Read City of God (Penguin Classics) Online
Authors: Saint Augustine
City of God (Penguin Classics) (127 page)
My heart has given vent to a noble subject; I am addressing my composition to the king. My tongue is the pen of a swift writer. You are more handsome than all the sons of men; grace has been poured on your lips, because God has blessed you for ever. Gird your sword on your thigh, most mighty one, in your majesty and beauty; arise and advance in prosperity and reign in the cause of truth, kindness and justice; and your right hand will lead you marvellously. Your arrows are sharp, most mighty one -peoples will fall beneath your sway – against the hearts of the king’s enemies. Your throne, O God, is for ever and ever, the sceptre of your rule is a sceptre of uprightness. You have loved justice and hated unrighteousness: therefore God, your God, has anointed you with the oil of exultation, in preference to your fellows. Myrrh, aloes, and cassia give fragrance from your garments, from palaces of ivory, from which the king’s daughters have given you delight, in your honour.
109
No one, however slow of wit, could fail to recognize in this passage the Christ whom we proclaim and in whom we believe, when he hears of ‘God, whose throne is for ever and ever’, and to recognize God’s anointed, anointed, be it understood, as God anoints – not with the visible oil but with the spiritual and intelligible chrism. For is there anyone so uninformed about our religion, or so deaf to its widespread renown, that he does not know that the name Christ is derived from ‘chrism’, that is from anointing? But as soon as he has recognized Christ as the king, let him subject himself to the king who reigns in the cause of truth, kindness, and justice, and let him inquire at leisure into all the allegorical descriptions of this psalm. Let him discover how
Christ’s beauty excels all the sons of men, with a kind of loveliness that calls forth the more love and admiration for not being mere physical grace, and let him find the meaning of his sword, his arrows and all the other details which are given for their allegorical meaning, not as literal description.
Then let him turn his attention to Christ’s Church, wedded to so great a husband by a spiritual marriage and a divine love, the Church which is described in the following verses:
The queen has taken her place at your right hand, in a garment of cloth of gold, swathed in a many-coloured robe. Listen, daughter; see, and incline your ear: forget your people and your father’s home. For the king has desired your beauty, because he himself is your God. And the daughters of Tyre will do you reverence with gifts; the rich among the people will beg for your regard. All the glory of that king’s daughter is within, swathed in a many-coloured robe with golden fringes. Her maidens will be brought to the king after her, her companions will be brought to you. They will be brought with joy and exultation; they will be led into the king’s temple. In place of your fathers there are sons born to you; you will make them princes over all the earth. They will remember your name in every succeeding generation. Therefore the nations will acknowledge your praise for ever and ever.
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I do not imagine that anyone is such a fool as to think that some mere woman is here praised and described, as the wife, that is, of one who is thus addressed: ‘Your throne, O God, is for ever and ever; the sceptre of your kingdom is a sceptre of uprightness. You have loved justice and hated unrighteousness; therefore God, your God, has anointed you with the oil of gladness, in preference to your fellows.’
111
Obviously, this is Christ, anointed above his Christian followers. For they are his followers, from whose unity and concord in all nations that queen comes into being, who in another psalm is described as ‘the city of the great king.’
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This queen is Sion, in the spiritual sense. The name Sion means ‘contemplation’;
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for she contemplates the great blessing of the age to come, since all her striving is directed to that end. She is also Jerusalem, in the same spiritual sense, which is a point on which I have already said a great deal. Her enemy is Babylon, the city of the Devil, whose name means ‘confusion.’
114
However, this queen among the nations is set free from that Babylon by rebirth, and passes over
from the worst to the best of kings, that is, from the Devil to Christ. That is why she is told to ‘forget your people and your father’s home.’ Those who are Israelites only by physical descent, and not by faith, are a part of that godless city; they are also enemies of this great king himself, and of his queen. For Christ came to them; but he was slain by them; and so he became instead the Christ of other men, men whom he did not see in his incarnate life. Hence he himself, our king, says in prophecy in one of the psalms. ‘You will rescue me from the attacks of the people; you will set me at the head of the nations. A people I did not know has become my servant; when they heard with their ears they obeyed me.’
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Thus the people of the Gentiles, whom Christ did not know in his bodily presence, believed in him, nevertheless, when he was announced to them. So it was justly said of them that ‘when they heard with their ears they obeyed me’, because ‘faith results from hearing.’
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This people, I say, added to those who are true Israelites both by descent and by faith, constitute the City of God, the City which also gave birth to Christ himself in the flesh, when it consisted solely of those Israelites. For the Virgin Mary, as we know, was of that race, and in her Christ assumed the flesh, so as to become man.
Another psalm speaks of this City in these terms: ‘ “Mother Sion”, a man will say, and, “a man was born in her, and the Most High founded her.” ’
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Who is this ‘Most High’ but God? This means that Christ, who is God before he became man by Mary in that City, himself founded the City in the persons of the patriarchs and prophets. Thus what we now see fulfilled was said in prophecy so long before to this queen, ‘In place of your fathers there are sons born to you; you will make them princes over all the earth’; for it is true that from her sons throughout all the earth come her leaders and fathers, since the people acknowledge her pre-eminence, as they flock together to confess her everlasting praise for all time to come. There can be no doubt then that whatever is said in this passage, though somewhat obscurely, in allegorical fashion, whatever the precise line of interpretation, must be consistent with those very obvious facts.
17.
Christ’s priesthood described in Psalm
110,
and his passion in Psalm
22.
In the psalm we have been examining Christ is proclaimed as king. Similarly, in another psalm he is set forth as priest. The pronouncement
is made in the clearest terms: ‘The Lord said to my Lord: “Sit on my right hand, until I put your enemies as a stool for your feet.” ’
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That Christ is at the right hand of the Father is a matter of belief, not of sight; and it is not yet obvious that his enemies are put under his feet. But this is what is happening, and it will be obvious in the end; so here we have something else which is now a matter of belief and will later be a matter of sight. As for the following statement: ‘The Lord will send out of Sion the rod of your strength; rule amidst your enemies!’ this is so plain that its denial would show not only the loss of faith and of happiness but even the failure of conscience. For even our enemies acknowledge that the law of Christ, which we call the gospel, was issued out of Sion, and in it we recognize the ‘rod of his strength.’ While the fact that he ‘rules amidst his enemies’ is witnessed by the very men among whom he rules, as they gnash their teeth and waste away
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and are powerless against him.
A little later we have these words: ‘The Lord has taken an oath, and he will not change his mind’, and this statement indicates the unchangeable nature of the following pronouncement: ‘You are a priest for ever, in the line of Melchizedech.’ Now who could take leave to doubt of whom these words are spoken, given the fact that there is at this time nowhere a priesthood or sacrifice in the line of Aaron, and that under Christ’s priesthood there is offered everywhere the oblation presented by Melchizedech, when he blessed Abraham?
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So we see that matters which are somewhat obscurely expressed in this psalm are, when rightly taken, referred to these obvious facts. I have already so related them in my sermons to the people.
We find the same thing in the psalm where Christ in a prophecy gives an eloquent description of the humiliation of his passion, in those words: ‘They have pierced my hands and feet; they have counted all my bones. Yes, they have looked me over and stared at me.’
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In this description, we may be sure, he points to his body stretched out on the cross, with his hands and feet pierced and fastened by the nails driven through them, and the spectacle he thus provided for those who looked him over and stared at him. He also adds, ‘They have divided my clothing among them and have cast lots for my garment’, and the gospel account records how this prophecy was fulfilled. Then there are other sayings in the psalm which are less explicit in their
reference; but there can be no question that they are rightly taken when the interpretation is consistent with the passages where the meaning is so patent, so luminously clear. We have the best of reasons for this conviction in that other events, not events of the past which we believe but of the present time which we behold, events which are now presented to observation over the whole world, answer precisely to the predictions we read in this same psalm, uttered so long ago. For example, these words occur a little later in the psalm: ‘All the ends of the earth will remember, and they will turn back to the Lord: all the families of the nations will offer worship in his sight. For the sovereignty belongs to the Lord, and he will hold sway over the nations.’
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18. The
death and resurrection of
the Lord
prophesied in Psalms
3, 41, 16
and
69
Moreover, the oracles of the psalms are by no means silent about the Lord’s resurrection. For what else is meant by the song which he is represented as singing in the third psalm, ‘I went to bed and fell asleep; I arose from sleep, for the Lord upheld me?
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Or is there anyone silly enough to believe that the prophet wanted to let us know, as an important piece of information, that he slept and got up again? That sleep must stand for death, and that awakening for resurrection; and the psalmist had to prophesy about Christ’s death and resurrection in this way.
This appears much more obviously in the fortieth psalm.
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There, in the usual manner, prophecies of the future are put into the mouth of the Mediator himself, in the form of a narrative of past events, because coming events had already, in a sense, happened, in the predestination and foreknowledge of God. ‘My enemies,’ he says,
spoke maliciously of me, saying: ‘When will he the, and his name perish?’ And if anyone came in to see me, his heart spoke empty words, and he heaped up wickedness for himself. They went out of doors and spoke all together with one intent. All my enemies whispered against me, they planned evil against me. They put about an evil saying against me: ‘Will not he who sleeps go on to rise up again?’
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This is surely so phrased here as to suggest the same meaning as if he had said: ‘Will not he who sleeps go on to come to life again?’ The earlier words prove that his enemies planned and arranged his death, and this was carried out by the agency of someone who came in to see him and went out to betray him. Here, inevitably, there comes to mind the disciple who turned traitor – Judas.
Thus because they were going to accomplish their designs, that is, they were about to kill him, he shows that they would kill him to no purpose in their futile malice, since he would rise again. He makes this plain by adding the verse, in which he says in effect, ‘You futile men, what are you achieving? What is a crime in you will be sleep for me. Will not he who sleeps go on to rise again?’ Nevertheless, he points out that they will not commit so grievous a crime with impunity, by saying, in the following verses: ‘Indeed, the man of my peace, in whom I placed my hope, who used to eat my bread, has enlarged his heel over me’, that is, he has trodden me down. ‘But Lord’, he says, ‘have mercy on me, and revive me, and I shall pay them back.’
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Who would now reject this interpretation, when he sees that the Jews, after the passion and resurrection of Christ, have been extirpated, root and branch, from their homes by the slaughter and destruction of war? For after the Lord had been killed by them he rose again and repaid them, in the meanwhile, with temporal discipline, which is temporal only if we discount the recompense reserved for those who have not amended, when he comes to judge the living and the dead.
For the Lord Jesus himself pointed out to his apostles that this Judas was his betrayer by handing him the bread; and in so doing he recalled this verse of our psalm and said that it was fulfilled in himself: ‘He who used to eat my bread has enlarged his heel over me.’
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But the words ‘in whom I placed my hope’ are appropriate not to the head but to the body. What I mean is that the Saviour himself was not ignorant of the character of the man of whom he had said earlier, ‘One of you will betray me’, and ‘One of you is a devil.’
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But it is his habit to transfer to himself the role of his members, and to attribute to himself what belongs to them, because Christ is at one and the same time both the head and the body. This explains the Gospel saying, ‘I was hungry and you gave me food to eat’, which he explains by saying, ‘When you did it for one of the least of my people, you did it for me.’
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So in this passage he ascribes to himself the hopes that
the disciples had placed in Judas when he was included in the number of the apostles.
Now the Jews do not expect that the Messiah (‘the Anointed’, the
Christ
) whom they hope for, will the. For that reason they do not think that the one whom the Law and the Prophets announced is our Christ, but some kind of Messiah of their own, a fiction of their imagination, a being remote from the suffering of death. This explains why with amazing stupidity and blindness, they maintain that the words we have quoted do not signify death and resurrection, but simply sleep and awakening.
But the fifteenth psalm
130
also cries aloud, ‘For this cause my heart was glad and my tongue exulted; my body, too, will rest in hope. For you will not abandon my soul in hell, nor will you allow your holy one to see corruption.’ Who would claim that his body had rested in hope, with the result that his soul was not abandoned in hell, but the soul quickly returned to his body and came to life again, so that his body should not suffer corruption as corpses normally do? No one, surely, but he who rose again on the third day. The Jews certainly cannot make this claim for their prophet and king, David.
The sixty-seventh
131
psalm also cries out, ‘Our God is the God who brings men salvation, and to the Lord belongs the way of escape of death.’
132
What clearer statement could there be? For ‘the God who brings men salvation’ is the Lord Jesus, whose name means ‘saviour’, or ‘saving.’ In fact the reason for his name was given when before his birth from the Virgin these words were said, ‘She will bear a son, and you will call his name Jesus; for he will save his people from their sins.’
133
Now since his blood was shed for the remission of those sins, it was, we can see, inevitable that he had no other ‘way of escape’ from this life, but only the way of death. Therefore after the statement that ‘our God is the God who brings men salvation’ we have the immediate addition of ‘and to the Lord belongs the way of escape of death’, to make it plain that it was by dying that he would bring salvation. But the words ‘and to the Lord belongs’ were said in a tone of wonder. They amount to saying, ‘Such is this mortal life that the Lord himself could not leave it except by the way of death.’