City of God (Penguin Classics) (156 page)

No one can doubt that Paul is here speaking of Antichrist, telling us that the day of judgement (which he calls the Day of the Lord) will not come without the prior coming of a figure whom he calls tne Apostate, meaning, of course, an apostate from the Lord God. And if this appellation can rightly be attached to all the ungodly, how much more to him! There is, however, some uncertainty about the ‘temple’ in which he is to take his seat. Is it in the ruins of the Temple built by King Solomon, or actually in a church? For the Apostle would not say ‘the temple of God’ if he meant the temple of some idol or demon. For that reason some people would have it that Antichrist means here not the leader himself but what we may call his whole body, the multitude, that is, of those who belong to him, together with himself, their leader. And they suppose that then it would be more correct to say, following the original Greek, that he ‘takes his seat
as
the temple of God’, instead of
‘in
the temple of God’, purporting to be himself God’s temple, that is, the Church: in the same way as we say, ‘He sits as a friend’, meaning ‘like a friend’ – there are customary expressions in this form.

As for the statement, ‘and you know what now restrains him’ -that is, what is stopping him, what is the cause of his delay – ‘so that he will be revealed only at the right time’, Paul did not choose to speak explicitly, because, as he says, they knew it. And that is why we who
have not their knowledge, are anxious to arrive at the Apostle’s meaning; but we find ourselves unable to do so, for all our efforts, especially as his next statement makes the meaning still more obscure. For what does he mean by saying, ‘For the secret power of wickedness is already at work; only let him who now restrains, restrain him until he is removed from the scene, and then the wicked one will be revealed‘? I admit that the meaning of this completely escapes me. For all that, I shall not refrain from mentioning some guesses at the meaning which I have been able to hear or read.

Some people suppose those words to refer to the Roman imperial power, and they think that the reason for Paul’s reluctance to write more explicitly was the fear of incurring a charge of slander, in wishing ill to the Roman Empire when it was hoped that it would last for ever. On this assumption ‘the secret power of wickedness already at work’ would be intended as a reference to Nero, whose actions already seemed like those of Antichrist. Hence there are people who suggest that Nero is to rise again and become Antichrist, while others suppose that he was not killed, but withdrawn instead so that he might be supposed killed
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and that he is still alive and in concealment in the vigour of the age he had reached at the time of his supposed death, until ‘he will be revealed at the right time for him’ and restored to his throne. For myself I am much astonished at the great presumption of those who venture such guesses.

On the other hand, when the Apostle says, ‘Only let him who now restrains, restrain until he is removed from the scene’, there is no incongruity in believing this to refer to the Roman imperial power, saying, in effect, ‘Let him who now reigns, reign until he is removed from the scene’, that is, until taken away. ‘Then the wicked one will be revealed’: there is no doubt that this means Antichrist. However, there are others who think that ‘you know what restrains’ and ‘the secret power of wickedness’ refer only to the evil people and the pretended Christians who are in the Church, until they reach such a number as to constitute a great people for Antichrist; this, they hold, is ‘the secret power of wickedness’ because it is, evidently, concealed. And they suppose the Apostle to be exhorting the faithful to hold on with perseverance to the faith they hold. In their view, he is saying, ‘Only let him who holds hold on, until he is removed from the scene’, meaning ‘until the secret power of wickedness, now concealed, departs
from the Church’. They also find a reference to this ‘secret power’ in what John the evangelist says in his epistle: ‘My children, it is the last hour! You have been told that Antichrist is to come, and now many antichrists have appeared; which is how we recognize that this is the last hour. They went out from among us, but they did not belong to us; if they had belonged, they would surely have stayed with us.’
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So in that hour which John calls ‘the last hour’, before the end, many heretics went out from the company of the Church; similarly, on this interpretation, at the actual time of the end there will go forth from the Church all who do not belong to Christ but to that last Antichrist, and it is then that he will be revealed.

Thus there are different interpretations of the obscure words of the Apostle, put forward by different commentators. But the general meaning of what he said is not doubtful. Christ will not come to judge the living and the dead without the prior coming of his adversary, Antichrist, to seduce those who are dead in soul – although their seduction depends on the judgement of God, which is now concealed. For, as it is said, ‘The coming of the wicked one is in accordance with Satan’s way of working, accompanied by every kind of miracle and sign and by lying portents, and all manner of deception that wickedness can use on those on the way to destruction.’ It is, in fact, at that time that Satan will be unloosed, and by the agency of that Antichrist he will carry on his work with every kind of miracle of his, marvellously, yes, but mendaciously. It is a continual matter of debate whether these are called ‘signs and lying portents’ because he is going to deceive mortal senses by illusions, by appearing to do what he does not really perform, or because, while they are genuine prodigies, their effect will be to draw men into falsehood, in that people will believe that they could only have been achieved by the power of God, being unaware of the strength of the Devil, and especially his strength when he has received such power as he never before enjoyed. For when fire fell from heaven and wiped out, in one sweep, all the large household and the numerous flocks of holy Job, and a whirlwind rushed down and overthrew his house and slew his children,
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those were no illusions; and yet they were the work of Satan, to whom God had given this power.

Now the reason for the description, ‘signs and lying portents’, will become more evident when they happen. But whatever the reason, those who are led astray by those signs and wonders will be those who deserve to be led astray, ‘because’, in the Apostle’s words, ‘they did not
welcome the love of truth so that they might be saved.’ And the Apostle had no hesitation in adding, ‘for this reason God will subject them to the influence of delusion, so that they may believe a lie.’ God, that is, will ‘subject them to that influence’ in the sense that, by a just decision of his own, he will allow the Devil to perform those feats, although the Devil performs them with a wicked and malignant design. ‘That they may all be brought to judgement’, he says, ‘all who did not believe the truth, but gave their support to wickedness.’ Thus they will be led astray after being judged, and after being led astray they will be judged. But when they have been judged they will be led astray by those judgements of God, secretly just, and justly secret, that judgement he has never ceased to exercise since the first sin of rational creatures; and after being led astray they will be judged by that last and open judgement administered by Jesus Christ, who is to judge with perfect justice, though it was with utter injustice that he himself was judged.

But it is continually being asked whether those whom Christ is to find living in this world (represented in the Apostle’s picture by himself and his contemporaries) are never to the at all, or whether in that precise moment of time when they are caught up in the clouds, along
with those rising again, to meet Christ in the air, they will pass with marvellous speed through death to immortality. For it must not be said that it is impossible for them to the and to come to life again in that space of time when they are being carried on high through the air. We are not to take the statement that ‘we shall always be with the Lord’, as meaning that we are to remain for ever in the air with the Lord. He himself will assuredly not remain there; he will pass through as he comes. The meeting with him, we may be sure, will take place as he comes, not while he lingers there; and we ‘shall be with the Lord’ in the sense that we shall have immortal bodies and so we shall be with him everywhere. The Apostle himself seems to demand that we should take his words in this sense; that is, we should take it that those whom the Lord will find alive here will undergo death and receive immortality in that brief space of time. He confirms this interpretation when he says, ‘In Christ all men will be brought to life‘, and by his statement in another passage, dealing directly with the resurrection of the body: ‘The seed you sow does not come to life unless it first dies.’
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If so, how can those whom Christ finds alive here come to life in him by receiving immortality, without dying, when we see that this was the point of the saying that ‘the seed you sow does not come to life unless it first dies’? Or it is not correct to speak of human bodies as being ‘sown’ unless they in some way return to the earth at death (as in the sentence divinely pronounced on the transgressor, the father of mankind: ‘Earth you are, and to earth you will go’
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) then we have to admit that those whom Christ, at his coming, will find not yet parted from the body, are not covered by the words of the Apostle and of Genesis – being caught up in the clouds they are certainly not sown, since they neither go to the earth nor return to it, whether they experience no death at all or the for a short space in the air.

But there is yet another saying of the Apostle that comes to mind; it is what he said to the Corinthians on the subject of the resurrection of the body. ‘We shall all rise again’, he says, or according to other manuscripts, ‘We shall all sleep.’
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Since, then, the resurrection cannot happen without a preceding death and we can only interpret sleep in this passage as meaning death, how can it be that ‘all’ sleep and rise again, if so many whom Christ is to find in the body will neither sleep nor rise again? If, then, we believe that the saints who
are found alive at Christ’s coming and are caught up to meet him will part from their bodies in that same snatching up and will straightway return to those bodies, now immortal – if we assume this, we shall encounter no difficulties in the words of the Apostle, either when he says, ‘The seed you sow does not come to life unless it first dies’, or when he says: ‘We shall all rise again’, or, ‘We shall all sleep.’ For they also will not be brought to life again unless they first the, however momentarily, and so they will not be debarred from resurrection, which for them is preceded by a sleep – an extremely short sleep, it is true, yet still a sleep. If it comes to that, why should we think it incredible that all those many bodies are, in a fashion, ‘sown’ in the air, where they come to life again straightway, a life exempt from death and decay? After all, we believe the explicit statement of the Apostle, that the resurrection will happen ‘in the twinkling of an eye’,
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and that the dust of corpses of remote antiquity will return with such ease and with a speed beyond all reckoning to limbs which are to live a life without ending.

We are not even to conclude that those saints are to be exempt from the sentence pronounced on man, ‘You are earth, and to earth you will go’, on the assumption that their bodies, when they die, will not fall back to earth, but just as they will die in the actual process of being caught up, so they will also rise again while they are being borne up into the air. ‘To earth you will go’ means, we may be sure, ‘On losing your life you will go back to what you were before you received life’, that is, ‘when the breath of life has left you you will be what you were before you received that breath’ (for, as we know, it was into a face of earth that God ‘breathed the breath of life’ when man was made a living soul‘). It is tantamount to saying, ‘You are animated earth, which you were not before: you will be inanimate earth, as you were before.’ This is the condition of all the bodies of the dead, even before they begin to putrify, and it will be the condition of the bodies of those saints, if they die, wherever they the, when they are deprived of life, only to receive it again straightway. Thus they will ‘go to earth’ because from being living men they will become earth, in the same way as what becomes ashes ‘turns to ashes‘, what becomes decrepit ‘goes into decrepitude’, what was clay and becomes a jar ‘turns into a jar’ – there are thousands of similar expressions. How this is to happen is something we can now only vaguely imagine with the poor little powers of our reason; but then, when it happens, we shall be able to understand. It is certainly our duty, if we wish to be
Christians, to believe that there will be a resurrection of the dead, and a resurrection in the flesh, when Christ comes to judge the living and the dead; it does not follow that our faith in this subject is vain just because we are unable to comprehend perfectly how this is to come about.

Our present obligation, however, is to show, as we promised above,
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what the ancient prophetical books foretold about this last judgement of God, as far as shall seem sufficient; and, in my opinion, it will not be necessary to treat them with any great length of exposition, if the reader will be at pains to make use of the help we have already furnished.