Letters & Polemics (CSEL) 3 part 66/87

The holy Gospel having been sown, as far as it behooved through His bodily presence, He suffered, died, rose again — by His Passion showing what we ought to endure for the truth, by His resurrection what we ought to hope for in eternity — apart from the depth of the sacrament, by which His blood was poured out for the remission of sins. He dwelt on earth forty days with His disciples, and as they watched ascended into heaven, and after ten days sent the promised Holy Spirit; of whose coming upon those who had believed there was then the greatest sign, and most especially necessary, that each one of them should speak in the tongues of all nations;

thus signifying the unity of the Catholic Church, which was to be throughout all nations, and so to speak in all tongues. CHAPTER 50. Of the preaching of the Gospel, which by the sufferings of the preachers was made more illustrious and more powerful. Then, according to that prophecy:

'Out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord out of Jerusalem,' and according to the predictions of the Lord Christ Himself — where after the resurrection, while His disciples were amazed at Him, He opened their understanding that they might understand the Scriptures, and said to them that thus it was written, and thus it behooved Christ to suffer and to rise again from the dead on the third day, and that penance and the remission of sins should be preached in His name throughout all nations, beginning at Jerusalem; and where again, to them asking about His last coming, He answered and said: 'It is not for you to know the times which the Father hath put in His own power;'

'but you shall receive the power of the Holy Spirit coming upon you, and you shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and even to the ends of the earth' — the Church first spread itself from Jerusalem, and when very many in Judea and Samaria had believed, it went also into other nations, those announcing the Gospel to them whom He Himself, as luminaries, had both fitted by the Word and kindled by the Holy Spirit. For He had said to them: 'Fear not those who kill the body, but cannot kill the soul.' That they might not be cold with fear, they burned with the fire of love.

Finally, not only through those who had seen and heard Him both before His Passion and after His resurrection, but even after their death, through their successors, amid horrendous persecutions and various tortures and the deaths of martyrs, the Gospel was preached throughout the whole world, God bearing witness by signs and wonders and various mighty works and the gifts of the Holy Spirit;

so that the peoples of the nations, believing in Him who was crucified for their redemption, with Christian love venerated the blood of the martyrs which they had shed in diabolical fury, and the very kings, by whose laws the Church was being devastated, were salutarily subjected to that Name which they had striven cruelly to remove from the earth, and began to persecute the false gods, for whose sake the worshippers of the true God had previously been persecuted. CHAPTER 51. That even through the dissensions of heretics the Catholic faith is strengthened.

But the devil, seeing the temples of the demons forsaken and the human race running into the name of the liberating Mediator, stirred up heretics, who under the Christian name should resist Christian doctrine, as though they could indifferently, without any rebuke, be held in the city of God, just as the city of confusion indifferently held philosophers thinking among themselves things diverse and adverse. Those, therefore, who in the Church of Christ are of some diseased and perverse mind, if, when rebuked that they may be of a sound and right mind, they resist contumaciously and refuse to amend their pestilent and deadly dogmas, but persist in defending them, become heretics, and going outside are reckoned among the enemies who exercise her.

For even thus indeed, by their own evil, they profit those true catholic members of Christ, while God uses even the evil well, and to those who love Him all things work together for good. For all the enemies of the Church, by whatever error they be blinded or by whatever malice they be depraved, if they receive the power of bodily afflicting, exercise her patience; if they oppose only by thinking ill, exercise her wisdom; but that even enemies may be loved, they exercise her benevolence, or even her beneficence, whether dealing with them by persuasive teaching or by terrifying discipline.

And through this, the devil, the prince of the impious city, by stirring his own vessels against the city of God that is on pilgrimage in this world, is permitted to do her no harm; for whom, without doubt, both consolation in prosperous things, that she be not broken by adversities, and exercise in adverse things, that she be not corrupted by prosperities, is provided by divine providence, and thus each is so tempered by the other that in the Psalm we recognize that voice as having arisen from no other source: 'According to the multitude of my sorrows in my heart, Thy consolations have gladdened my soul.' Hence too is that saying of the apostle: 'Rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation.' For that also which the same teacher says:

'All who wish to live godly in Christ suffer persecution,' must be thought to be lacking in no times. For even when, from those who are without, not raging, there seems to be tranquillity — and in truth there is, and it brings very much consolation, especially to the weak — yet there are not lacking, nay there are many within, who torment the hearts of those living godly by their own lost morals; since through them the Christian and catholic name is blasphemed; which the dearer it is to those who wish to live godly in Christ, so much the more do they grieve that, through evil ones placed within, it comes to pass that it is loved less than the minds of the godly desire.

The heretics themselves also, when they are considered to have the Christian name and sacraments and Scriptures and profession, cause great grief in the hearts of the godly; because both many who wish to be Christians are forced to hesitate on account of their dissensions, and many slanderers also find in these a matter for blaspheming the Christian name, since these too are in some way called Christians. By these and suchlike perverse morals and errors of men, those who wish to live godly in Christ suffer persecution, even with none assailing nor vexing their body. For they suffer this persecution not in their bodies, but in their hearts. Whence is that voice: 'According to the multitude of my sorrows in my heart.' For he does not say:

'In my body.' But again, since the immutable divine promises are considered, and that which the apostle says: 'The Lord knoweth who are His' (for of those whom He foreknew and predestinated to be conformed to the image of His Son, none can perish): therefore there follows in that Psalm: 'Thy consolations have gladdened my soul.' But the sorrow itself, which arises in the hearts of the godly whom the morals of evil or false Christians persecute, profits those who grieve, since it descends from charity, by which they do not wish those to perish nor to impede the salvation of others. Finally, great consolations arise even from the corrections of those, which suffuse the souls of the godly with as much gladness as the sorrows with which they were tormented over their perdition.

Thus in this world, in these evil days — not only from the time of the bodily presence of Christ and His apostles, but from Abel himself, whom, the first righteous man, his impious brother slew, and thenceforth even to the end of this world — the Church runs its course on pilgrimage amid the persecutions of the world and the consolations of God. CHAPTER 52. Whether it is to be believed, as some suppose, that, the ten persecutions which have been being fulfilled, none now remains except the eleventh, which is to be in the very time of Antichrist. Accordingly, I think it must not be rashly said or believed, as it has seemed or seems to some, that the Church will suffer no more persecutions until the time of Antichrist

more than it has already suffered, that is, ten, so that the eleventh and last should be from Antichrist. For they reckon the first to be that which was made by Nero, the second by Domitian, the third by Trajan, the fourth by Antoninus, the fifth by Severus, the sixth by Maximinus, the seventh by Decius, the eighth by Valerian, the ninth by Aurelian, the tenth by Diocletian and Maximian. For the plagues of the Egyptians, since they were ten before the people of God began to go out thence, they think are to be referred to this understanding, so that the last persecution of Antichrist may seem like the eleventh plague, by which the Egyptians, while pursuing the Hebrews in hostile manner, perished in the Red Sea as the people of God passed through on dry ground.

But I do not think that, by that event which took place in Egypt, these persecutions were prophetically signified; although by those who think this, those individual events seem to be exquisitely and ingeniously compared with these individual ones — not by a prophetic spirit, but by the conjecture of the human mind, which sometimes arrives at the truth, sometimes is deceived. For what will those who hold this say of the persecution in which the Lord Himself was crucified? In what number will they place it? But if they think it is to be reckoned with this one excepted, as though those are to be numbered which pertain to the body, not the one in which the Head Himself was assailed and slain: what will they do about that one

which, after Christ ascended into heaven, was made at Jerusalem, where the blessed Stephen was stoned, where James the brother of John was slain with the sword, where the apostle Peter was shut up that he might be killed and was freed by an angel, where the brethren were put to flight and dispersed from Jerusalem, where Saul, who afterward became the apostle Paul, devastated the Church, where he himself too, now evangelizing the faith which he had persecuted, suffered such things as he had done — whether throughout Judea or throughout other nations, wherever he most fervently preached Christ? Why, then, does it seem to them that the reckoning is to be begun from Nero, when the Church, by growing, had arrived at the times of Nero amid the most atrocious persecutions, of which it is far too long to tell them all?

But if they reckon that only persecutions stirred up by kings ought to be counted, then Herod was a king, who even after the Lord's ascension raised up a most grievous one. Furthermore, what answer do they give about Julian also, whom they do not number among the ten? Did not he too persecute the Church, he who forbade Christians to teach or to learn the liberal arts? Under him Valentinian the Elder, who was the third emperor after him, stood forth as a confessor of the Christian faith and was stripped of his military rank;

to say nothing of what he had begun to do at Antioch, had he not shuddered in horror at the freedom and cheerfulness of a single most faithful and most steadfast young man, who, when many had been seized to be tortured, was the first to be tortured throughout the whole day, and amid the iron claws and torments sang psalms; so that Valentinian feared he might come to blush more shamefully in the case of the rest. Finally, within our own memory, did not Valens, brother of the aforesaid Valentinian and an Arian, lay waste the Catholic Church throughout the regions of the East with a great persecution? But how can it be right not to consider that the Church, bearing fruit and growing throughout the whole world, may suffer persecution from kings among some nations even at a time when it does not suffer it among others?

Unless perhaps that is not to be counted a persecution, when the king of the Goths within Gothia itself persecuted the Christians with marvelous cruelty, although there were none there but Catholics, very many of whom were crowned with martyrdom—just as we have heard from certain brethren who at that time had been boys there and recalled without hesitation that they had themselves seen these things. And what of recent events in Persia? Did not the persecution rage so fiercely against the Christians (if indeed it has even now subsided) that some, fleeing from there, made their way as far as the towns of the Romans? When I ponder these things and others of this kind, it does not seem to me that the number of persecutions by which the Church must be exercised can be fixed.

But on the other hand, to affirm that some persecutions by kings are yet to come, besides that very last one about which no Christian doubts, is a piece of no lesser rashness. Therefore we leave this in the middle, establishing or demolishing neither side of this question, but only recalling men from the bold presumption of affirming either of these. CHAPTER LIII. That the time of the last persecution has been revealed to no man. That very last persecution, indeed, which is to come from Antichrist, Jesus Himself will extinguish by His own presence. For so it is written, that He will slay him with the spirit of His mouth, and destroy him with the brightness of His presence. Here the question is wont to be asked: When will this be? Most unseasonably indeed.

For if it would profit us to know this, by whom could it better be told to the inquiring disciples than by God Himself, their Master? For they were not silent about it in His presence, but asked Him when He was present, saying: Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel? But He said: It is not for you to know the times which the Father has put in His own power. They surely had not inquired about the hour or the day or the year, but about the time, when they received this answer. In vain, therefore, do we attempt to calculate and fix the number of years that remain to this age, since we hear from the mouth of Truth that it is not for us to know this;

yet some have said that from the Lord's ascension to His final coming four hundred years could be completed, others five hundred, others even a thousand. But how each of them props up his own opinion would be long to show, and is unnecessary. For they use human conjectures; nothing certain is brought forth by them from the authority of the canonical Scripture. But He who says, 'It is not for you to know the times which the Father has put in His own power,' unbends the fingers of all who reckon upon this matter, and bids them be still.

But since this is an evangelical pronouncement, it is no wonder that the worshippers of many false gods were not restrained by it from feigning that, by the responses of the demons whom they worship as gods, it had been determined how long the Christian religion would endure. For when they saw that it could not be consumed even by so many and so great persecutions, but had rather taken from these its wondrous increase, they devised certain Greek verses, as though poured forth to some inquirer by a divine oracle, in which they indeed make Christ innocent of the charge of this supposed sacrilege,

but they add that Peter wrought sorceries, so that the name of Christ should be worshipped for three hundred and sixty-five years, and then, the said number of years being completed, it should come to its end without delay. O hearts of learned men! O literate wits, worthy to believe such things of Christ, which you are unwilling to believe in Christ—that His disciple Peter did not learn the magic arts from Him, but that, though He was innocent, Peter was nonetheless a sorcerer, and chose by his magic arts, by his great labors and perils, and at last even by the shedding of his own blood, that Christ's name should be worshipped rather than his own! If Peter wrought sorcery that the world should so love Christ, what did the innocent Christ do, that Peter should so love Him?

Let them therefore answer to themselves, and, if they are able, let them understand that it was by that grace from above that the world came to love Christ for the sake of eternal life—by which same grace it came about that Peter too loved Christ both for the sake of the eternal life he was to receive from Him, and even to the suffering of a temporal death for Him.

Then again, who are these gods of theirs, who can foretell such things yet cannot avert them—thus succumbing to a single sorcerer and a single magical crime, by which (as they say) a boy a year old was slain and torn to pieces and buried with an unspeakable rite—so that they should permit a sect hostile to themselves to grow strong over so prolonged a time, to overcome the dreadful cruelties of so many and so great persecutions not by resisting but by suffering, and to arrive at the overthrow of their own images, temples, and sacred oracles? Who, finally, is that god—not ours, surely, but their own—who was either enticed by so great a crime or compelled to grant these things? For those verses say that Peter determined these things by the magic art, not to some demon, but to a god.

Such a god they have, who do not have Christ. CHAPTER LIV. Of the most foolish lie of the pagans, by which they pretended that the Christian religion would not endure beyond three hundred and sixty-five years. These things, and many of this kind, I would have collected, if that very year had not yet passed which the feigned divination promised and a deceived vanity believed. But seeing that, from the time when the worship of the name of Christ was established through His presence in the flesh and through the apostles, three hundred and sixty-five years were completed some years ago, what else do we seek by which this falsehood may be refuted?

For although we do not place the beginning of this matter at Christ's nativity—because as an infant and a boy He had no disciples—yet when He began to have them, without doubt the Christian teaching and religion then became known through His bodily presence; that is, after He was baptized in the river Jordan by the ministry of John. For on this account that prophecy had gone before concerning Him: He shall have dominion from sea to sea, and from the river unto the ends of the earth. But since, before He had suffered and risen from the dead, the faith had not yet been determined for all (for it was determined in the resurrection of Christ; for thus the apostle Paul speaks to the Athenians, saying:

Now He commands men everywhere to repent, inasmuch as He has appointed a day on which to judge the world in equity, by the man through whom He has determined faith for all, raising Him from the dead): we better take our beginning, in solving this question, from that point; especially because then also the Holy Spirit was given, just as He was fittingly to be given after the resurrection of Christ in that city from which the second law, that is, the new covenant, was to begin. For the first was from Mount Sinai through Moses, which is called the Old Covenant. But concerning this one, which was to be given through Christ, it was foretold: Out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.

Whence He Himself also said that repentance must be preached in His name among all nations, yet beginning at Jerusalem. There, then, the worship of this name took its rise, that men should believe in Jesus Christ, who had been crucified and had risen again. There this faith glowed with such notable beginnings that several thousands of men, converted to the name of Christ with marvelous eagerness, sold their possessions so that they might be distributed to the needy, and with holy resolve and most ardent love attained to voluntary poverty, and prepared themselves to contend even unto death for the truth, amid the raging and blood-thirsty Jews—not with armed power, but with the more powerful weapon of patience.

If this was done by no magic arts, why do they hesitate to believe that by the same divine power it could be done throughout the whole world, by which it was done at Jerusalem? But if, in order that at Jerusalem so great a multitude of men should be kindled to the worship of the name of Christ—the very multitude that had either fastened Him to the cross when seized, or had mocked Him when fastened—Peter had already wrought that sorcery, then from that very year we must seek when the three hundred and sixty-five years are completed. Christ, then, died when the two Gemini were consuls, on the eighth day before the Kalends of April. He rose again on the third day, as the apostles proved even by their own senses. Then after forty days He ascended into heaven; after ten days, that is, on the fiftieth day after His resurrection, He sent the Holy Spirit.

Then three thousand men believed, as the apostles preached Him. Then, therefore, the worship of that name took its rise—as we believe and as the truth holds, by the efficacy of the Holy Spirit; but as impious vanity has feigned or supposed, by the magic arts of Peter. A little later, too, when a marvelous sign had been wrought—when, at the word of Peter himself, a certain beggar, lame from his mother's womb so that he had to be carried by others and set at the gate of the temple where he might beg for alms, leaped up whole in the name of Jesus Christ—five thousand men believed; and thereafter, by yet other and other accessions of believers, the Church grew.

And from this is also gathered the day from which that very year took its beginning, namely when the Holy Spirit was sent, that is, on the Ides of May. The consuls accordingly being counted, three hundred and sixty-five years are found to have been completed on those same Ides, in the consulship of Honorius and Eutychianus. Moreover, in the following year, when Mallius Theodorus was consul—when, according to that oracle of demons or fiction of men, there ought to have been no Christian religion at all—what perhaps was done in other parts of the earth, it was not necessary to inquire;

meanwhile, what we know is that in the most renowned and most eminent city of Carthage in Africa, Gaudentius and Jovius, counts of the emperor Honorius, on the fourteenth day before the Kalends of April overthrew the temples of the false gods and broke their images. And from that time to this present time, through nearly thirty years, who does not see how much the worship of the name of Christ has increased—especially after many of those became Christians who were being called back from the faith as though by that true divination, and who, when the same number of years was completed, saw it to be empty and laughable? We, then, who are and are called Christians, do not believe in Peter, but in Him in whom Peter believed; built up by Peter's words about Christ, not poisoned by his magic incantations;

neither deceived by his sorceries, but aided by his benefits. That Christ, the teacher of Peter in the doctrine which leads to eternal life, is the teacher of us also. But let us at length now conclude this book, having discoursed thus far and shown, as much as seemed sufficient, what is the mortal course of the two cities, the heavenly and the earthly, intermingled from the beginning even to the end; of which the one that is earthly made for itself such false gods as it willed, whether from anywhere or even from men, by sacrificing to whom it might serve them; but the other, which is heavenly and a pilgrim on earth, makes no false gods, but is itself made by the true God, whose true sacrifice it itself is.

Both, nevertheless, alike make use of temporal goods, or are alike afflicted by temporal evils, but with a different faith, a different hope, a different love, until they be separated by the last judgment, and each receive its own end, of which there is no end; concerning the ends of both of which we must next discourse. [Of the question which the philosophical debate has stirred up concerning the ends of good and evil things, in which Varro saw that there could be two hundred and eighty-eight sects.] Since I see that I must next dispute concerning the due ends of each city, namely the earthly and the heavenly:

first there must be set forth, as far as the plan of completing this work allows, the arguments of mortal men by which they have striven to make for themselves blessedness in the unhappiness of this life, so that it may become clear how our hope, which God has given us, differs from their vain pursuits, and how the reality itself—that is, the true blessedness which He will give—differs from them, not only by divine authority, but also with reason brought to bear, such as we can bring to bear for the sake of unbelievers. For concerning the ends of good and evil the philosophers have disputed among themselves much and in manifold ways; and pursuing this question with the utmost intensity, they have endeavored to discover what makes a man blessed. For that is the end of our good for the sake of which other things are to be sought, while it is to be sought for its own sake;

and that is the end of evil, for the sake of which other things are to be avoided, while it itself is to be avoided for its own sake. We now speak, then, of the end of good, not in the sense that it is consumed so as to cease to be, but in the sense that it is perfected so as to be complete; and of the end of evil, not in the sense that it ceases to be, but in the sense to which it leads by its harming. These ends, accordingly, are the highest good and the highest evil. About discovering these, and about attaining the highest good in this life while avoiding the highest evil, those who professed the pursuit of wisdom amid the vanity of this world labored much, as I have said; and yet, although erring in diverse ways, the limit of nature did not permit them to deviate so far from the path of truth that some placed the ends of good and evil in the soul, others in the body, others in both.

From this threefold distribution, as it were, of the general classes of sects, Marcus Varro, in his book On Philosophy, having diligently and subtly scrutinized so great a variety of doctrines, came to note that, by applying certain differences, he could most easily arrive at two hundred and eighty-eight sects—not such as already existed, but such as could exist.

That I may show this briefly, I must begin from that point which he himself noted and set down in the aforesaid book: that there are certain four things which men, without a teacher, without any aid of instruction, without the diligence or art of living which is called virtue and which is undoubtedly learned, seek as it were naturally—either pleasure, by which the bodily sense is delightfully moved; or repose, by which it comes about that a man suffers no bodily distress; or both, which however Epicurus calls by the single name of pleasure; or, universally, the primary things of nature, in which both these and others are included, whether in the body, such as the soundness, health, and safety of its members, or in the soul, such as those things, whether small or great, which are found in the natural endowments of men.

These four, then—that is, pleasure, repose, both together, and the primary things of nature—are in us in such a way that either virtue, which doctrine afterwards implants, is to be sought for their sake, or they for the sake of virtue, or each for its own sake; and through this there come to be twelve sects. For by this reasoning each one is tripled; which, when I shall have demonstrated in one case, it will not be difficult to find in the rest. When, therefore, bodily pleasure is either subordinated to, or preferred to, or joined with the virtue of the soul, the diversity of sects is varied threefold. It is subordinated to virtue when it is taken up into the service of virtue.