Works (City of God, On the Trinity, etc.) 13 part 3/4

But even if He first ceased and afterward worked (which I know not in what way it can be understood by man): this beyond doubt — that which is called 'before' and 'after' — was in the things that first did not exist and afterward existed; but in Him no succeeding will changed or took away a preceding one, but by one and the same everlasting and immutable will He both brought it about that the things He created should not exist before, so long as they did not exist, and that they should exist afterward, when they began to be — thereby perhaps wondrously showing to those who can see such things how little He needed them, but created them out of gratuitous goodness, since without them He remained from an eternity lacking a beginning in no less blessedness.

But as for that other thing they say — that not even by God's knowledge can things that are infinite be comprehended: it remains for them to dare to say, and to plunge themselves into this deep abyss of impiety, that God does not know all numbers. That these are infinite is most certain; for in whatever number you should think a limit was to be made, that very number can, in the very theory and science of numbers, not only be augmented (I do not say by adding one), but — however great it be and however vast a multitude it contain — can even be multiplied. Yet each number is so bounded by its own properties that none of them can be equal to any other whatever.

Therefore they are both unequal to one another and diverse, and each single one is finite, and all together are infinite. Does God then, on account of their infinity, not know all numbers, and does the knowledge of God reach up to a certain sum of numbers and remain ignorant of the rest? Who, even the most demented, would say this? Nor will these men dare to despise numbers and say that they do not pertain to God's knowledge — men among whom Plato commends God with great authority as fashioning the world by numbers. And among us it is read as said to God: 'Thou hast ordered all things in measure, and number, and weight'; of whom the prophet also says: 'Who bringeth forth the world by number'; and the Savior in the Gospel says: 'The very hairs of your head are all numbered.'

Far be it therefore from us to doubt that every number is known to Him, of whose understanding, as is sung in the Psalm, there is no number. The infinity of number, therefore, although there be no number of infinite numbers, is nevertheless not incomprehensible to Him of whose understanding there is no number. Wherefore, if whatever is comprehended by knowledge is bounded by the comprehension of the knower: assuredly all infinity too is in some ineffable way finite to God, because it is not incomprehensible to His knowledge. Therefore, if the infinity of numbers cannot be infinite to the knowledge of God, by which it is comprehended:

who then are we, poor little men, that we should presume to set limits to His knowledge, saying that unless the same temporal things be repeated by the same cycles of times, God cannot either foreknow all the things He makes so as to make them, or know them when He has made them? His wisdom, simply manifold and uniformly multiform, comprehends all incomprehensible things with so incomprehensible a comprehension that, whatever new and dissimilar things consequent upon those preceding He should ever wish to make, He could not have them disordered and unforeseen, nor would He foresee them from the near time, but would contain them in eternal foreknowledge.

Whether He does this, and whether by a continuous connection there are joined together what are called 'ages of ages,' proceeding nonetheless in an ordered dissimilarity, one differing from another — with those at least who are freed from misery remaining in their blessed immortality without end; or whether they are called 'ages of ages' in such a way that the ages be understood as abiding with unshaken stability in the wisdom of God as the efficient causes of these ages which pass away with time — this I dare not determine. For perhaps 'age' might be said of that which is the ages, so that nothing else be meant by 'age of age' than 'ages of ages,' just as nothing else is meant by 'heaven of heaven' than 'heavens of heavens.' For God called the firmament 'heaven,' above which are the waters;

and yet the Psalm says: 'And let the waters that are above the heavens praise the name of the Lord.' Which of these two things it is, then, or whether besides these two something else can be understood concerning the 'ages of ages,' is a most profound question, and it does not hinder what we are now treating if it be for the time left undiscussed and deferred; whether we be able to determine something in it, or whether the more diligent examination itself make us more cautious, lest in so great an obscurity of matters we dare rashly to affirm anything. For now we are disputing against the opinion by which those cycles are asserted, in which the same things are supposed necessarily to be repeated at intervals of times; but whichever of those opinions concerning the 'ages of ages' be true, it has nothing to do with these cycles;

since whether the 'ages of ages' be not the same things repeated, but one proceeding out of another in a most orderly connection, while the blessedness of the freed remains most certain without any recurrence of miseries; or whether the 'ages of ages' be eternal, as it were dominating the temporal ones as their subjects — in either case those cycles which revolve the same things have no place, and it is above all the eternal life of the saints that refutes them.

For whose pious ears could bear that, after a life spent amid so many and so great calamities (if indeed this ought to be called life, which is rather a death so grievous that death, which frees from this, is feared out of love of this death), after evils so great and so many and so horrible, expiated and ended at last at some time through true religion and wisdom, one should thus come to the vision of God and be thus made blessed by the contemplation of incorporeal light, through participation in His immutable immortality, for the attaining of which we burn with love — only that it must at some time be forsaken, and those who forsake it, cast down from that eternity, truth, and felicity, be entangled in the mortality of hell, in shameful folly, in execrable miseries, where God is lost, where truth is held in hatred, where blessedness is sought through unclean wickednesses — and this again and again without any end of former and later things, at fixed intervals and measured spans of ages, done and to be done?

and this for the reason that God, by defined cycles ever going and returning through our false blessednesses and true miseries, may — alternately indeed, but by an unceasing revolution — have His own works everlastingly known to Him, since He can neither rest from making nor, by knowing, track out the things that are infinite? Who would hear these things? Who would believe them? Who would bear them? If these things were true, they would not only more prudently be kept silent, but even — that I may say what I wish in the way I can — would more learnedly be left unknown. For if we shall not hold these things in memory there, and on that account shall be blessed, why here is our misery weighed down the more by the knowledge of them?

But if we are necessarily to know these things there, let us at least not know them here, so that here the expectation may be happier than there the attainment of the highest good; since here eternal life is expected as yet to be obtained, but there a blessed but not eternal life is known as one day to be lost. But if they say that no one can come to that blessedness unless he has learned, in the schooling of this life, these cycles in which blessedness and misery alternate by turns: how then do they admit that the more each one loves God, the more easily he will come to blessedness — they who teach the very things by which love itself grows torpid?

For who would not love more remissly and tepidly Him whom he thinks he must necessarily forsake, and against whose truth and wisdom he will come to feel — and this when he shall have arrived, according to his capacity, at the full knowledge of Him in the perfection of blessedness? — since no one can even faithfully love a human friend whom he knows he shall become an enemy to. But far be it that those things be true which threaten us with a true misery never to be ended, but often and without end to be broken by the interpositions of a false blessedness. For what is more false and deceitful than that blessedness, wherein either, in so great a light of truth, we should not know that we are to be miserable, or, in the highest citadel of felicity, we should fear it?

For if we are to be ignorant of the coming calamity, our misery here is the more experienced, where we know of the coming blessedness; but if the impending disaster there will not be hidden from us, the miserable soul passes its times more blessedly — times which, once passed, it is raised up to blessedness — than the blessed soul, whose times, once passed, it is rolled back into misery. And thus the hope of our unhappiness is happy, and of our happiness unhappy. Whence it comes to pass that, because here we suffer present evils and there we dread impending ones, we can more truly be always miserable than at some time blessed.

But since these things are false, as piety cries out and truth convinces (for that true felicity is truly promised to us, whose sure security is ever to be retained and to be broken by no unhappiness): let us, following the straight way, which is Christ for us, with Him as leader and Savior, turn away the journey of our faith and our mind from the vain and foolish circle of the impious.

For if concerning these cycles and these ceaselessly alternating goings and returnings of souls, Porphyry the Platonist was unwilling to follow the opinion of his own school — whether moved by the vanity of the thing itself, or already having come to revere the Christian times — and, as I mentioned in the tenth book, chose rather to say that the soul was given to the world for the sake of coming to know evils, so that, freed and purged from them, when it returns to the Father, it should suffer nothing further of the kind: how much more ought we to detest and shun this falsehood, hostile to the Christian faith!

But these cycles being emptied out and brought to nothing, no necessity compels us to think, on that account, that the human race has no beginning of time from which it began to be — as if, through I know not what cycles, there were nothing new in things which had not also existed before at fixed intervals of times and would afterward be. For if the soul is freed, never to return to miseries, as it was never before freed: something comes to be in it which was never done before, and this indeed very great, namely an eternal felicity which shall never cease. But if in an immortal nature so great a novelty comes to be, repeated by no cycle and to be repeated by none, why is it contended that in mortal things it cannot come to be?

If they say that no novelty of blessedness comes to be in the soul, since it returns to that in which it always was, at least the very liberation is a new thing, since it is freed from a misery in which it never was, and the very novelty of that misery came to be in it which never was. But this novelty, if it did not come into the order of things which are governed by divine providence, but rather happened by chance — where then are those determined and measured cycles, in which no new things come to be, but the same things are repeated which have been? But if this novelty too is not excluded from the ordering of providence, whether the soul was given or fell: new things can come to be which neither were done before nor yet are alien from the order of things.

And if the soul could through imprudence make for itself a new misery which was not unforeseen by divine providence — so that providence should include even this in the order of things and not unforeseeingly free it from this — with what rashness, then, of human vanity do we dare to deny that the Divinity can make things new, not to Himself but to the world, which He neither made before nor ever held unforeseen? But if they say that souls, once freed, will indeed not return to misery, yet that when this happens nothing new comes to be in things, since souls, ever different ones, have been and are and shall be freed: this at least they concede, if it be so, that new souls come to be, for whom there is both a new misery and a new liberation.

For if they say that these souls are ancient and everlasting in the past, out of which new men are daily made — from whose bodies, if they have lived wisely, they are so freed that they never roll back into miseries — they will consequently have to say that they are infinite. For however great a finite number of souls there had been, it could not suffice for the infinite past ages, so that out of it men should always be made, whose souls were always to be freed from this mortality and never thereafter to return to it. Nor will they in any way explain how in things which they will to be finite, so that they may be able to be known to God, the number of souls is infinite.

Wherefore, since those cycles are now exploded, by which the soul was supposed necessarily to return to the same miseries: what remains more fitting to piety than to believe that it is not impossible to God both to make new the things He never made, and by ineffable foreknowledge to have a will that is not mutable? But whether the number of freed souls, never thereafter to return to miseries, can always be augmented, let them see to it who dispute so subtly about the restraining of the infinity of things; we, however, terminate our reasoning on both sides.

For if it can, what reason is there why it should be denied that there could have been created what was never before created, if the number of freed souls, which never before existed, has not only been made once, but shall never cease to be made? But if there must be some certain number of freed souls, which shall never return to misery, and this number be not further augmented: even that number itself, without doubt, whatever it shall be, certainly never existed before; which surely could not grow and come to the limit of its quantity without some beginning; which beginning in that manner never before existed. That this therefore might be, man was created, before whom no one existed.

Having therefore, as far as we could, explained this most difficult question — on account of the eternity of God who creates new things without any novelty of will — it is not hard to see that it was far better what was done: that from one man, whom He first created, He should multiply the human race, than if He had begun it from several. For whereas He has established some living creatures as solitary and, so to speak, given to wandering alone (that is, which rather seek solitude), such as are eagles, kites, lions, wolves, and whatever are so; and others as gregarious, which prefer to live gathered together and in flocks, as are doves, starlings, deer, roes, and the rest of this kind: yet He propagated neither kind from single individuals, but commanded several to exist at once.

But man, whose nature He was in a certain way establishing as intermediate between the angels and the beasts, so that, if he should keep the precept of his Creator as of his true Lord in pious obedience, he should pass into angelic fellowship, attaining a blessed immortality without any end and without the intervention of death;

but if, on the other hand, using his free will proudly and disobediently, he should offend the Lord his God, he should, given over to death, live like a beast, a slave of lust and destined after death to eternal punishment — this man He created one and single: not indeed that he was to be left alone without human society, but that in this way the unity of that very society and the bond of concord might be the more forcefully commended to him, if men should be knit together not only by likeness of nature among themselves, but also by the affection of kinship; since it did not please Him to create even the woman herself, to be joined to the man, as He created the man himself, but out of him, so that the human race might altogether be spread abroad from one man.

Nor was God ignorant that man would sin and, now subject to death, would propagate men destined to die, and would advance to such enormity of sinning that the beasts of their kind — devoid of rational will, whose beginning teemed forth in multitudes out of the waters and the earth — would live more safely and peaceably among themselves than men, whose race was propagated from one, to commend concord. For never among themselves have lions, or among themselves dragons, waged such wars as men. But He also foresaw by His grace a people of the pious to be called unto adoption, and, their sins remitted, to be justified by the Holy Spirit and joined to the holy angels in eternal peace, the last enemy, death, being destroyed;

and to which people the consideration of this matter would be profitable: that from one man God had established the human race, in order to commend to men how pleasing to Him unity is even among many. God therefore made man to His own image. For He created for him such a soul that by reason and intelligence he should be more excellent than all the animals of the earth, the waters, and the air, which do not have a mind of this kind.

And when He had formed the man of earthly dust and had put into him a soul such as I have described — whether one He had already made, by breathing it in, or rather had made it by breathing, and had willed that breath which He made by breathing (for what else is it to breathe than to make a breath?) to be the soul of man — He also made him a mate as a helper for begetting, a bone drawn from his side, as God does. For these things are not to be conceived after the manner of the flesh, as we are wont to see craftsmen fashioning out of any earthly material whatever they can by the industry of art with bodily members. The hand of God is the power of God, who works even visible things invisibly.

But these things they consider to be fabulous rather than true, who measure the power and wisdom of God — by which He knows and is able even without seeds to make the seeds themselves — from these customary and daily works; but the things which were first established, since they know them not, they think of unbelievingly, as though these very things which they do know about human conceptions and births, if they were told to those who had not experienced them, would not seem more incredible; although even these very things most people assign rather to the corporeal causes of nature than to the works of the divine mind. But with these men we have no business in these books, who do not believe that the divine mind makes or cares for these things.

But those who believe their Plato that all mortal animals — among which man holds the chief place, akin even to the gods themselves — were made not by that supreme God who fashioned the world, but by others, lesser ones whom indeed He Himself created, by His permission or command: if they be free from that superstition by which they seek a pretext whereby they may seem justly to offer sacred rites and sacrifices as it were to their own makers, they will easily also be free from the error of this opinion. For it is not lawful to believe or say that any nature, however small and mortal, has a creator other than God, even before it can be understood.

But the angels — whom they more willingly call gods — even if they lend their operation, whether commanded or permitted, to the things that are born in the world, we no more call them creators of animals than we call farmers the creators of crops and trees. For whereas there is one kind of form which is applied from without to any corporeal material, as potters, smiths, and craftsmen of that sort work — who also paint and mold shapes similar to the bodies of animals; but another kind, which has its efficient causes from within, from the secret and hidden choice of a living and intelligent nature, which makes not only the natural forms of bodies, but also the very souls of living creatures, while it is not itself made:

the aforesaid former kind of form may be ascribed to any craftsmen whatever; but this other kind to none save the one Craftsman, the Creator and Founder, God, who made the world itself and the angels without any world and without any angels. For by that same divine and, so to speak, effective power — which knows not how to be made, but to make — the roundness of the heaven and the roundness of the sun received their form when the world was being made: by that same divine and effective power, which knows not how to be made but to make, the roundness of the eye and the roundness of the apple and the other natural figures received their form, which we see in all things being born, applied not from without, but by the inmost power of the Creator, who said:

'I fill heaven and earth,' and whose wisdom it is 'which reacheth from end to end mightily, and ordereth all things sweetly.' Accordingly, what kind of ministry the angels, first made, furnished to the Creator as He made the rest, I do not know; nor do I dare to attribute to them what perhaps they cannot do, nor ought I to withhold what they can. Yet the creation and founding of all natures, whereby it comes about that they exist as natures at all, I attribute — even they themselves favoring it — to that God, to whom they know, with thanksgiving, that they too owe what they are. Not only, therefore, do we not call farmers the creators of any fruits, since we read: 'Neither he that planteth is anything, nor he that watereth, but God that giveth the increase';

But not even the earth itself, however much it may seem to be the fruitful mother of all things—the earth which brings forward what bursts up in shoots and holds fast by their roots the things that are set in it—may we call a creator, since we likewise read: God gives it a body as He has willed, and to each of the seeds its own body. So neither ought we to call the woman the creatress of her own offspring, but rather Him who said to a certain servant of His: Before I formed thee in the womb, I knew thee. And although the soul of a pregnant woman, affected in this way or that, may be able to clothe the fetus with certain qualities, as it were—as Jacob did with the parti-colored rods, so that the flocks were begotten of varied color—yet that nature which is begotten she no more made herself than she made her own self.

Whatever bodily or seminal causes, therefore, may be applied to the begetting of things—whether by the workings of angels or of men or of any animals whatsoever, or by the minglings of males and females; whatever desires or movements of the mother's soul may be able to sprinkle something of features or of colors upon the tender and soft conceptions—the very natures themselves, which are thus affected in one way or another within their own kind, none makes save the supreme God, whose hidden power, penetrating all things by an incorruptible presence, causes whatever in any way is to be, in whatever measure it is; for unless He made it, it would not be such or such, but could not exist at all.

Wherefore, if in that outward form which craftsmen impose upon corporeal things from without, we say that the founders of the city of Rome and the city of Alexandria were not the smiths and the architects, but the kings—by whose will, counsel, and command they were built—namely Rome its founder, Alexander that Alexandria: how much more ought we to call none but God the Founder of natures, who neither makes anything out of any matter which He Himself has not made, nor has any workmen save those whom He Himself has created; and if He were to withdraw His, so to speak, fabricating power from things, they would no more be than they were not before they came to be. But I say "before" in eternity, not in time. For who else is the creator of times but He who made those things by whose movements times might run?

[XXVII] Plato indeed held that the lesser gods, made by the supreme God, were the makers of the other living creatures, in such a way that they took the immortal part from Him, but themselves attached the mortal part. Accordingly, he did not wish them to be the creators of our souls, but of our bodies. Hence, since Porphyry says that, for the purification of the soul, every body is to be fled, and along with his Plato and the other Platonists holds that those who have lived immoderately and dishonorably return to mortal bodies to pay their penalties—Plato indeed even to the bodies of beasts, but Porphyry only to those of men—

it follows that they must say that those gods, whom they wish to be worshiped by us as though they were our parents and founders, are nothing other than the makers of our fetters and prisons, and are not our establishers but our imprisoners and binders in wretched workhouses and most grievous chains. Let the Platonists, then, either cease to threaten the souls with penalties out of these bodies, or let them not proclaim as gods to be worshiped by us those whose working in us they exhort us to flee and escape as much as we can—when nevertheless both are utterly false. For neither do souls thus pay penalties when they are rolled back again into this life, nor is there any founder of all living things, whether in heaven or on earth, save Him by whom heaven and earth were made.

For if there is no cause for living in this body except for the sake of undergoing punishments, how does the same Plato say that the world could not otherwise have been made most beautiful and best, unless it were filled with the kinds of all living creatures, that is, both immortal and mortal? But if our establishment, by which we were founded even as mortals, is a divine gift, how is it a punishment to return to these bodies, that is, to divine benefits? And if God, as Plato repeatedly recalls, held within His eternal intelligence the species of the whole universe, and likewise of all living creatures, how did He not Himself found them all? Or would He be unwilling to be the artificer of certain things, the art of whose making His ineffable and ineffably praiseworthy mind possessed?

[XXVIII] With good reason, therefore, does true religion acknowledge and proclaim Him whom it knows to be the Founder of the whole universe to be likewise the Founder of all living creatures too, that is, of both souls and bodies. Among earthly beings, man was made by Him after His own image, chief among them, for the cause I have stated—and perchance for some other and greater cause that lies hidden—made one, yet not left alone. For nothing is so quarrelsome as this human race by vice, nor so social by nature. Nor could human nature speak more fittingly against the vice of discord—either to guard against its coming to be, or to heal it when it had arisen—than by the remembrance of that parent whom God willed for this reason to create as one, from whom a multitude was to be propagated: so that by this reminder even among many a harmonious unity might be preserved.