire were
beginning to appear as threadbare and as vulnerable...
...wealthiest citizens and officials were either
half-hearted worshippers of the old gods or followers of a decadent Neoplatonism...
xii
His education had been entirely pagan...
...professed throughout a long life, the problem of
sin and evil both in himself and in the whole world of spiritual being.
The Manichean system was dualistic, with opposing powers of good and evil
and with the human soul a fragment of light, enclosed in a material, and
therefore evil, body.
We have it from Augustine himself that for many years
of his adolescence he could not conceive of a spiritual being...
...he was enlightened by the philosophical writings
of Cicero and by Neoplatonism, and then further illumined by the Gospel
of St. John...
...emotional and for long sensual and committed to
a dependence upon sexual gratification which his higher self resisted,
needed a moral as well as an intellectual conversion...
...love and prayers of his mother and the teaching
of St Ambrose of Milan, he resolved the conflict in his mind and soul in
387, and was babtized...
...at Carthage, then in Rome and finally at Milan,
had taught rhetoric...
...governorship of a province. Such a career, now
almost within his grasp, Augustine renounced...
xiii
One of the impulses leading towards Augustine’s
conversion had been the example of monastic life in imitation of the monks
of Egypt that had been visible at Milan.
...Hippo Regius and began to live as a monk with
some companions...
...395 consecrated bishop of the city...
...day by day, he went steadily through the sublime
meditations on the Gospel of St. John ...
Gradually Augustine, by his personality and reputation,
increased his congregation and reduced the Donatists. His position as judge
and arbitrator developed and he was treated as a colleague and counsellor
by the local aristocracy, both Christian and pagan. He was a man of many
friends and a vast correspondence. For himself, he remained an ascetic,
monastic figure, living a celibate life with his clergy...
St Augustine never left Africa again...
...leader of Catholic Africa first against theDonatists
and then agaisnt the Pelagians. The long Donatist struggle...bitter business
in which the imperial government, approved finally by the Church, used
force to combat violence. The Donatists at the peak of their influence
were in fact a rival church, like the Cathari of southern France centuries,
later, with nationalist African and revolutionary tendencies.
Palagius, a native of Britain active in Rome and
elsewhere c 400-418, was accused of watering down the traditional doctrine
of original sin and of teaching that man, by his unaided free will, could
fulfil the commandments of God and merit grace. The exact extent of his
teterodoxy is still debated, but he was fiercely resisted by Augustine
and Jerome. The controversy occupied Augustine for some twenty years and
earned him the title of Doctor of Grace, but it makes no appearance
in the City of God.
xv
Augustine... welcomed the intervention of the government
and countenanced repression...
In 410 Rome had been captured and sacked by Alaric
and his Goths and slaves
...to all thinking men in the Latin world it was
apsychological shock without parallel. Rome ahd been the mistress of Italy
for more than six centuries...
Rome as a papal city from the days of Constantine.
In fact, she had remained largely pagan, above all in the highest social
levels. The great senatorial families, whether genuinely ancient or relatively
new, clung obstinately to their traditions and to the gods of Rome, of
whose temples they wer official priests and custodians. A renaissance of
classical literature...confirmed in their opposition to Christianity by
the Neoplatonic philosophy, which provided a view of the universe which
could be made to seem more rational, more spiritual even, than the legends
enshrined in the sacred books of the Jews and Christians...
...attributed it, as have some modern historians,
to the Christian infiltration...
...fled to Africa
Christian imperial commissioner, Marcellinus, a friend
of Augustine appealed to the bishop as the only one capable of meeting
the pagan attacks in a language they would understand...
Augustine... ‘At this time Rome was overwhelmed
in disaster after its capture by the Goths under their king Lalric. Those
who worship the multitude of false gods, whom we usually call pagans, tried
to lay the blame for this disaster on the Christian religion, and began
to blashpheme the true God more fiercely and bitterly than before. This
fired me with zeal for the house of God and I began to write the City of
God to confute thieir blasphemies and falsehood. This took a number
of years for other tasks intervened ...but the great work on the City of
God was at last finished in twenty-two books.
xvi
‘The first five books refute those who attribute
prosperity and adversity to the cult of the gods or to the prohibition
of this cult. The next five are against those who hold that ills are never
wanting to men, but that worship of the gods helps towards the future life
after death. The second part of the work contains twelve books. The first
four describe the birth of the two cities, one of God the other of this
world. The second four continue thier story, and the third four depict
their final destiny.'
Augustine began the book early in 413... to the
spring of 426...sending it to his friend, the African priest Firmus, friend
also of St. Jerome.
...‘the City of God on pilgramage in this world’,
which seems to be opposed to the pagan city of Rome, and Augustine says
he will explain ‘the origin, development, and appointed end of those two
cities’. This he does, indeed, but not till the last books of the work...
xvii
At last, in Book xv, chapter 1, we have something
like a definition. ‘I classify the human race into two branches: the one
consists of those who live by human standards, the other of those who live
according to God’s will...By two cities I mean two societies of human beings,
one of which is predestined to reign with God from all eternity, the other
doomed to undergo eternal punishment with the devil.’
...ambiguity which A never clearly resolves, between
two societies or visible groups in theis world, and the members from each
of these two groups as separated into two invisible societies of those
predestined to glory and those doomed to punishment in the next world...
...those who believe in Christ, the City of God, are
in fact the Church, just as those that disbelieve are in fact the Roman
authorities and the pagans of the Empire, but there is no confromtation
of Church and State. We can see the reason for this: the constituent qualities
of the two cities are their two objects of love, the love of God leading
to contempt of self, and the love of self leading to contempt of God (Bk
xiv, 28). The two cities are therefore two loves and these are an inward
and spiritual, not an outward and political distinction.
...bishops who are the successors of the apostles...
For all truths not contained in Scripture we can
obtain certainty from plenary councils of all the bishops...
xviii
Job is given as a striking example in the days of
the Old Testament, but Augustine adds that he and others outside the visible
city who yet belong to the City of God must have somehow received a personal
revelation.
...recent syllabuses of the study of political thought...
...taken directly or remotely from Cicero, as is
the distinction between positive legal enactmetns and the eternal law of
nature which is the same in all men, the law which St. Paul and after him
Augustine take to be written in the hearts of all.
...slavery and of any sort of coercive governmetn...is
a ‘consequence of sin...found in some of the fathers immediately preceding
Augustine in date, such as Ambrose and ‘Ambrosiaster’...accepted and considerably
developed by Augustine. Slavery he accepts...it is a consequence of sin
and therefore tolerable as an institution, though it is not necessarily,
in this or that individual case, approved by God. Government with the sanction
of force is likewise not a primitive institution of God for the human race
but a punishment for sin.
xix
...main contribution to poliical thought lies in
his definition of what he terms ‘a people’ (populus) and ‘a commonwealth’
(res publica) and what we call ‘a State’.
A commonwealth, he maintained, was not just any and
every company of men, but a company associated in a recognized system of
rights and community of interests. Scipio went on to say that this implied
a just administiration of whatever kind it might be--monarchy, aristocracy
or democracy--but if this was wanting then the commonwealth was not merely
a bad one, it was no a commonwealth at all...
Augustine...’If justice be absent, what is a kingdom
but a crowd of gangsters? And what is a gang but a minor kingdom?' (Bk
1v,4)
...and there can be no true justice where the commands
of God are not observed.
a commonwealth is a multitude of rational beings voluntarily
associated in the pursuit of common interests. By this definition Rome
could be called a commonwealth or republic...even though justice must be
absent...
...however bad the ruler may be he derives his
authority from God (Bk v,21) ...
xx
Certainly there is an entire absence of any doctrine
of Church-State relationship in the City of God. No doubt it would be anachronistic
to expect anything of the kind. Yet to most historians who consider the
beginnings of that age old confrontation, the conversion and subsequent
patronage, not to say tutelage of the Church by Constantine marks an epoch,
a point of no return, when the Church was fist faced with a secular master,
benevolent though he might be. Augustine says not a word on this matter...
...little evidence of the influence of the City of
God upon later medieval theorists
Christian writers, not excluding Peter and Paul,
tend to confuse, or at least not to distinguish between, ‘the divine authority
of the institution of government and the divine authority of the individual
ruler
...human government as such is unquestioned. It
is essential to any Christian or indeed any theistic conception of human
life in society...
The authority of the actual ruler to command this
or that is another matter.
St. Gregory the Great goes far towards teaching
that the established powers must be obeyed, right or wrong, and the history
in Europe of the theory and practice of the Divine Right of the monarch
is evidence of the permanence of the appeal of this teaching.
Between these extremes [totalitarian or anarchic]
must lie the truth, viz., the justice of Plato, Scipio and Augustine...reason
enlightened by Chrisian teaching...
xxi
...even to men like this (sc. Nero) the power of
dominion is not given except by the providence of God, when he decides
that man’s condition deserves such masters. God’s statement on this point
is clear, when the divine Wisdom says: ‘It is through me that kings rule,
and through me that tyrants possess the land.’ It might be supposed that
‘tyrants’ here is used not in the sense of ‘wicked and irresponsible rulers’,
but in the ancient meaning of ‘men of power’...but this is precluded by
an unambiguious statement that God ‘makes a hypocrite to reign because
of the perversity of the people’.
Charlemagne, who could not read, delighted to listen
to readings from the City of God, and a recent French historian, Mgr F.X.
Arquilliere, has characterized the Carolingian Empire and the political
thought of the early Middle Ages as Augustinisme politique.
...incorporated in the actual practice of government...
Church would be a loose confederacy of bishoprics
controlled externally by the ruler, but recognizing the spiritual unity
of their body in terms of union with the See of Peter as the ultimate source
of doctrine and spiritual jurisdiction.
...from Otto I onwards, and the whole fabric of the
church became enmenshed in feudalism and simony, that this Augustinian
structure patently ceased to be viable, and the papacy came forward...
Augustinian City of God, whose only true citizens
were the company of the predestined, gave place to the hierarchical Church
made up of the elements that had each its juridical position--bishops,
clergy, vowed religious and layfolk, all under the jurisdiciton of the
biship of Rome.
...distinction between th Augustinian and the Gregorian
Church
xxii
...comparison of the City of God with the Dictatus
papae...of Gregory VII...
Augustine... no attempt to consider the operational
fabric of the great body in which he held a bishop’s office.
He recognized also the special place held by Peter
among the apostles, and by the bishop of Rome as his successor, construed,
shows that in practice he recognized Rome as the centre of authentic doctrine.
Augustine remains in the centre of his own spiritual
life, ready to share, but not to define.
In the course of his exposition of the Christian
outlook on the universe of being, Augustine comes necessarily into contact
with Greek philosophy, for philosophy in the later phases of the Roman
Empire had become in a sense fused with religion...
...deities and spirits of the late Roman pagan
pantheon could be regarded as popular translation of transcendental spirits
of Neoplatonism, and still more readily of the daemons of the decadent
Neoplatonism of the fourth century...
...ignorant of the writings of Plato and Aristotle
could himself join the select company of the world’s greatest thinkers
and be a prime agency in weaving Greek thought into Christian theology.
...scepticism of the New Academy and [interest
in] later Neoplatonism, that shattered for him the image of Manicheism
and led him towards the Gospel.
...what Augustine always refers to as the teachings
of Plato or ‘the Platonists’ was in fact that of Plotinus (205-70) as seen
in the Enneads.
[Plotinus] ‘produced’ Plato’s system, or sketches
of a system, into a clear-cut and schematic body of thought embracing theology,
metaphysics, epistemology and ethics.
...not unlike that of Aquinas in the thirteenth century
with regard to Aristotle.
...one transformed scattered insights and visionary
probings into a logical but closed circle; the other transfused a detailed
mechanical system with flexible spiritual power. Plotinus replaced Plato’s
vague Form of Good with a transcendent One. Aquinas made of Aristotle’s
impersonal First Mover the transcendent-immanent Creator.
xxiv
accepted the teaching of the Platonists as successful
attempts to reach the truth about the universe so far as man’s mind could
go.
Augustine, in the City of God, deal more explicitly
and more historically with Greek philosophy than anywhere else in his writings...
...analysis of the Presocratics and Socrates himself,
for example, which he may have largely taken from Cicero is remarkably
accurate...
...of Plato’s dialogues either in succession or as
material for a system he was entirely ignorant. Even more complete was
his ignorance of Aristotle.
...no ancient school carried on a living tradition
of Aristotle, save in the matter of his logic, which was taken as an instrument
and method of thought by all schools, including the Neoplatonists. Whereas
the tradition of Plato, or of what was thought to be Platonic doctrine,
travelled down the centuries at Athens and was diffused into Christianity
by the Neoplatonists, that of Aristotle proceeded eastwards to Antioch,
Syria and Persia, and was carried back by the Arabs to north Africa and
Muslim Spain and so to Paris and the West.
xxv
Plotinus...degrees of spiritual being emanated in
a hierarchical procession from the One, and could return to him, and which
left room for a mystical union of love with the supreme Being, proved vulnerable
...Christianity to influence and power increased
the anti-Christian bias visible in Plotinus...
...second and third generations [Neo platonists]
into alliance with the pagan aristocracy and intellectuals of Athens and
Rome...relationship with the old Roman religion which was the palladium
of the pagan senatorial families, and an endeavour was made to explain
the whole pantheon in terms of Neoplatonism.
Porphyry, the disciple of Plotinus...
Chaldean Oracles listed a vast number of supernatural
beings who became part of the Neoplatonist tradition, in addition to whom
much use was made of a class of spiritual beings, the demons...
...long discussion of demons by Augustine (Bk ix,
2ff)
[Augustine] dependent upon portions of Porphyry
and the still more derivative Apuleius without commentaries...
xxvi
He was able unaided to see the difference between
the traditional deities of Olympus and the rationalized gods of the late
Roman intelligentsia, but he had no means of distinguishing between the
Greek conception, however imperfect, of deity and the simple animism of
the pastoral and domestic fairies and goblins of Roman folklore.
...greater importance to the contemporary ‘demons’
of decadent Neoplatonism than they deserved.
...much deep thought in the City of God that
has been absorbed wholly or in part by Christian tradition
...creation is in origin good, but also that evil
can never, strictly speaking be natural to a created being.
So there is no problem of the origin of sin; sin has
no being; it is a failing to turn to God. It has no cause other than a
failure to do good, just as the slip of a typist need have no cause save
the possibility of failure in eye or nerve, a possibility which is built
in to all bodily faculties. Evil has, however, a certain positive quality
because it is not a ... action but a choice, a love, and if our love is
not given to God, it is given to our own self-satisfaction.
xxvii
Nor is the world-process cyclic; it is a straightforward
progress of time...
...resurrection of the body and that of eternal punishment
(Bk xx) and of the peace which is the aim of our striveng even of our wars
(Bk xix)
...table furnished with his body and blood...the
sacrifice which supersedes all the sacrifices of the old covenant’ (Bk
xvii, 19)
...sacrifice of the Mass.He is contrasting the sacrifices
of paganism and that of the old law...
xxviii
...Church, being the body of which he is head, learns
to offer itself through him...
After quoting Virgil’s account of the purificatory
punishment of sin ...he maintains that for grievous sin the punishment
is retributive and not also purificatory, but that some suffering can be
purificatory ‘both in this life and in the other’
xxii
Augustine and his contemporary and correspondent
Jerome...earliest in time of that group of writers and thinkers ...Founders
of the Middle Ages. We can extend the list as we choose, but Boethius and
Cassiodorus would certainly be included. All of them lived at a time and
in a region whence the full life of ancient civilizaiton had vanished,
but which retained most of its literature and some of its ways of thinking...
Augustine...mediated a heavy dose of Neoplatonism
and consequently, of Platonism, to the medieval Church.
In his construction of a work and its parts he is
medieval rather than classical. Whereas both Greek and Latin prose writers
know how to begin and end a work, and how to order its parts, A, trained
as a rhetor rathr than as a writer of prose, has little sense of economy
or proportion.
...City of God, which is not so much a single
work as a series of reflections on a large central topic, God’s design
for the salvation of mankind, composed over a long stretch of years with
many interruptions.
But if the political thought and even the conception
of the City of God found in Augustine had little influence on his
world, many ideas and many pages of the great work sank deep into the Christian
consciousness...
Book viii, ch 3, the teaching of Socrates,
ch10, Christianity and Platonic thought;
Book xi, ch6, the non-entity of evil;
Book xix, ch7, the misery of war;
ch13, the peace of the universe;
ch14, order, law and earthly peace;
Book xix, ch27, ‘As we forgive those who trespass
against us’
Book xxii, ch24, the beauties of creation and the
beauty of man’s mind;
ch26, How the common man is ‘saved as by fire’.
Augustine. The City of God. New York: Image
Books, 1958.
Book XIV
Ch 1
295
...for all the difference of the many and very
great nations throughout the world in religions and morals, language, weapons,
and dress, there exist no more than the two kinds of society, which according
to our Scriptures, we have rightly called the two cities.One city is that
of men who live according to the flesh. The other is of men who live acording
to the spirit.
Ch 2
...mistake imagining that it is the Epicurean philosophers
who live according to the flesh simply because they place man’s highest
good in material pleasure...
296
...mistake to imagine, because the Stoics place
man’s highest good in the soul (and because ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’ mean the
same), that, therefore, it is the Stoics who live according to the spirit.
...both of these classes live according to the
flesh...
‘And the Word was made flesh’...
297
Paul the Apostle wrote to the Galatians: ‘Now the
works of the flesh are manifest, which are: immorality, uncleanness, licentiousness,
idolatry, witchcrafts, enmities, contentions, jealousies, anger, quarrels,
factions, parties, envies, murders, drunkenness, carousings, and suchlike.
And concerning these I warn you, as I have warned you, that they who do
such things will not attain the kingdom of God.’
...interpret the word ‘flesh’ as meaning the whole
of human nature.
Ch3
298
Yet, it is an error to suppose that all the evils
of the soul proceed from the body.
Virgil...following Plato...
‘A fiery vigor of celestial birth
299
‘Thus do they fear and hope, rejoice and grieve,
Our faith teaches something very different. For the
corruption of the body, which is a burden on the soul, is not the cause
but the punishment of Adam’s first sin.
...not the corruptible flesh that made the soul sinful;
on the contrary, it was the sinful soul that made the flesh corruptible.
Else, we free the Devil from all such passions since
he has no flesh...but he is most certainly filled with pride and envy.
...pride--a vice which rules over the Devil who
has no flesh...
...can only be the works of the flesh in the sense
that they are the works of man...
Paul often refers to man under the name of ‘flesh.’
Ch4
300
When a man lives ‘according to man’ and not ‘according
to God’ he is like the Devil.
301
...two contrary and opposing cities arose because
some men live according to the flesh and others live according to the spirit,
we could equally well have said that they arose because some live according
to man and others according to God.
...the animal man does not perceive the things that
are of the spirit of God, for it is foolishness to him...
Ch5
302
We ought not, therefore, to blame our sins and defects
on the nature of the flesh, for this is to disparage the Creator. The flesh,
in its own kind and order, is good. But what is not good is to abandon
the Goodness of the Creator in pursuit of some created good, whether by
living deliberately according to the flesh, or according to the soul, or
according to the entire man, which is made up of soul and flesh and which
is the reason why either ‘soul’ alone or ‘flesh ‘ alone can mean a man.
...unlike the Manichaeans, Platonists are not so
senseless as to despise earthly bodies as though their nature derived from
an evil principle. The Platonists attribute to God, the Maker, all the
elements together with their qualities that make up this visible and tangible
universe. Nevertheless, they think that our souls are so influenced by
‘the earthly limbs and mortal members’ of our bodies that from these arise
the diseases of desires and fears, of joy and sadnes--the four perturbations
(as Cicero calls them) or passions (to use the common expression borrowed
from the Greeks) which comprehend the whole defectiveness of human behavior.
303
...(Platonists themselves, through the mouth of their
noble spokesman, teaching that this direful desire has so little to do
with the body that it compels even the soul already purified of every bodily
disease and now subsisting independently of any kind of body to seek an
existence in a body.
Ch6
Man’s will, then is all-important ...
304
...the will of a man is attracted or repelled by the
variety of things which he either seeks or shuns, so is it changed or converted
into one or other of these different emotions.
...neither hating the man because of his corruption
nor loving the corruption because of the man, he should hate the sin but
love the sinner. For, once the corruption has been cured, then all that
is lefft should be loved and nothing remains to be hated.
Ch7-10
From the main topic, the importance of the will
and its act of love, Augustine digresses to examine the Stoic theory of
virtue as non-disturbance from the passions. Stoic apathy is not fully
possible now in this life, but before the first sin Adam and Eve were undisturbed
by passions.
Ch11
305
...the first bad will, which was present in man before
any of his bad deeds, was rather a falling away from the work of God into
man’s own works than a positive work itself...
...this bad will or, what is the same, man in so far
as his will is bad is like a bad tree which brings forth these bad works
like bad fruit...
...contrary as it is to nature and not according to
nature, since it is a defect in nature...
...nature, of course, is one that God has created
out of nothing, and not out of Himself, as was the case when He begot the
Word through whom all things have been made...
...it was a soul made out of nothing which God
united to the body when man was created...
In the long run, however, the good triumphs over
the evil...
...while good can exist without any defect, as in
the true and supreme God Himself, and even in the whole of that visible
and invisible creation, high in the heavens above this gloomy atmosphere,
evil cannot exist without good, since the natures to which the defects
belong, in as much as they are natures, are good.
306
...will. Its choice is truly free only when it is
not a slave to sin and vice. God created man with such a free will.
...man once lived according to God in a Paradise that
was both material and spiritual...
...proud and, therefore, envious spiirit who fell
from the heavenly Paradise when his pride caused him to turn away from
God to his own self and the pleasures and pomp of tyranny, preferring to
rule over subjects than be subject himself.
This Lucifer, striving to insinuate his sly seductions
into the minds of man whose fidelity he envied, since he himself had fallen,
chose for his spokesman a serpent in the terrestrial Paradise, where all
the animals of earth were living in harmless subjection to Adam and Eve.
It was suited for the task because it was a slimy and slippery beast that
could slither and twist on its tortuous way. So, subjecting it to his diabolical
design by the powerful presence of his angelic nature and misusing it as
his instrument, he, at first, parleyed cunningly with the woman as with
the weaker part of that human society, hoping gredually to gain the whole.
He assumed that a man is less gullible and can be more easily tricked into
following a bad example than into making a mistake himself.
307
...not equally deceived by believing the serpent,
they equally sinned and were caught and ensnared by the Devil.
Ch12
308
...obedience, the virtue which is, so to speak, the
mother and guardian of all the virtues of a rational creature...
...our first parents only fell openly into the sin
of disobedience because, secretly, they had begun to be guilty.
What is pride but an appetite for inordinate exaltation?
309
...self-pleasing occurs when the soul falls away from
the unchangeable Good which ought to please the soul far more than the
soul can please itself.
Our first parents, then, must already have fallen
before they could do the evil deed, before they could commit the sin of
eating the forbidden fruit. For such ‘bad fruit’ could come only from a
‘bad tree.’ That the tree became bad was contrary to its nature, because
such a condition could come about only by a defeciton of the will, which
is contrary to nature.
...a nature is a nature because it is something made
by God, but a nature falls away from That which Is because the nature was
made out of nothing
Yet, man did not so fall away from Being as to be
absolutely nothing, but, insofar as he turned himself toward himself, he
became less than he was when he was adhering to Him who is supreme Being.
Thus, no longer to be in God but to be in oneself in the sense of to please
oneself is not to be wholly nothing but to be approaching nothingness
310
There is, then, a kind of lowliness which in some
wonderful way causes the heart to be lifted up, and there is a kind of
loftiness which makes the heart sink lower...
...‘when they were lifting themselves up thou has
cast them down.’ Psalms 72.18 Here, the Psalmist does not say: ‘When they
had been lifted up,’ ...but ‘when they are lifting themselves up, at that
moment they were cast down,’
...humility is the virtue especially esteemed in the
City of God.
...difference which distinguishes the two cities
of which we are speaking. The humble City is the society of holy men and
good angels; the proud city is the society of wicked men and evil angels.
The one City began with the love of God; the other had its beginnings in
the love of self.
Ch14
312
The pride of the woman blames the serpent; the
man’s pride blames the woman.
Ch15
For many reasons, then, the punishment meted out for
disobeying God’s order was just. It was God who had created man. He had
made man to His own image, set man above all other animals, placed him
in Paradise, and given him an abundance of goods and of well-being. God
had not burdened man with many precepts that were heavy and hard.
...single precept that was momentary and utterly easy
and that was meant merely as a medecine to make man’s obedience strong...
Man who was destined to become spiritual even in his
flesh, if only he had kept the commandment.
313
...the punishment for that sin the only penalty for
disobedience was, to put it in a single word, more disobedience. There
is nothing else that now makes a man more miserable than his own disobedience
to himself
...man cannot do what he desires to do, for the simple
reason that he refuses to obey himself; that is to say, neither his spirit
nor even his body obeys his will...
...spirit is frequently troubled and his body feels
pain...
if only our nature, wholly and in all its parts, would
obey our will, we would not have to suffer these and all our other ills
so unwillingly.
314
As for the objection that the only source of suffering
that makes service impossible is the body...because it was to Him that
we refused our obedience and our service that our body, which used to be
obedient, now troubles us by its insubordination...
He has no such need of our service as we have need
of the service of our body.
...when people talk of the sufferings of the body,
what they really mean are the sufferings of the soul which are felt in,
and because of, the body.
...some part of his soul is affected by what happens
to his flesh
Pain of body is simply suffering of soul arising from
the body
...anguish of spirit which is called sorrow is a disapproval
of what is happening in opposition to our wills.
...sensation in the flesh corresponding to desire
in the soul, familiar in the form of hunger and thirst, and commonly called
libido
when connected with sex-although, strictly speaking, lust is a word
applicable to any kind of appetite
...classical definition of anger as a lust for revenge
Ch16
315
There are, then, many kinds of lusts for this or
that, but when the word is used by itself without specification it suggests
to most people the lust for sexual excitement. Such lust does not merely
invade the whole body and outward members; it takes such complete and passionate
possession of the whole man, both physically and emotionally, that what
results is the keenest of all pleasures on the level of sensatio;
and, in the crisis of excitement, it practically paralyzes all power of
deliberate thought.
316
Sometimes, their lust is most importunate when they
least desire it; at other times, the feelings fail them when they crave
them most, their bodies remaining frigid when lust is blazing in their
souls...lust itself...refuses to obey
Ch17
An explanation is offered for Genesis 2:25, ‘they
were naked but they felt no shame.’
Ch18
Wherever sexual passion is at work, it feels ashamed
of itself. This is so not only in the case of rape, which seeks dark corners
to escape the law, but even where worldly society has legalized prostitution.
Even when there is no fear of the law and passion is indulged with impunity,
it shrinks from the public gaze. There is a natural shame which forces
even houses of ill fame to make provision for secrecy, because, easy as
it was for lust to get rid of legal restrictions, it was far too difficult
ever to remove the darkness from the dens of indecency. The most shameless
of men know that what they are doing is shameful; much as they love this
pleasure, they hate publicity.
317
...it is a good deed; but it is one that seeks to
be known only after it is done, and is ashamed to be seen while it is being
done. The reason can only be that what, by nature, has a purpose that everyone
praises involves, by penalty, a pasion that makes everyone ashamed.
Ch19-25
The shame now associated with procreation is noted, together with the view of the Cynic school that the marital act is good and so might well be performed in public. Criticizing this, Augustine speculates on the possibility of procreation without lust, on the peculiar things some people can do with their bodies (such as wiggling both ears), and on the ability of a man named Restitutus to assume a state of suspended animation. The point is made again taht no man can be perfectly happy in this life.
(**nb ear wiggling seems to suggest to A an ideal
state where the body obeys the will)
Ch26
Now, the point about Eden was that a man could live
there as a man longs to live, but only so long as he longed to live as
God willed him to live. Man in Eden lived in the enjoyment of God and he
was good by a communication of the goodness of God. His life was free from
want, and he was free to prolong his life as long as he chose. There were
food and drink to keep away hunger and thirst and the tree of life to stave
off death from senescence. There was not a sign or a seed of decay in man’s
body that could be a source of any physical pain. Not a sickness assailed
him fromm within, and he feared no harm from without. His body was perfectly
healthy and his sould completely at peace. And as in Eden itself there
was never a day too hot or too cold, so in Adam, who lived there, no fear
or desire was ever so passionate as to worry his will. Of sorrows there
was none at all and of joys none that was vain although a perpetual
joy that was genuine flowed from the presence of God, because God was loved
with a ‘charity from a pure heart and a good conscience and faith unfeigned.’
Family affection was ensured by purity of love; body and mind worked in
perfect accord; and there was an effortless observance of the law of God.
Finally, neither leisure nor labor had ever to suffer from boredom or sloth.
318
...surely, a man and his wife could play their
active and passive roles in the drama of conception without the lecherous
promptings of lust, with perfect serenity of soul and with no sense of
disintegration between body and soul. Merely because we have no present
experience to prove it, we have no right ot reject the possibility.
Perhaps these matters are somewhat too delicate for
futher discussion. It must suffice to have done the best that I could to
suggest what was possible in the Garden of Eden, before there was any need
for the reins of reticence to bridle a discussion like this. However, as
things now are, the demands of delicacy are more imperative than those
of discussion.
319
...trouble with the hypothesis of a passionless procreation
controlled
by will, as I am here suggesting it, is that it has never been verified
in experience
...it is practically impossible even to discuss the
hypothesis of voluntary control without the imagination being filled with
the realities of rebellioius lust. It is this last fact which explains
my reticence.
...there was no question of men meriting a place in
His City. They could only be marked out by His grace; and how great that
grace was they could see not only in their own deliverance but in the doom
meted out to those who were not delivered from damnation. For no one can
help but acknowledge how gratuitous and undeserved is the grace which delivers
him when he sees so clearly the contrast between his priveleged, personal
immunity and the fate of the penalized community whose punishment he was
justly condemned to share.
...answer to the problem why God should have created
men whom He foresaw would sin...in them and by means of them He could reveal
how much was deserved by their guilt and condoned by His grace, and, also,
because the harmony of the whole of reality which God has created and controls
cannot be marred by the perverse discordancy of those who sin.
Ch27
320
...there was no reason why God should not make
a good use even of the bad angel who was so doomed to obduracy ...
...by permitting the bad angel to tempt the first
man who had been created good...
...the first man had been so constituted that if,
as a good man, he had relied on the help of God, he could have overcome
the bad angel, whereas he was bound to be overcome if he proudly relied
on his own will in preference to this wisdom of his maker and helper, God;
and he was destined to a merited reward if his will remained firm with
the help of God, and to an equally deserved doom if his will wavered because
of his desertion from God.
...reliance on the help of God was a positive act
that was only possible by the help of God, the reliance on his own will
was a negative falling away from favors of divine grace...
321
God was in no uncertainty regarding the defeat which
man would uffer; but what matters more, God foresaw the defeat which the
Devil would suffer at the hands of a descendant of Adam...
...nothing in the future escaped the foreknowledge
of God, yet nothing in the foreknowledge compelled anyone to sin...
Ch28
...two societies have issued from two kinds of
love. Worldly society has flowered from a selfish love which dared to despise
even God, whereas the communion of saints is rooted in a love of God that
is ready to trample on self.
In the city of the world both the rulers themselves
and the people they dominate are dominated by the lust for domination;
whereas in the City of God all citizens serve one another in charity
The one city loves its leaders as symbols of its
own strength; the other says to its God: ‘I love thee, O Lord, my strength.’
...even the wise men in the city of man live according to man...