City of God (Penguin Classics) (141 page)
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Authors: Saint Augustine
52.
The belief that after the ten persecutions that have occurred only one is still to come, in time of Antichrist
Accordingly, I do not imagine that we should rashly assert or believe the theory that some have entertained or still do entertain: that the Church is not going to suffer any more persecutions until the time of Antichrist, beyond the number she has already endured, namely ten.
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On this theory the eleventh and last persecution will come from Antichrist. The first persecution they reckon to be that of Nero, the second that of Domitian, the third of Trajan, the fourth of Antoninus, the fifth of Severus, the sixth of Maximinus, the seventh of Decius, the eighth of Valerian, the ninth of Aurehan, the tenth of Diocletian and Maximian, their assumption being that the fact that there were ten plagues of Egypt, before the people of God began their exodus from that country, should be taken as signifying that the last persecution, that of Antichrist, is to be regarded as the counterpart of the eleventh plague, in which the Egyptians in their vengeful pursuit of the Hebrews, perished in the Red Sea, while the people of God passed over on dry land. In my judgement, however, those events in Egypt were not prophetic symbols of these persecutions, although those who hold this theory have shown such highly-wrought ingenuity in comparing the details in each case – but they did this not so much by prophetic inspiration as by the speculation of the human mind, which sometimes arrives at the truth, but sometimes misses the mark.
For what will the supporters of this theory have to say about the persecution in which the Lord himself was crucified? What place is this to have in their enumeration? If, however, they consider that this persecution is to be omitted from the list, on the assumption that the only instances to be reckoned are those which concern the body, and that the one in which the head was attacked and slain is to be excluded, what will they do about the one which broke out after Christ’s ascension into heaven? This was in Jerusalem, where the blessed Stephen was stoned, where James the brother of John was butchered with the sword, and where the apostle Peter was imprisoned to be put to death and was rescued by an angel. Then, too, the brethren were put to flight and dispersed from Jerusalem, and Saul (who afterwards became Paul the apostle) was wreaking havoc on the Church; and Saul himself, when he was spreading the Gospel which he had persecuted, suffered the same treatment as he had inflicted, both in Judaea and among the Gentiles, wherever, with his burning enthusiasm, he proclaimed Christ. Why, then, do they decide to start with Nero, seeing that the Church in its growth reached the time of Nero amidst the most ruthless persecutions, which it would take too long to describe in full detail? But if they consider that only persecutions inflicted by
kings should be included in the list, it was a king, Herod, who inflicted the most severe persecution even after the ascension of the Lord.
Again, what answer will they give about Julian, whom they do not list among the ten? Did he not persecute the Church in forbidding the Christians to give or to receive a liberal education? Under him the elder Valentinian, who was the third emperor after him, showed himself a confessor of the Christian faith, and was deprived of his military rank. I shall pass over what Julian began to do at Antioch, and would have accomplished had it not been for one young man of unswerving faith and constancy. When many people were being arrested and taken for torture, this youth was the first to be taken, and he was tortured for a whole day, but continued singing hymns of praise while he was torn and racked. The emperor was awestricken in amazement at his bold cheerfulness, and was afraid to persecute the other victims in case he should be put to the blush with greater ignominy. Lastly, within our own memory, did not Valens, the Arian, the brother of the before-mentioned Valentinian, wreak havoc on the Catholic Church in the East in a great persecution? “What a strange thing it is not to consider that the Church, as it grows and bears fruit throughout the whole world, can suffer persecution from kings among some peoples, even when it does not suffer the same among other nations! Or are we to suppose that it was not to be counted as a persecution when the king of the Goths persecuted the Christians
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in the actual kingdom of the Goths with stupendous ferocity, since there were only Catholics there? Many of these were crowned with martyrdom, as we have heard from some of the brethren, who were boys at the time in that country, and who immediately recalled that they had witnessed these events. Then what of the recent happenings in Persia?
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Did not persecution boil up so hotly against the Christians (if indeed it has yet calmed down) that a number of refugees from Persia fled as far as to Roman towns? When I think over events like these it seems to me that no limit can be set to the number of persecutions which the Church is bound to suffer for her training. On the other hand, it is no less rash to assert that there are to be other persecutions by kings, apart from that final persecution about which no Christian has any doubt. And so I leave the question undecided, offering no support or opposition to either side. I merely call upon both sides to renounce the audacious presumption of making any pronouncement on the question.
53.
The time of the final persecution has been revealed to no human being
That last persecution, to be sure, which will be inflicted by Antichrist, will be extinguished by Jesus himself, present in person. For the Scripture says that ‘he will kill him with the breath of his mouth and annihilate him by the splendour of his coming.’
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Here the usual question is, ‘When will this happen?’ But the question is completely ill-timed. For had it been in our interest to know this, who could have been a better informant than the master, God himself, when the disciples asked him? For they did not keep silent about it with him, but put the question to him in person, ‘Lord, is this the time when you are going to restore the sovereignty to Israel?’ But he replied, ‘It is not for you to know the times which the Father has reserved for his own control.’
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Now in fact they had not asked about the hour or the day or the year, but about the time, when they were given this answer. It is in vain, therefore, that we try to reckon and put a limit to the number of years that remain for this world, since we hear from the mouth of the truth that it is not for us to know this. And yet some have asserted that 400, 500, or as much as 1,000 years may be completed between the Lord’s ascension and his final coming. But to show how each of them supports his opinion would take too long; and in any case it is unnecessary, for they make use of human conjectures, and quote no decisive evidence from the authority of canonical Scripture. In fact, to all those who make such calculations on this subject comes the command, ‘Relax your fingers, and give them a rest.’
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And it comes from
him
who says, ‘It is not for you to know the times, which the Father has reserved for his own control.’
But since this statement is given in the Gospel, it is not to be wondered at that the worshippers of many false gods have not been restrained by it from pretending that the length of the future duration of the Christian religion has been defined by the responses of the demons whom they worship as gods. For when those pagans saw that Christianity could not be wiped out by all those great persecutions, but on the contrary had made astonishing advances because of them, they thought up some sort of Greek verses, supposedly the effusions of a divine oracle, given to someone consulting it. In them they do indeed make Christ innocent of this alleged offence of sacrilege, but go on to
say that Peter used sorcery to ensure that the name of Christ should be worshipped for 365 years, and that on the completion of that number of years it should come to an immediate end.
What intelligence! What scholarship! It takes educated wits to believe such things about Christ, while refusing to believe in Christ. To believe, that is, that Peter, his disciple, did not learn magical arts from his master, yet, that though his master was innocent, his disciple was a sorcerer, and preferred that through his magical arts his master’s name rather than his own should be worshipped, at the cost of great hardships and dangers to himself and at last even at the cost of shedding his own blood. If Peter the sorcerer ensured that the world should so love Christ, what had Christ done to make Peter so love him? Let them give the answer to themselves; and let them realize if they can, that by that grace from on high it came about that the world loved Christ with a view to eternal life, and by the same grace it came about that Peter loved Christ both with a view to receiving eternal life from him, and even to the extent of suffering temporal death for him. Then again, what kind of gods are those who can make this prediction but cannot avert it, who succumb to a single sorcerer and a single act of criminal magic (a child of a year old, they allege, was slain, torn to pieces, and buried with abominable ceremonies), so much so that they allowed a sect opposed to them to gather strength over such an extended period, and to survive the terrible savageries of so many great persecutions, not by resistance but by endurance, and to reach the point of overthrowing their own images, temples, ceremonies and oracles? Lastly, who was the god – it was assuredly not ours, but one of their own – who was either enticed or compelled by such a criminal act to provide that result? For it was not by using his magic on some demon, but on a god, as those verses inform us, that Peter determined this period. That is the kind of god possessed by those who do not possess Christ!
54.
The foolish pagan falsehood that limits the Christian religion to 365 years
I might have amassed many other arguments of similar tenor, had it not been that that year has already gone by, which was foretold by a trumped-up divination and believed in by deluded idiots. In fact the 365 years were completed some time ago, starting the count from the time when the worship of Christ was established by his presence in bodily form, and by his apostles, so why should we seek any other argument to refute this falsehood? Now we need not take the time of
Christ’s birth as the start of this period, because he had no disciples in his infancy and boyhood. Still, from the time when he began to have disciples, the Christian doctrine and religion undoubtedly became widely known through his bodily presence, that is, after his baptism in the river Jordan by the ministry of John. This in fact is the reason for the famous prophecy about him uttered long before, ‘He will have dominion from sea to sea, and from the river as far as to the ends of the earth.’
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But before Christ’s passion and resurrection the Christian faith had not yet reached its final formulation for all mankind. That formulation was, of course, reached at the resurrection, for this is what the apostle Paul has to say, addressing the Athenians, ‘This is now the time when God gives all men everywhere notice to repent, because he has fixed a day for the judgement of the world in righteousness, by a man in whose person he has defined the faith for all mankind, by raising him from the dead.’
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Consequently, this is a better starting-point for us to take in looking for the answer to this question; especially as it was also the time for the giving of the Holy Spirit, inasmuch as the Spirit had to be bestowed after the resurrection of Christ, in that City from which the second Law, that is, the new covenant, was due to come into operation. For the first Law, called the old covenant, came from Mount Sinai, through Moses; whereas about this second Law, which was to be given through Christ, there was a prediction which said, ‘Out of Sion the Law will issue, and the word of the Lord out of Jerusalem.’
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That is why Christ himself said that repentance had to be preached in his name among all nations, yet the start was to be made from Jerusalem.
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Thus it was at Jerusalem that the worship of this name began, so that men believed in Jesus Christ, crucified and risen. It was there that this faith blazed up, with such remarkable beginnings that some thousands of people were converted to the name of Christ with amazing promptness. They sold their possessions to give the proceeds to the needy, and to attain to a voluntary poverty by holy resolution and burning love, and they prepared themselves, surrounded as they were by the bloodthirsty fury of the Jews, to fight for the cause of truth even unto death, and to fight not by armed force, but by the mightier power of steadfast endurance. If so much was achieved without any magical
arts, why are the pagans reluctant to believe that the same result could have been attained throughout the whole world by the same divine power that effected it here?
But let us assume that Peter had already performed his act of sorcery, with this result; that at Jerusalem such great numbers of men were fired to worship the name of Christ, men who had taken him and fastened him to the cross, or had jeered at him when fastened there. If so, then that is the very year from which to start when trying to find out when the 365 years came to an end. Well, then, Christ died on the twenty-fifth of March in the consulship of the two Gemini (
A.D
.29). He rose again on the third day, as the apostles proved by the evidence of their own senses. Then, after forty days, he ascended to heaven; and ten days later (that is, on the fiftieth day after his resurrection) he sent the Holy Spirit. It was then that 3,000 people believed when the apostles proclaimed Christ. It was then, therefore, that the worship of that name arose, as we believe and as the truth holds, through the effective working of the Holy Spirit, but according to the story invented – or supposed true – by the blasphemy of fools, by Peter’s magic arts. Again, a little later, 5,000 people believed, after an amazing miracle, effected through the words of this same Peter, when a beggar man, so lame from his mother’s womb that he was carried by others to the door of the temple to beg for alms, was cured in the name of Jesus Christ and leaped to his feet. After that the Church grew by successive additions to the number of believers.
Hence we can establish the actual day from which the year takes its start, namely the day when the Holy Spirit was sent – on the Ides of May. By reckoning the consuls from this date, the 365 years are found to be completed on the same Ides in the consulship of Honorius and Eutychianus.
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Now in the next year, when Malius Theodoras was consul, the Christian religion should have ceased to exist, according to that oracle of the demons or fiction of men; and yet we know that at Carthage, that famous and important city – there was no need for research into what may have happened in other parts – at Carthage, Gaudentius and Jovius, the officials of the Emperor Honorius, on the eighteenth of March demolished the temples of the false gods and broke up their images. No one could fail to see how much the worship of Christ’s name has increased in the space of about thirty years from that time to the present day,
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and especially after many people had
become Christians who had formerly been kept from joining the faith by that oracular prophecy, supposing it to be genuine, and who now, after the completion of the number of years specified, saw it to be ridiculous nonsense. We, therefore, who are Christians and are called by that name, do not believe in Peter but in the one in whom Peter believed. We are edified by Peter’s discourses about Christ; we are not poisoned by Peter’s spells, we are not deluded by his evil arts, but we are assisted by his good offices. That same Christ, who was Peter’s master in the teaching that leads to eternal life, is himself our master also.
But now at last we must bring this book to its close. In it we have brought our discussion to this point, and we have shown sufficiently, as it seemed to me, what is the development in this mortal condition of the two cities, the earthly and the Heavenly, which are mingled together from the beginning to the end of their history. One of them, the earthly city, has created for herself such false gods as she wanted, from any source she chose – even creating them out of men – in order to worship them with sacrifices. The other city, the Heavenly City on pilgrimage in this world, does not create false gods. She herself is the creation of the true God, and she herself is to be his true sacrifice. Nevertheless, both cities alike enjoy the good things, or are afflicted with the adversities of this temporal state, but with a different faith, a different expectation, a different love, until they are separated by the final judgement, and each receives her own end, of which there is no end. And those different ends of the two cities must be the next subject for our discussion.