Augustinus.
Concerning the City of God Against the
Pagans.
Knowles, David ed. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972
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 Augustineıs
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. Ciceroıs
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 Augustineıs 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 lifeıs problems. But in Augustineıs 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 Augustineıs 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 worldı,
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 citiesı. 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 Godıs 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.ı
...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
Ambrosiasterı...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 peopleı (populus)
and a commonwealthı (res publica) and what we call a Stateı.
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...ıIf 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 manıs condition deserves such masters. Godıs 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.ı It might be supposed that
tyrantsı here is used not in the sense of wicked and irresponsible rulersı,
but in the ancient meaning of men of powerı...but this is precluded by an
unambiguious statement that God makes a hypocrite to reign because of the
perversity of the peopleı.
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 bishopıs 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 worldıs
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 Platonistsı was in fact that of
Plotinus (205-70) as seen in the Enneads.
[Plotinus] producedı Platoıs 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 Platoıs
vague Form of Good with a transcendent One. Aquinas made of Aristotleıs
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 manıs 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
Platoıs 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 demonsı 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 covenantı (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 Virgilıs 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 otherı
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,
Godıs 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 usı
Book xxii, ch24, the beauties of creation and the
beauty of manıs mind;
ch26,
How the common man is saved as by fireı.
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 manıs
highest good in material pleasure...
296
...mistake to imagine, because the Stoics place
manıs highest good in the soul (and because soulı and spiritı 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 fleshı...
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.ı
...interpret the word fleshı
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
Endows these seeds so slowed by weight of earth
Or bodyıs drag;
and so they ever lie
In bondage to dull limbs that one day die
299
Thus do they fear and hope,
rejoice and grieve,
Blind in the gloomy jail they cannot leave.ı
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 Adamıs 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.ı
Ch4
300
When a man lives according to manı and not
according to Godı 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 soulı 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 membersı 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
Manıs 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 manıs 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 fruitı could come only from a bad tree.ı
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.ı Psalms 72.18 Here, the Psalmist does
not say: When they had been lifted up,ı ...but when they are lifting
themselves up, at that moment they were cast down,ı
...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 manıs pride blames the woman.
Ch15
For many reasons, then, the punishment meted out
for disobeying Godıs 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
manıs 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.ı
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 manıs 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.ı 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.ı
...even
the wise men in the city of man live according to man...