(NOTE: The electronic text obtained from The Electronic Bible Society was 
not completely corrected. EWTN has corrected all discovered errors.)

Transliteration of Greek words: All phonetical except: w = omega; h serves 
three puposes: 1. = Eta; 2. = rough breathing, when appearing initially 
before a vowel; 3. = in the aspirated letters theta = th, phi = ph, chi = 
ch. Accents are given immediately after their corresponding vowels: acute = 
' , grave = `, circumflex = ^. The character ' doubles as an apostrophe, 
when necessary.


ST. AUGUSTIN

THE CITY OF GOD, BOOKS XI-XIII

[Translated by Rev. Marcus Dods, D.D.]


BOOK XI.

ARGUMENT: HERE BEGINS THE SECOND PART(1) OF THIS WORK, WHICH TREATS OF THE 
ORIGIN, HISTORY, AND DESTINIES OF THE TWO CITIES, THE EARTHLY AND THE 
HEAVENLY. IN THE FIRST PLACE, AUGUSTIN SHOWS IN THIS BOOK HOW THE TWO 
CITIES WERE FORMED ORIGINALLY, BY THE SEPARATION OF THE GOOD AND BAD 
ANGELS; AND TAKES OCCASION TO TREAT OF THE CREATION OF THE WORLD, AS IT IS 
DESCRIBED IN HOLY SCRIPTURE IN THE BEGINNING OF THE BOOK OF GENESIS.

CHAP. 1--OF THIS PART OF THE WORK, WHEREIN WE BEGIN TO EXPLAIN THE ORIGIN 
AND END OF THE TWO CITIES.

    The City Of God we speak of is the same to which testimony is borne by 
that Scripture, which excels all the writings of all nations by its divine 
authority, and has brought under its influence all kinds of minds, and this 
not by a casual intellectual movement, but obviously by an express 
providential arrangement. For there it is written, "Glorious things are 
spoken of thee, O city of God."(2) And in another psalm we read, "Great is 
the Lord, and greatly to be praised in the city of our God, in the mountain 
of His holiness, increasing the joy of the whole earth."(3) And, a little 
after, in the same psalm, "As we have heard, so have we seen in the city of 
the Lord of hosts, in the city of our God. God has established it for 
ever." And in another, "There is a river the streams whereof shall make 
glad the city of our God, the holy place of the tabernacles of the Most 
High. God is in the midst of her, she shall not be moved."(4) From these 
and similar testimonies, all of which it were tedious to cite, we have 
learned that there is a city of God, and its Founder has inspired us with a 
love which makes us covet its citizenship. To this Founder of the holy city 
the citizens of the earthly city prefer their own gods, not knowing that He 
is the God of gods, not of false, i.e., of impious and proud gods, who, 
being deprived of His unchangeable and freely communicated light, and so 
reduced to a kind of poverty-stricken power, eagerly grasp at their own 
private privileges, and seek divine honors from their deluded subjects; but 
of the pious and holy gods, who are better pleased to submit themselves to 
one, than to subject many to themselves, and who would rather worship God 
than be worshipped as God. But to the enemies of this city we have replied 
in the ten preceding books, according to our ability and the help afforded 
by our Lord and King. Now, recognizing what is expected of me, and not 
unmindful of my promise, and relying, too, on the same succor, I will 
endeavor to treat of the origin, and progress, and deserved destinies of 
the two cities (the earthly and the heavenly, to wit), which, as we said, 
are in this present world commingled, and as it were entangled together. 
And, first, I will explain how the foundations of these two cities were 
originally laid, in the difference that arose among the angels.

CHAP. 2.--OF THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD, TO WHICH NO MAN CAN ATTAIN SAVE THROUGH 
THE MEDIATOR BETWEEN GOD AND MEN, THE MAN CHRIST JESUS.

     It is a great and very rare thing for a man, after he has contemplated 
the whole creation, corporeal and incorporeal, and has discerned its 
mutability, to pass beyond it, and, by the continued soaring of his mind, 
to attain to the unchangeable substance of God, and, in that height of 
contemplation, to learn from God Himself that none but He has made all that 
is not of the divine essence. For God speaks with a man not by means of 
some audible creature dinning in his ears, so that atmospheric vibrations 
connect Him that makes with him that hears the sound, nor even by means of 
a spiritual being with the semblance of a body, such as we see in dreams or 
similar states; for even in this case He speaks as if to the ears of the 
body, because it is by means of the semblance of a body He speaks, and with 
the appearance of a real interval of space,--for visions are exact 
representations of bodily objects. Not by these, then, does God speak, but 
by the truth itself, if any one is prepared to hear with the mind rather 
than with the body. For He speaks to that part of man which is better than 
all else that is in him, and than which God Himself alone is better. For 
since man is most properly understood (or, if that cannot be, then, at 
least, believed) to be made in God's image, no doubt it is that part of him 
by which he rises above those lower parts he has in common with the beasts, 
which brings him nearer to the Supreme. But since the mind itself, though 
naturally capable of reason and intelligence is disabled by besotting and 
inveterate vices not merely from delighting and abiding in, but even from 
tolerating His unchangeable light, until it has been gradually healed, and 
renewed, and made capable of such felicity, it had, in the first place, to 
be impregnated with faith, and so purified. And that in this faith it might 
advance the more confidently towards the truth, the truth itself, God, 
God's Son, assuming humanity without destroying His divinity,(1) 
established and founded this faith, that there might be a way for man to 
man's God through a God-man. For this is the Mediator between God and men, 
the man Christ Jesus. For it is as man that He is the Mediator and the Way. 
Since, if the way lieth between him who goes, and the place whither he 
goes, there is hope of his reaching it; but if there be no way, or if he 
know not where it is, what boots it to know whither he should go? Now the 
only way that is infallibly secured against all mistakes, is when the very 
same person is at once God and man, God our end, man our way.(2)

CHAP. 3.--OF THE AUTHORITY OF THE CANONICAL SCRIPTURES COMPOSED BY THE 
DIVINE SPIRIT.

    This Mediator, having spoken what He judged sufficient first by the 
prophets, then by His own lips, and afterwards by the apostles, has besides 
produced the Scripture which is called canonical, which has paramount 
authority, and to which we yield assent in all matters of which we ought 
not to be ignorant, and yet cannot know of ourselves. For if we attain the 
knowledge of present objects by the testimony of our own senses,(3) whether 
internal or external, then, regarding objects remote from our own senses, 
we need others to bring their testimony, since we cannot know them by our 
own, and we credit the persons to whom the objects have been or are 
sensibly present. Accordingly, as in the case of visible objects which we 
have not seen, we trust those who have, (and likewise with all sensible 
objects,) so in the case of things which are perceived(4) by the mind and 
spirit, i.e., which are remote from our own interior sense, it behoves us 
to trust those who have seen them set in that incorporeal light, or 
abidingly contemplate them.

CHAP. 4.--THAT THE WORLD IS NEITHER WITHOUT BEGINNING, NOR YET CREATED BY A 
NEW DECREE OF GOD, BY WHICH HE AFTERWARDS WILLED WHAT HE HAD NOT BEFORE 
WILLED.

    Of all visible things, the world is the greatest; of all invisible, the 
greatest is God. But, that the world is, we see; that God is, we believe. 
That God made the world, we can believe from no one more safely than from 
God Himself. But where have we heard Him? Nowhere more distinctly than in 
the Holy Scriptures, where His prophet said, "In the beginning God created 
the heavens and the earth."(5) Was the prophet present when God made the 
heavens and the earth? No; but the wisdom of God, by whom all things were 
made, was there,(6) and wisdom insinuates itself into holy souls, and makes 
them the friends of God and His prophets, and noiselessly informs them of 
His works. They are taught also by the angels of God, who always behold the 
face of the Father,(7) and announce His will to whom it befits. Of these 
prophets was he who said and wrote, "In the beginning God created the 
heavens and the earth." And so fit a witness was he of God, that the same 
Spirit of God, who revealed these things to him, enabled him also so long 
before to predict that our faith also would be forthcoming.

    But why did God choose then to create the heavens and earth which up to 
that time He had not made?(1) If they who put this question wish to make 
out that the world is eternal and without beginning, and that consequently 
it has not been made by God, they are strangely deceived, and rave in the 
incurable madness of impiety. For, though the voices of the prophets were 
silent, the world itself, by its well-ordered changes and movements, and by 
the fair appearance of all visible things, bears a testimony of its own, 
both that it has been created, and also that it could not have been created 
save by God, whose greatness and beauty are unutterable and invisible. As 
for those(2) who own, indeed, that it was made by God, and yet ascribe to 
it not a temporal but only a creational beginning, so that in some scarcely 
intelligible way the world should always have existed a created world they 
make an assertion which seems to them to defend God from the charge of 
arbitrary hastiness, or of suddenly conceiving the idea of creating the 
world as a quite new idea, or of casually changing His will, though He be 
unchangeable. But I do not see how this supposition of theirs can stand in 
other respects, and chiefly in respect of the soul; for if they contend 
that it is co-eternal with God, they will be quite at a loss to explain 
whence there has accrued to it new misery, which through a previous 
eternity had not existed. For if they said that its happiness and misery 
ceaselessly alternate, they must say, further, that this alternation will 
continue for ever; whence will result this absurdity, that, though the soul 
is called blessed, it is not so in this, that it foresees its own misery 
and disgrace. And yet, if it does not foresee it, and supposes that it will 
be neither disgraced nor wretched, but always blessed, then it is blessed 
because it is deceived; and a more foolish statement one cannot make. But 
if their idea is that the soul's misery has alternated with its bliss 
during the ages of the past eternity, but that now, when once the soul, has 
been set free, it will return henceforth no more to misery, they are 
nevertheless of opinion that it has never been truly blessed before, but 
begins at last to enjoy a new and uncertain happiness; that is to say, they 
must acknowledge that some new thing, and that an important and signal 
thing, happens to the soul which never in a whole past eternity happened it 
before. And if they deny that God's eternal purpose included this new 
experience of the soul, they deny that He is the Author of its blessedness, 
which is unspeakable impiety. If, on the other hand, they say that the 
future blessedness of the soul is the result of a new decree of God, how 
will they show that God is not chargeable with that mutability which 
displeases them? Further, if they acknowledge that it was created in time, 
but will never perish in time,--that it has, like number,(3) a beginning 
but no end, --and that, therefore, having once made trial of misery, and 
been delivered from it, it will never again return thereto, they will 
certainly admit that this takes place without any violation of the 
immutable counsel of God. Let them, then, in like manner believe regarding 
the world that it too could be made in time, and yet that God, in making 
it, did not alter His eternal design.

CHAP. 5.--THAT WE OUGHT NOT TO SEEK TO COMPREHEND THE INFINITE AGES OF TIME 
BEFORE THE WORLD, NOR THE INFINITE REALMS OF SPACE.

    Next, we must see what reply can be made to those who agree that God is 
the Creator of the world, but have difficulties about the time of its 
creation, and what reply, also, they can make to difficulties we might 
raise about the place of its creation. For, as they demand why the world 
was created then and no sooner, we may ask why it was created just here 
where it is, and not elsewhere. For if they imagine infinite spaces of time 
before the world, during which God could not have been idle, in like manner 
they may conceive outside the world infinite realms of space, in which, if 
any one says that the Omnipotent cannot hold His hand from working, will it 
not follow that they must adopt Epicurus' dream of innumerable worlds? with 
this difference only, that he asserts that they are formed and destroyed by 
the fortuitous movements of atoms, while they will hold that they are made 
by God's hand, if they maintain that, throughout the boundless immensity of 
space, stretching interminably in every direction round the world, God 
cannot rest, and that the worlds which they suppose Him to make cannot be 
destroyed. For here the question is with those who, with ourselves, believe 
that God is spiritual, and the Creator of all existences but Himself. As 
for others, it is a condescension to dispute with them on a religious 
question, for they have acquired a reputation only among men who pay divine 
honors to a number of gods, and have become conspicuous among the other 
philosophers for no other reason than that, though they are still far from 
the truth, they are near it in comparison with the rest. While these, then, 
neither confine in any place, nor limit, nor distribute the divine 
substance, but, as is worthy of God, own it to be wholly though spiritually 
present everywhere, will they perchance say that this substance is absent 
from such immense spaces outside the world, and is occupied in one only, 
(and that a very little one compared with the infinity beyond), the one, 
namely, in which is the world? I think they will not proceed to this 
absurdity. Since they maintain that there is but one world, of vast 
material bulk, indeed, yet finite, and in its own determinate position, and 
that this was made by the working of God, let them give the same account of 
God's resting in the infinite times before the world as they give of His 
resting in the infinite spaces outside of it. And as it does not follow 
that God set the world in the very spot it occupies and no other by 
accident rather than by divine reason, although no human reason can 
comprehend why it was so set, and though there was no merit in the spot 
chosen to give it the precedence of infinite others, so neither does it 
follow that we should suppose that God was guided by chance when He created 
the world in that and no earlier time, although previous times had been 
running by during an infinite past, and though there was no difference by 
which one time could be chosen in preference to another. But if they say 
that the thoughts of men are idle when they conceive infinite places, since 
there is no place beside the world, we reply that, by the same showing, it 
is vain to conceive of the past times of God's rest, since there is no time 
before the world.

CHAP. 6.--THAT THE WORLD AND TIME HAD BOTH ONE BEGINNING, AND THE ONE DID 
NOT ANTICIPATE THE OTHER.

    For if eternity and time are rightly distinguished by this, that time 
does not exist without some movement and transition, while in eternity 
there is no change, who does not see that there could have been no time had 
not some creature been made, which by some motion could give birth to 
change,--the various parts of which motion and change, as they cannot be 
simultaneous, succeed one another,--and thus, in these shorter or longer 
intervals of duration, time would begin? Since then, God, in whose eternity 
is no change at all, is the Creator and Ordainer of time, I do not see how 
He can be said to have created the world after spaces of time had elapsed, 
unless it be said that prior to the world there was some creature by whose 
movement time could pass. And if the sacred and infallible Scriptures say 
that in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, in order that 
it may be understood that He had made nothing previously,--for if He had 
made anything before the rest, this thing would rather be said to have been 
made "in the beginning,"--then assuredly the world was made, not in time, 
but simultaneously with time. For that which is made in time is made both 
after and before some time,--after that which is past, before that which is 
future. But none could then be past, for there was no creature by whose 
movements its duration could be measured. But simultaneously with time the 
world was made, if in the world's creation change and motion were created, 
as seems evident from the order of the first six or seven days. For in 
these days the morning and evening are counted, until, on the sixth day, 
all things which God then made were finished, and on the seventh the rest 
of God was mysteriously and sublimely signalized. What kind of days these 
were it is extremely difficult, or perhaps impossible for us to conceive, 
and how much more to say!

CHAP. 7.--OF THE NATURE OF THE FIRST DAYS, WHICH ARE SAID TO HAVE HAD 
MORNING AND EVENING, BEFORE THERE WAS A SUN.

    We see, indeed, that our ordinary days have no evening but by the 
setting, and no morning but by the rising, of the sun; but the first three 
days of all were passed without sun, since it is reported to have been made 
on the fourth day. And first of all, indeed, light was made by the word of 
God, and God, we read, separated it from the darkness, and called the light 
Day, and the darkness Night; but what kind of light that was, and by what 
periodic movement it made evening and morning, is beyond the reach of our 
senses; neither can we understand how it was, and .yet must unhesitatingly 
believe it. For either it was some material light, whether proceeding from 
the upper parts of the world, far removed from our sight, or from the spot 
where the sun was afterwards kindled; or under the name of light the holy 
city was signified, composed of holy angels and blessed spirits, the city 
of which the apostle says, "Jerusalem which is above is our eternal mother 
in heaven;"(1) and in another place, "For ye are all the children of the 
light, and the children of the day; we are not of the night, nor of 
darkness."' Yet in some respects we may appropriately speak of a morning 
and evening of this day also. For the knowledge of the creature is, in 
comparison of the knowledge of the Creator, but a twilight; and so it dawns 
and breaks into morning when the creature is drawn to the praise and love 
of the Creator; and night never falls when the Creator is not forsaken 
through love of the creature. In fine, Scripture, when it would recount 
those days in order, never mentions the word night. It never says, " Night 
was," but "The evening and the morning were the first day." So of the 
second and the rest. And, indeed, the knowledge of created things 
contemplated by themselves is, so to speak, more colorless than when they 
are seen in the wisdom of God, as in the art by which they were made. 
Therefore evening is a more suitable figure than night; and yet, as I said, 
morning returns when the creature returns to the praise and love of the 
Creator. When it does so in the knowledge of itself, that is the first day; 
when in the knowledge of the firmament, which is the name given to the sky 
between the waters above and those beneath, that is the second day; when in 
the knowledge of the earth, and the sea, and all things that grow out of 
the earth, that is the third day; when in the knowledge of the greater and 
less luminaries, and all the stars, that is the fourth day; when in the 
knowledge of all animals that swim in the waters and that fly in the air, 
that is the fifth day; when in the knowledge of all animals that live on 
the earth, and of man himself, that is the sixth day.(3)

CHAP. 8.--WHAT WE ARE TO UNDERSTAND OF GOD'S RESTING ON THE SEVENTH DAY, 
AFTER THE SIX DAYS' WORK.

    When it is said that God rested on the seventh day from all His works, 
and hallowed it, we are not to conceive of this in a childish fashion, as 
if work were a toil to God, who "spake and it was done,"--spake by the 
spiritual and eternal, not audible and transitory word. But God's rest 
signifies the rest of those who rest in God, as the joy of a house means 
the joy of those in the house who rejoice, though not the house, but 
something else, causes the joy. How much more intelligible is such 
phraseology, then, if the house itself, by its own beauty, makes the 
inhabitants joyful! For in this case we not only call it joyful by that 
figure of speech in which the thing containing is used for the thing 
contained (as when we say, "The theatres applaud," "The meadows low," 
meaning that the men in the one applaud, and the oxen in the other low), 
but also by that figure in which the cause is spoken of as if it were the 
effect, as when a letter is said to be joyful, because it makes its readers 
so. Most appropriately, therefore, the sacred narrative states that God 
rested, meaning thereby that those rest who are in Him, and whom He makes 
to rest. And this the prophetic narrative promises also to the men to whom 
it speaks, and for whom it was written, that they themselves, after those 
good works which God does in and by them, if they have managed by faith to 
get near to God in this life, shall enjoy in Him eternal rest. This was 
pre-figured to the ancient people of God by the rest enjoined in their 
sabbath law, of which, in its own place, I shall speak more at large.

CHAP. 9.--WHAT THE SCRIPTURES TEACH US TO BELIEVE CONCERNING THE CREATION 
OF THE ANGELS,

    At present, since I have undertaken to treat of the origin of the holy 
city, and first of the holy angels, who constitute a large part of this 
city, and indeed the more blessed part, since they have never been 
expatriated, I will give myself to the task of explaining, by God's help, 
and as far as seems suitable, the Scriptures which relate to this point. 
Where Scripture speaks of the world's creation, it is not plainly said 
whether or when the angels were created; but if mention of them is made, it 
is implicitly under the name of "heaven," when it is said, "In the 
beginning God created the heavens and the earth," or perhaps rather under 
the name of "light," of which presently. But that they were wholly omitted, 
I am unable to believe, because it is written that God on the seventh day 
rested from all His works which He made; and this very book itself begins, 
"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth," so that before 
heaven and earth God seems to have made nothing. Since, therefore, He began 
with the heavens and the earth,--and the earth itself, as Scripture adds, 
was at first invisible and formless, light not being as yet made, and 
darkness covering the face of the deep (that is to say, covering an 
undefined chaos of earth and sea, for where light is not, darkness must 
needs be),--and then when all things, which are recorded to have been 
completed in six days, were created and arranged, how should the angels be 
omitted, as if they were not among the works of God, from which on the 
seventh day He rested? Yet, though the fact that the angels are the work of 
God is not omitted here, it is indeed not explicitly mentioned; but 
elsewhere Holy Scripture asserts it in the clearest manner. For in the Hymn 
of the Three Children in the Furnace it was said, "O all ye works of the 
Lord bless ye the Lord;"(1) and among these works mentioned afterwards in 
detail, the angels are named. And in the psalm it is said, "Praise ye the 
Lord from the heavens, praise Him in the heights. Praise ye Him, all His 
angels; praise ye Him, all His hosts. Praise ye Him, sun and moon; praise 
him, all ye stars of light. Praise Him, ye heaven of heavens; and ye waters 
that be above the heavens. Let them praise the name of the Lord; for He 
commanded, and they were created."(2) Here the angels are most expressly 
and by divine authority said to have been made by God, for of them among 
the other heavenly things it is said, "He commanded, and they were 
created." Who, then, will be bold enough to suggest that the angels were 
made after the six days' creation? If any one is so foolish, his folly is 
disposed of by a scripture of like authority, where God says, "When the 
stars were made, the angels praised me with a loud voice."(3) The angels 
therefore existed before the stars; and the stars were made the fourth day. 
Shall we then say that they were made the third day? Far from it; for we 
know what was made that day. The earth was separated from the water, and 
each element took its own distinct form, and the earth produced all that 
grows on it. On the second day, then? Not even on this; for on it the 
firmament was made between the waters above and beneath, and was called 
"Heaven," in which firmament the stars were made on the fourth day. There 
is no question, then, that if the angels are included in the works of God 
during these six days, they are that light which was called "Day," and 
whose unity Scripture signalizes by calling that day not the "first day," 
but "one day."(4) For the second day, the third, and the rest are not other 
days; but the same "one" day is repeated to complete the number six or 
seven, so that there should be knowledge both of God's works and of His 
rest. For when God said, "Let there be light, and there was light," if we 
are justified  in understanding in this light the creation of the angels, 
then certainly they were created partakers of the eternal light which is 
the unchangeable Wisdom of God, by which all things were made, and whom we 
call the only-begotten Son of God; so that they, being illumined by the 
Light that created them, might themselves become light and be called "Day," 
in participation of that unchangeable Light and Day which is the Word of  
God, by whom both themselves and all else were made. "The true Light, which 
lighteth every man that cometh into the world,"(5)--this Light lighteth 
also every pure angel, that he may be light not in himself, but in God; 
from whom if an angel turn away, he becomes impure, as are all those who 
are called unclean spirits, and are no longer light in the Lord, but 
darkness in themselves, being deprived of the participation of Light 
eternal. For evil has no positive nature; but the loss of good has received 
the name "evil."(6)

CHAP. 10.--OF THE SIMPLE AND UNCHANGEABLE TRINITY, FATHER, SON, AND HOLY 
GHOST, ONE GOD, IN WHOM SUBSTANCE AND QUALITY ARE IDENTICAL.

    There is, accordingly, a good which is alone simple, and therefore 
alone unchangeable, and this is God. By this Good have all others been 
created, but not simple, and therefore not unchangeable. "Created," I say,-
-that is, made, not begotten. For that which is begotten of the simple Good 
is simple as itself, and the same as itself. These two we call the Father 
and the Son; and both together with the Holy Spirit are one God; and to 
this Spirit the epithet Holy is in Scripture, as it were, appropriated. And 
He is another than the Father and the Son, for He is neither the Father nor 
the Son. I say "another," not "another thing," because He is equally with 
them the simple Good, unchangeable and co-eternal. And this Trinity is one 
God; and none the less simple because a Trinity. For we do not say that the 
nature of the good is simple, because the Father alone possesses it, or the 
Son alone, or the Holy Ghost alone; nor do we say, with the Sabellian 
heretics, that it is only nominally a Trinity, and has no real distinction 
of persons; but we say it is simple, because it is what it has, with the 
exception of the relation of the persons to one another. For, in regard to 
this relation, it is true that the Father has a Son, and yet is not Himself 
the Son; and the Son has a Father, and is not Himself the Father. But, as 
regards Himself, irrespective of relation to the other, each is what He 
has; thus, He is in Himself living, for He has life, and is Himself the 
Life which He has.

    It is for this reason, then, that the nature of the Trinity is called 
simple, because it has not anything which it can lose, and because it is 
not one thing and its contents another, as a cup and the liquor, or a body 
and its color, or the air and the light or heat of it, or a mind and its 
wisdom. For none of these is what it has: the cup is not liquor, nor the 
body color, nor the air light and heat, nor the mind wisdom. And hence they 
can be deprived of what they have, and can be turned or changed into other 
qualities and states, so that the cup may be emptied of the liquid of which 
it is full, the body be discolored, the air darken, the mind grow silly. 
The incorruptible body which is promised to the saints in the resurrection 
cannot, indeed, lose its quality of incorruption, but the bodily substance 
and the quality of incorruption are not the same thing. For the quality of 
incorruption resides entire in each several part, not greater in one and 
less in another; for no part is more incorruptible than another. The body, 
indeed, is itself greater in whole than in part; and one part of it is 
larger, another smaller, yet is not the larger more incorruptible than the 
smaller. The body, then, which is not in each of its parts a whole body, is 
one thing; incorruptibility, which is throughout complete, is another 
thing;--for every part of the incorruptible body, however unequal to the 
rest otherwise, is equally incorrupt. For the hand, e.g., is not more 
incorrupt than the finger because it is larger than the finger; so, though 
finger and hand are unequal, their incorruptibility is equal. Thus, 
although incorruptibility is inseparable from an incorruptible body, yet 
the substance of the body is one thing, the quality of incorruption 
another. And therefore the body is not what it has. The soul itself, too, 
though it be always wise (as it will be eternally when it is redeemed), 
will be so by participating in the unchangeable wisdom, which it is not; 
for though the air be never robbed of the light that is shed abroad in it, 
it is not on that account the same thing as the light. I do not mean that 
the soul is air, as has been supposed by some who could not conceive a 
spiritual nature;(1) but, with much dissimilarity, the two things have a 
kind of likeness, which makes it suitable to say that the immaterial soul 
is illumined with the immaterial light of the simple wisdom of God, as the 
material air is irradiated with material light, and that, as the air, when 
deprived of this light, grows dark, (for material darkness is nothing else 
than air wanting light,(2)) so the soul, deprived of the light of wisdom, 
grows dark.

    According to this, then, those things which are essentially and truly 
divine are called simple, because in them quality and substance are 
identical, and because they are divine, or wise, or blessed in themselves, 
and without extraneous supplement. In Holy Scripture, it is true, the 
Spirit of wisdom is called "manifold"(3) because it contains many things in 
it; but what it contains it also is, and it being one is all these things. 
For neither are there many wisdoms, but one, in which are untold and 
infinite treasures of things intellectual, wherein are all invisible and 
unchangeable reasons of things visible and changeable which were created by 
it.(4) For God made nothing unwittingly; not even a human workman can be 
said to do so. But if He knew all that He made, He made only those things 
which He had known. Whence flows a very striking but true conclusion, that 
this world could not be known to us unless it existed, but could not have 
existed unless it had been known to God.

CHAP. 11.--WHETHER THE ANGELS THAT FELL PARTOOK OF THE BLESSEDNESS WHICH 
THE HOLY ANGELS HAVE ALWAYS ENJOYED FROM THE TIME OF THEIR CREATION.

    And since these things are so, those spirits whom we call angels were 
never at any time or in any way darkness, but, as soon as they were made, 
were made light; yet they were not so created in order that they might 
exist and live in any way whatever, but were enlightened that they might 
live wisely and blessedly. Some of them, having turned away from this 
light, have not won this wise and blessed life, which is certainly eternal, 
and accompanied with the sure confidence of its eternity; but they have 
still the life of reason, though darkened with folly, and this they cannot 
lose even if they would. But who can determine to what extent they were 
partakers of that wisdom before they fell? And how shall we say that they 
participated in it equally with those who through it are truly and fully 
blessed, resting in a true certainty of eternal felicity? For if they had 
equally participated in this true knowledge, then the evil angels would 
have remained eternally blessed equally with the good, because they were 
equally expectant of it. For, though a life be never so long, it cannot be 
truly called eternal if it is destined to have an end; for it is called 
life inasmuch as it is lived, but eternal because it has no end. Wherefore, 
although everything eternal is not therefore blessed (for hell-fire is 
eternal), yet if no life can be truly and perfectly blessed except it be 
eternal, the life of these angels was not blessed, for it was doomed to 
end, and therefore not eternal, whether they knew it or not. In the one 
case rear, in the other ignorance, prevented them from being blessed. And 
even if their ignorance was not so great as to breed in them a wholly false 
expectation, but left them wavering in uncertainty whether their good would 
be eternal or would some time terminate, this very doubt concerning so 
grand a destiny was incompatible with the plenitude of blessedness which we 
believe the holy angels enjoyed. For we do not so narrow and restrict the 
application of the term "blessedness" as to apply it to God only,(1) though 
doubtless He is so truly blessed that greater blessedness cannot be; and, 
in comparison of His blessedness, what is that of the angels, though, 
according to their capacity, they be perfectly blessed?

CHAP. 12.--A COMPARISON OF THE BLESSEDNESS OF THE RIGHTEOUS, WHO HAVE NOT 
YET RECEIVED THE DIVINE REWARD, WITH THAT OF OUR FIRST PARENTS IN PARADISE.

    And the angels are not the only members of the rational and 
intellectual creation whom we call blessed. For who will take upon him to 
deny that those first men in Paradise were blessed previously to sin, 
although they were uncertain how long their blessedness was to last, and 
whether it would be eternal (and eternal it would have been had they not 
sinned),--who, I say, will do so, seeing that even now we not unbecomingly 
call those blessed whom we see leading a righteous and holy life, in hope 
of immortality, who have no harrowing remorse of conscience, but obtain 
readily divine remission of the sins of their present infirmity? These, 
though they are certain that they shall be rewarded if they persevere, are 
not certain that they will persevere. For what man can know that he will 
persevere to the end in the exercise and increase of grace, unless he has 
been certified by some revelation from Him who, in His just and secret 
judgment, while He deceives none, informs few regarding this matter? 
Accordingly, so far as present comfort goes, the first man in Paradise was 
more blessed than any just man in this insecure state; but as regards the 
hope of future good, every man who not merely supposes, but certainly knows 
that he shall eternally enjoy the most high God in the company of angels, 
and beyond the reach of ill,--this man, no matter what bodily torments 
afflict him, is more blessed than was he who, even in that great felicity 
of Paradise, was uncertain of his fate.(2)

CHAP. 13.--WHETHER ALL THE ANGELS WERE SO CREATED IN ONE COMMON STATE OF 
FELICITY, THAT THOSE WHO FELL WERE NOT AWARE THAT THEY WOULD FALL, AND THAT 
THOSE WHO STOOD RECEIVED ASSURANCE OF THEIR OWN PERSEVERANCE AFTER THE RUIN 
OF THE FALLEN.

    From all this, it will readily occur to any one that the blessedness 
which an intelligent being desires as its legitimate object results from a 
combination of these two things, namely, that it uninterruptedly enjoy the 
unchangeable good, which is God; and that it be delivered from all dubiety, 
and know certainly that it shall eternally abide in the same enjoyment. 
That it is so with the angels of light we piously believe; but that the 
fallen angels, who by their own default lost that light, did not enjoy this 
blessedness even before they sinned, reason bids us conclude. Yet if their 
life was of any duration before they fell, we must allow them a blessedness 
of some kind, though not that which is accompanied with foresight. Or, if 
it seems hard to believe that, when the angels were created, some were 
created in ignorance either of their perseverance or their fail, while 
others were most certainly assured of the eternity of their felicity,--if 
it is hard to believe that they were not all from the beginning on an equal 
footing, until these who are now evil did of their own will fall away from 
the light of goodness, certainly it is much harder to believe that the holy 
angels are now uncertain of their eternal blessedness, and do not know 
regarding themselves as much as we have been able to gather regarding them 
from the Holy Scriptures. For what catholic Christian does not know that no 
new devil will ever arise among the good angels, as he knows that this 
present devil will never again return into the fellowship of the good? For 
the truth in the gospel promises to the saints and the faithful that they 
will be equal to the angels of God; and it is also promised them that they 
will "go away into life eternal."(1) But if we are certain that we shall 
never lapse from eternal felicity, while they are not certain, then we 
shall not be their equals, but their superiors. But as the truth never 
deceives, and as we shall be their equals, they must be certain of their 
blessedness. And because the evil angels could not be certain of that, 
since their blessedness was destined to come to an end, it follows either 
that the angels were unequal, or that, if equal, the good angels were 
assured of the eternity of their blessedness after the perdition of the 
others; unless, possibly, some one may say that the words of the Lord about 
the devil "He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the 
truth,"(2) are to be understood as if he was not only a murderer from the 
beginning of the human race, when man, whom he could kill by his deceit, 
was made, but also that he did not abide in the truth from the time of his 
own creation, and was accordingly never blessed with the holy angels, but 
refused to submit to his Creator, and proudly exulted as if in a private 
lordship of his own, and was thus deceived and deceiving. For the dominion 
of the Almighty cannot be eluded; and he who will not piously submit 
himself to things as they are, proudly feigns, and mocks himself with a 
state of things that does not exist; so that what the blessed Apostle John 
says thus becomes intelligible: "The devil sinneth from the beginning,"(3)-
-that is, from the time he was created he refused righteousness, which none 
but a will piously subject to God can enjoy. Whoever adopts this opinion at 
least disagrees with those heretics the Manichees, and with any other 
pestilential sect that may suppose that the devil has derived from some 
adverse evil principle a nature proper to himself. These persons are so 
befooled by error, that, although they acknowledge with ourselves the 
authority of the gospels, they do not notice that the Lord did not say, 
"The devil was naturally a stranger to the truth," but "The devil abode not 
in the truth," by which He meant us to understand that he had fallen from 
the truth, in which, if he had abode, he would have become a partaker of 
it, and have remained in blessedness along with the holy angels.(4)

CHAP. 14.--AN EXPLANATION OF WHAT IS SAID OF THE DEVIL, THAT HE DID NOT 
ABIDE IN THE TRUTH, BECAUSE THE TRUTH WAS NOT IN HIM.

    Moreover, as if we had been inquiring why the devil did not abide in 
the truth, our Lord subjoins the reason, saying, "because the truth is not 
in him." Now, it would be in him had he abode in it. But the phraseology is 
unusual. For, as the words stand, "He abode not in the truth, because the 
truth is not in him," it seems as if the truth's not being in him were the 
cause of his not abiding in it; whereas his not abiding in the truth is 
rather the cause of its not being in him. The same form of speech is found 
in the psalm: "I have called upon Thee, for Thou hast heard me, O God,"(5) 
where we should expect it to be said, Thou hast heard me, O God, for I have 
called upon Thee. But when he had said, "I have called," then, as if some 
one were seeking proof of this, he demonstrates the effectual earnestness 
of his prayer by the effect of God's hearing it; as if he had said, The 
proof that I have prayed is that Thou hast heard me.

CHAP. 15.--HOW WE ARE TO UNDERSTAND THE WORDS, "THE DEVIL SINNETH FROM THE 
BEGINNING."

    As for what John says about the devil, "The devil sinneth from the 
beginning"(6) they(7) who suppose it is meant hereby that the devil was 
made with a sinful nature, misunderstand it; for if sin be natural, it is 
not sin at all. And how do they answer the prophetic proofs,--either what 
Isaiah says when he represents the devil under the person of the king of 
Babylon, "How art thou fallen, O Lucifer, son of the morning!"(8) or what 
Ezekiel says, "Thou hast been in Eden, the garden of God; every precious 
stone was thy covering,"(9) where it is meant that he was some time without 
sin; for a little after it is still more explicitly said, "Thou wast 
perfect in thy ways?" And if these passages cannot well be otherwise 
interpreted, we must understand by this one also, "He abode not in the 
truth," that he was once in the truth, but did not remain in it. And from 
this passage." The devil sinneth from the beginning," it is not to be 
supposed that he sinned from the beginning of his created existence, but 
from the beginning of his sin, when by his pride he had once commenced to 
sin. There is a passage, too, in the Book of Job, of which the devil is the 
subject: "This is the beginning of the creation of God, which He made to be 
a sport to His angels,"(1) which agrees with the psalm, where it is said, 
"There is that dragon which Thou hast made to be a sport therein."(2) But 
these passages are not to lead us to suppose that the devil was originally 
created to be the sport of the angels, but that he was doomed to this 
punishment after his sin. His beginning, then, is the handiwork of God; for 
there is no nature, even among the least, and lowest, and last of the 
beasts, which was not the work of Him from whom has proceeded all measure, 
all form, all order, without which nothing can be planned or conceived. How 
much more, then, is this angelic nature, which surpasses in dignity all 
else that He has made, the handiwork of the Most High!

CHAP. 16.--OF THE RANKS AND DIFFERENCES OF THE CREATURES, ESTIMATED BY 
THEIR UTILITY, OR ACCORDING TO THE NATURAL GRADATIONS OF BEING.

    For, among those beings which exist, and which are not of God the 
Creator's essence, those which have life are ranked above those which have 
none; those that have the power of generation, or even of desiring, above 
those which want this faculty. And, among things that have life, the 
sentient are higher than those which have no sensation, as animals are 
ranked above trees. And, among the sentient, the intelligent are above 
those that have not intelligence,--men, e.g., above cattle. And, among the 
intelligent, the immortal such as the angels, above the mortal, such as 
men. These are the gradations according to the order of nature; but 
according to the utility each man finds in a thing, there are various 
standards of value, so that it comes to pass that we prefer some things 
that have no sensation to some sentient beings. And so strong is this 
preference, that, had we the power, we would abolish the latter from nature 
altogether, whether in ignorance of the place they hold in nature, or, 
though we know it, sacrificing them to our own convenience. Who, e.g., 
would not rather have bread in his house than mice, gold than fleas? But 
there is little to wonder at in this, seeing that even when valued by men 
themselves (whose nature is certainly of the highest dignity), more is 
often given for a horse than for a slave, for a jewel than for a maid. Thus 
the reason of one contemplating nature prompts very different judgments 
from those dictated by the necessity of the needy, or the desire of the 
voluptuous; for the former considers what value a thing in itself has in 
the scale of creation, while necessity considers how it meets its need; 
reason looks for what the mental light will judge to be true, while 
pleasure looks for what pleasantly titilates the bodily sense. But of such 
consequence in rational natures is the weight, so to speak, of will and of 
love, that though in the order of nature angels rank above men, yet, by the 
scale of justice, good men are of greater value than bad angels.

CHAP. 17 .--THAT THE FLAW OF WICKEDNESS IS NOT NATURE, BUT CONTRARY TO 
NATURE, AND HAS ITS ORIGIN, NOT IN THE CREATOR, BUT IN THE WILL.

    It is with reference to the nature, then, and not to the wickedness of 
the devil, that we are to understand these words, "This is the beginning of 
God's handiwork; "(3) for, without doubt, wickedness can be a flaw or 
vice(4) only where the nature previously was not vitiated. Vice, too, is so 
contrary to nature, that it cannot but damage it. And therefore departure 
from God would be no vice, unless in a nature whose property it was to 
abide With God. So that even the wicked will is a strong proof of the 
goodness of the nature. But God, as He is the supremely good Creator of 
good natures, so is He of evil wills the most just Ruler; so that, while 
they make an ill use of good natures, He makes a good use even of evil 
wills. Accordingly, He caused the devil (good by God's creation, wicked by 
his own will) to be cast down from his high position, and to become the 
mockery of His angels,--that is, He caused his temptations to benefit those 
whom he wishes to injure by them. And because God, when He created him, was 
certainly not ignorant of his future malignity, and foresaw the good which 
He Himself would bring out of his evil, therefore says the psalm, "This 
leviathan whom Thou hast made to be a sport therein,"(5) that we may see 
that, even while God in His goodness created him good, He yet had already 
foreseen and arranged how He would make use of him when he became wicked

CHAP. 18.--OF THE BEAUTY OF THE UNIVERSE, WHICH BECOMES, BY GOD'S 
ORDINANCE, MORE BRILLIANT BY THE OPPOSITION OF CONTRARIES.

    For God would never have created any, I do not say angel, but even man, 
whose future wickedness He foreknew, unless He had equally known to what 
uses in behalf of the good He could turn him, thus embellishing, the course 
of the ages, as it were an exquisite poem set off with antitheses. For what 
are called antitheses are among the most elegant of the ornaments of 
speech. They might be called in Latin "oppositions," or, to speak more 
accurately, "contrapositions;" but this word is not in common use among 
us,(1) though the Latin, and indeed the languages of all nations, avail 
themselves of the same ornaments of style. In the Second Epistle to the 
Corinthians the Apostle Paul also makes a graceful use of antithesis, in 
that place where he says, "By the armor of righteousness on the right hand 
and on the left, by honor and dishonor, by evil report and good report: as 
deceivers, and yet true; as unknown, and yet well known; as dying, and, 
behold, we live; as chastened, and not killed; as sorrowful, yet always 
rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet 
possessing all things."(2) As, then, these oppositions of contraries lend 
beauty to the language, so the beauty of the course of this world is 
achieved by the opposition of contraries, arranged, as it were, by an 
eloquence not of words, but of things. This is quite plainly stated in the 
Book of Ecclesiasticus, in this way: "Good is set against evil, and life 
against death: so is the sinner against the godly. So look upon all the 
works of the Most High, and these are two and two, one against another."(3)

CHAP. 19.--WHAT, SEEMINGLY, WE ARE TO UNDERSTAND BY THE WORDS, "GODDIVIDED 
THE LIGHT FROM THE DARKNESS."

    Accordingly, though the obscurity of the divine word has certainly this 
advantage, that it causes many opinions about the truth to be started and 
discussed, each reader seeing some fresh meaning in it, yet, whatever is 
said to be meant by an obscure passage should be either confirmed by the 
testimony of obvious facts, or should be asserted in other and less 
ambiguous texts. This obscurity is beneficial, whether the sense of the 
author is at last reached after the discussion of many other 
interpretations, or whether, though that sense remain concealed, other 
truths are brought out by the discussion of the obscurity. To me it does 
not seem incongruous with the working of God, if we understand that the 
angels were created when that first light was made, and that a separation 
was made between the holy and the unclean angels, when, as is said, "God 
divided the light from the darkness; and God called the light Day, and the 
darkness He called Night." For He alone could make this discrimination, who 
was able also before they fell, to foreknow that they would fall, and that, 
being deprived of the light of truth, they would abide in the darkness of 
pride. For, so far as regards the day and night, with which we are 
familiar, He commanded those luminaries of heaven that are obvious to our 
senses to divide between the light and the darkness. "Let there be," He 
says, "lights in the firmament of the heaven, to divide the day from the 
night;" and shortly after He says, "And God made two great lights; the 
greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: the 
stars also. And God set them in the firmament of the heaven, to give light 
upon the earth, and to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide 
the light from the darkness."(4) But between that light, which is the holy 
company of the angels spiritually radiant with the illumination of the 
truth, and that opposing darkness, which is the noisome foulness of the 
spiritual condition of those angels who are turned away from the light of 
righteousness, only He Himself could divide, from whom their wickedness 
(not of nature, but of will), while yet it was future, could not be hidden 
or uncertain.

CHAP. 20.--OF THE WORDS WHICH FOLLOW THE SEPARATION OF LIGHT AND DARKNESS, 
"AND GOD SAW THE LIGHT THAT IT WAS GOOD."

    Then, we must not pass from this passage of Scripture without noticing 
that when God said, "Let there be light, and there was light," it was 
immediately added, "And God saw the light that it was good." No such 
expression followed the statement that He separated the light from the 
darkness, and called the light Day and the darkness Night, lest the seal of 
His approval might seem to be set on such darkness, as well as on the 
light. For when the darkness was not subject of disapprobation, as when it 
was divided by the heavenly bodies from this light which our eyes discern, 
the statement that God saw that it was good is inserted, not before, but 
after the division is recorded. "And God set them," so runs the passage, 
"in the firmament of the heaven, to give light upon the earth, and to rule 
over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: 
and God saw that it was good." For He approved of both, because both were 
sinless. But where God said, "Let there be light, and there was light; and 
God saw the light that it was good;" and the narrative goes on, "and God 
divided the light from the darkness! and God called the light Day, and the 
darkness He called Night," there was not in this place subjoined the 
statement, "And God saw that it was good," lest both should be designated 
good, while one of them was evil, not by nature, but by its own fault. And 
therefore, in this ease, the light alone received the approbation of the 
Creator, while the angelic darkness, though it had been ordained, was yet 
not approved.

CHAP. 21.--OF GOD'S ETERNAL AND UNCHANGEABLE KNOWLEDGE AND WILL, WHEREBY 
ALL HE HAS MADE PLEASED HIM IN THE ETERNAL DESIGN AS WELL AS IN THE ACTUAL 
RESULT.

    For what else is to be understood by that invariable refrain, "And God 
saw that it was good," than the approval of the work in its design, which 
is the wisdom of God? For certainly God did not in the actual achievement 
of the work first learn that it was good, but, on the contrary, nothing 
would have been made had it not been first known by Him. While, therefore, 
He sees that that is good which, had He not seen it before it was made, 
would never have been made, it is plain that He is not discovering, but 
teaching that it is good. Plato, indeed, was bold enough to say that, when 
the universe was completed, God was, as it were, elated with joy.(1) And 
Plato was not so foolish as to mean by this that God was rendered more 
blessed by the novelty of His creation; but he wished thus to indicate that 
the work now completed met with its Maker's approval, as it had while yet 
in design. It is not as if the knowledge of God were of various kinds, 
knowing in different ways things which as yet are not, things which are, 
and things which have been. For not in our fashion does He look forward to 
what is future, nor at what is present, nor back upon what is past; but in 
a manner quite different and far and profoundly remote from our way of 
thinking. For He does not pass from this to that by transition of thought, 
but beholds all things with absolute unchangeableness; so that of those 
things which emerge in time, the future, indeed, are not yet, and the 
present are now, and the past no longer are; but all of these are by Him 
comprehended in His stable and eternal presence. Nether does He see in one 
fashion by the eye, in another by the mind, for He is not composed of mind 
and body; nor does His present knowledge differ from that which it ever was 
or shall be, for those variations of time, past, present, and future, 
though they alter our knowledge, do not affect His, "with whom is no 
variableness, neither shadow of turning."(2) Neither is there any growth 
from thought to thought in the conceptions of Him in whose spiritual vision 
all things which He knows are at once embraced. For as without any movement 
that time can measure. He Himself moves all temporal things, so He knows 
all times with a knowledge that time cannot measure. And therefore He saw 
that what He had made was good, when He saw that it was good to make it. 
And when He saw it made, He had not on that account a twofold nor any way 
increased knowledge of it; as if He had less knowledge before He made what 
He saw. For certainly He would not be the perfect worker He is, unless His 
knowledge were so perfect as to receive no addition from His finished 
works. Wherefore, if the only object had been to inform us who made the 
light, it had been enough to say, "God made the light;" and if further 
information regarding the means by which it was made had been intended, it 
would have sufficed to say, "And God said, Let there be light, and there 
was light," that we might know not only that God had made the world, but 
also that He had made it by the word. But because it was right that three 
leading truths regarding the creature be intimated to us, viz., who made 
it, by what means, and why, it is written, "God said, Let there be light, 
and there was light. And God saw the light that it was good." If, then, we 
ask who made it, it was "God." If, by what means, He said "Let it be," and 
it was. If we ask, why He made it, "it was good." Neither is there any 
author more excellent than God, nor any skill more efficacious than the 
word of God, nor any cause better than that good might be created by the 
good God. This also Plato has assigned as the most sufficient reason for 
the creation of the world, that good works might be made by a good God;(3) 
whether he read this passage, or, perhaps, was informed of these things by 
those who had read them, or, by his quick-sighted genius, penetrated to 
things spiritual and invisible through the things that are created, or was 
instructed regarding them by those who had discerned them.

CHAP. 22.--OF THOSE WHO DO NOT APPROVE OF CERTAIN THINGS WHICH ARE A PART 
OF THIS GOOD CREATION OF A GOOD CREATOR, AND WHO THINK THAT THERE IS SOME 
NATURAL EVIL.

    This cause, however, of a good creation, namely, the goodness of God,--
this cause, I say, so just and fit, which, when piously and carefully 
weighed, terminates all the controversies of those who inquire into the 
origin of the world, has not been recognized by some heretics,(1) because 
there are, forsooth, many things, such as fire, frost, wild beasts, and so 
forth, which do not suit but injure this thinblooded and frail mortality of 
our flesh, which is at present under just punishment. They do not consider 
how admirable these things are in their own places, how excellent in their 
own natures, how beautifully adjusted to the rest of creation, and how much 
grace they contribute to the universe by their own contributions as to a 
commonwealth; and how serviceable they are even to ourselves, if we use 
them with a knowledge of their fit adaptations,--so that even poisons, 
which are destructive when used injudiciously, become wholesome and 
medicinal when used in conformity with their qualities and design; just as, 
on the other hand, those things which give us pleasure, such as food, 
drink, and the light of the sun, are found to be hurtful when immoderately 
or unseasonably used. And thus divine providence admonishes us not 
foolishly to vituperate things, but to investigate their utility with care; 
and, where our mental capacity or infirmity is at fault, to believe that 
there is a utility, though hidden, as we have experienced that there were 
other things which we all but failed to discover. For this concealment of 
the use of things is itself either an exercise of our humility or a 
levelling of our pride; for no nature at all is evil, and this is a name 
for nothing but the want of good. But from things earthly to things 
heavenly, from the visible to the invisible, there are some things better 
than others; and for this purpose are they unequal, in order that they 
might all exist. Now God is in such sort a great worker in great things, 
that He is not less in little things,--for these little things are to be 
measured not by their own greatness (which does not exist), but by the 
wisdom of their Designer; as, in the visible appearance of a man, if one 
eyebrow be shaved off, how nearly nothing is taken from the body, but how 
much from the beauty!--for that is not constituted by bulk, but by the 
proportion and arrangement of the members. But we do not greatly wonder 
that persons, who suppose that some evil nature has been generated and 
propagated by a kind of opposing principle proper to it, refuse to admit 
that the cause of the creation was this, that the good God produced a good 
creation. For they believe that He was driven to this enterprise of 
creation by the urgent necessity of repulsing the evil that warred against 
Him, and that He mixed His good nature with the evil for the sake of 
restraining and conquering it; and that this nature of His, being thus 
shamefully polluted, and most cruelly oppressed and held captive, He labors 
to cleanse and deliver it, and with all His pains does not wholly succeed; 
but such part of it as could not be cleansed from that defilement is to 
serve as a prison and chain of the conquered and incarcerated enemy. The 
Manichaeans would not drivel, or rather, rave in such a style as this, if 
they believed the nature of God to be, as it is, unchangeable and 
absolutely incorruptible, and subject to no injury; and if, moreover, they 
held in Christian sobriety, that the soul which has shown itself capable of 
being altered for the worse by its own will, and of being corrupted by sin, 
and so, of being deprived of the light of eternal truth,--that this soul, I 
say, is not a part of God, nor of the same nature as God, but is created by 
Him, and is far different from its Creator.

CHAP. 23.---OF THE ERROR IN WHICH THE DOCTRINE OF ORIGEN IS INVOLVED.

    But it is much more surprising that some even of those who, with 
ourselves, believe that there is one only source of all things, and that no 
nature which is not divine can exist unless originated by that Creator, 
have yet refused to accept with a good and simple faith this so good and 
simple a reason of the world's creation, that a good God made it good; and 
that the things created, being different from God, were inferior to Him, 
and yet were good, being created by none other than He. But they say that 
souls, though not, indeed, parts of God, but created by Him, sinned by 
abandoning God; that, in proportion to their various sins, they merited 
different degrees of debasement from heaven to earth, and diverse bodies as 
prison-houses; and that this is the world, and this the cause of its 
creation, not the production of good things, but the restraining of evil. 
Origen is justly blamed for holding this opinion. For in the books which he 
entitles peri` archw^n, that is, Of Origins, this is his sentiment, this 
his utterance. And I cannot sufficiently express my astonishment, that a 
man so erudite and well versed in ecclesiastical literature, should not 
have observed, in the first place, how opposed this is to the meaning of 
this authoritative Scripture, which, in recounting all the works of God, 
regularly adds, "And God saw that it was good;" and, when all were 
completed, inserts the words, "And God saw everything that He had made, 
and, behold, it was very good."(1) Was it not obviously meant to be 
understood that there was no other cause of the world's creation than that 
good creatures should be made by a good God? In this creation, had no one 
sinned, the world would have been filled and beautified with natures good 
without exception; and though there is sin, all things are not therefore 
full of sin, for the great majority of the heavenly inhabitants preserve 
their nature's integrity. And the sinful will though it violated the order 
of its own nature, did not on that account escape the laws of God, who 
justly orders all things for good. For as the beauty of a picture is 
increased by well-managed shadows, so, to the eye that has skill to discern 
it, the universe is beautified even by sinners, though, considered by 
themselves, their deformity is a sad blemish.

    In the second place, Origen, and all who think with him, ought to have 
seen that if it were the true opinion that the world was created in order 
that souls might, for their sins, be accommodated with bodies in which they 
should be shut up as in houses of correction, the more venial sinners 
receiving lighter and more ethereal bodies, while the grosser and graver 
sinners received bodies more crass and grovelling, then it would follow 
that the devils, who are deepest in wickedness, ought, rather than even 
wicked men, to have earthly bodies, since these are the grossest and least 
ethereal of all, But in point of fact, that we might see that the deserts 
of souls are not to be estimated by the qualities of bodies, the wickedest 
devil possesses an ethereal body, while man, wicked, it is true, but with a 
wickedness small and venial in comparison with his, received even before 
his sin a body of clay. And what more foolish assertion can be advanced 
than that God, by this sun of ours, did not design to benefit the material 
creation, or lend lustre to its loveliness, and therefore created one 
single sun for this single world, but that it so happened that one soul 
only had so sinned as to deserve to be enclosed in such a body as it is? On 
this principle, if it had chanced that not one, but two, yea, or ten, or a 
hundred had sinned similarly, and with a like degree of guilt, then this 
world would have one hundred suns. And that such is not the case, is due 
not to the considerate foresight of the Creator, contriving the safety and 
beauty of things material, but rather to the fact that so fine a quality of 
sinning was hit upon by only one soul, so that it alone has merited such a 
body. Manifestly persons holding such opinions should aim at confining, not 
souls of which they know not what they say, but themselves, lest they fall, 
and deservedly, far indeed from the truth. And as to these three answers 
which I formerly recommended when in the case of any creature the questions 
are put, Who made it? By what means? Why? that it should be replied, God, 
By the Word, Because it was good,--as to these three answers, it is very 
questionable whether the Trinity itself is thus mystically indicated, that 
is, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, or whether there is some good 
reason for this acceptation in this passage of Scripture,--this, I say, is 
questionable, and one can't be expected to explain everything in one 
volume.

CHAP. 24.--OF THE DIVINE TRINITY, AND THE INDICATIONS OF ITS PRESENCE 
SCATTERED EVERYWHERE AMONG ITS WORKS.

    We believe, we maintain, we faithfully preach, that the Father begat 
the Word, that is, Wisdom, by which all things were made, the only-begotten 
Son, one as the Father is one, eternal as the Father is eternal, and, 
equally with the Father, supremely good; and that the Holy Spirit is the 
Spirit alike of Father and of Son, and is Himself consubstantial and co-
eternal with both; and that this whole is a Trinity by reason of the 
individuality(2)  of the persons, and one God by reason of the indivisible 
divine substance, as also one Almighty by reason of the indivisible 
omnipotence; yet so that, when we inquire regarding each singly, it is said 
that each is God and Almighty; and, when we speak of all together, it is 
said that there are not three Gods, nor three Almighties, but one God 
Almighty; so great is the indivisible unity of these Three, which requires 
that it be so stated. But, whether the Holy Spirit of the Father, and of 
the Son, who are both good, can be with propriety called the goodness of 
both, because He is common to both, I do not presume to determine hastily. 
Nevertheless, I would have less hesitation in saying that He is the 
holiness of both, not as if He were a divine attribute merely, but Himself 
also the divine substance, and the third person in the Trinity. I am the 
rather emboldened to make this statement, because, though the Father is a 
spirit, and the Son a spirit, and the Father holy, and the Son holy, yet 
the third person is distinctively called the Holy Spirit, as if He were the 
substantial holiness consubstantial with the other two. But if the divine 
goodness is nothing else than the divine holiness, then certainly it is a 
reasonable studiousness, and not presumptuous intrusion, to inquire whether 
the same Trinity be not hinted at in an enigmatical mode of speech, by 
which our inquiry is stimulated, when it is written who made each creature, 
and by what means, and why. For it is the Father of the Word who said, Let 
there be. And that which was made when He spoke was certainly made by means 
of the Word. And by the words, "God saw that it was good," it is 
sufficiently intimated that God made what was made not from any necessity, 
nor for the sake of supplying any want, but solely from His own goodness, 
i.e., because it was good. And this is stated after the creation had taken 
place, that there might be no doubt that the thing made satisfied the 
goodness on account of which it was made. And if we are right in 
understanding; that this goodness is the Holy Spirit, then the whole 
Trinity is revealed to us in the creation. In this, too, is the origin, the 
enlightenment, the blessedness of the holy city which is above among the 
holy angels. For if we inquire whence it is, God created it; or whence its 
wisdom, God illumined it; or whence its blessedness, God is its bliss. It 
has its form by subsisting in Him; its enlightenment by contemplating Him; 
its joy by abiding in Him. It is; it sees; it loves. In God's eternity is 
its life; in God's truth its light; in God's goodness its joy.

CHAP. 25.--OF THE DIVISION OF PHILOSOPHY INTO THREE PARTS.

    As far as one can judge, it is for the same reason that philosophers 
have aimed at a threefold division of science, or rather, were enabled to 
see that there was a threefold division (for they did not invent, but only 
discovered  it), of which one part is called physical, another logical, the 
third ethical. The Latin equivalents of these names are now naturalized in 
the writings of many authors, so that these divisions are called natural, 
rational, and moral, on which I have touched slightly in the eighth book. 
Not that I would conclude that these philosophers, in this threefold 
division, had any thought of a trinity in God, although Plato is said to 
have been the first to discover and promulgate this distribution, and he 
saw that God alone could be the author of nature, the bestower of 
intelligence, and the kindler of love by which life becomes good and 
blessed. But certain it is that, though philosophers disagree both 
regarding the nature of things, and the mode of investigating truth, and of 
the good to which all our actions ought to tend, yet in these three great 
general questions all their intellectual energy is spent. And though there 
be a confusing diversity of opinion, every man striving to establish his 
own opinion in regard to each of these questions, yet no one of them all 
doubts that nature has some cause, science some method, life some end and 
aim. Then, again, there are three things which every artificer must possess 
if he is to effect anything,--nature, education, practice. Nature is to be 
judged by capacity, education by knowledge, practice by its fruit. I am 
aware that, properly speaking, fruit is what one enjoys, use [practice] 
what one uses. And this seems to be the difference between them, that we 
are said to enjoy that which in itself, and irrespective of other ends, 
delights us; to use that which we seek for the sake of some end beyond. For 
which reason the things of time are to be used rather than enjoyed, that we 
may deserve to enjoy things eternal; and not as those perverse creatures 
who would fain enjoy money and use God,--not spending money for God's sake, 
but worshipping God for money's sake. However, in common parlance, we both 
use fruits and enjoy uses. For we correctly speak of the "fruits of the 
field," which certainly we all use in the present life. And it was in 
accordance with this usage that I said that there were three things to be 
observed in a man, nature, education, practice. From these the philosophers 
have elaborated, as I said, the threefold division of that science by which 
a blessed life is attained: the natural having respect to nature, the 
rational to education, the moral to practice. If, then, we were ourselves 
the authors of our nature, we should have generated knowledge in ourselves, 
and should not require to reach it by education, i.e., by learning it from 
others. Our love, too, proceeding from ourselves and returning to us, would 
suffice to make our life blessed, and would stand in need of no extraneous 
enjoyment. But now, since our nature has God as its requisite author, it is 
certain that we must have Him for our teacher that we may be wise; Him, 
too, to dispense to us spiritual sweetness that we may be blessed.

CHAP. 26.--OF THE IMAGE OF THE SUPREME TRINITY, WHICH WE FIND IN SOLVE SORT 
IN HUMAN NATURE EVEN IN ITS PRESENT STATE.

    And we indeed recognize in ourselves the image of God, that is, of the 
supreme Trinity, an image which, though it be not equal to God, or rather, 
though it be very far removed from Him,--being neither co-eternal, nor, to 
say all in a word, consubstantial with Him,--is yet nearer to Him in nature 
than any other of His works, and is destined to be yet restored, that it 
may bear a still closer resemblance. For we both are, and know that we are, 
and delight in our being, and our knowledge of it. Moreover, in these three 
things no true-seeming illusion disturbs us; for we do not come into 
contact with these by some bodily sense, as we perceive the things outside 
of us,--colors, e.g., by seeing, sounds by hearing, smells by smelling, 
tastes by tasting, hard and soft objects by touching,--of all which 
sensible objects it is the images resembling them, but not themselves which 
we perceive in the mind and hold in the memory, and which excite us to 
desire the objects. But, without any delusive representation of images or 
phantasms, I am most certain that I am, and that I know and delight in 
this. In respect of these truths, I am not at all afraid of the arguments 
of the Academicians, who say, What if you are deceived? For if I am 
deceived, I am.(1) For he who is not, cannot be deceived; and if I am 
deceived, by this same token I am. And since I am if I am deceived, how am 
I deceived in believing that I am? for it is certain that I am if I am 
deceived. Since, therefore, I, the person deceived, should be, even if I 
were deceived, certainly I am not deceived in this knowledge that I am. 
And, consequently, neither am I deceived in knowing that I know. For, as I 
know that I am, so I know this also, that I know. And when I love these two 
things, I add to them a certain third thing, namely, my love, which is of 
equal moment. For neither am I deceived in this, that I love, since in 
those things which I love I am not deceived; though even if these were 
false, it would still be true that I loved false things. For how could I 
justly be blamed and prohibited from loving false things, if it were false 
that I loved them? But, since they are true and real, who doubts that when 
they are loved, the love of them is itself true and real? Further, as there 
is no one who does not wish to be happy, so there is no one who does not 
wish to be. For how can he be happy, if he is nothing?

CHAP. 27.--OF EXISTENCE, AND KNOWLEDGE OF IT, AND THE LOVE OF BOTH.

    And truly the very fact of existing is by some natural spell so 
pleasant, that even the wretched are, for no other reason, unwilling to 
perish; and, when they feel that they are wretched, wish not that they 
themselves be annihilated, but that their misery be so. Take even those 
who, both in their own esteem, and in point of fact, are utterly wretched, 
and who are reckoned so, not only by wise men on account of their folly, 
but by those who count themselves blessed, and who think them wretched 
because they are poor and destitute,--if any one should give these men an 
immortality, in which their misery should be deathless, and should offer 
the alternative, that if they shrank from existing eternally in the same 
misery they might be annihilated, and exist nowhere at all, nor in any 
condition, on the instant they would joyfully, nay exultantly, make 
election to exist always, even in such a condition, rather than not exist 
at all. The well-known feeling of such men witnesses to this. For when we 
see that they fear to die, and will rather live in such misfortune than end 
it by death, is it not obvious enough how nature shrinks from annihilation? 
And, accordingly, when they know that they must die, they seek, as a great 
boon, that this mercy be shown them, that they may a little longer live in 
the same misery, and delay to end it by death. And so they indubitably 
prove with what glad alacrity they would accept immortality, even though it 
secured to them endless destruction. What! do not even all irrational 
animals, to whom such calculations are unknown, from the huge dragons down 
to the least worms, all testify that they wish to exist, and therefore shun 
death by every movement in their power? Nay, the very plants and shrubs, 
which have no such life as enables them to shun destruction by movements we 
can see, do not they all seek in their own fashion to conserve their 
existence, by rooting themselves more and more deeply in the earth, that so 
they may draw nourishment, and throw out healthy branches towards the sky? 
In fine, even the lifeless bodies, which want not only sensation but 
seminal life, yet either seek the upper air or sink deep, or are balanced 
in an intermediate position, so that they may protect their existence in 
that situation where they can exist in most accordance with their nature.

    And how much human nature loves the knowledge of its existence, and how 
it shrinks from being deceived, will be sufficiently understood from this 
fact, that every man prefers to grieve in a sane mind, rather than to be 
glad in madness. And this grand and wonderful instinct belongs to men alone 
of all animals; for, though some of them have keener eyesight than 
ourselves for this world's light, they cannot attain to that spiritual 
light with which our mind is somehow irradiated, so that we can form right 
judgments of all things. For our power to judge is proportioned to our 
acceptance of this light. Nevertheless, the irrational animals, though they 
have not knowledge, have certainly something resembling knowledge; whereas 
the other material things are said to be sensible, not because they have 
senses, but because they are the objects of our senses. Yet among plants, 
their nourishment and generation have some resemblance to sensible life. 
However, both these and all material things have their causes hidden in 
their nature; but their outward forms, which lend beauty to this visible 
structure of the world, are perceived by our senses, so that they seem to 
wish to compensate for their own want of knowledge by providing us with 
knowledge. But we perceive them by our bodily senses in such a way that we 
do not judge of them by these senses. For we have another and far superior 
sense, belonging to the inner man, by which we perceive what things are 
just, and what unjust,--just by means of an intelligible idea, unjust by 
the want of it. This sense is aided in its functions neither by the 
eyesight, nor by the orifice of the ear, nor by the air-holes of the 
nostrils, nor by the palate's taste, nor by any bodily touch. By it I am 
assured both that I am, and that I know this; and these two I love, and in 
the same manner I am assured that I love them.

CHAP. 28.--WHETHER WE OUGHT TO LOVE THE LOVE ITSELF WITH WHICH WE LOVE OUR 
EXISTENCE AND OUR KNOWLEDGE OF IT, THAT SO WE MAY MORE NEARLY RESEMBLE THE 
IMAGE OF THE DIVINE TRINITY.

    We have said as much as the scope of this work demands regarding these 
two things, to wit, our existence, and our knowledge of it, and how much 
they are loved by us, and how there is found even in the lower creatures a 
kind of likeness of these things, and yet with a difference. We have yet to 
speak of the love wherewith they are loved, to determine whether this love 
itself is loved. And doubtless it is; and this is the proof. Because in men 
who are justly loved, it is rather love itself that is loved; for he is not 
justly called a, good man who knows what is good, but who loves it. Is it 
not then obvious that we love in ourselves the very love wherewith we love 
whatever good we love? For there is also a love wherewith we love that 
which we ought not to love; and this love is hated by him who loves that 
wherewith he loves what ought to be loved. For it is quite possible for 
both to exist in one man. And this co-existence is good for a man, to the 
end that this love which conduces to our living well may grow, and the 
other, which leads us to evil may decrease, until our whole life be 
perfectly healed and transmuted into good. For if we were beasts, we should 
love the fleshly and sensual life, and this would be our sufficient good; 
and when it was well with us in respect of it, we should seek nothing 
beyond. In like manner, if we were trees, we could not, indeed, in the 
strict sense of the word, love anything; nevertheless we should seem, as it 
were, to long for that by which we might become more abundantly and 
luxuriantly fruitful. If we were stones, or waves, or wind, or flame, or 
anything of that kind, we should want, indeed, both sensation and life, yet 
should possess a kind of attraction towards our own proper position and 
natural order. For the specific gravity of bodies is, as it were, their 
love, whether they are carried downwards by their weight, or upwards by 
their levity. For the body is borne by its gravity, as the spirit by love, 
whithersoever it is borne.(1) But we are men, created in the image of our 
Creator, whose eternity is true, and whose truth is eternal, whose love is 
eternal and true, and who Himself is the eternal, true, and adorable 
Trinity, without confusion, without separation; and, therefore, while, as 
we run over all the works which He has established, we may detect, as it 
were, His footprints, now more and now less distinct even in those things 
that are beneath us, since they could not so much as exist, or be bodied 
forth in any shape, or follow and observe any law, bad they not been made 
by Him who supremely is, and is supremely good and supremely wise; yet in 
ourselves beholding His image, let us, like that younger son of the gospel, 
come to ourselves, and arise and return to Him from whom by our sin we had 
departed. There our being will have no death, our knowledge no error, our 
love no mishap. But now, though we are assured of our possession of these 
three things, not on the testimony of others, but by our own consciousness 
of their presence, and because we see them with our own most truthful 
interior vision, yet, as we cannot of ourselves know how long they are to 
continue, and whether they shall never cease to be, and what issue their 
good or bad use will lead to, we seek for others who can acquaint us of 
these things, if we have not already found them. Of the trustworthiness of 
these witnesses, there will, not now, but subsequently, be an opportunity 
of speaking. But in this book let us go on as we have begun, with God's 
help, to speak of the city of God, not in its state of pilgrimage and 
mortality, but as  it exists ever immortal in the heavens,--that is, let us 
speak of the holy angels who maintain their allegiance to God, who never 
were, nor ever shall be, apostate, between whom and those who forsook light 
eternal and became  darkness, God, as we have already said, made at the 
first a separation.

CHAP. 29.--OF THE KNOWLEDGE BY WHICH THE HOLY ANGELS KNOW GOD IN HIS 
ESSENCE, AND BY WHICH THEY SEE THE CAUSES OF HIS WORKS IN THE ART OF THE 
WORKER, BEFORE THEY SEE THEM IN THE WORKS OF THE ARTIST.

    Those holy angels come to the knowledge of God not by audible words, 
but by the presence to their souls of immutable truth, i.e., of the only-
begotten Word of God; and they know this Word Himself, and the Father, and 
their Holy Spirit, and that this Trinity is indivisible, and that the three 
persons of it are one substance, and that there are not three Gods but one 
God; and this they so know that it is better understood by them than we are 
by ourselves. Thus, too, they know the creature also, not in itself, but by 
this better way, in the wisdom of God, as if in the art by which it was 
created; and, consequently, they know themselves better in God than in 
themselves, though they have also this latter knowledge. For they were 
created, and are different from their Creator. In Him, therefore, they 
have, as it were, a noonday knowledge; in themselves, a twilight knowledge, 
according to our former explanations? For there is a great difference 
between knowing a thing in the design in conformity to which it was made, 
and knowing it in itself,--e.g., the straightness of lines and correctness 
of figures is known in one way when mentally conceived, in another when 
described on paper; and justice is known in one way in the unchangeable 
truth, in another in the spirit of a just man. So is it with all other 
things,--as, the firmament between the water above and below, which was 
called the heaven; the gathering of the waters beneath, and the laying bare 
of the dry land, and the production of plants and trees; the creation of 
sun, moon, and stars; and of the animals out of the waters, fowls, and 
fish, and monsters of the deep; and of everything that walks or creeps on 
the earth, and of man himself, who excels all that is on the earth,--all 
these things are known in one way by the angels in the Word of God, in 
which they see the eternally abiding causes and reasons according to which 
they were made, and in another way in themselves: in the former, with a 
clearer knowledge; in the latter, with a knowledge dimmer, and rather of 
the bare works than of the design. Yet, when these works are referred to 
the praise and adoration of the Creator Himself, it is as if morning dawned 
in the minds of those who contemplate them.

CHAP. 30.--OF THE PERFECTION OF THE NUMBER SIX, WHICH IS THE FIRST OF THE 
NUMBERS WHICH IS COMPOSED OF ITS ALIQUOT PARTS.

    These works are recorded to have been completed in six days (the same 
day being six times repeated), because six is a perfect number,--not 
because God required a protracted time, as if He could not at once create 
all things, which then should mark the course of time by the movements 
proper to them, but because the perfection of the works was signified by 
the number six. For the number six is the first which is made up of its own 
parts, i.e., of its sixth, third, and half, which are respectively one, 
two, and three, and which make a total of six. In this way of looking at a 
number, those are said to be its parts which exactly divide it, as a half, 
a third, a fourth, or a fraction with any denominator, e.g., four is a part 
of nine, but not therefore an aliquot part; but one is, for it is the ninth 
part; and three is, for it is the third. Yet these two parts, the ninth and 
the third, or one and three, are far from making its whole sum of nine. So 
again, in the number ten, four is a part, yet does not divide it; but one 
is an aliquot part, for it is a tenth; so it has a fifth, which is two; and 
a half, which is five. But these three parts, a tenth, a fifth, and a half, 
or one, two, and five, added together, do not make ten, but eight. Of the 
number twelve, again, the parts added together exceed the whole; for it has 
a twelfth, that is, one; a sixth, or two; a fourth, which is three; a 
third, which is four; and a half, which is six. But one, two, three, four, 
and six make up, not twelve, but more, viz., sixteen. So much I have 
thought fit to state for the sake of illustrating the perfection of the 
number six, which is, as I said, the first which is exactly made up of its 
own parts added together; and in this number of days God finished His 
work.(1) And, therefore, we must not despise the science of numbers, which, 
in many passages of holy Scripture, is found to be of eminent service to 
the careful interpreter.(2) Neither has it been without reason numbered 
among God's praises, "Thou hast ordered all things in number, and measure, 
and weight."(3)

CHAP. 31.--OF THE SEVENTH DAY, IN WHICH COMPLETENESS AND REPOSE ARE 
CELEBRATED.

    But, on the seventh day (i.e., the same day repeated seven times, which 
number is also a perfect one, though for another reason), the rest of God 
is set forth, and then, too, we first hear of its being hallowed. So that 
God did not wish to hallow this day by His works, but by His rest, which 
has no evening, for it is not a creature; so that, being known in one way 
in the Word of God, and in another in itself, it should make a twofold 
knowledge, daylight and dusk (day and evening). Much more might be said 
about tile perfection of the number seven, but this book is already too 
long, and I fear lest I should seem to catch at an opportunity of airing my 
little smattering of science more childishly than profitably. I must speak, 
therefore, in moderation and with dignity, lest, in too keenly following 
"number," I be accused of forgetting "weight" and "measure." Suffice it 
here to say, that three is the first whole number that is odd, four the 
first that is even, and of these two, seven is composed. On this account it 
is often put for all numbers together, as, "A just man falleth seven times, 
and riseth up again,"(4)--that is, let him fall never so often, he will not 
perish (and this was ment to be understood not of sins, but of afflictions 
conducing to lowliness). Again, "Seven times a day will I praise Thee,"(5) 
which elsewhere is expressed thus, "I will bless the Lord at all times."(6) 
And many such instances are found in the divine authorities, in which the 
number seven is, as I said, commonly used to express the whole, or the 
completeness of anything. And so the Holy Spirit, of whom the Lord says, 
"He will teach you all truth,"(7) is signified by this number,(8) In it is 
the rest of God, the rest His people find in Him. For rest is in the whole, 
i.e.., in perfect completeness, while in the part there is labor. And thus 
we labor as long as we know in part; "but when that which is perfect is 
come, then that which is in part shall be done away."(9) It is even with 
toil we search into the Scriptures themselves. But the holy angels, towards 
whose society and assembly we sigh while in this our toilsome pilgrimage, 
as they already abide in their eternal home, so do they enjoy perfect 
facility of knowledge and felicity of rest. It is without difficulty that 
they help us; for their spiritual movements, pure and free, cost them no 
effort.

CHAP. 32.--OF THE OPINION THAT THE ANGELS WERE CREATED BEFORE THE WORLD.

    But if some one oppose our opinion, and say that the holy angels are 
not referred to when it is said, "Let there be light, and there was light;" 
if he suppose or teach that some material light, then first created, was 
meant, and that the angels were created, not only before the firmament 
dividing the waters and named "the heaven," but also before the time 
signified in the words, "In the beginning God created the heaven and the 
earth;" if he allege that this phrase, "In the beginning," does not mean 
that nothing was made before (for the angels were), but that God made all 
things by His Wisdom or Word, who is named in Scripture "the Beginning," as 
He Himself, in the gospel, replied to the Jews when they asked Him who He 
was, that He was the Beginning;(10)--I will not contest the point, chiefly 
because it gives me the liveliest satisfaction to find the Trinity 
celebrated in the very beginning of the book of Genesis. For having said 
"In the Beginning God created the heaven and the earth," meaning that the 
Father made them in the Son (as the psalm testifies where it says, "How 
manifold are Thy works, O Lord! in Wisdom hast Thou made them all"(11), a 
little afterwards mention is fitly made of the Holy Spirit also. For, when 
it had been told us what kind of earth God created at first, or what the 
mass or matter was which God, under the name of "heaven and earth," had 
provided for the construction of the world, as is told in the additional 
words, "And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the 
face of the deep," then, for the sake of completing the mention of the 
Trinity, it is immediately added, "And the Spirit of God moved upon the 
face of the waters." Let each one, then, take it as he pleases; for it is 
so profound a passage, that it may well suggest, for the exercise of the 
reader's tact, many opinions, and none of them widely departing from the 
rule of faith. At the same time, let none doubt that the holy angels in 
their heavenly abodes are, though not, indeed, co-eternal with God, yet 
secure and certain of eternal and true felicity. To their company the Lord 
teaches that His little ones belong; and not only says, "They shall be 
equal to the angels of God,"(1) but shows, too, what blessed contemplation 
the angels themselves enjoy, saying, "Take heed that ye despise not one of 
these little ones: for I say unto you, that in heaven their angels do 
always behold the face of my Father which is in heaven."(2)

CHAP. 33.--OF THE TWO DIFFERENT AND DISSIMILAR COMMUNITIES OF ANGELS, WHICH 
ARE NOT INAPPROPRIATELY SIGNIFIED BY THE NAMES LIGHT AND DARKNESS.

    That certain angels sinned, and were thrust down to the lowest parts of 
this world, where they are, as it were, incarcerated till their final 
damnation in the day of judgment, the Apostle Peter very plainly declares, 
when he says that "God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them 
down to hell, and delivered them into chains of darkness to be reserved 
into judgment."(3) Who, then, can doubt that God, either in foreknowledge 
or in act, separated between these and the rest? And who will dispute that 
the rest are justly called "light?" For even we who are yet living by 
faith, hoping only and not yet enjoying equality with them, are already 
called "light" by the apostle: "For ye were sometimes darkness, but now are 
ye light in the Lord."(4) But as for these apostate angels, all who 
understand or believe them to be worse than unbelieving men are well aware 
that they are called "darkness." Wherefore, though light and darkness are 
to be taken in their literal signification in these passages of  Genesis in 
which it is said, "God said, Let there be light, and there was light," and 
"God divided the light from the darkness," yet, for our part, we understand 
these two societies of angels,--the one enjoying God, the other swelling 
with pride; the one to whom it is said, "Praise ye Him, all His angels,"(5) 
the other whose prince says, "All these things will I give Thee if Thou 
wilt fall down and worship me;"(6) the one blazing with the holy love of 
God, the other reeking with the unclean lust of self-advancement. And 
since, as it is written, "God resisteth the proud, but giveth grace unto 
the humble,"(7) we may say, the one dwelling in the heaven of heavens, the 
other cast thence, and raging through the lower regions of the air; the one 
tranquil in the brightness of piety, the other tempest-tossed with 
beclouding desires; the one, at God's pleasure, tenderly succoring, justly 
avenging,--the other, set on by its own pride, boiling with the lust of 
subduing and hurting; the one the minister of God's goodness to the utmost 
of their good pleasure, the other held in by God's power from doing the 
harm it would; the former laughing at the latter when it does good 
unwillingly by its persecutions, the latter envying the former when it 
gathers in its pilgrims. These two angelic communities, then, dissimilar 
and contrary to one another, the one both by nature good and by will 
upright, the other also good by nature but by will depraved, as they are 
exhibited in other and more explicit passages of holy writ, so I think they 
are spoken of in this book of Genesis under the names of light and 
darkness; and even if the author perhaps had a different meaning, yet our 
discussion of the obscure language has not been wasted time; for, though we 
have been unable to discover his meaning, yet we have adhered to the rule 
of faith, which is sufficiently ascertained by the faithful from other 
passages of equal authority. For, though it is the material works of God 
which are here spoken of, they have certainly a resemblance to the 
spiritual, so that Paul can say, "Ye are all the children of light, and the 
children of the day: we are not of the night, nor of darkness."(8) If, on 
the other hand, the author of Genesis saw in the words what we see, then 
our discussion reaches this more satisfactory conclusion, that the man of 
God, so eminently and divinely wise, or rather, that the Spirit of God who 
by him recorded God's works which were finished on the sixth day, may be 
supposed not to have omitted all mention of the angels whether he included 
them in the words "in the beginning," because He made them first, or, which 
seems most likely, because He made them in the only-begotten Word. And, 
under these names heaven and earth, the whole creation is signified, either 
as divided into spiritual and material, which seems the more likely, or 
into the two great parts of the world in which all created things are 
contained, so that, first of all, the creation is presented in sum, and 
then its parts are enumerated according to the mystic number of the days.

CHAP. 34.--OF THE IDEA THAT THE ANGELS WERE MEANT WHERE THE SEPARATION OF 
THE WATERS BY THE FIRMAMENT IS SPOKEN OF, AND OF THAT OTHER IDEA THAT THE 
WATERS WERE NOT CREATED.

    Some,(1) however, have supposed that the angelic hosts are somehow 
referred to under the name of waters, and that this is what is meant by 
"Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters:"(2) that the waters 
above should be understood of the angels, and those below either of the 
visible waters, or of the multitude of bad angels, or of the nations of 
men. If this be so, then it does not here appear when the angels were 
created, but when they were separated. Though there have not been wanting 
men foolish and wicked enough a to deny that the waters were made by God, 
because it is nowhere written, "God said, Let there be waters." With equal 
folly they might say the same of the earth, for nowhere do we read, "God 
said, Let the earth be." But, say they, it is written, "In the beginning 
God created the heaven and the earth." Yes, and there the water is meant, 
for both are included in one word. For "the sea is His," as the psalm says, 
"and He made it; and His hands formed the dry land."(4) But those who would 
understand the angels by the waters above the skies have a difficulty about 
the specific gravity of the elements, and fear that the waters, owing to 
their fluidity and weight, could not be set in the upper parts of the 
world. So that, if they were to construct a man upon their own principles, 
they would not put in his head any moist humors, or "phlegm" as the Greeks 
call it, and which acts the part of water among the elements of our body. 
But, in God's handiwork, the head is the seat of the phlegm, and surely 
most fitly; and yet, according to their supposition, so absurdly that if we 
were not aware of the fact, and were informed by this same record that God 
had put a moist and cold and therefore heavy humor in the uppermost part of 
man's body, these world-weighers would refuse belief. And if they were 
confronted with the authority of Scripture, they would maintain that 
something else must be meant by the words. But, were we to investigate and 
discover all the details which are written in this divine book regarding 
the creation of the world, we should have much to say, and should widely 
digress from the proposed aim of this work. Since, then, we have now said 
what seemed needful regarding these two diverse and contrary communities of 
angels, in which the origin of the two human communities (of which we 
intend to speak anon) is also found, let us at once bring this book also to 
a conclusion.


BOOK XII

ARGUMENT: AUGUSTIN FIRST INSTITUTES TWO INQUIRIES REGARDING THE ANGELS; 
NAMELY, WHENCE IS THERE IN SOME A GOOD, AND IN OTHERS AN EVIL WILL? AND, 
WHAT IS THE REASON OF THE BLESSEDNESS OF THE GOOD, AND THE MISERY OF THE 
EVIL? AFTERWARDS HE TREATS OF THE CREATION OF MAN, AND TEACHES THAT HE IS 
NOT FROM ETERNITY, BUT WAS CREATED, AND BY NONE OTHER THAN GOD.

CHAP. 1.--THAT THE NATURE OF THE ANGELS, BOTH GOOD AND BAD, IS ONE AND THE 
SAME.

    IT has already, in the preceding book, been shown how the two cities 
originated among the angels. Before I speak of the creation of man, and 
show how the cities took their rise so far as regards the race of rational 
mortals I see that I must first, so far as I can, adduce what may 
demonstrate that it is not incongruous and unsuitable to speak of a society 
composed of angels and men together; so that there are not four cities or 
societies,--two, namely, of angels, and as many of men,--but rather two in 
all, one composed of the good, the other of the wicked, angels or men 
indifferently.

    That the contrary propensities m good and bad angels have arisen, not 
from a difference in their nature and origin, since God, the good Author 
and Creator of all essences, created them both, but from a difference in 
their wills and desires, it is impossible to doubt. While some steadfastly 
continued in that which was the common good of all, namely, in God Himself, 
and in His eternity, truth, and love; others, being enamored rather of 
their own power, as if they could be their own good, lapsed to this private 
good Of their own, from that higher and beatific good which was common to 
all, and, bartering the lofty dignity of eternity for the inflation of 
pride, the most assured verity for the slyness of vanity, uniting love for 
factious partisanship, they became proud, deceived, envious. The cause, 
therefore, of the blessedness of the good is adherence to God. And so the 
cause of the others' misery will be found in the contrary, that is, in 
their not adhering to God. Wherefore, if when the question is asked, why 
are the former blessed, it is rightly answered, because they adhere to God; 
and when it is asked, why are the latter miserable, it is rightly answered, 
because they do not adhere to God,--then there is no other good for the 
rational or intellectual creature save God only. Thus, though it is not 
every creature that can be blessed (for beasts, trees, stones, and things 
of that kind have not this capacity), yet that creature which has the 
capacity cannot be blessed of itself, since it is created out of nothing, 
but only by Him by whom it has been created. For it is blessed by the 
possession of that whose loss makes it miserable. He, then, who is blessed 
not in another, but in himself, cannot be miserable, because he cannot lose 
himself.

    Accordingly we say that there is no unchangeable good but the one, 
true, blessed God; that the things which He made are indeed good because 
from Him, yet mutable because made not out of Him, but out of nothing. 
Although, therefore, they are not the supreme good, for God is a greater 
good, yet those mutable things which can adhere to the immutable good, and 
so be blessed, are very good; for so completely is He their good, that 
without Him they cannot but be wretched. And the other created things in 
the universe are not better on this account, that they cannot be miserable. 
For no one would say that the other members of the body are superior to the 
eyes, because they cannot he blind. But as the sentient nature, even when 
it feels pain, is superior to the stony, which can feel none, so the 
rational nature, even when wretched, is more excellent than that which 
lacks reason or feeling, and can therefore experience no misery. And since 
this is so, then in this nature which has been created so excellent, that 
though it be mutable itself, it can yet secure its blessedness by adhering 
to the immutable good, the supreme God: and since it is not satisfied 
unless it be perfectly blessed, and cannot be thus blessed save in God,--in 
this nature, I say, not to adhere to God, is manifestly a fault.(1) Now 
every fault injures the nature, and is consequently contrary to the nature. 
The creature, therefore, which cleaves to God, differs from those who do 
not, not by nature, but by fault; and yet by this very fault the nature 
itself is proved to be very noble and admirable. For that nature is 
certainly praised, the fault of which is justly blamed. For we justly blame 
the fault because it mars the praiseworthy nature. As, then, when we say 
that blindness is a defect of the eyes, we prove that sight belongs to the 
nature of the eyes; and when we say that deafness is a defect of the ears, 
hearing is thereby proved to belong to their nature;--so, when we say that 
it is a fault of the angelic creature that it does not cleave to God, we 
hereby most plainly declare that it pertained to its nature to cleave to 
God. And who can worthily conceive or express how great a glory that is, to 
cleave to God, so as to live to Him, to draw wisdom from Him, to delight in 
Him, and to enjoy this so great good, without death, error, or grief? And 
thus, since every vice is an injury of the nature, that very vice of the 
wicked angels, their departure from God, is sufficient proof that God 
created their nature so good, that it is an injury to it not to be with 
God.

CHAP. 2.--THAT THERE IS NO ENTITY(2) CONTRARY TO THE DIVINE, BECAUSE 
NONENTITY SEEMS TO BE THAT WHICH IS WHOLLY OPPOSITE TO HIM WHO SUPREMELY 
AND ALWAYS IS.

    This may be enough to prevent any one from supposing, when we speak of 
the apostate angels, that they could have another nature, derived, as it 
were, from some different origin, and not from God. From the great impiety 
of this error we shall disentangle ourselves the more readily and easily, 
the more distinctly we understand that which God spoke by the angel when He 
sent Moses to the children of Israel: "I am that I am."(3) For since God is 
the supreme existence, that is to say, supremely is, and is therefore 
unchangeable, the things that He made He empowered to be, but not to be 
supremely like Himself. To some He communicated a more ample, to others a 
more limited existence, and thus arranged the natures of beings in ranks. 
For as from sapere  comes sapientia, so from esse  comes essentia,--a new 
word indeed, which the old Latin writers did not use, but which is 
naturalized in our day,(4) that our language may not want an equivalent for 
the Greek ousi'a. For this is expressed word for word by essentia. 
Consequently, to that nature which supremely is, and which created all else 
that exists, no nature is contrary save that which does not exist. For 
nonentity is the contrary of that which is. And thus there is no being 
contrary to God, the Supreme Being, and Author of all beings whatsoever.

CHAP. 3--THAT THE ENEMIES OF GOD ARE SO, NOT BY NATURE, BUT BY WILL, WHICH, 
AS IT INJURES THEM, INJURES A GOOD NATURE; FOR IF VICE DOES NOT INJURE, IT 
IS NOT VICE.

    In Scripture they are called God's enemies who oppose His rule, not by 
nature, but by vice; having no power to hurt Him, but only themselves. For 
they are His enemies, not through their power to hurt, but by their will to 
oppose Him. For God is unchangeable, and wholly proof against injury. 
Therefore the vice which makes those who are called His enemies resist Him, 
is an evil not to God, but to themselves. And to them it is an evil, solely 
because it corrupts the good of their nature. It is not nature, therefore, 
but vice, which is contrary to God. For that which is evil is contrary to 
the good. And who will deny that God is the supreme good? Vice, therefore, 
is contrary to God, as evil to good. Further, the nature it vitiates is a 
good, and therefore to this good also it is contrary. But while it is 
contrary to God only as evil to good, it is contrary to the nature it 
vitiates, both as evil and as hurtful. For to God no evils are hurtful; but 
only to natures mutable and corruptible, though, by the testimony of the 
vices themselves, originally good. For were they not good, vices could not 
hurt them. For how do they hurt them but by depriving them of integrity, 
beauty, welfare, virtue, and, in short, whatever natural good vice is wont 
to diminish or destroy? But if there be no good to take away, then no 
injury can be done, and consequently there can be no vice. For it is 
impossible that there should be a harmless vice. Whence we gather, that 
though vice cannot injure the unchangeable good, it can injure nothing but 
good; because it does not exist where it does not injure. This, then, may 
be thus formulated: Vice cannot be in the highest good, and cannot be but 
in some good. Things solely good, therefore, can in some circumstances 
exist; things solely evil, never; for even those natures which are vitiated 
by an evil will, so far indeed as they are vitiated, are evil, but in so 
far as they are natures they are good. And when a vitiated nature is 
punished, besides the good it has in being a nature, it has this also, that 
it is not unpunished.(1) For this is just, and certainly everything just is 
a good. For no one is punished for natural, but for voluntary vices. For 
even the vice which by the force of habit and long continuance has become a 
second nature, had its origin in the will. For at present we are speaking 
of the vices of the nature, which has a mental capacity for that 
enlightenment which discriminates between what is just and what is unjust.

CHAP. 4.--OF THE NATURE OF IRRATIONAL AND LIFELESS CREATURES, WHICH IN 
THEIR OWN KIND AND ORDER DO NOT MAR THE BEAUTY OF THE UNIVERSE.

    But it is ridiculous to condemn the faults of beasts and trees, and 
other such mortal and mutable things as are void of intelligence, 
sensation, or life, even though these faults should destroy their 
corruptible nature; for these creatures received, at their Creator's will, 
an existence fitting them, by passing away and giving place to others, to 
secure that lowest form of beauty, the beauty of seasons, which in its own 
place is a requisite part of this world. For things earthly were neither to 
be made equal to things heavenly, nor were they, though inferior, to be 
quite omitted from the universe. Since, then, in those situations where 
such things are appropriate, some perish to make way for others that are 
born in their room, and the less succumb to the greater, and the things 
that are overcome are transformed into the quality of those that have the 
mastery, this is the appointed order of things transitory. Of this order 
the beauty does not strike us, because by our mortal frailty we are so 
involved in a part of it, that we cannot perceive the whole, in which these 
fragments that offend us are harmonized with the most accurate fitness and 
beauty. And therefore, where we are not so well able to perceive the wisdom 
of the Creator, we are very properly enjoined to believe it, lest in the 
vanity of human rashness we presume to find any fault with the work of so 
great an Artificer. At the same time, if we attentively consider even these 
faults of earthly things, which are neither voluntary nor penal, they seem 
to illustrate the excellence of the natures themselves, which are all 
originated and created by God; for it is that which pleases us in this 
nature which we are displeased to see removed by the fault,--unless even 
the natures themselves displease men, as often happens when they become 
hurtful to them, and then men estimate them not by their nature, but by 
their utility; as in the case of those animals whose swarms scourged the 
pride of the Egyptians. But in this way of estimating, they may find fault 
with the sum itself; for certain criminals or debtors ate sentenced by the 
judges to be set in the sun. Therefore it is not with respect to our 
convenience or discomfort, but with respect to their own nature, that the 
creatures are glorifying to their Artificer. Thus even the nature of the 
eternal fire, penal though it be to the condemned sinners, is most 
assuredly worthy of praise. For what is more beautiful than fire flaming, 
blazing, and shining? What more useful than fire for warming, restoring, 
cooking, though nothing is more destructive than fire burning and 
consuming? The same thing, then, when applied in one way, is destructive, 
but when applied suitably, is most beneficial. For who can find words to 
tell its uses throughout the whole world? We must not listen, then, to 
those who praise the light of fire but find fault with its heat, judging it 
not by its nature, but by their convenience or discomfort. For they wish to 
see, but not to be burnt. But they forget that this very light which is so 
pleasant to them, disagrees with and hurts weak eyes; and in that heat 
which is disagreeable to them, some animals find the most suitable 
conditions of a healthy life.

CHAP. 5.--THAT IN ALL NATURES, OF EVERY KIND AND RANK, GOD IS GLORIFIED.

    All natures, then, inasmuch as they are, and have therefore a rank and 
species of their own, and a kind of internal harmony, are certainly good. 
And when they are in the places assigned to them by the order of their 
nature, they preserve such being as they have received. And those things 
which have not received everlasting being, are altered for better or for 
worse, so as to suit the wants and motions of those things to which the 
Creator's law has made them subservient; and thus they tend in the divine 
providence to that end which is embraced in the general scheme of the 
government of the universe. So that, though the corruption of transitory 
and perishable things brings them to utter destruction, it does not prevent 
their producing that which was designed to be their result. And this being 
so, God, who supremely is, and who therefore created every being which has 
not supreme existence (for that which was made Of nothing could not be 
equal to Him, and indeed could not be at all had He not made it), is not to 
be found fault with on account of the creature's faults, but is to be 
praised in view of the natures He has made.

CHAP. 6.--WHAT THE CAUSE OF THE BLESSEDNESS OF THE GOOD ANGELS IS, AND WHAT 
THE CAUSE OF THE MISERY OF THE WICKED.

    Thus the true cause of the blessedness of the good angels is found to 
be this, that they cleave to Him who supremely is. And if we ask the cause 
of the misery of the bad, it occurs to us, and not unreasonably, that they 
are miserable because they have forsaken Him who supremely is, and have 
turned to themselves who have no such essence. And this vice, what else is 
it called than pride? For "pride is the beginning of sin."(1) They were 
unwilling, then, to preserve their strength for God: and as adherence to 
God was the condition of their enjoying an ampler being, they diminished it 
by preferring themselves to Him. This was the first defect, and the first 
impoverishment, and the first flaw of their nature, which was created, not 
indeed supremely existent, but finding its blessedness in the enjoyment of 
the Supreme Being; whilst by abandoning Him it should become, not indeed no 
nature at all, but a nature with a less ample existence, and therefore 
wretched.

    If the further question be asked, What was the efficient cause of their 
evil will? there is none. For what is it which makes the will bad, when it 
is the will itself which makes the action bad? And consequently the bad 
will is the cause of the bad action, but nothing is the efficient cause of 
the bad will. For if anything is the cause, this thing either has or has 
not a will. If it has, the will is either good or bad. If good, who is so 
left to himself as to say that a good will makes a will bad? For in this 
case a good will would be the cause of sin; a most absurd supposition. On 
the other hand, if this hypothetical thing has a bad will, I wish to know 
what made it so; and that we may not go on forever, I ask at once, what 
made the first evil will bad? For that is not the first which was itself 
corrupted by an evil will, but that is the first which was made evil by no 
other will. For if it were preceded by that which made it evil, that will 
was first which made the other evil. But if it is replied, "Nothing made it 
evil; it always was evil," I ask if it has been existing in some nature. 
For if not, then it did not exist at all; and if it did exist in some 
nature, then it vitiated and corrupted it, and injured it, and consequently 
deprived it of good. And therefore the evil will could not exist in an evil 
nature, but in a nature at once good and mutable, which this vice could 
injure. For if it did no injury, it was no vice; and consequently the will 
in which it was, could not be called evil. But if it did injury, it did it 
by taking away or diminishing good. And therefore there could not be from 
eternity, as was suggested, an evil will in that thing in which there had 
been previously a natural good, which the evil will was able to diminish by 
corrupting it. If, then, it was not from eternity, who, I ask, made it? The 
only thing that can be suggested in reply is, that something which itself 
had no will, made the will evil. I ask, then, whether this thing was 
superior, inferior, or equal to it? If superior, then it is better. How, 
then, has it no will, and not rather a good will? The same reasoning 
applies if it was equal; for so long as two things have equally a good 
will, the one cannot produce in the other an evil will. Then remains the 
supposition that that which corrupted the will of the angelic nature which 
first sinned, was itself an inferior thing without a will. But that thing, 
be it of the lowest and most earthly kind, is certainly itself good, since 
it is a nature and being, with a form and rank of its own in its own kind 
and order. How, then, can a good thing be the efficient cause of an evil 
will? How, I say, can good be the cause of evil? For when the will abandons 
what is above itself, and turns to what is lower, it becomes evil--not 
because that is evil to which it turns, but because the turning itself is 
wicked. Therefore it is not an inferior thing which has made the will evil, 
but it is itself which has become so by wickedly and inordinately desiring 
an inferior thing. For if two men, alike in physical and moral 
constitution, see the same corporal beauty, and one of them is excited by 
the sight to desire an illicit enjoyment while the other steadfastly 
maintains a modest restraint of his will, what do we suppose brings it 
about, that there is an evil will in the one and not in the other? What 
produces it in the man in whom it exists? Not the bodily beauty, for that 
was presented equally to the gaze of both, and vet did not produce in both 
an evil will. Did the flesh of the one cause the desire as he looked? But 
why did not the flesh of the other? Or was it the disposition? But why not 
the disposition of both? For we are supposing that both were of a like 
temperament of body and soul. Must we, then, say that the one was tempted 
by a secret suggestion of the evil spirit? As if it was not by Iris own 
will that he consented to this suggestion and to any inducement whatever! 
This consent, then, this evil will which he presented to the evil suasive 
influence,--what was the cause of it, we ask? For, not to delay on such a 
difficulty as this, if both are tempted equally and one yields and consents 
to the temptation while the other remains unmoved by it, what other account 
can we give of the matter than this, that the one is willing, the other 
unwilling, to fall away from chastity? And what causes this but their own 
wills, in cases at least such as we are supposing, where the temperament is 
identical? The same beauty was equally obvious to the eyes of both; the 
same secret temptation pressed on both with equal violence. However 
minutely we examine the case, therefore, we can discern nothing which 
caused the will of the one to be evil. For if we say that the man himself 
made his will evil, what was the man himself before his will was evil but a 
good nature created by God, the unchangeable good? Here are two men who, 
before the temptation, were alike in body and soul, and of whom one yielded 
to the tempter who persuaded him, while the other could not be persuaded to 
desire that lovely body which was equally before the eyes of both. Shall we 
say of the successfully tempted man that he corrupted his own will, since 
he was certainly good before his will became bad? Then, why did he do so? 
Was it because his will was a nature, or because it was made of nothing? We 
shall find that the latter is the case. For if a nature is the cause of an 
evil will, what else can we say than that evil arises from good or that 
good is the cause of evil? And how can it come to pass that a nature, good 
though mutable, should produce any evil--that is to say, should make the 
will itself wicked?

CHAP. 7.--THAT WE OUGHT NOT TO EXPECT TO FIND ANY EFFICIENT CAUSE OF THE 
EVIL WILL.

    Let no one, therefore, look for an efficient cause of the evil will; 
for it is not efficient, but deficient, as the will itself is not an 
effecting of something, but a defect. For defection from that which 
supremely is, to that which has less of being,--this is to begin to have an 
evil will. Now, to seek to discover the causes of these defections,--
causes, as I have said, not efficient, but deficient,--is as if some one 
sought to see darkness, or hear silence. Yet both of these are known by us, 
and the former by means only of the eye, the latter only by the ear; but 
not by their positive actuality,(1) but by their want of it. Let no one, 
then seek to know from me what I know that I do not know; unless he perhaps 
wishes to learn to be ignorant of that of which all we know is, that it 
cannot be known. For those things which are known not by their actuality, 
but by their want of it, are known, if our expression may be allowed and 
understood, by not knowing them, that by knowing them they may be not 
known. For when the eyesight surveys objects that strike the sense, it 
nowhere sees darkness but where it begins, not to see. And so no other 
sense but the ear can perceive silence, and yet it is only perceived by not 
hearing. Thus, too, our mind perceives intelligible forms by understanding 
them; but when they are deficient, it knows them by not knowing them; for 
"who can understand defects?"(2)

CHAP. 8.--OF THE MISDIRECTED LOVE WHEREBY THE WILL FELL AWAY FROM THE 
IMMUTABLE TO THE MUTABLE GOOD.

     This I do know, that the nature of God can never, nowhere, nowise be 
defective, and that natures made of nothing can. These latter, however, the 
more being they have, and the. more good they do (for then they do 
something positive), the more they have efficient causes; but in so far as 
they are defective in being, and consequently do evil (for then what is 
their work but vanity?), they have deficient causes. And I know likewise, 
that the will could not become evil, were it unwilling to become so; and 
therefore its failings are. justly punished, being not necessary, but 
voluntary. For its defections are not to evil things, but are themselves 
evil; that is to say, are not towards things that are naturally and in 
themselves evil, but the defection of the will is evil, because it is 
contrary to the order of nature, and an abandonment of that which has 
supreme being for that which has less. For avarice is not a fault inherent 
in gold, but in the man who inordinately loves gold, to the detriment of 
justice, which ought to be held in incomparably higher regard than gold. 
Neither is luxury the fault of lovely and charming objects, but of the 
heart that inordinately loves sensual pleasures, to the neglect of 
temperance, which attaches us to objects more lovely in their spirituality, 
and more delectable by their incorruptibility. Nor yet is boasting the 
fault of human praise, but of the soul that is inordinately fond of the 
applause of men, and that makes light of the voice of conscience. Pride, 
too, is not the fault of him who delegates power, nor of power itself, but 
of the soul that is inordinately enamored of its own power, and despises 
the more just dominion of a higher authority. Consequently he who 
inordinately loves the good which any nature possesses, even though he 
obtain it, himself becomes evil in the good, and wretched because deprived 
of a greater good.

CHAP. 9.--WHETHER THE ANGELS, BESIDES RECEIVING FROM GOD THEIR NATURE, 
RECEIVED FROM HIM ALSO THEIR GOOD WILL BY THE HOLY SPIRIT IMBUING THEM WITH 
LOVE.

    There is, then, no natural efficient cause or, if I may be allowed the 
expression, no essential cause, of the evil will, since itself is the 
origin of evil in mutable spirits, by which the good of their nature is 
diminished and corrupted; and the will is made evil by nothing else than 
defection from God,--a defection of which the cause, too, is certainly 
deficient. But as to the good will, if we should say that there is no 
efficient cause of it, we must beware of giving currency to the opinion 
that the good will of the good angels is not created, but is co-eternal 
with God. For if they themselves are created, how can we say that their 
good will was eternal? But if created, was it created along with 
themselves, or did they exist for a time without it? If along with 
themselves, then doubtless it was created by Him who created them, and, as 
soon as ever they were created, they attached themselves to Him who created 
them, with the love He created in them. And they are separated from the 
society of the rest, because they have continued in the same good will; 
while the others have fallen away to another will, which is an evil one, by 
the very fact of its being a falling away from the good; from which, we may 
add, they would not have fallen away had they been unwilling to do so. But 
if the good angels existed for a time without a good will, and produced it 
in themselves without God's interference, then it follows that they made 
themselves better than He made them. Away with such a thought! For without 
a good will, what were they but evil? Or if they were not evils, because 
they had not an evil will any more than a good one (for they had not fallen 
away from that which as yet they had not begun to enjoy), certainly they 
were not the same, not so good, as when they came to have a good will. Or 
if they could not make themselves better than they were made by Him who is 
surpassed by none in His work, then certainly, without His helpful 
operation, they could not come to possess that good will which made them 
better. And though their good will effected that they did not turn to 
themselves, who had a more stinted existence, but to Him who supremely is, 
and that, being united to Him, their own being was enlarged, and they lived 
a wise and blessed life by His communications to them, what does this prove 
but that the will, however good it might be, would have continued 
helplessly only to desire Him, had not He who had made their nature out of 
nothing, and yet capable of enjoying Him, first stimulated it to desire 
Him, and then filled it with Himself, and so made it better?

    Besides, this too has to be inquired into, whether, if the good angels 
made their own will good, they did so with or without will? If without, 
then it was not their doing. If with, was the will good or bad? If bad, how 
could a bad will give birth to a good one? If good, then already they had a 
good will. And who made this will, which already they had, but He who 
created them with a good will, or with that chaste love by which they 
cleaved to Him, in one and the same act creating their nature, and endowing 
it with grace? And thus we are driven to believe that the holy angels never 
existed without a good will or the love of God. But the angels who, though 
created good, are yet evil now, became so by their own will. And this will 
was not made evil by their good nature, unless by its voluntary defection 
from good; for good is not the cause of evil, but a defection from good is. 
These angels, therefore, either received less of the grace of the divine 
love than those who persevered in the same; or if both were created equally 
good, then, while the one fell by their evil will, the others were more 
abundantly assisted, and attained to that pitch of blessedness at which 
they became certain they should never fall from it,--as we have already 
shown in the preceding book.(1) We must therefore acknowledge, with the 
praise due to the Creator, that not only of holy men, but also of the holy 
angels, it can be said that "the love of God is shed abroad in their hearts 
by the Holy Ghost, which is given unto them."(1) And that not only of men, 
but primarily and principally of angels it is true, as it is written, "It 
is good to draw near to God."(2)  And those who have this good in common, 
have, both with Him to whom they draw near, and with one another, a holy 
fellowship, and form one city of God--His living sacrifice, and His living 
temple. And I see that, as I have now spoken of the rise of this city among 
the angels, it is time to speak of the origin of that part of it which is 
hereafter to be united to the immortal angels, and which at present is 
being gathered from among mortal men, and is either sojourning on earth, 
or, in the persons of those who have passed through death, is resting in 
the secret receptacles and abodes of disembodied spirits. For from one man, 
whom God created as the first, the whole human race descended, according to 
the faith of Holy Scripture, which deservedly is of wonderful authority 
among all nations throughout the world; since, among its other true 
statements, it predicted, by its divine foresight, that all nations would 
give credit to it.

CHAP. 10.--OF THE FALSENESS OF THE HISTORY WHICH ALLOTS MANY THOUSAND YEARS 
TO THE WORLD'S PAST.

    Let us, then, omit the conjectures of men who know not what they say, 
when they speak of the nature and origin of the human race. For some hold 
the same opinion regarding men that they hold regarding the world itself, 
that they have always been. Thus Apuleius says when he is describing our 
race, "Individually they are mortal, but collectively, and as a race, they 
are immortal."(3) And when they are asked, how, if the human race has 
always been, they vindicate the truth of their history, which narrates who 
were the inventors, and what they invented, and who first instituted the 
liberal studies and the other arts, and who first inhabited this or that 
region, and this or that island? they reply,(4) that most, if not all 
lands, were so desolated at intervals by fire and flood, that men were 
greatly reduced in numbers, and from these, again, the population was 
restored to its former numbers, and that thus there was at intervals a new 
beginning made, and though those things which had been interrupted and 
checked by the severe devastations were only renewed, yet they seemed to be 
originated then; but that man could not exist at all save as produced by 
man. But they say what they think, not what they know.

    They are deceived, too, by those highly mendacious documents which 
profess to give the history of many thousand years, though, reckoning by 
the sacred writings, we find that not 6000 years have yet passed.(5) And, 
not to spend many words in exposing the baselessness of these documents, in 
which so many thousands of years are accounted for, nor in proving that 
their authorities are totally inadequate, let me cite only that letter 
which Alexander the Great wrote to his mother Olympias,(6) giving her the 
narrative he had from an Egyptian priest, which he had extracted from their 
sacred archives, and which gave an account of kingdoms mentioned also by 
the Greek historians. In this letter of Alexander's a term of upwards of 
5000 years is assigned to the kingdom of Assyria; while in the Greek 
history only 1300 years are reckoned from the reign of Bel himself, whom 
both Greek and Egyptian agree in counting the first king of Assyria. Then 
to the empire of the Persians and Macedonians this Egyptian assigned more 
than 8000 years, counting to the time of Alexander, to whom he was 
speaking; while among the Greeks, 485 years are assigned to the Macedonians 
down to the death of Alexander, and to the Persians 233 years, reckoning to 
the termination of his conquests. Thus these give a much smaller number of 
years than the Egyptians; and indeed, though multiplied three times, the 
Greek chronology would still be shorter. For the Egyptians are said to have 
formerly reckoned only four months to their year;(7) so that one year, 
according to the fuller and truer computation now in use among them as well 
as among ourselves, would comprehend three of their old years. But not even 
thus, as I said, does the Greek history correspond with the Egyptian in its 
chronology. And therefore the former must receive the greater credit, 
because it does not exceed the true account of the duration of the world as 
it is given by our documents, which are truly sacred. Further, if this 
letter of Alexander, which has become so famous, differs widely in this 
matter of chronology from the probable credible account, how much less can 
we believe these documents which, though full of fabulous and fictitious 
antiquities, they would fain oppose to the authority of our well-known and 
divine books, which predicted that the whole world would believe them, and 
which the whole world accordingly has believed; which proved, too, that it 
had truly narrated past events by its prediction of future events, which 
have so exactly come to pass!

CHAP. 11.--OF THOSE WHO SUPPOSE THAT THIS WORLD INDEED IS NOT ETERNAL, BUT 
THAT EITHER THERE ARE NUMBERLESS WORLDS, OR THAT ONE AND THE SAME WORLD IS 
PERPETUALLY RESOLVED INTO ITS ELEMENTS, AND RENEWED AT THE CONCLUSION OF 
FIXED CYCLES.

    There are some, again, who, though they do not suppose that this world 
is eternal, are of opinion either that this is not the only world, but that 
there are numberless worlds or that indeed it is the only one, but that it 
dies, and is born again at fixed intervals, and this times without 
number;(1) but they must acknowledge that the human race existed before 
there were other men to beget them. For they cannot suppose that, if the 
whole world perish, some men would be left alive in the world, as they 
might survive in floods and conflagrations, which those other speculators 
suppose to be partial, and from which they can therefore reasonably argue 
that a few then survived whose posterity would renew the population; but as 
they believe that the world itself is renewed out of its own material, so 
they must believe that out of its elements the human race was produced, and 
then that the progeny of mortals sprang like that of other animals from 
their parents.

CHAP. 12.--HOW THESE PERSONS ARE TO BE ANSWERED, WHO FIND FAULT WITH THE 
CREATION OF MAN ON THE SCORE OF ITS RECENT DATE.

    As to those who are always asking why man was not created during these 
countless ages of the infinitely extended past, and came into being so 
lately that, according to Scripture, less than 6000 years have elapsed 
since He began to be, I would reply to them regarding the creation of man, 
just as I replied regarding the origin of the world to those who will not 
believe that it is not eternal, but had a beginning, which even Plato 
himself most plainly declares, though some think Iris statement was not 
consistent with his real opinion.(2) If it offends them that the time that 
has elapsed since the creation of man is so short, and his years so few 
according to our authorities, let them take this into consideration, that 
nothing that has a limit is long, and that all the ages of time being 
finite, are very little, or indeed nothing at all, when compared to the 
interminable eternity. Consequently, if there had elapsed since the 
creation of man, I do not say five or six, but even sixty or six hundred 
thousand years, or sixty times as many, or six hundred or six hundred 
thousand times as many, or this sum multiplied until it could no longer be 
expressed in numbers, the same question could still be put, Why was he not 
made before? For the past and boundless eternity during which God abstained 
from creating man is so great, that, compare it with what vast and untold 
number of ages you please, so long as there is a definite conclusion of 
this term of time, it is not even as if you compared the minutest. drop of 
water with the ocean that everywhere flows around the globe. For of these 
two, one indeed is very small, the other incomparably vast, yet both are 
finite; but that space of time which starts from some beginning, and is 
limited by some termination, be it of what extent it may, if you compare it 
with that which has no beginning, I know not whether to say we should count 
it the very minutest thing, or nothing at all. For, take this limited time, 
and deduct from the end of it, one by one, the briefest moments (as you 
might take day by day from a man's life, beginning at the day in which he 
now lives, back to that of his birth), and though the number of moments you 
must subtract in this backward movement be so great that no word can 
express it, yet this subtraction will sometime carry you to the beginning. 
But if you take away from a time which has no beginning, I do not say brief 
moments one by one, nor yet hours, or days, or months, or years even in 
quantities, but terms of years so vast that they cannot be named by the 
most skillful arithmeticians,--take away terms of years as vast as that 
which we have supposed to be gradually consumed by the deduction of 
moments,--and take them away not once and again repeatedly, but always, and 
what do you effect, what do you make by your deduction, since you never 
reach the beginning, which has no existence? Wherefore, that which we now 
demand after five thousand odd years, our descendants might with like 
curiosity demand after six hundred thousand years, supposing these dying 
generations of men continue so long to decay and be renewed, and supposing 
posterity continues as weak and ignorant as ourselves. The same question 
might have been asked by those who have lived before us and while man was 
even newer upon earth. The first man himself in short might the day after 
or the very day of his creation have asked why he was created no sooner. 
And no matter at what earlier or later period he had been created, this 
controversy about the commencement of this world's history would have had 
precisely the same difficulties as it has now.

CHAP. 13.--OF THE REVOLUTION OF THE AGES, WHICH SOME PHILOSOPHERS BELIEVE 
WILL BRING ALL THINGS ROUND AGAIN, AFTER A CERTAIN FIXED CYCLE, TO THE SAME 
ORDER AND FORM AS AT FIRST.

    This controversy some philosophers have seen no other approved means of 
solving than by introducing cycles of time, in which there should be a 
constant renewal and repetition of the order of nature;(1)  and they have 
therefore asserted that these cycles will ceaselessly recur, one passing 
away and another coming, though they are not agreed as to whether one 
permanent world shall pass through all these cycles, or whether the world 
shall at fixed intervals die out, and be renewed so as to exhibit a 
recurrence of the same phenomena--the things which have been, and those 
which are to be, coinciding. And from this fantastic vicissitude they 
exempt not even the immortal soul that has attained wisdom, consigning it 
to a ceaseless transmigration between delusive blessedness and real misery. 
For how can that be truly called blessed which has no assurance of being so 
eternally, and is either in ignorance of the truth, and blind to the misery 
that is approaching, or, knowing it, is in misery and fear? Or if it passes 
to bliss, and leaves miseries forever, then there happens in time a new 
thing which time shall not end. Why not, then, the world also? Why may not 
man, too, be a similar thing? So that, by following the straight path of 
sound doctrine, we escape, I know not what circuitous paths, discovered by 
deceiving and deceived sages.

    Some, too, in advocating these recurring cycles that restore all things 
to their original cite in favor of their supposition what Solomon says in 
the book of Ecclesiastes: "What is that which hath been? It is that which 
shall be. And what is that which is done? It is that which shall be done: 
and there is no new thing under the sun. Who can speak and say, See, this 
is new? It hath been already of old time, which was before us."(2) This he 
said either of those things of which he had just been speaking--the 
succession of generations, the orbit of the sun, the course of rivers,--or 
else of all kinds of creatures. that are born and die. For men were before 
us, are with us, and shall be after us; and so all living things and all 
plants. Even monstrous and irregular productions, though differing from one 
another, and though some are reported as solitary instances, yet resemble 
one another generally, in so far as they are miraculous and monstrous, and, 
in this sense, have been, and shall be, and are no new and recent things 
under the sun. However, some would understand these words as meaning that 
in the predestination of God all things have already existed, and that 
thus. there is no new thing under the sun. At all events, far be it from 
any true believer to suppose that by these words of Solomon those cycles 
are meant, in which, according to those philosophers, the same periods and 
events of time are repeated; as if, for example, the philosopher Plato, 
having taught in the school at Athens which is called the Academy, so, 
numberless ages before, at long but certain intervals, this same Plato and 
the same school, and the same disciples existed, and so also are to be 
repeated during the countless cycles that are yet to be,--far be it, I say, 
from us to believe this. For once Christ died for our sins; and, rising 
from the dead, He dieth no more. "Death hath no more dominion over Him;(3) 
and we ourselves after the resurrection shall be "ever with the Lord,"(4) 
to whom we now say, as the sacred Psalmist dictates, "Thou shall keep us, O 
Lord, Thou shall preserve us from this generation."(5) And that too which 
follows, is, I think, appropriate enough: "The wicked walk in a circle," 
not because their life is to recur by means. of these circles, which these 
philosophers imagine, but because the path in which their false doctrine 
now runs is circuitous.

CHAP. 14.--OF THE CREATION OF THE HUMAN RACE IN TIME, AND HOW THIS WAS 
EFFECTED WITHOUT ANY NEW DESIGN OR CHANGE OF PURPOSE ON GOD'S PART.

    What wonder is it if, entangled in these circles, they find neither 
entrance nor egress? For they know not how the human race, and this mortal 
condition of ours, took its origin, nor how it will be brought to an end, 
since they cannot penetrate the inscrutable wisdom of God. For, though 
Himself eternal, and without beginning, yet He caused time to have a 
beginning; and man, whom He had not previously made He made in time, not 
from a new and sudden resolution, but by His unchangeable and eternal 
design. Who can search out the unsearchable depth of this purpose, who can 
scrutinize the inscrutable wisdom, wherewith God, without change of will, 
created man, who had never before been, and gave him an existence in time, 
and increased the human race from one individual? For the Psalmist himself, 
when he had first said, "Thou shalt keep us, O Lord, Thou shall preserve us 
from this generation for ever," and had then rebuked those whose foolish 
and impious doctrine preserves for the soul no eternal deliverance and 
blessedness adds immediately, "The wicked walk in a circle." Then, as if it 
were said to him, "What then do you believe, feel, know? Are we to believe 
that it suddenly occurred to God to create man, whom He had never before 
made in a past eternity,--God, to whom nothing new can occur, and in whom 
is no changeableness?" the Psalmist goes on to reply, as if addressing God 
Himself, "According to the depth of Thy wisdom Thou hast multiplied the 
children of men." Let men, he seems to say, fancy what they please, let 
them conjecture and dispute as seems good to them, but Thou hast multiplied 
the children of men according to the depth of thy wisdom, which no man can 
comprehend. For this is a depth indeed, that God always has been, and that 
man, whom He had never made before, He willed to make in time, and this 
without changing His design and will.

CHAP. 15.--WHETHER WE ARE TO BELIEVE THAT GOD, AS HE HAS ALWAYS BEEN 
SOVEREIGN LORD, HAS ALWAYS HAD CREATURES OVER WHOM HE EXERCISED HIS 
SOVEREIGNTY; AND IN WHAT SENSE WE CAN SAY THAT THE CREATURE HAS ALWAYS 
BEEN, AND YET CANNOT SAY IT IS CO-ETERNAL.

    For my own part, indeed, as I dare not say that there ever was a time 
when the Lord God was not Lord,(1) so I ought not to doubt that man had no 
existence before time, and was first created in time. But when I consider 
what God could be the Lord of, if there was not always some creature, I 
shrink from making any assertion, remembering my own insignificance, and 
that it is written, "What man is he that can know the counsel of God? or 
who can think what the will of the Lord is? For the thoughts of mortal men 
are timid, and our devices are but uncertain. For the corruptible body 
presseth down the soul, and the earthly tabernacle weigheth down the mind 
that museth upon many things."' Many things certainly do I muse upon in 
this earthly tabernacle, because the one thing which is true among the 
many, or beyond the many, I cannot find. If, then, among these many 
thoughts, I say that there have always been creatures for Him to be Lord 
of, who is always and ever has been Lord, but that these creatures have not 
always been the same, but succeeded one another (for we would not seem to 
say that any is co-eternal with the Creator, an assertion condemned equally 
by faith and sound reason), I must take care lest I fall into the absurd 
and ignorant error of maintaining that by these successions and changes 
mortal creatures have always existed, whereas the immortal creatures had 
not begun to exist until the date of our own world, when the angels were 
created; if at least the angels are intended by that light which was first 
made, or, rather, by that heaven of which it is said, "In the beginning God 
created the heavens and the earth."(3) The angels, at least did not exist 
before they were created; for if we say that they have always existed, we 
shall seem to make them co-eternal with the Creator. Again, if I say that 
the angels were not created in time, but existed before all times, as those 
over whom God, who has ever been Sovereign, exercised His sovereignty, then 
I shall be asked whether, if they were created before all time, they, being 
creatures, could possibly always exist. It may perhaps be replied, Why not 
always, since that which is in all time may very properly be said to be 
"always?" Now so true is it that these angels have existed in all time that 
even before time was they were created; if at least time began with the 
heavens, and the angels existed before the heavens. And if time was even 
before the heavenly bodies, not indeed marked by hours, days, months, and 
years,--for these measures of time's periods which are commonly and 
properly called times, did manifestly begin with the motion of the heavenly 
bodies, and so God said, when He appointed them, "Let them be for signs, 
and for seasons, and for days, and for years,"(4) if, I say, time was 
before these heavenly bodies by some changing movement, whose parts 
succeeded one another and could not exist simultaneously, and if there was 
some such movement among the angels which necessitated the existence of 
time, and that they from their very creation should be subject to these 
temporal changes, then they have existed in all time, for time came into 
being along with them. And who will say that what was in all time, was not 
always?

    But if I make such a reply, it will be said to me, How, then, are they 
not co-eternal with the Creator, if He and they always have been? How even 
can they be said to have been created, if we are to understand that they 
have always existed? What shall we reply to this? Shall we say that both 
statements are true? that they always have been, since they have been in 
all time, they being created along with time, or time along with them, and 
yet that also they were created? For, similarly, we will not deny that time 
itself was created, though no one doubts that time has been in all time; 
for if it has not been in all time, then there was a time when there was no 
time. But the most foolish person could not make such an assertion. For we 
can reasonably say there was a time when Rome was not; there was a time 
when Jerusalem was not; there was a time when Abraham was not; there was a 
time when man was not, and so on: in fine, if the world was not made at the 
commencement of time, but after some time had elapsed, we can say there was 
a time when the world was not. But to say there was a time when time was 
not, is as absurd as to say there was a man when there was no man; or, this 
world was when this world was not. For if we are not referring to the same 
object, the form of expression may be used, as, there was another man when 
this man was not. Thus we can reasonably say there was another time when 
this time was not; but not the merest simpleton could say there was a time 
when there was no time. As, then, we say that time was created, though we 
also say that it always has been, since in all time time has been, so it 
does not follow that if the angels have always been, they were therefore 
not created. For we say that they have always been, because they have been 
in all time; and we say they have been in all time, because time itself 
could no wise be without them For where there is no creature whose changing 
movements admit of succession, there cannot be time at all. And 
consequently, even if they have always existed, they were created; neither, 
if they have always existed, are they therefore co-eternal with the 
Creator. For He has always existed in unchangeable eternity; while they 
were created, and are said to have been always, because they have been in 
all time, time being impossible without the creature. But time passing away 
by its changefulness, cannot be co eternal with changeless eternity. And 
consequently, though the immortality of the angels does not pass in time, 
does not become past as if now it were not, nor has a future as if it were 
not yet, still their movements, which are the basis of time, do pass from 
future to past; and therefore they cannot be co-eternal with the Creator, 
in whose movement we cannot say that there has been that which now is not, 
or shall be that which is not yet. Wherefore, if God always has been Lord, 
He has always had creatures under His dominion,--creatures, however, not 
begotten of Him, but created by Him out of nothing; nor co-eternal with 
Him, for He was before them though at no time without them, because He 
preceded them, not by the lapse of time, but by His abiding eternity. But 
if I make this reply to those who demand how He was always Creator, always 
Lord, if there were not always a subject creation; or how this was created, 
and not rather co-eternal with its Creator, if it always was, I fear I may 
be accused of recklessly affirming what I know not, instead of teaching 
what I know. I return, therefore, to that which our Creator has seen fit 
that we should know; and those things which He has allowed the abler men to 
know in this life, or has reserved to be known in the next by the perfected 
saints, I acknowledge to be beyond my capacity. But I have thought it right 
to discuss these matters without making positive assertions, that they who 
read may be warned to abstain from hazardous questions, and may not deem 
themselves fit for everything. Let them rather endeavor to obey the 
wholesome injunction of the apostle, when he says, "For I say, through the 
grace given unto me, to every man that is among you, not to think of 
himself more highly than he ought to think; but to think soberly, according 
as God hath dealt to every man the measure of faith."(1) For if an infant 
receive nourishment suited to its strength, it becomes capable, as it 
grows, of taking more; but if its strength and capacity be overtaxed, it 
dwines away in place of growing.

CHAP. 16.--HOW WE ARE TO UNDERSTAND GOD'S PROMISE OF LIFE ETERNAL, WHICH 
WAS UTTERED BEFORE THE "ETERNAL TIMES."

    I own that I do not know what ages passed before the human race was 
created, yet I have no doubt that no created thing is co-eternal with the 
Creator. But even the apostle speaks of time as eternal, and this with 
reference, not to the future, but, which is more surprising, to the past. 
For he says, "In hope of eternal life, which God that cannot lie promised 
before the eternal times, but hath in clue times manifested His word."(1) 
You see he says that in the past there have been eternal times, which, 
however, were not co-eternal with God. And since God before these eternal 
times not only existed, but also, "promised" life eternal, which He 
manifested in its own times (that is to say, in due times), what else is 
this than His word? For this is life eternal. But then, how did He promise; 
for the promise was made to men, and yet they had no existence before 
eternal times? Does this not mean that, in His own eternity, and in His co-
eternal word, that which was to be in its own time was already predestined 
and fixed?

CHAP. 17.--WHAT DEFENCE IS MADE BY SOUND FAITH REGARDING GOD'S UNCHANGEABLE 
COUNSEL AND WILL, AGAINST THE REASONINGS OF THOSE WHO HOLD THAT THE WORKS 
OF GOD ARE ETERNALLY REPEATED IN REVOLVING CYCLES THAT RESTORE ALL THINGS 
AS THEY WERE.

    Of this, too, I have no doubt, that before the first man was created, 
there never had been a man at all, neither this same man himself recurring 
by I know not what cycles, and having made I know not how many revolutions, 
nor any other of similar nature. From this belief I am not frightened by 
philosophical arguments, among which that is reckoned the most acute which 
is founded on the assertion that the infinite cannot be comprehended by any 
mode of knowledge. Consequently, they argue, God has in his own mind finite 
conceptions of all finite things which He makes. Now it cannot be supposed 
that His goodness was ever idle; for if it were, there should be ascribed 
to Him an awakening to activity in time, from a past eternity of 
inactivity, as if He repented of an idleness that had no beginning, and 
proceeded, therefore, to make a beginning of work. This being the case, 
they say it must be that the same things are always repeated, and that as 
they pass, so they are destined always to return, whether amidst all these 
changes the world remains the same,--the world which has always been, and 
yet was created,--or that the world in these revolutions is perpetually 
dying out and being renewed; otherwise, if we point to a time when the 
works of God were begun, it would be believed that He considered His past 
eternal leisure to be inert and indolent, and therefore condemned and 
altered it as displeasing to Himself. Now if God is supposed to have been 
indeed always making temporal things, but different from one another, and 
one after the other, so, that He thus came at last to make man, whom He had 
never made before, then it may seem that He made man not with knowledge 
(for they suppose no knowledge can comprehend the infinite succession of 
creatures), but at the dictate of the hour, as it struck him at the moment, 
with a sudden and accidental change of mind. On the other hand, say they, 
if those cycles be admitted, and if we suppose that the same temporal 
things are repeated, while the world either remains identical through all 
these rotations, or else dies away and is renewed, then there is ascribed 
to God neither the slothful ease of a past eternity, nor a rash and 
unforeseen creation. And if the same things be not thus repeated in cycles, 
then they cannot by any science or prescience be comprehended in their 
endless diversity. Even though reason could not refute, faith would smile 
at these argumentations, with which the godless endeavor to turn our simple 
piety from the right way, that we may walk with them "in a circle." But by 
the help of the Lord our God, even reason, and that readily enough, 
shatters these revolving circles which conjecture frames. For that which 
specially leads these men astray to refer their own circles to the straight 
path of truth, is, that they measure by their own human, changeable, and 
narrow intellect the divine mind, which is absolutely unchangeable, 
infinitely capacious, and without succession of thought, counting all 
things without number. So that saying of the apostle comes true of them, 
for, "comparing themselves with themselves, they do not understand."(2) For 
because they do, in virtue of a new purpose, whatever new thing has 
occurred to them to be done (their minds being changeable), they conclude 
it is so with God; and thus compare, not God,--for they cannot conceive 
God, but think of one like themselves when they think of Him,--not God, but 
themselves, and not with Him, but with themselves. For our part, we dare 
not believe that God is affected in one way when He works, in another when 
He rests. Indeed, to say that He is affected at all, is an abuse of 
language, since it implies that there comes to be something in His nature 
which was not there before. For he who is affected is acted upon, and 
whatever is acted upon is changeable. His leisure, therefore, is no 
laziness, indolence, inactivity; as in His work is no labor, effort, 
industry. He can act while He reposes, and repose while He acts. He can 
begin a new work with (not a new, but) an eternal design; and what He has 
not made before, He does not now begin to make because He repents of His 
former repose. But when one speaks of His former repose and subsequent 
operation (and I know not how men can understand these things), this 
"former" and "subsequent" are applied only to the things created, which 
formerly did not exist, and subsequently came into existence. But in God 
the former purpose is not altered and obliterated by the subsequent and 
different purpose, but by one and the same eternal and unchangeable will He 
effected regarding the things He created, both that formerly, so long as 
they were not, they should not be, and that subsequently, when they began 
to be, they should come into existence. And thus, perhaps, He would show, 
in a very striking way, to those who have eyes for such things, how 
independent He is of what He makes, and how it is of His own gratuitous 
goodness He creates, since from eternity He dwelt without creatures in no 
less perfect a blessedness.

CHAP. 18. AGAINST THOSE WHO ASSERT THAT THINGS THAT ARE INFINITE(1) CANNOT 
BE COMPREHENDED BY THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD.

    As for their other assertion, that God's knowledge cannot comprehend 
things infinite, it only remains for them to affirm, in order that they may 
sound the depths of their impiety, that God does not know all numbers. For 
it is very certain that they are infinite; since, no matter of what number 
you suppose an end to be made, this number can be, I will not say, 
increased by the addition of one more, but however great it be, and however 
vast be the multitude of which it is the rational and scientific 
expression, it can still be not only doubled, but even multiplied. 
Moreover, each number is so defined by its own properties, that no two 
numbers are equal. They are therefore both unequal and different from one 
another; and while they are simply finite, collectively they are infinite. 
Does God, therefore, not know numbers on account of this infinity; and does 
His knowledge extend only to a certain height in numbers, while of the rest 
He is ignorant? Who is so left to himself as to say so? Yet they can hardly 
pretend to put numbers out of the question, or maintain that they have 
nothing to do with the knowledge of God; for Plato,(2) their great 
authority, represents God as framing the world on numerical principles: and 
in our books also it is said to God, "Thou hast ordered all things in 
number, and measure, and weight."(3) The prophet also says," Who bringeth 
out their host by number."(4) And the Saviour says in the Gospel, "The very 
hairs of your head are all numbered."(5) Far be it, then, from us to doubt 
that all number is known to Him "whose understanding," according to the 
Psalmist, "is infinite."(6) The infinity of number, though there be no 
numbering of infinite numbers, is yet not incomprehensible by Him whose 
understanding is infinite. And thus, if everything which is comprehended is 
defined or made finite by the comprehension of him who knows it, then all 
infinity is in some ineffable way made finite to God, for it is 
comprehensible by His knowledge. Wherefore, if the infinity of numbers 
cannot be infinite to the knowledge of God, by which it is comprehended, 
what are we poor creatures that we should presume to fix limits to His 
knowledge, and say that unless the same temporal thing be repeated by the 
same periodic revolutions, God cannot either foreknow His creatures that He 
may make them, or know them when He has made them? God, whose knowledge is 
simply manifold, and uniform in its variety, comprehends all 
incomprehensibles with so incomprehensible a comprehension, that though He 
willed always to make His later works novel and unlike what went before 
them, He could not produce them without order and foresight, nor conceive 
them suddenly, but by His eternal foreknowledge.

CHAP. 19.--OF WORLDS WITHOUT END, OR AGES OF AGES.(7)

    I do not presume to determine whether God does so, and whether these 
times which are called "ages of ages" are joined together in a continuous 
series, and succeed one another with a regulated diversity, and leave 
exempt from their vicissitudes only those who are freed from their misery, 
and abide without end in a blessed immortality; or whether these are called 
"ages of ages," that we may understand that the ages remain unchangeable in 
God's unwavering wisdom, and are the efficient causes, as it were, of those 
ages which are being spent in time. Possibly "ages" is used for "age," so 
that nothing else is meant by "ages of ages" than by "age of age," as 
nothing else is meant by "heavens of heavens" than by "heaven of heaven." 
For God called the firmament, above which are the waters, "Heaven," and yet 
the psalm says, "Let the waters that are above the heavens praise the name 
of the Lord."(1) Which of these two meanings we are to attach to "ages of 
ages," or whether there is not some other and better meaning still, is a 
very profound question; and the subject we are at present handling presents 
no obstacle to our meanwhile deferring the discussion of it, whether we may 
be able to determine anything about it, or may only be made more cautious 
by its further treatment, so as to be deterred from making any rash 
affirmations in a matter of such obscurity. For at present we are disputing 
the opinion that affirms the existence of those periodic revolutions by 
which the same things are always recurring at intervals of time. Now 
whichever of these suppositions regarding the "ages of ages" be the true 
one, it avails nothing for the substantiating of those cycles; for whether 
the ages of ages be not a repetition of the same world, but different 
worlds succeeding one another in a regulated connection, the ransomed souls 
abiding in well-assured bliss without any recurrence of misery, or whether 
the ages of ages be the eternal causes which rule what shall be and is in 
time, it equally follows, that those cycles which bring round the same 
things have no .existence; and nothing more thoroughly explodes them than 
the fact of the eternal life of the saints.

CHAP. 20.--OF THE IMPIETY OF THOSE WHO ASSERT THAT THE SOULS WHICH ENJOY 
TRUE AND PERFECT BLESSEDNESS, MUST YET AGAIN AND AGAIN IN THESE PERIODIC 
REVOLUTIONS RETURN TO LABOR AND MISERY.

    What pious ears could bear to hear that after a life spent in so many 
and severe distresses (if, indeed, that should be called a life at all 
which is rather a death, so utter that the love of this present death makes 
us fear that death which delivers us from it,) that after evils so 
disastrous, and miseries of all kinds have at length been expiated and 
finished by the help of true religion and wisdom, and when we have thus 
attained to the vision of God, and have entered into bliss by the 
contemplation of spiritual light and participation in His unchangeable 
immortality, which we burn to attain,--that we must at some time lose all 
this, and that they who do lose it are cast down from that eternity, truth, 
and felicity to infernal mortality and shameful foolishness, and are 
involved in accursed woes, in which God is lost, truth held in detestation, 
and happiness sought in iniquitous impurities? and that this will happen 
endlessly again and again, recurring at fixed intervals, and in regularly 
returning periods? and that this everlasting and ceaseless revolution of 
definite cycles, which remove and restore true misery and deceitful bliss 
in turn, is contrived in order that God may be able to know His own works, 
since on the one hand He cannot rest from creating and on the other, cannot 
know the infinite number of His creatures, if He always makes creatures? 
Who, I say, can listen to such things? Who can accept or suffer them to be 
spoken? Were they true, it were not only more prudent to keep silence 
regarding them, but even (to express myself as best I can) it were the part 
of wisdom not to know them. For if in the future world we shall not 
remember these things, and by this oblivion be blessed, why should we now 
increase our misery, already burdensome enough, by the knowledge of them? 
If, on the other hand, the knowledge of them will be forced Upon us 
hereafter, now at least let us remain in ignorance, that in the present 
expectation we may enjoy a blessedness which the future reality is not to 
bestow; since in this life we are expecting to obtain life everlasting, but 
in the world to come are to discover it to be blessed, but not everlasting.

    And if they maintain that no one can attain to the blessedness of the 
world to come, unless in this life he has been indoctrinated in those 
cycles in which bliss and misery relieve one another, how do they avow that 
the more a man loves God, the more readily he attains to blessedness,--they 
who teach what paralyzes love itself? For who would not be more remiss and 
lukewarm in his love for a person whom he thinks he shall be forced to 
abandon, and whose truth and wisdom he shall come to hate; and this, too, 
after he has quite attained to the utmost and most blissful knowledge of 
Him that he is capable of? Can any one be faithful in his love, even to a 
human friend, if he knows that he is destined to become his enemy?(2) God 
forbid that there be any truth in an opinion which threatens us with a real 
misery that is never to end, but is often and endlessly to be interrupted 
by intervals of fallacious happiness. For what happiness can be more 
fallacious and false than that in whose blaze of truth we yet remain 
ignorant that we shall be miserable, or in whose most secure citadel we yet 
fear that we shall be so? For if, on the one hand, we are to be ignorant of 
coming calamity, then our present misery is not so short-sighted for it is 
assured of coming bliss. If, on the other hand, the disaster that threatens 
is not concealed from us in the world to come, then the time of misery 
which is to be at last exchanged for a state of blessedness, is spent by 
the soul more happily than its time of happiness, which is to end in a 
return to misery. And thus our expectation of unhappiness is happy, but of 
happiness unhappy. And therefore, as we here suffer present ills, and 
hereafter fear ills that are imminent, it were truer to say that we shall 
always be miserable than that we can some time be happy.

    But these things are declared to be false by the loud testimony of 
religion and truth; for religion truthfully promises a true blessedness, of 
which we shall be eternally assured, and which cannot be interrupted by any 
disaster. Let us therefore keep to the straight path, which is Christ, and, 
with Him as our Guide and Saviour, let us turn away in heart and mind from 
the unreal and futile cycles of the godless. Porphyry, Platonist though he 
was, abjured the opinion of his school, that in these cycles souls are 
ceaselessly passing away and returning, either being struck with the 
extravagance of the idea, or sobered by his knowledge of Christianity. As I 
mentioned in the tenth book,(1) he preferred saying that the soul, as it 
had been sent into the world that it might know evil, and be purged and 
delivered from it, was never again exposed to such an experience after it 
had once returned to the Father. And if he abjured the tenets of his 
school, how much more ought we Christians to abominate and avoid an opinion 
so unfounded and hostile to our faith? But having disposed of these cycles 
and escaped out of them, no necessity compels us to suppose that the human 
race had no beginning in time, on the ground that there is nothing new in 
nature which, by I know not what cycles, has not at some previous period 
existed, and is not hereafter to exist again. For if the soul, once 
delivered, as it never was before, is never to return to misery. then there 
happens in its experience something which never happened before; and this, 
indeed, something of the greatest consequence, to wit, the secure entrance 
into eternal felicity. And if in an immortal nature there can occur a 
novelty, which never has been, nor ever shall be, reproduced by any cycle, 
why is it disputed that the same may occur in mortal natures? If they 
maintain that blessedness is no new experience to the soul, but only a 
return to that state in which it has been eternally, then at least its 
deliverance from misery is something new, since, by their own showing, the 
misery from which it is delivered is itself, too, a new experience. And if 
this new experience fell out by accident, and was not embraced in the order 
of things appointed by Divine Providence, then where are those determinate 
and measured cycles in which no new thing happens, but all things are 
reproduced as they were before? If, however, this new experience was 
embraced in that providential order of nature (whether the soul was exposed 
to the evil of this world for the sake of discipline, or fell into it by 
sin), then it is possible for new things to happen which never happened 
before, and which yet are not extraneous to the order of nature. And if the 
soul is able by its own imprudence to create for itself a new misery, which 
was not unforeseen by the Divine Providence, but was provided for in the 
order of nature along with the deliverance from it, how can we, even with 
all the rashness of human vanity, presume to deny that God can create new 
things--new to the world, but not to Him--which He never before created, 
but yet foresaw from all eternity? If they say that it is indeed true that 
ransomed souls return no more to misery, but that even so no new thing 
happens, since there always have been, now are, and ever shall be a 
succession of ransomed souls, they must at least grant that in this case 
there are new souls to whom the misery and the deliverance from it are new. 
For if they maintain that those souls out of which new men are daily being 
made (from whose bodies, if they have lived wisely, they are so delivered 
that they never return to misery) are not new, but have existed from 
eternity, they must logically admit that they are infinite. For however 
great a finite number of souls there were, that would not have sufficed to 
make perpetually new men from eternity,--men whose souls were to be 
eternally freed from this mortal state, and never afterwards to return to 
it. And our philosophers will find it hard to explain how there is an 
infinite number of souls in an order of nature which they require shall be 
finite, that it may be known by God.

    And now that we have exploded these cycles which were supposed to bring 
back the soul at fixed periods to the same miseries, what can seem more in 
accordance with godly reason than to believe that it is possible for God 
both to create new things never before created, and in doing so, to 
preserve His will unaltered? But whether the number of eternally redeemed 
souls can be continually increased or not, let the philosophers themselves 
decide, who are so subtle in determining where infinity cannot be admitted. 
For our own part, our reasoning holds in either case. For if the number of 
souls can be indefinitely increased, what reason is there to deny that what 
had never before been created, could be created? since the number of 
ransomed souls never existed before, and has yet not only been once made, 
but will never cease to be anew coming into being. If, on the other hand, 
it be more suitable that the number of eternally ransomed souls be 
definite, and that this number will never be increased, yet this number, 
whatever it be, did assuredly never exist before, and it cannot increase, 
and reach the amount it signifies, without having some beginning; and this 
beginning never before existed. That this beginning, therefore, might be, 
the first man was created.

CHAP. 21.--THAT THERE WAS CREATED AT FIRST BUT ONE INDIVIDUAL, AND THAT THE 
HUMAN RACE WAS CREATED IN HIM.

    Now that we have solved, as well as we could, this very difficult 
question about the eternal God creating new things, without any novelty of 
will, it is easy to see how much better it is that God was pleased to 
produce the human race from the one individual whom He created, than if He 
had originated it in several men. For as to the other animals, He created 
some solitary, and naturally seeking lonely places,--as the eagles, kites, 
lions, wolves, and such like; others gregarious, which herd together, and 
prefer to live in company,--as pigeons, starlings, stags, and little fallow 
deer, and the like: but neither class did He cause to be propagated from 
individuals, but called into being several at once. Man, on the other hand, 
whose nature was to be a mean between the angelic and bestial, He created 
in such sort, that if he remained in subjection to His Creator as his 
rightful Lord, and piously kept His commandments, he should pass into the 
company of the angels, and obtain, without the intervention of death,(1) a 
blessed and endless immortality; but if he offended the Lord his God by a 
proud and disobedient use of his free will, he should become subject to 
death, and live as the beasts do,--the slave of appetite, and doomed to 
eternal punishment after death. And therefore God created only one single 
man, not, certainly, that he might be a solitary, bereft of all society, 
but that by this means the unity of society and the bond of concord might 
be more effectually commended to him, men being bound together not only by 
similarity of nature, but by family affection. And indeed He did not even 
create the woman that was to be given him as his wife, as he created the 
man, but created her out of the man, that the whole human race might derive 
from one man.

CHAP. 22.--THAT GOD FOREKNEW THAT THE FIRST MAN WOULD SIN, AND THAT HE AT 
THE SAME TIME FORESAW HOW LARGE A MULTITUDE OF GODLY PERSONS WOULD BY HIS 
GRACE BE TRANSLATED TO THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE ANGELS.

    And God was not ignorant that man would sin, and that, being himself 
made subject now to death, he would propagate men doomed to die, and that 
these mortals would run to such enormities in sin, that even the beasts 
devoid of rational will, and who were created in numbers from the waters 
and the earth, would live more securely and peaceably with their own kind 
than men, who had been propagated from one individual for the very purpose 
of commending concord. For not even lions or dragons have ever waged with 
their kind such wars as men have waged with one another.(2) But God foresaw 
also that by His grace a people would be called to adoption, and that they, 
being justified by the remission of their sins, would be united by the Holy 
Ghost to the holy angels in eternal peace, the last enemy, death, being 
destroyed; and He knew that this people would derive profit from the 
consideration that God had caused all men to be derived from one, for the 
sake of showing how highly He prizes unity in a multitude.

CHAP. 23.--OF THE NATURE OF THE HUMAN SOUL CREATED IN THE IMAGE OF GOD.

    God, then, made man in His own image. For He created for him a soul 
endowed with reason and intelligence, so that he might excel all the 
creatures of earth, air, and sea, which were not so gifted. And when He had 
formed the man out of the dust of the earth, and had willed that his soul 
should be such as I have said,--whether He had already made it, and now by 
breathing imparted it to man, or rather made it by breathing, so that that 
breath which God made by breathing (for what else is "to breathe" than to 
make breath ?) is the soul,(1)--He made also a wife for him, to aid him in 
the work of generating his kind, and her He formed of a bone taken out of 
the man's side, working in a divine manner. For we are not to conceive of 
this work in a carnal fashion, as if God wrought as we commonly see 
artisans, who use their hands, and material furnished to them, that by 
their artistic skill they may fashion some material object. God's hand is 
God's power; and He, working invisibly, effects visible results. But this 
seems fabulous rather than true to men, who measure by customary and 
everyday works the power and wisdom of God, whereby He understands and 
produces without seeds even seeds themselves; and because they cannot 
understand the things which at the beginning were created, they are 
sceptical regarding them--as if the very things which they do know about 
human  propagation, conceptions and births, would seem less incredible if 
told to those who had no experience of them; though these very things, too, 
are attributed by many rather to physical and natural causes than to the 
work of the divine mind.

CHAP. 24.--WHETHER THE ANGELS CAN BE SAID TO BE THE CREATORS OF ANY, EVEN 
THE LEAST CREATURE.

    But in this book we have nothing to do with those who do not believe 
that the divine mind made or cares for this world, As for those who believe 
their own Plato, that all mortal animals--among whom man holds the pre-
eminent place, and is near to the gods themselves--were created not by that 
most high God who made the world, but by other lesser gods created by the 
Supreme, and exercising a delegated power under His control,--if only those 
persons be delivered from the superstition which prompts them to seek a 
plausible reason for paying divine honors and sacrificing to these gods as 
their creators, they will easily be disentangled also from this their 
error. For it is blasphemy to believe or to say (even before it can be 
understood) that any other than God is creator of any nature, be it never 
so small and mortal. And as for the angels, whom those Platonists prefer to 
call gods, although they do, so far as they are permitted and commissioned, 
aid in the production of the things around us, yet not on that account are 
we to call them creators, any more than we call gardeners the creators of 
fruits and trees.

CHAP. 25.--THAT GOD ALONE IS THE CREATOR OF EVERY KIND OF CREATURE, 
WHATEVER ITS NATURE OR FORM.

    For whereas there is one form which is given from without to every 
bodily substance,--such as the form which is constructed by potters and 
smiths, and that class of artists who paint and fashion forms like the body 
of animals,--but another and internal form which is not itself constructed, 
but, as the efficient cause, produces not only the natural bodily forms, 
but even the life itself of the living creatures, and which proceeds from 
the secret and hidden choice of an intelligent and living nature,--let that 
first-mentioned form be attributed to every artificer, but this latter to 
one only, God, the Creator and Originator who made the world itself and the 
angels, without the help of world or angels. For the same divine and, so to 
speak, creative energy, which cannot be made, but makes, and which gave to 
the earth and sky their roundness,--this same divine, effective, and 
creative energy gave their roundness to the eye and to the apple; and the 
other natural objects which we anywhere see, received also their form, not 
from without, but from the secret and profound might of the Creator, who 
said, "Do not I fill heaven and earth?(2) and whose wisdom it is that 
"reacheth from one end to another mightily; and sweetly doth she order all 
things."(3) Wherefore I know not what kind of aid the angels, themselves 
created first, afforded to the Creator in making other things. I cannot 
ascribe to them what perhaps they cannot do, neither ought I to deny them 
such faculty as they have. But, by their leave, I attribute the creating 
and originating work which gave being to all natures to God, to whom they 
themselves thankfully ascribe their existence. We do not call gardeners the 
creators of their fruits, for we read, "Neither is he that planteth 
anything, neither he that watereth, but God that giveth the increase."(4) 
Nay, not even the earth itself do we call a creator, though she seems to be 
the prolific mother of all things which she aids in germinating and 
bursting forth from the seed, and which she keeps rooted in her own breast; 
for we likewise read, "God giveth it a body, as it hath pleased Him, and to 
every seed his own body.(5)" We ought not even to call a woman the 
creatress of her own offspring; for He rather is its creator who said to 
His servant, "Before I formed thee in the womb, I knew thee."(6) And 
although the various mental emotions of a pregnant woman do produce in the 
fruit of her womb similar qualities,--as Jacob with his peeled wands caused 
piebald sheep to be produced,--yet the mother as little creates her 
offspring as she created herself. Whatever bodily or seminal causes, then, 
may be used for the production of things, either by the cooperation of 
angels, men, or the lower animals, or by sexual generation; and whatever 
power the desires and mental emotions of the mother have to produce in the 
tender and plastic foetus corresponding lineaments and colors; yet the 
natures themselves, which are thus variously affected, are the production 
of none but the most high God. It is His occult power which pervades all 
things, and is present in all without being contaminated, which gives being 
to all that is, and modifies and limits its existence; so that without Him 
it would not be thus, or thus, nor would have any being at all.(1) If, 
then, in regard to that outward form which the workman's hand imposes on 
his work, we do not say that Rome and Alexandria were built by masons and 
architects, but by the kings by whose will, plan, and resources they were 
built, so that the one has Romulus, the other Alexander, for its founder; 
with how much greater reason ought we to say that God alone is the Author 
of all natures, since He neither uses for His work any material which was 
not made by Him, nor any workmen who were not also made by Him, and since, 
if He were, so to speak, to withdraw from created things His creative 
power, they would straightway relapse into the nothingness in which they 
were before they were created? "Before," I mean, in respect of eternity, 
not of time. For what other creator could there be of time, than He who 
created those things whose movements make time?(2)

CHAP. 26.--OF THAT OPINION OF THE PLATONISTS, THAT THE ANGELS WERE 
THEMSELVES INDEED CREATED BY GOD, BUT THAT AFTERWARDS THEY CREATED MAN'S 
BODY.

    It is obvious, that in attributing the creation of the other animals to 
those inferior gods who were made by the Supreme, he meant it to be 
understood that the immortal part was taken from God Himself, and that 
these minor creators added the mortal part; that is to say, he meant them 
to be considered the creators of our bodies, but not of our souls. But 
since Porphyry maintains that if the soul is to be purified all 
entanglement with a body must be escaped from; and at the same time agrees 
with Plato and the Platonists  in thinking that those who have not spent a 
temperate and honorable life return to mortal bodies as their punishment 
(to bodies of brutes in Plato's opinion, to human bodies in Porphyry's); it 
follows that those whom they would have us worship as our parents and 
authors, that they may plausibly call them gods, are, after all, but the 
forgers of our fetters and chains,--not our creators, but our jailers and 
turnkeys, who lock us up in the most bitter and melancholy house of 
correction. Let the Platonists, then, either cease menacing us with our 
bodies as the punishment of our souls, or preaching that we are to worship 
as gods those whose work upon us they exhort us by all means in our power 
to avoid and escape from. But, indeed, both opinions are quite false. It is 
false that souls return again to this life to be punished; and it is false 
that there is any other creator of anything in heaven or earth, than He who 
made the heaven and the earth. For if we live in a body only to expiate our 
sins, how says Plato in another place, that the world could not have been 
the most beautiful and good, had it not been filled with all kinds of 
creatures, mortal and immortal?(3) But if our  creation even as mortals be 
a divine benefit, I how is it a punishment to be restored to a body, that 
is, to a divine benefit? And if God, as Plato continually maintains, 
embraced in His eternal intelligence the ideas both of the universe and of 
all the animals, how, then, should He not with His own hand make them all? 
Could He be unwilling to be the constructor of works, the idea and plan of 
which called for His ineffable and ineffably to be praised intelligence?

CHAP. 27.--THAT THE WHOLE PLENITUDE OF THE HUMAN RACE WAS EMBRACED IN THE 
FIRST MAN, AND THAT GOD THERE SAW THE PORTION OF IT WHICH WAS TO BE HONORED 
AND REWARDED, AND THAT WHICH WAS TO BE CONDEMNED AND PUNISHED.

    With good cause, therefore, does the true religion recognize and 
proclaim that the same God who created the universal cosmos, created also 
all the animals, souls as well as bodies. Among the terrestrial animals man 
was made by Him in His own image, and, for the reason I have given, was 
made one individual, though he was not left solitary. For there is nothing 
so social by nature, so unsocial by its corruption, as this race. And human 
nature has nothing more appropriate, either for the prevention of discord, 
or for the healing of it, where it exists, than the remembrance of that 
first parent of us all, whom God was pleased to create alone, that all men 
might be derived from one, and that they might thus be admonished to 
preserve unity among their whole multitude. But from the fact that the 
woman was made for him from his side, it was plainly meant that we should 
learn how dear the bond between man and wife should be. These works of God 
do certainly seem extraordinary, because they are the first works. They who 
do not believe them, ought not to believe any prodigies; for these would 
not be called prodigies did they not happen out of the ordinary course of 
nature. But, is it possible that anything should happen in vain, however 
hidden be its cause, in so grand a government of divine providence? One of 
the sacred Psalmists says, "Come, behold the works of the Lord, what 
prodigies He hath wrought in the earth."(1) Why God made woman out of man's 
side, and what this first prodigy prefigured, I shall, with God's help, 
tell in another place. But at present, since this book must be concluded, 
let us merely say that in this first man, who was created in the beginning, 
there was laid the foundation, not in. deed evidently, but in God's 
foreknowledge, of these two cities or societies, so far as regards the 
human race. For from that man all men were to be derived--some of them to 
be associated with the good angels in their reward, others with the wicked 
in punishment; all being ordered by the secret yet just judgment of God. 
For since it is written, "All the paths of the Lord are mercy and 
truth,"(2) neither can His grace be unjust, nor His justice cruel.


BOOK XIII.

ARGUMENT: IN THIS BOOK IT IS TAUGHT THAT DEATH IS PENAL, AND HAD ITS ORIGIN 
IN ADAM'S SIN.

CHAP. 1.--OF THE FALL OF THE FIRST MAN, THROUGH WHICH MORTALITY HAS BEEN 
CONTRACTED.

    HAVING disposed of the very difficult questions concerning the origin 
of our world and the beginning of the human race, the natural order 
requires that we now discuss the fall of the first man (we may say of the 
first men), and of the origin and propagation of human death. For God had 
not made man like the angels, in such a condition that, even though they 
had sinned, they could none the more die. He had so made them, that if they 
discharged the obligations of obedience, an angelic immortality and a 
blessed eternity might ensue, without the intervention of death; but if 
they disobeyed, death should be visited on them with just sentence--which, 
too, has been spoken to in the preceding book.

CHAP. 2.--OF THAT DEATH WHICH CAN AFFECT AN IMMORTAL SOUL, AND OF THAT TO 
WHICH THE BODY IS SUBJECT.

    But I see I must speak a little more carefully of the nature of death. 
For although the human soul is truly affirmed to be immortal, yet it also 
has a certain death of its own. For it is therefore called immortal, 
because, in a sense, it does not cease to live and to feel; while the body 
is called mortal, because it can be forsaken of all life, and cannot by 
itself live at all. The death, then, of the soul takes place when God 
forsakes it, as the death of the body when the soul forsakes it. Therefore 
the death of both--that is, of the whole man--occurs when the soul, 
forsaken by God, forsakes the body. For, in this case, neither is God the 
life of the soul, nor the soul the life of the body. And this death of the 
whole man is followed by that which, on the authority of the divine 
oracles, we call the second death. This the Saviour referred to when He 
said, "Fear Him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell."(1) 
And since this does not happen before the soul is so joined to its body 
that they cannot be separated at all, it may be matter of wonder how the 
body can be said to be killed by that death in which it is not forsaken by 
the soul, but, being animated and rendered sensitive by it, is tormented. 
For in that penal and everlasting punishment, of which in its own place we 
are to speak more at large, the soul is justly said to die, because it does 
not live in connection with God; but how can we say that the body is dead, 
seeing that it lives by the soul? For it could not otherwise feel the 
bodily torments which are to follow the resurrection. Is it because life of 
every kind is good, and pain an evil, that we decline to say that that body 
lives, in which the soul is the cause, not of life, but of pain? The soul, 
then, lives by God when it lives well, for it cannot live well unless by 
God working in it what is good; and the body lives by the soul when the 
soul lives in the body, whether itself be living by God or no. For the 
wicked man's life in the body is a life not of the soul, but of the body, 
which even dead souls--that is, souls forsaken of God--can confer upon 
bodies, how little so-ever of their own proper life, by which they are 
immortal, they retain. But in the last damnation, though man does not cease 
to feel, yet because this feeling of his is neither sweet with pleasure nor 
wholesome with repose, but painfully penal, it is not without reason called 
death rather than life. And it is called the second death because it 
follows the first, which sunders the two cohering essences, whether these 
be God and the soul, or the soul and the body. Of the first and bodily 
death, then, we may say that to the good it is good, and evil to the evil. 
But, doubtless, the second, as it happens to none of the good, so it can be 
good for none.

CHAP. 3.--WHETHER DEATH, WHICH BY THE SIN OF OUR FIRST PARENTS HAS PASSED 
UPON ALL MEN, IS THE PUNISHMENT OF SIN, EVEN TO THE GOOD.

    But a question not to be shirked arises: Whether in very truth death, 
which separates soul and body, is good to the good?(1) For if it be, how 
has it come to pass that such a thing should be the punishment of sin? For 
the first men would not have suffered death had they not sinned. How, then, 
can that be good to the good, which could not have happened except to the 
evil? Then, again, if it could only happen to the evil, to the good it 
ought not to be good, but non-existent. For why should there be any 
punishment where there is nothing to punish? Wherefore we must say that the 
first men were indeed so created, that if they had not sinned, they would 
not have experienced any kind of death; but that, having become sinners, 
they were so punished with death, that whatsoever sprang from their stock 
should also be punished with the same death. For nothing else could be born 
of them than that which they themselves had been. Their nature was 
deteriorated in proportion to the greatness of the condemnation of their 
sin, so that what existed as punishment in those who first sinned, became a 
natural consequence in their children. For man is not produced by man, as 
he was from the dust. For dust was the material out of which man was made: 
man is the parent by whom man is begotten. Wherefore earth and flesh are 
not the same thing, though flesh be made of earth. But as man the parent 
is, such is man the offspring. In the first man, therefore, there existed 
the whole human nature, which was to be transmitted by the woman to 
posterity, when that conjugal union received the divine sentence of its own 
condemnation; and what man was made, not when created, but when he sinned 
and was punished, this he propagated, so far as the origin of sin and death 
are concerned. For neither by sin nor its punishment was he himself reduced 
to that infantine and helpless infirmity of body and mind which we see in 
children. For God ordained that infants should begin the world as the young 
of beasts begin it, since their parents had fallen to the level of the 
beasts in the fashion of their life and of their death; as it is written, 
"Man when he was in honor understood not; he became like the beasts that 
have no understanding."(2) Nay more, infants, we see, are even feebler in 
the use and movement of their limbs, and more infirm to choose and refuse, 
than the most tender offspring of other animals; as if the force that 
dwells in human nature were destined to surpass all other living things so 
much the more eminently, as its energy has been longer restrained, and the 
time of its exercise delayed, just as an arrow flies the higher the further 
back it has been drawn. To this infantine imbecility(3) the first man did 
not fall by his lawless presumption and just sentence; but human nature was 
in his person vitiated and altered to such an extent, that he suffered in 
his members the warring of disobedient last, and became subject to the 
necessity of dying. And what he himself had become by sin and punishment, 
such he generated those whom he begot; that is to say, subject to sin and 
death. And if infants are delivered from this I bondage of sin by the 
Redeemer's grace, they can suffer only this death which separates soul and 
body; but being redeemed from the obligation of sin, they do not pass to 
that second endless and penal death.

CHAP. 4.--WHY DEATH, THE PUNISHMENT OF SIN, IS NOT WITHHELD FROM THOSE WHO 
BY THE GRACE OF REGENERATION ARE ABSOLVED FROM SIN.

    If, moreover, any one is solicitous about this point, how, if death be 
the very punishment of sin, they whose guilt is cancelled by grace do yet 
suffer death, this difficulty has already been handled and solved in our 
other work which we have written on the baptism of infants.(4) There it was 
said that the parting of soul and body was left, though its connection with 
sin was removed, for this reason, that if the immortality of the body 
followed immediately upon the sacrament of regeneration, faith itself would 
be thereby enervated. For faith is then only faith when it waits in hope 
for what is not yet seen in substance. And by the vigor and conflict of 
faith, at least in times past, was the fear of death overcome. Specially 
was this conspicuous in the holy martyrs, who could have had no victory, no 
glory, to whom there could not even have been any conflict, if, after the 
layer of regeneration, saints could not suffer bodily death.

    Who would not, then, in company with the infants presented for baptism, 
run to the grace of Christ, that so he might not be dismissed from the 
body? And thus faith would not be tested with an unseen reward; and so 
would not even be faith, seeking and receiving an immediate recompense of 
its works. But now, by the greater and more admirable grace of the Saviour, 
the punishment of sin is turned to the service of righteousness. For then 
it was proclaimed to man, "If thou sinnest, thou shall die;" now it is said 
to the martyr, "Die, that thou sin not." Then it was said, "If ye trangress 
the commandments, ye shall die;(1) now it is said, "If ye decline death, ye 
transgress the commandment." That which was formerly set as an object of 
terror, that men might not sin, is now to be undergone if we would not sin. 
Thus, by the unutterable mercy of God, even the very punishment of 
wickedness has become the armor of virtue,  and the penalty of the sinner 
becomes the reward of the righteous. For then death was incurred by 
sinning, now righteousness is fulfilled by dying. In the case of the holy 
martyrs it is so; for to them the persecutor proposes the alternative, 
apostasy or death. For the righteous prefer by believing to suffer what the 
first transgressors suffered by not believing. For unless they had sinned, 
they would not have died; but the martyrs sin if they do not die. The one 
died because they sinned, the others do not sin because they die. By the 
guilt of the first, punishment was incurred; by the punishment of the 
second, guilt is prevented. Not that death, which was before an evil, has 
become something good, but only that God has granted to faith this grace, 
that death, which is the admitted opposite to life, should become the 
instrument by which life is reached.

CHAP. 5.--AS THE WICKED MAKE AN ILL USE OF THE LAW, WHICH IS GOOD, SO THE 
GOOD MAKE A GOOD USE OF DEATH, WHICH IS AN ILL.

    The apostle, wishing to show how hurtful a thing sin is, when grace 
does not aid us, has not hesitated to say that the strength of sin is that 
very law by which sin is prohibited. "The sting of death is sin, and the 
strength of sin is the law."(1) Most certainly true; for prohibition 
increases the desire of illicit action, if righteousness is not so loved 
that the desire of sin is conquered by that love. But unless divine grace 
aid us, we cannot love nor delight in true righteousness. But lest the law 
should be thought to be an evil, since it is called the strength of sin, 
the apostle, when treating a similar question in another place, says, "The 
law indeed is holy, and the commandment holy, and just, and good. Was then 
that which is holy made death unto me? God forbid. But sin, that it might 
appear sin, working death in me by that which is good; that sin by the 
commandment might become exceeding sinful."(2) Exceeding, he says, because 
the transgression is more heinous when through the increasing lust of sin 
the law itself also is despised. Why have we thought it worth while to 
mention this? For this reason, because, as the law is not an evil when it 
increases the lust of those who sin, so neither is death a good thing when 
it increases the glory of those who suffer it, since either the former is 
abandoned wickedly, and makes transgressors, or the latter is embraced, for 
the truth's sake, and makes martyrs. And thus the law is indeed good, 
because it is prohibition of sin, and death is evil because it is the wages 
of sin; but as wicked men make an evil use not only of evil, but also of 
good things, so the righteous make a good use not  only of good, but also 
of evil things. Whence it comes to pass that the wicked make an ill use of 
the law, though the law is good; and that the good die well, though death 
is an evil.

CHAP. 6.--OF THE EVIL OF DEATH IN GENERAL, CONSIDERED AS THE SEPARATION OF 
SOUL AND BODY.

    Wherefore, as regards bodily death, that is, the separation of the soul 
from the body,  it is good unto none while it is being endured by those 
whom we say are in the article of death. For the very violence with which 
body and soul are wrenched asunder, which in the living had been conjoined 
and closely intertwined, brings with it a harsh experience, jarring 
horridly on nature so long as it continues, till there comes a total loss 
of sensation, which arose from the very interpenetration of spirit and 
flesh. And all this anguish is sometimes forestalled by one stroke of the 
body or sudden flitting of the soul, the swiftness of which prevents it 
from being felt. But whatever that may be in the dying which with violently 
painful sensation robs of all sensation, yet, when it is piously and 
faithfully borne, it increases the merit of patience, but does not make the 
name of punishment inapplicable. Death, proceeding by ordinary generation 
from the first man, is the punishment of all who are born of him, yet, if 
it be endured for righteousness' sake, it becomes the glory of those who 
are born again; and though death be the award of sin, it sometimes secures 
that nothing be awarded to sin.

CHAP. 7.--OF THE DEATH WHICH THE UN-BAPTIZED(1) SUFFER FOR THE CONFESSION 
OF CHRIST.

    For whatever unbaptized persons die confessing Christ, this confession 
is of the same efficacy for the remission of sins as if they were washed in 
the sacred font of baptism. For He who said, "Except a man be born of water 
and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God,"(2) made also 
an exception in their favor, in that other sentence where He no less 
absolutely said, "Whosoever shall confess me before men, him will I confess 
also before my Father which is in heaven;"(3) and in another place, 
"Whosoever will lose his life for my sake, shall find it."(4) And this 
explains the verse, "Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of His 
saints."(5) For what is more precious than a death by which a man's sins 
are all forgiven, and his merits increased an hundredfold? For those who 
have been baptized when they could no longer escape death, and have 
departed this life with all their sins blotted out have not equal merit 
with those who did not defer death, though it was in their power to do so, 
but preferred to end their life by confessing Christ, rather than by 
denying Him to secure an opportunity of baptism. And even had they denied 
Him under pressure of the fear of death, this too would have been forgiven 
them in that baptism, in which was remitted even the enormous wickedness of 
those who had slain Christ. But how abundant in these men must have been 
the grace of the Spirit, who breathes where He listeth, seeing that they so 
dearly loved Christ as to be unable to deny Him even in so sore an 
emergency, and with so sure a hope of pardon! Precious, therefore, is the 
death of the saints, to whom the grace of Christ has been applied with such 
gracious effects, that they do not hesitate to meet death themselves, if so 
be they might meet Him. And precious is it, also, because it has proved 
that what was originally ordained for the punishment of the sinner, has 
been used for the production of a richer harvest of righteousness. But not 
on this account should we look upon death as a good thing, for it is 
diverted to such useful purposes, not by any virtue of its own, but by the 
divine interference. Death was originally proposed as an object of dread, 
that sin might not be committed; now it must be undergone that sin may not 
be committed, or, if committed, be remitted, and the award of righteousness 
bestowed on him whose victory has earned it.

CHAP. 8.--THAT THE SAINTS, BY SUFFERING THE FIRST DEATH FOR THE TRUTH'S 
SAKE, ARE FREED FROM THE SECOND.

    For if we look at the matter a little more carefully, we shall see that 
even when a man dies faithfully and laudably for the truth's sake, it is 
still death he is avoiding. For he submits to some part of death, for the 
very purpose of avoiding the whole, and the second and eternal death over 
and above. He submits to the separation of soul and body, lest the soul be 
separated both from God and from the body, and so the whole first death be 
completed, and the second death receive him everlastingly. Wherefore death 
is indeed, as I said, good to none while it is being actually suffered, and 
while it is subduing the dying to its power; but it is meritoriously 
endured for the sake of retaining or winning what is good. And regarding 
what happens after death, it is no absurdity to say that death is good to 
the good, and evil to the evil. For the disembodied spirits of the just are 
at rest; but those of the wicked suffer punishment till their bodies rise 
again,--those of the just to life everlasting, and of the others to death 
eternal, which is called the second death.

CHAP. 9.--WHETHER WE SHOULD SAY THAT TIlE MOMENT OF DEATH, IN WHICH 
SENSATION CEASES, OCCURS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF THE DYING OR IN THAT OF THE 
DEAD.

    The point of time in which the souls of the good and evil are separated 
from the body, are we to say it is after death, or in death rather? If it 
is after death, then it is not death which is good or evil, since death is 
done with and past, but it is the life which the soul has now entered on. 
Death was an evil when it was present, that is to say, when it was being 
suffered by the dying; for to them it brought with it a severe and grievous 
experience, which the good make a good use of. But when death is past, how 
can that which no longer is be either good or evil? Still further, if we 
examine the matter more closely, we shall see that even that sore and 
grievous pain which the dying experience is not death itself. For so long 
as they have any sensation, they are certainly still alive; and, if still 
alive, must rather be said to be in a state previous to death than in 
death. For when death actually comes, it robs us of all bodily sensation, 
which, while death is only approaching is painful. And thus it is difficult 
to explain how we speak of those who are not yet dead, but are agonized in 
their last and mortal extremity, as being in the article of death. Yet what 
else can we call them than dying persons? for when death which was imminent 
shall have actually come, we can no longer call them dying but dead. No 
one, therefore, is dying unless living; since even he who is in the last 
extremity of life, and, as we say, giving up the ghost, yet lives. The same 
person is therefore at once dying and living, but drawing near to death, 
departing from life; yet in life, because his spirit yet abides in the 
body; not yet in death, because not yet has his spirit forsaken the body. 
But if, when it has forsaken it, the man is not even then in death, but 
after death, who shall say when he is in death? On the one hand, no one can 
be called dying, if a man cannot be dying and living at, the same time; and 
as long as the soul is in the body, we cannot deny that he is living. On 
the other hand, if the man who is approaching death be rather called dying, 
I know not who is living.

CHAP. 10.--OF THE LIFE OF MORTALS, WHICH IS RATHER TO BE CALLED DEATH THAN 
LIFE.

    For no sooner do we begin to live in this dying body, than we begin to 
move ceaselessly towards death.(1) For in the whole course of this life (if 
life we must call it) its mutability tends towards death. Certainly there 
is no one who is not nearer it this year than last year, and to-morrow than 
to-day, and to-day than yesterday, and a short while hence than now, and 
now than a short while ago. For whatever time we live is deducted from our 
whole term of life, and that which remains is daily becoming less and less; 
so that our whole life is nothing but a race towards death, in which no one 
is allowed to stand still for a little space, or to go somewhat more 
slowly, but all are driven forwards with an impartial movement, and with 
equal rapidity. For he whose life is short spends a day no more swiftly 
than he whose life is longer. But while the equal moments are impartially 
snatched from both, the one has a nearer and the other a more remote goal 
to reach with this their equal speed. It is one thing to make a longer 
journey, and another to walk more slowly. He, therefore, who spends longer 
time on his way to death does not proceed at a more leisurely pace, but 
floes over more ground. Further, if every man begins to die, that is, is in 
death, as soon as death has begun to show itself in him (by taking away 
life, to wit; for when life is all taken away, the man will be then not in 
death, but after death), then he begins to die so soon as he begins to 
live. For what else is going on in all his days, hours, and moments, until 
this slow-working death is fully consummated? And then comes the time after 
death, instead of that in which life was being withdrawn, and which we 
called being in death. Man, then, is never in life from the moment he 
dwells in this dying rather than living body,--if, at least, he cannot be 
in life and death at once. Or rather, shall we say, he is in both?--in 
life, namely, which he lives till all is consumed; but in death also, which 
he dies as his life is consumed? For if he is not in life, what is it which 
is consumed till all be gone? And if he is not in death, what is this 
consumption itself? For when the whole of life has been consumed, the 
expression "after death" would be meaningless, had that consumption not 
been death. And if, when it has all been consumed, a man is not in death 
but after death, when is he in death unless when life is being consumed 
away?

CHAP. 11.--WHETHER ONE CAN BOTH BE LIVING AND DEAD AT THE SAME TIME.

    But if it is absurd to say that a man is in death before he reaches 
death (for to what is his course running as he passes through life, if 
already he is in death?), and if it outrage common usage to speak of a man 
being at once alive and dead, as much as it does so to speak of him as at 
once asleep and awake, it remains to be asked when a man is dying? For, 
before death comes, he is not dying but living; and when death has come, he 
is not dying but dead. The one is before, the other after death. When, 
then, is he in death so that we can say he is dying? For as there are three 
times, before death, in death, after death, so there are three states 
corresponding, living, dying, dead. And it is very hard to define when a 
man is in death or dying, when he is neither living, which is before death, 
nor dead, which is after death, but dying, which is in death. For so long 
as the soul is in the body, especially if consciousness remain, the man 
certainly lives; for body and soul constitute the man. And thus, before 
death, he cannot be said to be in death, but when, on the other hand, the 
soul has departed, and all bodily sensation is extinct, death is past, and 
the man is dead. Between these two states the dying condition finds no 
place; for if a man yet lives, death has not arrived; if he has ceased to 
live, death is past. Never, then, is he dying, that is, comprehended in the 
state of death. So also in the passing of time,--you try to lay your finger 
on the present, and cannot find it, because the present occupies no space, 
but is only the transition of time from the future to the past. Must we 
then conclude that there is thus no death of the body at all? For if there 
is, where is it, since it is in no one, and no one can be in it? Since, 
indeed, if there is yet life, death is not yet; for this state is before 
death, not in death: and if life has already ceased, death is not present; 
for this state is after death, not in death. On the other hand, if there is 
no death before or after, what do we mean when we say "after death," or 
"before death?" This is a foolish way of speaking if there is no death. And 
would that we had lived so well in Paradise that in very truth there were 
now no death! But not only does it now exist, but so grievous a thing is 
it, that no skill is sufficient either to explain or to escape it.

    Let us, then, speak in the customary way,--no man ought to speak 
otherwise,--and let us call the time before death come, "before death;" as 
it is written, "Praise no man before his death."(1) And when it has 
happened, let us say that "after death" this or that took place. And of the 
present time let us speak as best we can, as when we say, "He, when dying, 
made his will, and left this or that to such and such persons,"--though, of 
course, he could not do so unless he were living, and did this rather 
before death than in death. And let us use the same phraseology as 
Scripture uses; for it makes no scruple of saying that the dead are not 
after but in death. So that verse, "For in death there is no remembrance of 
thee."(2) For until the resurrection men are justly said to be in death; as 
every one is said to be in sleep till he awakes. However, though we can say 
of persons in sleep that they are sleeping, we cannot speak in this way of 
the dead, and say they are dying. For, so far as regards the death of the 
body, of which we are now speaking, one cannot say that those who are 
already separated from their bodies continue dying. But this, you see, is 
just what I was saying,--that no words can explain now either the dying are 
said to live, or now the dead are said, even after death, to be in death. 
For how can they be after death if they be in death, especially when we do 
not even call them dying, as we call those in sleep, sleeping; and those in 
languor, languishing; and those in grief, grieving; and those in life, 
living? And yet the dead, until they rise again, are said to be in death, 
but cannot be called dying.

    And therefore I think it has not unsuitably nor inappropriately come to 
pass, though not by the intention of man, yet perhaps with divine purpose, 
that this Latin word moritur cannot be declined by the grammarians 
according to the rule followed by similar words. For oritur gives the form 
ortus est for the perfect; and all similar verbs form this tense from their 
perfect participles. But if we ask the perfect of moritur, we get the 
regular answer mortuus est, with a double u. For thus mortuus is 
pronounced, like fatuus, arduus, conspicuus, and similar words, which are 
not perfect participles but adjectives, and are declined without regard to 
tense. But mortuus, though in form an adjective, is used as perfect 
participle, as if that were to be declined which cannot be declined; and 
thus it has suitably come to pass that, as the thing itself cannot in point 
of fact be declined, so neither can the word significant of the act be 
declined. Yet, by the aid of our Redeemer's grace, we may manage at least 
to decline the second. For that is more grievous still, and, indeed, of all 
evils the worst, since it consists not in the separation of soul and body, 
but in the uniting of both in death eternal. And there, in striking 
contrast to our present conditions, men will not be before or after death, 
but always in death; and thus never living, never dead, but endlessly 
dying. And never can a man be more disastrously in death than when death 
itself shall be deathless.

CHAP. 12.--WHAT DEATH GOD INTENDED, WHEN HE THREATENED OUR FIRST PARENTS 
WITH DEATH IF THEY SHOULD DISOBEY HIS COMMANDMENT.

    When, therefore, it is asked what death it was with which God 
threatened our first parents if they should transgress the commandment they 
had received from Him, and should fail to preserve their obedience,--
whether it was the death of soul, or of body, or of the whole man, or that 
which is called second death,--we must answer, It is all. For the first 
consists of two; the second is the complete death, which consists of all. 
For, as the whole earth consists of many lands, and the Church universal of 
many churches, so death universal consists of all deaths. The first 
consists of two, one of the body, and another of the soul. So that the 
first death is a death of the whole man, since the soul without God and 
without the body suffers punishment for a time: but the second is when the 
soul, without God but with the body, suffers punishment everlasting. When, 
therefore, God said to that first man whom he had placed in Paradise, 
referring to  the forbidden fruit," In the day that thou eatest thereof 
thou shalt surely die,"(1) that threatening included not only the first 
part of the first death, by which the soul is deprived of God; nor only the 
subsequent part of the first death, by which the body is deprived of the 
soul; nor only the whole first death itself, by which the soul is punished 
in separation from God and from the body;--but it includes whatever of 
death there is, even to that final death which is called second, and to 
which none is subsequent.

CHAP. 13.--WHAT WAS THE FIRST PUNISHMENT OF THE TRANSGRESSION OF OUR FIRST 
PARENTS?

    For, as soon as our first parents had transgressed the commandment, 
divine grace forsook them, and they were confounded at their own 
wickedness; and therefore they took fig-leaves (which were possibly the 
first that came to hand in their troubled state of mind), and covered their 
shame; for though their members remained the same, they had shame now where 
they had none before. They experienced a new motion of their flesh, which 
had become disobedient to them, in strict retribution of their own 
disobedience to God. For the soul, revelling in its own liberty, and 
scorning to serve God, was itself deprived of the command it had formerly 
maintained over the body. And because it had willfully deserted its 
superior Lord, it no longer held its own inferior servant; neither could it 
hold the flesh subject, as it would always have been able to do had it 
remained itself subject to God. Then began the flesh to lust against the 
Spirit,(2) in which strife we are born, deriving from the first 
transgression a seed of death, and bearing in our members, and in our 
vitiated nature, the contest or even victory of the flesh.

CHAP. 14.--IN WHAT STATE MAN WAS MADE BY GOD, AND INTO WHAT ESTATE HE FELL 
BY THE CHOICE OF HIS OWN WILL.

    For God, the author of natures, not of vices, created man upright; but 
man, being of his own will corrupted, and justly condemned, begot corrupted 
and condemned children. For we all were in that one man, since we all were 
that one man, who fell into sin by the woman who was made from him before 
the sin. For not yet was the particular form created and distributed to us, 
in which we as individuals were to live, but already the seminal nature was 
there from which we were to be propagated; and this being vitiated by sin, 
and bound by the chain of death, and justly condemned, man could not be 
born of man in any other state. And thus, from the bad use of free will, 
there originated the whole train of evil, which, with its concatenation of 
miseries, convoys the human race from its depraved origin, as from a 
corrupt root, on to the destruction of the second death, which has no end, 
those only being excepted who are freed by the grace of God.

CHAP. 15.--THAT ADAM IN HIS SIN FORSOOK GOD ERE GOD FORSOOK HIM, AND THAT 
HIS FALLING AWAY FROMGOD WAS THE FIRSTDEATH OF THE SOUL.

    It may perhaps be supposed that because God said, "Ye shall die the 
death,"(3) and not "deaths," we should understand only that death which 
occurs when the soul is deserted by God, who is its life; for it was not 
deserted by God, and so deserted Him, but deserted Him, and so was deserted 
by Him. For its own will was the originator of its evil, as God was the 
originator of its motions towards good, both in making it when it was not, 
and in remaking it when it had fallen and perished. But though we suppose 
that God meant only this death, and that the words, "In the day ye eat of 
it ye shall die the death," should be understood as meaning, "In the day ye 
desert me in disobedience, I will desert you in justice," yet assuredly in 
this death the other deaths also were threatened, which were its inevitable 
consequence. For in the first stirring of the disobedient motion which was 
felt in the flesh of the disobedient soul, and which caused our first 
parents to cover their shame, one death indeed is experienced, that, 
namely, which occurs when God forsakes the soul. (This was intimated by the 
words He uttered, when the man, stupefied by fear, had hid himself, "Adam, 
where art thou?"(4)--words which He used not in ignorance of inquiry, but 
warning him to consider where he was, since God was not with him.) But when 
the soul itself forsook the body, corrupted and decayed with age, the other 
death was experienced of which God had spoken in pronouncing man's 
sentence, "Earth thou art, and unto earth shall thou return."(5) And of 
these two deaths that first death of the whole man is composed. And this 
first death is finally followed by the second, unless man be freed by 
grace. For the body would not return to the earth from which it was made, 
save only by the death proper to itself, which occurs when it is forsaken 
of the soul, its life. And therefore it is agreed among all Christians who 
truthfully hold the catholic faith, that we are subject to the death of the 
body, not by the law of nature, by which God ordained no death for man, but 
by His righteous infliction on account of sin; for God, taking vengeance on 
sin, said to the man, in whom we all then were, "Dust thou art, and unto 
dust shall thou return."

CHAP. 16.--CONCERNING THE PHILOSOPHERS WHO THINK THAT THE SEPARATION OF 
SOUL AND BODY IS NOT PENAL, THOUGH PLATO REPRESENTS THE SUPREME DEITY AS 
PROMISING TO THE INFERIOR GODS THAT THEY SHALL NEVER BE DISMISSED FROM 
THEIR BODIES.

    But the philosophers against whom we are defending the city of God, 
that is, His Church seem to themselves to have good cause to deride us, 
because we say that the separation of the soul from the body is to be held 
as part of man' s punishment. For they suppose that the blessedness of the 
soul then only is complete, when it is quite denuded of the body, and 
returns to God a pure and simple, and, as it were, naked soul. On this 
point, if I should find nothing in their own literature to refute this 
opinion, I should be forced laboriously to demonstrate that it is not the 
body, but the corruptibility of the body, which is a burden to the soul. 
Hence that sentence of Scripture we quoted in a foregoing book," For the 
corruptible body presseth down the soul."(1) The word corruptible is added 
to show that the soul is burdened, not by any body whatsoever, but by the 
body such as it has become in consequence of sin. And even though the word 
had not been added, we could understand nothing else. But when Plato most 
expressly declares that the gods who are made by the Supreme have immortal 
bodies, and when he introduces their Maker himself, promising them as a 
great boon that they should abide in their bodies eternally, and never by 
any death be loosed from them, why do these adversaries of ours, for the 
sake of troubling the Christian faith, feign to be ignorant of what they 
quite well know, and even prefer to contradict themselves rather than lose 
an opportunity of contradicting us?  Here are Plato's words, as Cicero has 
translated them,(2) in which he introduces the Supreme addressing the gods 
He had made, and saying, "Ye who are sprung from a divine stock, consider 
of what works I am the parent and author. These (your bodies) are 
indestructible so long as I will it; although all that is composed can be 
destroyed. But it is wicked to dissolve what reason has compacted. But, 
seeing that ye have been born, ye cannot indeed be immortal and 
indestructible; yet ye shall by no means be destroyed, nor shall any fates 
consign you to death, and prove superior to my will, which is a stronger 
assurance of your perpetuity than those bodies to which ye were joined when 
ye were born." Plato, you see, says that the gods are both mortal by the 
connection of the body and soul, and yet are rendered immortal by the will 
and decree of their Maker. If, therefore, it is a punishment to the soul to 
be connected with any body whatever, why does God address them as if they 
were afraid of death, that is, of the separation, of soul and body? Why 
does He seek to reassure them by promising them immortality, not in virtue 
of their nature, which is composite and not simple, but by virtue of His 
invincible will, whereby He can effect that neither things born die, nor 
things compounded be dissolved, but preserved eternally?

    Whether this opinion of Plato's about the stars is true or not, is 
another question. For we cannot at once grant to him that these luminous 
bodies or globes, which by day and night shine on the earth with the light 
of their bodily substance, have also intellectual and blessed souls which 
animate each its own body, as he confidently affirms of the universe 
itself, as if it were one huge animal, in which all other animals were 
contained.(3) But this, as I said, is another question, which we have not 
undertaken to discuss at present. This much only I deemed right to bring 
forward, in opposition to those who so pride themselves on being, or on 
being called Platonists, that they blush to be Christians, and who cannot 
brook to be called by a name which the common people also bear, lest they 
vulgarize the philosophers' coterie, which is proud in proportion to its 
exclusiveness. These men, seeking a weak point in the Christian doctrine, 
select for attack the eternity of the body, as if it were a contradiction 
to contend for the blessedness of the soul, and to wish it to be always 
resident in the body, bound, as it were, in a lamentable chain; and this 
although Plato, their own founder and master, affirms that it was granted 
by the Supreme as a boon to the gods He had made, that they should not die, 
that is, should not be separated from the bodies with which He had 
connected them,

CHAP. 17. AGAINST THOSE WHO AFFIRM THAT EARTHLY BODIES CANNOT BE MADE 
INCORRUPTIBLE AND ETERNAL.

    These same philosophers further contend that terrestrial bodies cannot 
be eternal though they make no doubt that the whole earth, which is itself 
the central member of their god,--not, indeed, of the greatest, but yet of 
a great god, that is, of this whole world,--is eternal. Since, then, the 
Supreme made for them another god, that is, this world, superior to the 
other gods beneath Him; and since they suppose that this god is an animal, 
having, as they affirm, a rational or intellectual soul enclosed in the 
huge mass of its body, and having, as the fitly situated and adjusted 
members of its body, the four elements, whose union they wish to be 
indissoluble and eternal, lest perchance this great god of theirs might 
some day perish; what reason is there that the earth, which is the central 
member in the body of a greater creature, should be eternal, and the bodies 
of other terrestrial creatures should not possibly be eternal if God should 
so will it? But earth, say they, must return to earth, out of which the 
terrestrial bodies of the animals have been taken. For this, they say, is 
the reason of the necessity of their death and dissolution, and this the 
manner of their restoration to the solid and eternal earth whence they 
came. But if any one says the same thing of fire, holding that the bodies 
which are derived from it to make celestial beings must be restored to the 
universal fire, does not the immortality which Plato represents these gods 
as receiving from the Supreme evanesce in the heat of this dispute? Or does 
this not happen with those celestials because God, whose will, as Plato 
says, overpowers all powers, has willed it should not be so? What, then, 
hinders God from ordaining the same of terrestrial bodies? And since, 
indeed, Plato acknowledges that God can prevent things that are born from 
dying, and things that are joined from being sundered, and things that are 
composed from  being dissolved, and can ordain that the souls once allotted 
to their bodies should never abandon them, but enjoy along with them 
immortality and everlasting bliss, why may He not also effect that 
terrestrial bodies die not? Is God powerless to do everything that is 
special to the Christian's creed, but powerful to effect everything the 
Platonists desire? The philosophers, forsooth, have been admitted to a 
knowledge of the divine purposes and power which has been denied to the 
prophets! The truth is, that the Spirit of God taught His prophets so much 
of His will as He thought fit to reveal, but the philosophers, in their 
efforts to discover it, were deceived by human conjecture.

    But they should not have been so led astray, I will not say by their 
ignorance, but by their obstinacy, as to contradict themselves so 
frequently; for they maintain, with all their vaunted might, that in order 
to the happiness of the soul, it must abandon not only its earthly body, 
but every kind of body. And yet they hold that the gods, whose souls are 
most blessed, are bound to everlasting bodies, the celestials to fiery 
bodies, and the soul of Jove himself (or this world, as they would have us 
believe) to all the physical elements which compose this entire mass 
reaching from earth to heaven. For this soul Plato believes to be extended 
and diffused by musical numbers,(1) from the middle of the inside of the 
earth, which geometricians call the centre, outwards through all its parts 
to the utmost heights and extremities of the heavens; so that this world is 
a very great and blessed immortal animal, whose soul has both the perfect 
blessedness of wisdom, and never leaves its own body and whose body has 
life everlasting from the soul, and by no means clogs or hinders it, though 
itself be not a simple body, but compacted of so many and so huge 
materials. Since, therefore, they allow so much to their own conjectures, 
why do they refuse to believe that by the divine will and power immortality 
can be conferred on earthly bodies, in which the souls would be neither 
oppressed with the burden of them, nor separated from them by any death, 
but live eternally and blessedly? Do they not assert that their own gods so 
live in bodies of fire, and that Jove himself, their king, so lives in the 
physical elements? If, in order to its blessedness, the soul must quit 
every kind of body, let their gods flit from the starry spheres, and 
Jupiter from earth to sky; or, if they cannot do so, let them be pronounced 
miserable. But neither alternative will these men adopt. For, on the one 
hand, they dare not ascribe to their own gods a departure from the body, 
lest they should seem to worship mortals; on the other hand, they dare not 
deny their happiness, lest they should acknowledge wretches as gods. 
Therefore, to obtain blessedness, we need not quit every kind of body, but 
only the corruptible, cumbersome, painful, dying,--not such bodies as the 
goodness of God contrived for the first man, but such only as man's sin 
entailed.

CHAP. 18.--OF EARTHLY BODIES, WHICH THE PHILOSOPHERS AFFIRM CANNOT BE IN 
HEAVENLY PLACES, BECAUSE WHATEVER IS OF EARTH IS BY ITS NATURAL WEIGHT 
ATTRACTED TO EARTH.

    But it is necessary, they say, that the natural weight of earthly 
bodies either keeps them on earth or draws them to it; and therefore they 
cannot be in heaven. Our first parents were indeed on earth, in a well-
wooded and fruitful spot, which has been named Paradise. But let our 
adversaries a little more carefully consider this subject of earthly 
weight, because it has important bearings, both on the ascension of the 
body of Christ, and also on the resurrection body of the saints. If human 
skill can by some contrivance fabricate vessels that float, out of metals 
which sink as soon as they are placed on the water, how much more credible 
is it that God, by some occult mode of operation, should even more 
certainly effect that these earthy masses be emancipated from the downward 
pressure of their weight? This cannot be impossible to that God by whose 
almighty will, according to Plato, neither things born perish, nor things 
composed dissolve, especially since it is much more wonderful that 
spiritual and bodily essences be conjoined than that bodies be adjusted to 
other material substances. Can we not also easily believe that souls, being 
made perfectly blessed, should be endowed with the power of moving their 
earthy but incorruptible bodies as they please, with almost spontaneous 
movement, and of placing them where they please with the readiest action? 
If the angels transport whatever terrestrial creatures they please from any 
place they please, and convey them whither they please, is it to be 
believed that they cannot do so without toil and the feeling of burden? 
Why, then, may we not believe that the spirits of the saints, made perfect 
and blessed by divine grace, can carry their own bodies where they please, 
and set them where they will? For, though we have been accustomed to 
notice, in bearing weights, that the larger the quantity the greater the 
weight of earthy bodies is, and that the greater the weight the more 
burdensome it is, yet the soul carries the members of its own flesh with 
less difficulty when they are massive with health, than in sickness when 
they are wasted. And though the hale and strong man feels heavier to other 
men carrying him than the lank and sickly, yet the man himself moves and 
carries his own body with less feeling of burden when he has the greater 
bulk of vigorous health, than when his frame is reduced to a minimum by 
hunger or disease. Of such consequence, in estimating the weight of earthly 
bodies, even while yet corruptible and mortal, is the consideration not of 
dead weight, but of the healthy equilibrium of the parts. And what words 
can tell the difference between what we now call health and future 
immortality? Let not the philosophers, then, think to upset our faith with 
arguments from the weight of bodies; for I don't care to inquire why they 
cannot believe an earthly body can be in heaven, while the whole earth is 
suspended on nothing. For perhaps the world keeps its central place by the 
same law that attracts to its centre all heavy bodies. But this I say, if 
the lesser gods, to whom Plato committed the creation of man and the other 
terrestrial creatures, were able, as he affirms, to withdraw from the fire 
its quality of burning, while they left it that of lighting, so that it 
should shine through the eyes; and if to the supreme God Plato also 
concedes the power of preserving from death things that have been born, and 
of preserving from dissolution things that are composed of parts so 
different as body and spirit;--are we to hesitate to concede to this same 
God the power to operate on the flesh of him whom He has endowed with 
immortality, so as to withdraw its corruption but leave its nature, remove 
its burdensome weight but retain its seemly form and members? But 
concerning our belief in the resurrection of the dead, and concerning their 
immortal bodies, we shall speak more at large, God willing, in the end of 
this work.

CHAP. 19.--AGAINST THE OPINION OF THOSE WHO DO NOT BELIEVE THAT THE 
PRIMITIVE MEN WOULD HAVE BEEN IMMORTAL IF THEY HAD NOT SINNED.

    At present let us go on, as we have begun, to give some explanation 
regarding the bodies of our first parents. I say then, that, except as the 
just consequence of sin, they would not have been subjected even to this 
death, which is good to the good,--this death, which is not exclusively 
known and believed in by a few, but is known to all, by which soul and body 
are separated, and by which the body of an animal which was but now visibly 
living is now visibly dead. For though there can be no manner of doubt that 
the souls of the just and holy dead live in peaceful rest, yet so much 
better would it be for them to be alive in healthy, well-conditioned 
bodies, that even those who hold the tenet that it is most blessed to be 
quit of every kind of body, condemn this opinion in spite of themselves. 
For no one will dare to set wise men, whether yet to die or already dead,--
in other words, whether already quit of the body, or shortly to be so,--
above the immortal gods, to whom the Supreme, in Plato, promises as a 
munificent gift life indissoluble, or in eternal union with their bodies. 
But this same Plato thinks that nothing better can happen to men than that 
they pass through life piously and justly, and, being separated from their 
bodies, be received into the bosom of the gods, who never abandon theirs; 
"that, oblivious of the past, they may revisit the upper air, and conceive 
the longing to return again to the body."(1) Virgil is applauded for 
borrowing this from the Platonic system. Assuredly Plato thinks that the 
souls of mortals cannot always be in their bodies, but must necessarily be 
dismissed by death; and, on the other hand, he thinks that without bodies 
they cannot endure for ever, but with ceaseless alternation pass from life 
to death, and from death to life. This difference, however, he sets between 
wise men and the rest, that they are carried after death to the stars, that 
each man may repose for a while in a star suitable for him, and may thence 
return to the labors and miseries of mortals when he has become oblivious 
of his former misery, and possessed with the desire of being embodied. 
Those, again, who have lived foolishly transmigrate into bodies fit for 
them, whether human or bestial. Thus he has appointed even the good and 
wise souls to a very hard lot indeed, since they do not receive such bodies 
as they might always and even immortally inhabit, but such only as they can 
neither permanently retain nor enjoy eternal purity without. Of this notion 
of Plato's, we have in a former book already said(2) that Porphyry was 
ashamed in the light of these Christian times, so that he not only 
emancipated human souls from a destiny in the bodies of beasts but also 
contended for the liberation of the souls of the wise from all bodily ties, 
so that, escaping from all flesh, they might, as bare and blessed souls, 
dwell with the Father time without end. And that he might not seem to be 
outbid by Christ's promise of life everlasting to His saints, he also 
established purified souls in endless felicity, without return to their 
former woes; but, that he might contradict Christ, he denies the 
resurrection of incorruptible bodies, and maintains that these souls will 
live eternally, not only without earthly bodies, but without any bodies at 
all. And yet, whatever he meant by this teaching, he at least did not teach 
that these souls should offer no religious observance to the gods who dwelt 
in bodies. And why did he not, unless because he did not believe that the 
souls, even though separate from the body, were superior to those gods? 
Wherefore, if these philosophers will not dare (as I think they will not) 
to set human souls above the gods who are most blessed, and yet are tied 
eternally to their bodies, why do they find that absurd which the Christian 
faith preaches,(3) namely, that our first parents were so created that, if 
they had not sinned, they would not have been dismissed from their bodies 
by any death, but would have been endowed with immortality as the reward of 
their obedience, and would have lived eternally with their bodies; and 
further, that the saints will in the resurrection inhabit those very bodies 
in which they have here toiled, but in such sort that neither shall any 
corruption or unwieldiness be suffered to attach to their flesh, nor any 
grief or trouble to cloud their felicity?

CHAP. 20.--THAT THE FLESH NOW RESTING IN PEACE SHALL BE RAISED TO A 
PERFECTION NOT ENJOYED BY THE FLESH OF OUR FIRST PARENTS.

    Thus the souls of departed saints are not affected by the death which 
dismisses them from their bodies, because their flesh rests in hope, no 
matter what indignities it receives after sensation is gone. For they do 
not desire that their bodies be forgotten, as Plato thinks fit, but rather, 
because they remember what has been promised by Him who deceives no man, 
and who gave them security for the safe keeping even of the hairs of their 
head, they with a longing patience wait in hope of the resurrection of 
their bodies, in which they have suffered many hardships, and are now to 
suffer never again. For if they did not "hate their own flesh," when it, 
with its native infirmity, opposed their will, and had to be constrained by 
the spiritual law, how much more shall they love it, when it shall even 
itself have become spiritual! For as, when the spirit serves the flesh, it 
is fitly called carnal, so, when the flesh serves the spirit, it will 
justly be called spiritual. Not that it is converted into spirit, as some 
fancy from the words, "It is sown in corruption, it is raised in 
incorruption,"(4) but because it is subject to the spirit with a perfect 
and marvellous readiness of obedience, and responds in all things to the 
will that has entered on immortality,-all reluctance, all corruption, and 
all slowness being removed. For the body will not only be better than it 
was here in its best estate of health, but it will surpass the bodies of 
our first parents ere they sinned. For, though they were not to die unless 
they should sin, yet they used food as men do now, their bodies not being 
as yet spiritual, but animal only. And though they decayed not with years, 
nor drew nearer to death,--a condition secured to them in God's marvellous 
grace by the tree of life, which grew along with the forbidden tree in the 
midst of Paradise,--yet they took other nourishment, though not of that one 
tree, which was interdicted not because it was itself bad, but for the sake 
of commending a pure and simple obedience, which is the great virtue of the 
rational creature set under the Creator as his Lord. For, though no evil 
thing was touched, yet if a thing forbidden was touched, the very 
disobedience was sin. They were, then, nourished by other fruit, which they 
took that their animal bodies might not suffer the discomfort of hunger or 
thirst; but they tasted the tree of life, that death might not steal upon 
them from any quarter, and that they might not, spent with age, decay. 
Other fruits were, so to speak, their nourishment, but this their 
sacrament. So that the tree of life would seem to have been in the 
terrestrial Paradise what the wisdom of God is in the spiritual, of which 
it is written, "She is a tree of life to them that lay hold upon her."(1)

CHAP. 21.--OF PARADISE, THAT IT CAN BE UNDERSTOOD IN A SPIRITUAL SENSE 
WITHOUT SACRIFICING THE HISTORIC TRUTH OF THE NARRATIVE REGARDING THE REAL 
PLACE.

    On this account some allegorize all that concerns Paradise itself, 
where the first men, the parents of the human race, are, according to the 
truth of holy Scripture, recorded to have been; and they understand all its 
trees and fruit-bearing plants as virtues and habits of life, as if they 
had no existence in the external world, but were only so spoken of or 
related for the sake of spiritual meanings. As if there could not be a real 
terrestrial Paradise! As if there never existed these two women, Sarah and 
Hagar, nor the two sons who were born to Abraham, the one of the bond 
woman, the other of the free, because the apostle says that in them the two 
covenants were prefigured; or as if water never flowed from the rock when 
Moses struck it, because therein Christ can be seen in a figure, as the 
same apostle says, "Now that rock was Christ!"(2) No one, then, denies that 
Paradise may signify the life of the blessed; its four rivers, the four 
virtues, prudence, fortitude, temperance, and justice; its trees, all 
useful knowledge; its fruits, the customs of the godly; its tree of life, 
wisdom herself, the mother of all good; and the tree of the knowledge of 
good and evil, the experience of a broken commandment. The punishment which 
God appointed was in itself, a just, and therefore a good thing; but man's 
experience of it is not good.

    These things can also and more profitably be understood of the Church, 
so that they become prophetic foreshadowings of things to come. Thus 
Paradise is the Church, as it is called in the Canticles;(3) the four 
rivers of Paradise are the four gospels; the fruit-trees the saints, and 
the fruit their works; the tree of life is the holy of holies, Christ; the 
tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the will's free choice. For if man 
despise the will of God, he can only destroy himself; and so he learns the 
difference between consecrating himself to the common good and revelling in 
his own. For he who loves himself is abandoned to himself, in order that, 
being overwhelmed with fears and sorrows, he may cry, if there be yet soul 
in him to feel his ills, in the words of the psalm, "My soul is cast down 
within me,"(4) and when chastened, may say," Because of his strength I will 
wait upon Thee."(5) These and similar allegorical interpretations may be 
suitably put upon Paradise without giving offence to any one, while yet we 
believe the strict truth of the history, confirmed by its circumstantial 
narrative of facts(6)

CHAP. 22.--THAT THE BODIES OF THE SAINTS SHALL AFTER THE RESURRECTION BE 
SPIRITUAL, AND YET FLESH SHALL NOT BE CHANGED INTO SPIRIT.

    The bodies of the righteous, then, such as they shall be in the 
resurrection, shall need neither any fruit to preserve them from dying of 
disease or the wasting decay of old age, nor any other physical nourishment 
to allay the cravings of hunger or of thirst; for they shall be invested 
with so sure and every way inviolable an immortality, that they shall not 
eat save when they choose, nor be under the necessity of eating, while they 
enjoy the power of doing so. For so also was it with the angels who 
presented themselves to the eye and touch of men, not because they could do 
no otherwise, but because they were able and desirous to suit themselves to 
men by a kind of manhood ministry. For neither are we to suppose, when men 
receive them as guests, that the angels eat only in appearance, though to 
any who did not know them to be angels they might seem to eat from the same 
necessity as ourselves. So these words spoken in the Book of Tobit, "You 
saw me eat, but you saw it but in vision;"(1) that is, you thought I took 
food as you do for the sake of refreshing my body. But if in the case of 
the angels another opinion seems more capable of defence, certainly our 
faith leaves no room to doubt regarding our Lord Himself, that even after 
His resurrection, and when now in spiritual but yet real flesh, He ate and 
drank with His disciples; for not the power, but the need, of eating and 
drinking is taken from these bodies. And so they will be spiritual, not 
because they shall cease to be bodies, but because they shall subsist by 
the quickening spirit.

CHAP. 23.--WHAT WE ARE TO UNDERSTAND BY THE ANIMAL AND SPIRITUAL BODY; OR 
OF THOSE WHO DIE IN ADAM, AND OF THOSE WHO ARE MADE ALIVE IN CHRIST.

    For as those bodies of ours, that have a living soul, though not as yet 
a quickening spirit, are called soul-informed bodies, and yet are not souls 
but bodies, so also those bodies are called spiritual,--yet God forbid we 
should therefore suppose them to be spirits and not bodies,--which, being 
quickened by the Spirit, have the substance, but not the unwieldiness and 
corruption of flesh. Man will then be not earthly but heavenly,--not 
because the body will not be that very body which was made of earth, but 
because by its heavenly endowment it will be a fit inhabitant of heaven, 
and this not by losing its nature, but by changing its quality. The first 
man, of the earth earthy, was made a living soul, not a quickening spirit,-
-which rank was reserved for him as the reward of obedience. And therefore 
his body, which required meat and drink to satisfy hunger and thirst, and 
which had no absolute and indestructible immortality, but by means of the 
tree of life warded off the necessity of dying, and was thus maintained in 
the flower of youth,--this body, I say, was doubtless not spiritual, but 
animal; and yet it would not have died but that it provoked God's 
threatened vengeance by offending. And though sustenance was not denied him 
even outside Paradise, yet, being forbidden the tree of life, he was 
delivered over to the wasting Of time, at least in respect of that life 
which, had he not sinned, he might have retained perpetually in Paradise, 
though only in an animal body, till such time as it became spiritual in 
acknowledgment of his obedience.

    Wherefore, although we understand that this manifest death, which 
consists in the separation of soul and body, was also signified by God when 
He said, "In the day thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die,"(2) it 
ought not on that account to seem absurd that they were not dismissed from 
the body on that very day on which they took the forbidden and death-
bringing fruit. For certainly on that very day their nature was altered for 
the worse and vitiated, and by their most just banishment from the tree of 
life they were involved in the necessity even of bodily death, in which 
necessity we are born. And therefore the apostle does not say, "The body 
indeed is doomed to die on account of sin," but he says, "The body indeed 
is dead because of sin." Then he adds, "But if the Spirit of Him that 
raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you, He that raised up Christ from 
the dead shall also quicken your mortal bodies by His Spirit that dwelleth 
in you."(3) Then accordingly shall the body become a quickening spirit 
which is now a living soul; and yet the apostle calls it "dead," because 
already it lies under the necessity of dying. But in Paradise it was so 
made a living soul, though not a quickening spirit, that it could not 
properly be called dead, for, save through the commission of sin, it could 
not come under the power of death. Now, since God by the words, "Adam, 
where art thou?" pointed to the death of the soul, which results when He 
abandons it, and since in the words, "Earth thou art, and unto earth shalt 
thou return,"(4) He signified the death of the body, which results when the 
soul departs from it, we are led, therefore, to believe that He said 
nothing of the second death, wishing it to be kept hidden, and reserving it 
for the New Testament dispensation, in which it is most plainly revealed. 
And this He did in order that, first of all, it might be evident that this 
first death, which is common to all, was the result of that sin which in 
one man became common to all.(5) But the second death is not common to all, 
those being excepted who were "called according to His purpose. For whom He 
did foreknow, He also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of His 
Son, that He might be the first-born among many brethren."(1) Those the 
grace of God has, by a Mediator, delivered from the second death.

    Thus the apostle states that the first man was made in an animal body. 
For, wishing to distinguish the animal body which now is from the 
spiritual, which is to be in the resurrection, he says, "It is sown in 
corruption, it is raised in incorruption: it is sown in dishonor, it is 
raised in glory: it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power: it is sown 
a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body." Then, to prove this, he 
goes on, "There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body." And to 
show what the animated body is, he says, "Thus it was written, The first 
man Adam was made a living soul, the last Adam was made a quickening 
spirit."(2) He wished thus to show what the animated body is, though 
Scripture did not say of the first man Adam, when his soul was created by 
the breath of God, "Man was made in an animated body," but "Man was made a 
living soul."(3) By these words, therefore, "The first man was made a 
living soul," the apostle wishes man's animated body to be understood. But 
how he wishes the spiritual body to be understood he shows when he adds, 
"But the last Adam was made a quickening spirit," plainly referring to 
Christ, who has so risen from the dead that He cannot die any more. He then 
goes on to say, "But that was not first which is spiritual, but that which 
is natural; and afterward that which is spiritual." And here he much more 
clearly asserts that he referred to the animal body when he said that the 
first man was made a living soul, and to the spiritual when he said that 
the last man was made a quickening spirit. The animal body is the first, 
being such as the first Adam had, and which would not have died had he not 
sinned, being such also as we now have, its nature being changed and 
vitiated by sin to the extent of bringing us under the necessity of death, 
and being such as even Christ condescended first of all to assume, not 
indeed of necessity, but of choice; but afterwards comes the spiritual 
body, which already is worn by anticipation by Christ as our head, and will 
be worn by His members in the resurrection of the dead.

    Then the apostle subjoins a notable difference between these two men, 
saying, "The first man is of the earth, earthy; the second man is the Lord 
from heaven. As is the earthy, such are they also that are earthy, and as 
is the heavenly, such are they also that are heavenly. And as we have borne 
the image of the earthy, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly."(4) 
So he elsewhere says, "As many of you as have been baptized into Christ 
have put on Christ;"(5) but in very deed this shall be accomplished when 
that which is animal in us by our birth shall have become spiritual in our 
resurrection. For, to use his words again," We are saved by hope."(6) Now 
we bear the image of the earthly man by the propagation of sin and death, 
which pass on us by ordinary generation; but we bear the image of the 
heavenly by the grace of pardon and life eternal, which regeneration 
confers upon us through the Mediator of God and men, the Man Christ Jesus. 
And He is the heavenly Man of Paul's passage, because He came from heaven 
to be clothed with a body Of earthly mortality, that He might clothe it 
with heavenly immortality. And he calls others heavenly, because by grace 
they become His members, that, together with them, He may become one 
Christ, as head and body. In the same epistle he puts this yet more 
clearly: "Since by man came death, by Man came also the resurrection of the 
dead. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made 
alive,"(7)--that is to say, in a spiritual body which shall be made a 
quickening spirit. Not that all who die in Adam shall be members of 
Christ,--for the great majority shall be punished in eternal death,--but he 
uses the word "all" in both Clauses, because, as no one dies in an animal 
body except in Adam, so no one is quickened a spiritual body save in 
Christ. We are not, then, by any means to suppose that we shall in the 
resurrection have such a body as the first man had before he sinned, nor 
that the words, "As is the earthy such are they also that are earthy," are 
to be understood of that which was brought about by sin; for we are not to 
think that Adam had a spiritual body before he fell, and that, in 
punishment of his sin, it was changed into an animal body. If this be 
thought, small heed has been given to the words of so great a teacher, who 
says. "There is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body; as it is 
written, The first man Adam was made a living soul." Was it after sin he 
was made so? or was not this the primal condition of man from which the 
blessed apostle selects his testimony to show what the animal body is?

CHAP. 24.--HOW WE MUST UNDERSTAND THAT BREATHING OF GOD BY WHICH "THE FIRST 
MAN WAS MADE A LIVING SOUL," AND THAT ALSO BY WHICH THE LORD CONVEYED HIS 
SPIRIT TO HIS DISCIPLES WHEN HE SAID, "RECEIVE YE THE HOLY GHOST."

    Some have hastily supposed from the words, "God breathed into Adam's 
nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul,(1)" that a soul 
was not then first given to man, but that the soul already given was 
quickened by the Holy Ghost. They are encouraged in this supposition by the 
fact that the Lord Jesus after His resurrection breathed on His disciples, 
and said, "Receive ye the Holy Spirit."(2) From this they suppose that the 
same thing was effected in either case, as if the evangelist had gone on to 
say, And they became living souls. But if he had made this addition, we 
should only understand that the Spirit is in some way the life of souls, 
and that without Him reasonable souls must be accounted dead, though their 
bodies seem to live before our eyes. But that this was not what happened 
when man was created, the very words of the narrative sufficiently show: 
"And God made man dust of the earth;" which some have thought to render 
more clearly by the words, "And God formed man of the clay of the earth." 
For it had before been said that "there went up a mist from the earth, and 
watered the whole face of the ground,"(3) in order that the reference to 
clay, formed of this moisture and dust, might be understood. For on this 
verse there immediately follows the announcement, "And God created man dust 
of the earth;" so those Greek manuscripts have it from which this passage 
has been translated into Latin. But whether one prefers to read "created" 
or "formed," where the Greek reads e'plasen, is of little importance; yet 
"formed" is the better rendering. But those who preferred "created" thought 
they thus avoided the ambiguity arising from the fact, that in the Latin 
language the usage obtains that those are said to form a thing who frame 
some feigned and fictitious thing. This man, then, who was created of the 
dust of the earth, or of the moistened dust or clay,--this "dust of the 
earth" (that I may use the express words of Scripture) was made, as the 
apostle teaches, an animated body when he received a soul. This man, he 
says, "was made a living soul;" that is, this fashioned dust was made a 
living soul.

    They say, Already he had a soul, else he would not be called a man; for 
man is not a body alone, nor a soul alone, but a being composed of both. 
This, indeed, is true, that the soul is not the whole man, but the better 
part of man; the body not the whole, but the inferior part of man; and that 
then, when both are joined, they receive the name of man, which, however, 
they do not severally lose even when we speak of them singly. For who is 
prohibited from saying, in colloquial usage, "That man is dead, and is now 
at rest or in torment," though this can be spoken only of the soul; or "He 
is buried in such and such a place," though this refers only to the body? 
Will they say that Scripture follows no such usage? On the contrary, it so 
thoroughly adopts it, that even while a man is alive, and body and soul are 
united, it calls each of them singly by the name "man," speaking of the 
soul as the "inward man," and of the body as the "outward man,"(4) as if 
there were two men, though both together are indeed but one. I But we must 
understand in what sense man is said to be in the image of God, and is yet 
dust, and to return to the dust. The former is spoken of the rational soul, 
which God by His breathing, or, to speak more appropriately, by His 
inspiration, conveyed to man, that is, to his body; but the latter refers 
to his body, which God formed of the dust, and to which a soul was given, 
that it might become a living body, that is, that man might become a living 
soul.

    Wherefore, when our Lord breathed on His disciples, and said, "Receive 
ye the Holy Ghost," He certainly wished it to be understood that the Holy 
Ghost was not only the Spirit of the Father, but of the only begotten Son 
Himself. For the same Spirit is, indeed, the Spirit of the Father and of 
the Son, making with them the trinity of Father, Son, and Spirit, not a 
creature, but the Creator. For neither was that material breath which 
proceeded from the mouth of His flesh the very substance and nature of the 
Holy Spirit, but rather the intimation, as I said, that the Holy Spirit was 
common to the Father and to the Son; for they have not each a separate 
Spirit, but both one and the same. Now this Spirit is always spoken of in 
sacred Scripture by the Greek word pneu^ma, as the Lord, too, named Him in 
the place cited when He gave Him to His disciples, and intimated the gift 
by the breathing of His lips; and there does not occur to me any place in 
the whole Scriptures where He is otherwise named. But in this passage where 
it is said, "And the Lord formed man dust of the earth, and breathed, or 
inspired, into his face the breath of life;" the Greek has not pneu^ma, the 
usual word for the Holy Spirit, but pnoh', a word more frequently used of 
the creature than of the Creator; and for this reason some Latin 
interpreters have preferred to render it by "breath" rather than "spirit." 
For this word occurs also in the Greek in Isa. lvii. 16, where God says, "I 
have made all breath," meaning, doubtless, all souls. Accordingly, this 
word pnoh' is sometimes rendered "breath," sometimes "spirit," sometimes 
"inspiration," sometimes "aspiration," sometimes "soul," even when it is 
used of God. Pneu^ma, on the other hand, is uniformly rendered "spirit," 
whether of man, of whom the apostle says, "For What man knoweth the things 
of a man, save the spirit of man which is in him?"(1) or of beast, as in 
the book of Solomon, "Who knoweth the spirit of man that goeth upward, and 
the spirit of the beast that goeth downward to the earth?"(2) or of that 
physical spirit which is called wind, for so the Psalmist calls it: "Fire 
and hail; snow and vapors; stormy wind;"(3) or of the uncreated Creator 
Spirit, of whom the Lord said in the gospel, "Receive ye the Holy Ghost," 
indicating the gift by the breathing of His mouth; and when He says, "Go ye 
and baptize all nations in the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the 
Holy Ghost,"(4) words which very expressly and excellently commend the 
Trinity; and where it is said, "God is a Spirit;"(5) and in very many other 
places of the sacred writings. In all these quotations from Scripture we do 
not find in the Greek the word pnoh' used, but peu^ma, and in the Latin, 
not flatus, but spiritus. Wherefore, referring again to that place where it 
is written, "He inspired," or to speak more properly, "breathed into his 
face the breath of life," even though the Greek had not used pnoh' (as it 
has) but pneu^ma, it would not on that account necessarily follow that the 
Creator Spirit, who in the Trinity is distinctively called the Holy Ghost, 
was meant, since, as has been said, it is plain that pneu^ma is used not 
only of the Creator, but also of the creature.

    But, say they, when the Scripture used the word "spirit,"(6) it would 
not have added "of life" unless it meant us to understand the Holy Spirit; 
nor, when it said, "Man became a soul," would it also have inserted the 
word "living" unless that life of the soul were signified which is imparted 
to it from above by the gift of God. For, seeing that the soul by itself 
has a proper life of its own, what need, they ask, was there of adding 
living, save only to show that the life which is given it by the Holy 
Spirit was meant? What is this but to fight strenuously for their own 
conjectures, while they carelessly neglect the teaching of Scripture? 
Without troubling themselves much, they might have found in a preceding 
page of this very book of Genesis the words, "Let the earth bring forth the 
living soul,"(7) when all the terrestrial animals were created. Then at a 
slight interval, but still in the same book, was it impossible for them to 
notice this verse, "All in whose nostrils was the breath of life, of all 
that was in the dry land, died," by which it was signified that all the 
animals which lived on the earth had perished in the deluge? If, then, we 
find that Scripture is accustomed to speak both of the "living soul" and 
the "spirit of life" even in reference to beasts; and if in this place, 
where it is said, "All things which have the spirit of life," the word 
pnoh', not pneu^ma, is used; why may we not say, What need was there to add 
"living," since the soul cannot exist without being alive? or, What need to 
add "of life" after the word spirit? But we understand that Scripture used 
these expressions in its ordinary style so long as it speaks of animals, 
that is, animated bodies, in which the soul serves as the residence of 
sensation; but when man is spoken of, we forget the ordinary and 
established usage of Scripture, whereby it signifies that man received a 
rational soul, which was not produced out of the waters and the earth like 
the other living creatures, but was created by the breath of God. Yet this 
creation was ordered that the human soul should live in an animal body, 
like those other animals of which the Scripture said, "Let the earth 
produce every living soul," and regarding which it again says that in them 
is the breath of life, where the word <greek>pnoh</greek> and not 
<greek>pneuma</greek> is used in the Greek, and where certainly not the 
Holy Spirit, but their spirit, is signified under that name.

    But, again, they object that breath is understood to have been emitted 
from the mouth of God; and if we believe that is the soul, we must 
consequently acknowledge it to be of the same substance, and equal to that 
wisdom, which says, "I come out of the mouth of the Most High."(8) Wisdom, 
indeed, does not-say it was breathed out of the mouth of God, but proceeded 
out of it. But as we are able, when we breathe, to make a breath, not of 
our own human nature, but of the surrounding air, which we inhale and 
exhale as we draw our breath and breathe again, so almighty God was able to 
make breath, not of His own nature, nor of the creature beneath Him, but 
even of nothing; and this breath, when He communicated it to man's body, He 
is most appropriately said to have breathed or inspired,--the Immaterial 
breathing it also immaterial, but the Immutable not also the immutable; for 
it was created, He uncreated. Yet that these persons who are forward to 
quote Scripture, and yet know not the usages of its language, may know that 
not only what is equal and consubstantial with God is said to proceed out 
of His mouth, let them hear or read what God says: "So then because thou 
art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my 
mouth."(1)

    There is no ground, then, for our objecting, when the apostle so 
expressly distinguishes the animal body from the spiritual--that is to say, 
the body in which we now are from that in which we are to be. He says, "It 
is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body. There is a natural 
body, and there is a spiritual body. And so it is written, The first man 
Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit. 
Howbeit that was not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural; 
and afterward that which is spiritual. The first man is of the earth, 
earthy; the second man is the Lord from heaven. As is the earthy, such are 
they also that are earthy; and as is the heavenly, such are they also that 
are heavenly. And as we have borne the image of the earthy, we shall also 
bear the image of the heavenly."(2) Of all which words of his we have 
previously spoken. The animal body, accordingly, in which the apostle says 
that the first man Adam was made, was not so made that it could not die at 
all, but so that it should not die unless he should have sinned. That body, 
indeed, which shall be made spiritual and immortal by the quickening Spirit 
shall not be able to die at all; as the soul has been created immortal, and 
therefore, although by sin it may be said to die, and does lose a certain 
life of its own, namely, the Spirit of God, by whom it was enabled to live 
wisely and blessedly, yet it does not cease living a kind of life, though a 
miserable, because it is immortal by creation. So, too, the rebellious 
angels, though by sinning they did in a sense die, because they forsook 
God, the Fountain of life, which while they drank they were able to live 
wisely and well, yet they could not so die as to utterly cease living and 
feeling, for they are immortals by creation. And so, after the final 
judgment, they shall be hurled into the second death, and not even there be 
deprived of life or of sensation, but shall suffer torment. But those men 
who have been embraced by God's grace, and are become the fellow-citizens 
of the holy angels who have continued in bliss, shall never more either sin 
or die, being endued with spiritual bodies; yet, being clothed with 
immortality, such as the angels enjoy, of which they cannot be divested 
even by sinning, the nature of their flesh shall continue the same, but all 
carnal corruption and unwieldiness shall be removed.

    There remains a question which must be discussed, and, by the help of 
the Lord God of truth, solved: If the motion of concupiscence in the unruly 
members of our first parents arose out of their sin, and only when the 
divine grace deserted them; and if it was on that occasion that their eyes 
were opened to see, or, more exactly, notice their nakedness, and that they 
covered their shame because the shameless motion of their members was not 
subject to their will,--how, then, would they have begotten children had 
they remained sinless as they were created? But as this book must be 
concluded, and so large a question cannot be summarily disposed of, we may 
relegate it to the following book, in which it will be more conveniently 
treated.


Taken from "The Early Church Fathers and Other Works" originally published 
by Wm. B. Eerdmans Pub. Co. in English in Edinburgh, Scotland, beginning in 
1867. (LNPF I/II, Schaff). The digital version is by The Electronic Bible 
Society, P.O. Box 701356, Dallas, TX 75370, 214-407-WORD.

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