文集（天主之城·論三位一體等） 第 12 章 第 1/4 段

[I] We speak of the City of God, whose witness is that Scripture which—not by fortuitous movements of minds, but plainly by the disposition of the supreme Providence—has, by its divine and surpassing authority, subjected to itself above all the writings of all the nations all the kinds of human intellects. For there it is written: Glorious things are spoken of thee, O City of God; and in another psalm it is read: Great is the Lord and greatly to be praised in the city of our God, in His holy mountain, spreading abroad the exultations of the whole earth; and a little after in the same psalm: As we have heard, so also we have seen, in the city of the Lord of hosts, in the city of our God; God hath founded it forever; likewise in another:

There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God; the Most High hath sanctified His tabernacle. God is in the midst of her; she shall not be moved. By these and testimonies of this kind, all of which it would be too long to recount, we have learned that there is a certain City of God, whose citizens we have longed to be, moved by that love which its Founder has inspired in us. To this Founder of the holy City the citizens of the earthly city prefer their own gods, being ignorant that He is the God of gods—not of false gods, that is, of the impious and proud, who, deprived of His unchangeable and universally common light and thereby reduced to a certain needy power, in a certain manner pursue their own private powers and seek divine honors from their deceived subjects;

but of the gods who are pious and holy, who take more delight in subjecting themselves to the One than in subjecting many to themselves, and in worshipping God rather than in being worshipped in the place of God. But to the enemies of this holy city we have replied in the ten preceding books, as far as we were able, with the help of our Lord and King.

But now, recognizing what is expected of me and not forgetful of my debt, I shall—as far as I am able, relying on the aid of that same Lord and King everywhere—undertake to discuss the origin, the course, and the appointed ends of the two cities, the earthly, namely, and the heavenly, which, as I have said, are in this present age in a certain manner intertwined and mutually mingled. And first I shall tell how the beginnings of these two cities were foreshadowed in the diversity among the angels.

[II] It is a great and altogether rare thing, when the whole creation, both corporeal and incorporeal, has been considered and found to be mutable, to transcend it by the effort of the mind and to arrive at the immutable substance of God, and there to learn from Himself that all nature which is not what He Himself is was made by none other than Himself. For thus God speaks with man not through any bodily creature, resounding in bodily ears, so that the spaces of air are struck between the one who sounds and the one who hears, nor through the like spiritual medium which is shaped by likenesses of bodies, as in dreams or in some other such manner (for even so He speaks as it were to the ears of the body, because He speaks as it were through a body and as though with the interval of bodily places interposed;

for such visions are very like bodies); but He speaks by the truth itself, if anyone is fit to hear with the mind and not with the body. For He speaks to that in man which is better than the other parts of which man consists, and than which God alone is better. For since man is most rightly understood, or, if this cannot be, at least believed to have been made in the image of God, surely it is by that part of himself that he is nearer to the God above him, by which he surpasses the lower parts of himself which he has in common even with the beasts.

But because the mind itself, in which reason and understanding naturally reside, is weakened by certain dark and ancient vices, not only for cleaving to and enjoying, but even for enduring the immutable light, until, being renewed and healed from day to day, it becomes capable of so great a felicity, it had first to be imbued and purified by faith. And that it might walk more confidently toward the truth in that faith, the Truth itself, God the Son of God, having assumed manhood without consuming the Godhead, established and founded this same faith, that there might be for man a way to man's God through the God-man. For this is the mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus. For He is mediator in that He is man, and in that same respect He is also the way.

For if between him who journeys and the goal to which he journeys there is a way in between, there is hope of arriving; but if the way be lacking, or it be unknown which way one must go, what does it profit to know whither one must go? Now the only way most thoroughly fortified against all errors is that one and the same should be both God and man: as God the goal to which one goes, as man the way by which one goes. [III] He spoke first through the prophets, then through Himself, afterward through the apostles, as much as He judged to be sufficient; and He also established the Scripture which is called canonical, of most eminent authority, to which we give faith concerning those matters which it is not expedient to be ignorant of, and yet which we are not fit to know by ourselves.

For if those things can be known by our own testimony which are not remote from our senses, whether inner or even outer (whence they are also called things present, because we say they are thus before the senses, just as things before the eyes are those which are at hand to the eyes): surely those things which are remote from our senses, since we cannot know them by our own testimony, we seek other witnesses concerning them and believe those from whose senses we do not believe them to be, or to have been, remote. As, then, concerning visible things which we have not seen we believe those who have seen them, and so likewise concerning other things that pertain to each one's own bodily sense:

so concerning those things which are perceived by soul and mind (for the mind too is most rightly called a sense, whence also the word 'sentence' has taken its name), that is, concerning invisible things which are remote from our inner sense, we ought to believe those who have learned these things as set in order in that incorporeal light, or who contemplate them as abiding there. [IV] Of all visible things the greatest is the world; of all invisible things the greatest is God. But that the world is, we behold; that God is, we believe. But that God made the world, we more safely believe from none than from God Himself. Where have we heard Him? Nowhere for the present better than in the holy Scriptures, where His prophet said: In the beginning God made heaven and earth.

Was that prophet perhaps present there, when God made heaven and earth? No; but there was present the Wisdom of God, through whom all things were made, which also transfers itself into holy souls, makes them friends of God and prophets, and inwardly, without any noise, relates to them His works. The angels of God also speak to them, who always behold the face of the Father and announce His will to those to whom they ought. Of these was that prophet one, who said and wrote: In the beginning God made heaven and earth. Being so fit a witness through whom God is to be believed, he foretold even our own faith that was to come, so long beforehand, by that same Spirit of God by which he came to know these things revealed to him.

But why did it please the eternal God then to make heaven and earth, which He had not made before? Those who say this, if they would have the world seem eternal, without any beginning, and therefore not made by God, are exceedingly turned away from the truth and rave with the deadly disease of impiety. For, apart from the prophetic voices, the world itself, by its most orderly changeableness and mobility and by the most beautiful appearance of all visible things, proclaims after a certain manner, though silently, both that it was made and that it could not have been made except by a God ineffably and invisibly great and ineffably and invisibly beautiful.

But those who indeed confess that it was made by God, yet do not wish it to have a beginning of time, but only of its creation, so that in some scarcely intelligible manner it was always being made—these do say something whereby they seem to defend God from a chance rashness, lest it be believed that it suddenly came into His mind to make the world, a thing that had never come before, and that a new will befell Him who is in no way at all mutable; but I do not see how that reasoning of theirs can hold in other matters, and especially in the case of the soul, which if they contend to be coeternal with God, they will be by no means able to explain whence there befell it a new misery, which never before through all eternity had been.

For if they say that its misery and blessedness have always alternated, they must needs say that they will also always alternate; whence this absurdity will follow them, that even when the soul is said to be blessed, in this respect at least it is not blessed, if it foresees its coming misery and disgrace; but if it does not foresee, nor that it will be disgraced and miserable, but always deems itself blessed, then it is blessed by a false opinion, than which nothing more foolish can be said. But if they think that indeed through the infinite ages of the past the soul's misery has alternated with blessedness, yet that now henceforth, once it has been set free, it will not return to misery, they are nonetheless convinced that it was never truly blessed, but henceforth begins to be so by a certain new and non-deceptive blessedness.

And by this they will confess that something new befalls it, and that a great and glorious thing, which never before throughout eternity had befallen. If they deny that God, in His eternal counsel, had the cause of this newness, they will at the same time deny that He is the author of its blessedness, which is a thing of unspeakable impiety; but if they say that He too by a new counsel devised that the soul should henceforth be blessed for eternity, how will they show Him to be free from that mutability which even they find displeasing? Further, if they confess the soul to have been created in time, but destined to perish in no subsequent time—like a number, to have a beginning but no end—and therefore, having once experienced miseries, if it be freed from them, never afterward to be miserable:

they will surely not doubt that this comes to pass while the immutability of God's counsel abides. So then let them believe that the world too could be made in time, and yet that God, in making it, did not thereby change His eternal counsel and will. [V] Next it must be seen: those who agree that God is the founder of the world, yet ask us what we answer concerning the world's time, let them consider what they themselves answer concerning the world's place. For it is asked why it was made then rather and not before, in the same way as it may be asked why it is here rather where it is and not elsewhere.

For if they imagine infinite spaces of time before the world, in which it does not seem to them that God could have ceased from work, let them likewise imagine outside the world infinite spaces of places, in which, if anyone should say that the Omnipotent could not have been idle, will it not follow that they be forced to dream, with Epicurus, of innumerable worlds (with only this difference, that he asserts them to be begotten and dissolved by the fortuitous motions of atoms, while these men will say they were made by the work of God)—if they will not have Him idle throughout the boundless immensity of places extending on every side outside the world, and if they hold that those same worlds, as they think even of this one, can be dissolved by no cause?

For we are dealing here with those who, together with us, hold that God is incorporeal and the creator of all natures which are not what He Himself is; but as for others, it is far too unworthy to admit them to this discussion of religion, especially because among those who think that sacred worship is to be rendered to many gods, these men have surpassed the other philosophers in nobility and authority, for no other reason than that, though by a long interval, they are nevertheless nearer to the truth than the rest.

Or will they perhaps say that the substance of God, which they neither enclose nor bound nor extend by place, but which, as it is worthy to think concerning God, they confess to be wholly everywhere by an incorporeal presence—will they say that it is absent from those so great spaces of places outside the world, and confined to one place only, and, in comparison with that infinity, so exceedingly small a place, in which the world is? I do not think they will proceed to such vain talk. Since, then, they say that the world is one, of enormous corporeal mass indeed, yet finite and determined to its own place, and made by the working of God: let them answer to themselves concerning the infinite times before the world—why in them God ceased from work—the very thing they answer concerning the infinite places outside the world, why in them God should cease from work.

And just as it does not follow that God established the world by chance rather than by divine reason in no other place but this one in which it is—since infinite places lay equally open everywhere, and this one could be chosen by no more excellent merit—although that same divine reason by which this was done, no human being can comprehend: so it does not follow that we should suppose anything fortuitous to have befallen God, in that He founded the world at that time rather than at an earlier one, since the earlier times had equally passed away through infinite space backward, nor had there been any difference whereby one time should be preferred to another in the choosing. But if they say that the thoughts of men are empty, by which they imagine infinite places, since there is no place besides the world:

it is answered to them, in the same manner, that men vainly imagine the past times of God's idleness, since there is no time before the world. [VI] For if eternity and time are rightly distinguished—that time is not without some movable changeableness, while in eternity there is no change—who does not see that times would not have been, unless a creature were made which by some motion should change something, in the movement and changing of which, when one thing and another, which cannot exist at the same time, gives way and succeeds, time would follow in shorter or longer intervals of delay? Since, therefore, God, in whose eternity there is no change at all, is the creator and orderer of times:

how it may be said that after intervals of times He created the world, I do not see, unless it be said that before the world there was already some creature by whose motions the times might run. Further, if the sacred and most truthful writings say that in the beginning God made heaven and earth, in such a way that He is understood to have made nothing before—because this would rather have been said to have been made 'in the beginning,' if He had made anything before all the rest that He made—then beyond doubt the world was not made in time, but with time. For that which is made in time is made both after some time and before some time; after that which is past, before that which is future; but there could have been nothing past, because there was no creature by whose changeable motions it might be carried on.

But the world was made with time, if in its constitution a changeable motion was made—as even that order of the first six or seven days seems to have it, in which both morning and evening are named, until all the things which God made in those days are completed on the sixth day, and on the seventh, in a great mystery, God's rest is commended. Of what sort those days are, it is either very difficult or even impossible for us to conceive, how much more to say. [VII] For we see that these days known to us have no evening except from the setting of the sun, nor morning except from the rising of the sun; but the former three of those days were passed without the sun, which is reported to have been made on the fourth day.

And first indeed, light is narrated to have been made by the word of God, and God to have separated between it and the darkness, and to have called that same light Day, but the darkness Night; yet of what sort that light is, and by what alternating motion, and what kind of evening and morning it made, is remote from our senses, nor can it be understood by us as it is—which nevertheless is to be believed without any hesitation. For either it is some corporeal light, whether in the higher parts of the world far from our sight, or whence the sun was afterward kindled; or by the name of light was signified the holy city in the holy angels and blessed spirits, of which the apostle says: The Jerusalem which is above, our eternal mother in heaven; for indeed he says also in another place:

For you are all sons of light and sons of the day; we are not of the night nor of darkness—if, that is, we are able somewhat fittingly to understand also the evening and the morning of this day. Since the knowledge of the creature, in comparison with the knowledge of the Creator, in a certain manner grows toward evening, and likewise dawns and becomes morning, when it too is referred to the praise and love of the Creator; nor does it verge into night, where the Creator is not forsaken by the love of the creature. Finally, when the Scripture reckoned up those days in order, it nowhere interposed the word 'night.' For it nowhere says: Night was made; but: There was made evening and there was made morning, one day. So the second day, and the rest.

For the knowledge of the creature in itself is, so to speak, more faded than when it is known in the Wisdom of God, as in the art by which it was made. Therefore it can more fittingly be called evening than night; which nevertheless, as I have said, when it is referred to the praising and loving of the Creator, recurs into morning. And this, when it does so in the knowledge of itself, is one day; when in the knowledge of the firmament, which between the lower and upper waters was called heaven, the second day; when in the knowledge of earth and sea and of all things that spring forth, which are joined by roots to the earth, the third day; when in the knowledge of the greater and lesser luminaries and of all the stars, the fourth day;

when in the knowledge of all the swimming and flying animals out of the waters, the fifth day; when in the knowledge of all the earthly animals and of man himself, the sixth day. [VIII] But when on the seventh day God rests from all His works and sanctifies it, it must by no means be taken childishly, as if God had labored in working—He who spoke, and they were made, by an intelligible and everlasting word, not a word audible and temporal. But the rest of God signifies the rest of those who rest in God, just as the gladness of a house signifies the gladness of those who are glad in the house, even though it is not the house itself, but some other thing, that makes them glad.

How much more, if that same house by its own beauty should make its inhabitants glad, so that it is called glad not only in that mode of speaking by which we signify, through that which contains, that which is contained (as when we say 'the theaters applaud, the meadows low,' when in the theaters men applaud, in the meadows oxen low); but also in that mode by which is signified, through the maker, that which is made; as a letter is called glad, signifying the gladness of those whom it makes glad by reading it. Most fittingly therefore, when the prophetic authority narrates that God rested, is signified the rest of those who rest in Him, and whom He Himself makes to rest;

this also, by the prophecy, promising to men, to whom He speaks and for whose sake indeed it was written, that they too, after the good works which God works in them and through them, if they have first in this life in some manner drawn near to Him through faith, shall have in Him everlasting rest. For this too was figured in the old people of God by the sabbath rest according to the precept of the law, whereof I think it more diligently to be discoursed in its own place.

[IX] Now, since I have undertaken to speak of the origin of the holy city, and have thought that first what pertains to the holy angels should be spoken of—who are both a great part of this city and the more blessed, in that they have never wandered abroad in exile—I shall take care, by God's bounty, to unfold, as far as shall seem sufficient, what divine testimonies are here at hand concerning it. Where the sacred writings speak of the constitution of the world, it is not evidently said whether, or in what order, the angels were created; but if they were not passed over, they were signified either by the name of heaven, where it is said, In the beginning God made heaven and earth, or rather of this light of which I am speaking.

But that they were not passed over I judge from this, that it is written that God rested on the seventh day from all His works which He made, since the book itself thus began: In the beginning God made heaven and earth; so that before heaven and earth He seems to have made nothing else. Since, then, He began from heaven and earth, and the earth itself, which He first made—as the Scripture consequently declares—was invisible and without form, and light not yet being made there were of course darkness over the abyss, that is, over a certain undistinguished confusion of earth and water (for where there is no light, there must needs be darkness), and then all things were arranged in the creating, which are narrated to have been consummated through six days:

how could the angels be passed over, as though they were not among the works of God from which He rested on the seventh day? Now that the angels are a work of God, here indeed, even if not passed over, is nevertheless not evidently expressed; but elsewhere the holy Scripture testifies this with a most clear voice. For in the hymn of the three men in the furnace, when it had been said beforehand: Bless the Lord, all you works of the Lord, in the enumeration of those same works the angels too are named; and in the psalm it is sung: Praise the Lord from the heavens, praise Him in the heights; praise Him, all His angels; praise Him, all His hosts; praise Him, sun and moon; praise Him, all stars and light;

praise Him, you heavens of heavens, and let the waters that are above the heavens praise the name of the Lord; for He spoke, and they were made; He commanded, and they were created. Here too it is said most openly and by divine authority that the angels were made by God, since, they being commemorated among the other heavenly things, is brought in concerning all: He spoke, and they were made. Who, moreover, will dare to opine that the angels were made after all these things which were enumerated in the six days? But even if anyone is so foolish, that Scripture of equal authority refutes this vanity, where God says: When the stars were made, all my angels praised me with a great voice. The angels therefore already were, when the stars were made. But they were made on the fourth day.

Shall we then say that they were made on the third day? Far be it. For it is plain what was made on that day. The earth was of course separated from the waters, and these two elements took on the distinct kinds of their own sort, and the earth produced whatever clings to it by roots. Was it perhaps the second day? Not even this. For then was made the firmament between the upper and lower waters and was called heaven; in which firmament, on the fourth day, the stars were made. Assuredly, then, if the angels pertain to the works of God of these days, they are that light which received the name of Day, whose unity, that it might be commended, it was not called the first day, but one day. Nor is there another second day or third or the rest;

but that same one day was repeated to fill up the number six or seven, on account of the sevenfold knowledge—the sixfold, namely, of the works which God made, and the seventh of God's rest. For when God said: Let there be light, and there was light, if in this light the creation of the angels is rightly understood, then surely they were made partakers of the eternal light, which is the very immutable Wisdom of God, through whom all things were made, whom we call the only-begotten Son of God; so that, being illumined by that light by which they were created, they might become light and be called day by participation in the immutable light and day, which is the Word of God, through whom both they themselves and all things were made.

For the true Light, which illumines every man coming into this world, this also illumines every pure angel, so that it is light not in itself, but in God; from whom if an angel turns away, it becomes impure; as are all those who are called unclean spirits, and are no longer light in the Lord, but darkness in themselves, deprived of the participation of the eternal light. For of evil there is no nature; but the loss of good has received the name of evil. [X] There is therefore one only simple good, and for this reason one only immutable, which is God. By this good were created all goods, but not simple, and for this reason mutable. Created, I say, that is, made, not begotten.

For that which is begotten of the simple good is equally simple, and is that which He is of whom it is begotten; these two we call Father and Son; and both these, together with their Spirit, are one God; which Spirit of the Father and of the Son is called the Holy Spirit by a certain proper connotation of this name in the sacred writings. But He is other than the Father and the Son, because He is neither the Father nor the Son; but I said 'other' (alius), not 'another thing' (aliud), because this too is equally a simple and equally immutable and coeternal good. And this Trinity is one God; nor is it therefore not simple, because it is a Trinity.

For we do not on this account call that nature of the good simple, because the Father alone is in it, or the Son alone, or the Holy Spirit alone, or truly because it is that mere trinity of name without the subsistence of persons, as the Sabellian heretics supposed; but it is called simple for this reason, that what it has, it is—except for that which each person is said to be relatively to another. For the Father certainly has a Son, yet is not Himself the Son, and the Son has a Father, yet is not Himself the Father. In that, therefore, in which each is said with reference to Himself, not to another, He is that which He has; as He is said to be living with reference to Himself, by having life indeed, and He Himself is that same life.

For this reason, then, that nature is called simple, to which it is not the case that it has something which it could either lose; or that one thing is the possessor and another that which it possesses; as a vessel possesses some liquid, or a body a color, or the air light or heat, or the soul wisdom. For none of these is that which it has; for neither is the vessel the liquid, nor the body the color, nor the air the light or heat, nor the soul the wisdom. Hence it is that they can also be deprived of the things which they have, and be turned and changed into other states or qualities: so that both the vessel is emptied of the moisture with which it is full, and the body is discolored, and the air grows dark or grows cold, and the soul loses its wisdom.