City of God (Penguin Classics) (67 page)
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Authors: Saint Augustine
Therefore, he did not make himself known to the demons as the life eternal, and the unchangeable light which illuminates his true worshippers, whose hearts are purified by faith in him so that they see that light; he was known to the demons through certain temporal effects of his power, the signs of his hidden presence, which could be more evident to angelic senses, even those of malignant spirits, than to the weak perception of men. It is true that when he decided that those signs of power should be restrained, and when he concealed his real person more completely, the prince of the demons had doubts about him, and tested him to see if he were the Christ – in so far as he allowed himself to be tempted so that, under his control, the human nature which he wore might present an example for our imitation. But after that temptation, as the Scripture says, angels ministered to him
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– good and holy angels, of course, and therefore striking fear and trembling into the impure spirits; and after that his greatness was increasingly made known to the demons, so that none of them dared to resist his commands, even though the weakness of his flesh might seem contemptible.
22.
The difference between the knowledge of angels and the knowledge of demons
The good angels hold cheap all the knowledge of material and temporal matters, which inflates the demons with pride. It is not that they are ignorant of such things: it is because the love of God, by which they are sanctified, is dear. His beauty is not only immaterial, but immutable also and ineffable, and it inflames them with a holy love. In comparison with that beauty, they despise everything that is below it, everything that is other than that beauty; they despise even themselves,
so that they may enjoy, to the full extent of their goodness, that good from which their goodness comes. And they have a surer knowledge even of those temporal and changeable things, just because they see their first causes in the Word of God, through whom the world was made. By those causes all things are ordained, though some of these things are approved, and some are reprobated.
In contrast, the demons do not behold the eternal causes of temporal events, the cardinal causes, so to speak, in the Wisdom of God, but they have much more knowledge of the future than men can have, by their greater acquaintance with certain signs which are hidden from us; sometimes they also foretell their own intentions. It is true that they are often deceived, while the angels are never deceived. It is one thing to conjecture temporal matters from temporal evidence, mutable things from mutable evidence, and then to interfere in events in a temporal and mutable fashion by the exercise of will and power; this is, in a restricted measure, permitted to the demons. It is a very different thing to foresee the changes of the temporal order in the eternal and unchanging laws of God, which live eternally in his wisdom, and, by participation in the Spirit of God, to know the will of God, which is supremely certain and supremely powerful; this privilege is granted, by a just distinction, to the holy angels. Thus they are blessed, as well as eternal. The good, which renders them blessed, is God, by whom they were created; and the participation in his life and the contemplation of his beauty is their never-failing joy.
23.
The ascription of the title
‘
gods
’
The Platonists may prefer to call those good angels ‘gods’ rather than ‘demons’, and to include them among those whom Plato, their founder and master, writes of as having been created by the supreme God.
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They may do as they like; there is no need for us to engage in a tiresome dispute about words. If they mean that they are immortal, but, at the same time, created by the supreme God and that they are blessed, not by themselves, but through adhering to him who made them, then their meaning is the same as ours, whatever title they use. That this is the opinion of the Platonists, or at least of the better Platonists, can be proved from their writings. As for the actual title, the fact that they give the name ‘gods’ to creatures who are immortal and blessed in the above sense, there is here no dispute between us, simply because one can find in our sacred Scriptures such quotations as
‘The Lord, the lord of gods, has spoken,’
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and, in another place: ‘Give thanks to the God of gods,’
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and ‘a great king above all gods’.
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The passage where it says, ‘He is terrible above all gods’,
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is explained by what immediately follows, ‘Since all the gods of the nations are demons; but the Lord made the ‘heavens’.
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The psalmist says ‘above all
gods’;
but he adds
’of
the nations’, meaning those whom the nations regard as gods, who are really ‘demons’: ‘terrible’ refers to the terror which made the demons say to the Lord, ‘Have you come to destroy us?’
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But ‘God of gods’ cannot be understood as meaning ‘God of demons’; and it is unthinkable that ‘a great king above all gods’ should mean ‘a great king above all demons’. The Scriptures also use the name ‘gods’ to describe men who belong to the people of God. I have said, “You are gods, and all of you are sons of the Highest.” ’
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Thus it is possible to take ‘God of gods’ as referring to ‘gods’ in this sense, and to interpret ‘a great king above all gods’ in the same way.
But it may be asked: If men are called ‘gods’, because they belong to the people of God – that people with whom God talks by the agency of either angels or men – are not the immortal beings much more worthy of that name? For they now enjoy that blessedness which men long to reach in their worship of God. The only reply is that it is not for nothing that in the holy Scriptures men are given the title of ‘gods’ more expressly than are those immortal and blessed beings, to whom, as we are promised, we shall become equal in the resurrection. Presumably the intention was to guard against the possibility that man, in his feebleness, might become unfaithful to God and presume to set up one of those angels as a god for us. There was less risk of this in the case of a man. And it was essential that men who belonged to God’s people should be called ‘gods’ with greater emphasis, so that they might have sure confidence that he was their God, who was entitled ‘God of gods’. For although the name ‘gods’ is applied to those blessed immortals who are in the heavens, they are not called ‘gods of gods’, that is, gods of men who have been given a place among the people of God, the men to whom it was said, ‘I have said, “You are gods, and all of you are sons of the Highest”.’ Hence the saying of the Apostle,
Although there are those who are called gods, whether in heaven or on earth, there being many ‘gods’ and many ‘lords’; nevertheless for us there is one God, the Father, from whom all things come, and in whom we have our being; and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things come into being, through whom we came to be.
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There is no need, then, of a long discussion about the name, since the facts are clear beyond any shadow of doubt. But there is another matter. We Christians say that it is from the company of these blessed immortals that angels have been sent to announce the will of God to men. The philosophers will not have it so. They ascribe this ministry not to those beings whom they call ‘gods’, that is, to beings who are both immortal and blessed, but to demons who are immortal, but whom they do not venture to call blessed – or at least, if they are both immortal and blessed, they are still good
demons
, and not gods, since gods (for them) have their dwelling on high, far removed from human contact. Here we may seem to have a dispute about names. But the name ‘demons’ is so detestable that we are bound to repudiate utterly its application to the holy angels.
And so we may end this book with this assertion. We know that immortal and blessed beings, by whatever name they are called, who for all that, are created beings, do not act as intermediaries, to bring to immortal blessedness wretched mortals, from whom they are separated by a twofold difference. On the other hand, those who are in an intermediate position, by sharing immortality with those above them and misery with those below, are more likely to grudge us happiness than to procure it for us, since their own misery is the due reward of their malice. Hence the supporters of the demons cannot put forward any sound reason why we should worship those demons as our helpers, seeing that we ought rather to shun them as deceivers. As for those good beings, who, because of their goodness, are happy as well as immortal, these philosophers reckon that they should be given the title of ‘gods’, and worshipped with sacred rites and sacrifices, in order that we may attain to a life of blessedness after death. But, whatever be the nature of those beings, and whatever be the name they deserve, they themselves do not wish that such devout homage should be offered in worship to any being other than the one God, by whom they were created, the God who imparts to them their happiness by granting them a share in his own being. This is a matter we shall, God helping us, discuss in detail in the next book.
1.
The Platonists say that true blessedness is conferred only by God. The question now arises: do those beings, whom they suppose that men should worship for the attainment of blessedness, desire that men should sacrifice to them, or to God alone
?
T
HAT
all men desire happiness is a truism for all who are in any degree able to use their reason. But mortals, in their weakness, ask, ‘Who is happy? And how is happiness gained?’ And those questions have stirred up many disputes of importance which have consumed the energy and the leisure of philosophers. It would be tedious to bring them up and discuss them, and it is also unnecessary. The line we followed in the eighth book was to select the philosophers with whom we should debate the question about the life of happiness which follows death, the question whether we can attain this life by offering the homage of devotion and worship to the one true God, who is also the creator of the gods, or to a multitude of gods. If the reader remembers this, he will not be expecting us to go over the same ground again: especially because, if he happens to have forgotten the details, he can turn back to refresh his memory.
Now we selected the Platonists as being deservedly the best known of all philosophers, because they have been able to realize that the soul of man, though immortal and rational (or intellectual), cannot attain happiness except by participation in the light of God, the creator of the soul and of the whole world. They also assert that no one can attain this life of blessedness, the object of all mankind’s desire, unless he has adhered, with the purity of chaste love, to that unique and supreme Good, which is the changeless God. And yet those philosophers themselves have either yielded to the futile errors of people in general or, in the Apostle’s words, ‘have dwindled into futility in their thinking’,
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in that they have supposed (or were willing that it should be supposed) that many gods are to be worshipped. Some, in fact, have gone so far as to lay it down that the divine honours of ceremonies and sacrifices are to be rendered even to demons. But I
have already replied to this at some considerable length. Our present task concerns those immortal and blessed beings, established in heavenly abodes, in ‘dominations, principalities and powers’,
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the beings whom the philosophers call ‘gods’, and give to some of them the name of ‘demons’, or ‘angels’ – the word used by Christians. The question we must consider and discuss, as far as God grants us strength, is this: What kind of observances of religion and devotion are we to believe that they wish to see in us? Or, to put it more plainly: Is it their desire that we should offer ceremony and sacrifice, or consecrate with solemn ritual either our possessions or ourselves, to their God, who is also our God, and to him alone? Or do they claim those honours also for themselves?
For this is the kind of worship which we owe to the Divinity, or, more precisely, the Deity. I cannot think of a suitable Latin term to express it in one word, and so I shall be inserting, where necessary, a Greek word to convey my meaning.
Latreia
is the word represented in our translations by ‘service’, wherever it is found in the Scriptures. But the service due to man, the service referred to by the Apostle when he says that servants should be obedient to their masters,
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is called by a different word in Greek, whereas
latreia
, according to the usage of the writers who preserve for us the words of God, is always, or almost always, the word employed for the service which concerns the worship of God. The word ‘cult’ (
cultus
) by itself would not imply something due only to God. For we are said to ‘cultivate’ (
colere
) men when we continually pay respect to them either in our memory or by our presence. And this word is employed not only in respect of things which in a spirit of devout humility we regard as above us, but even of some things which are below us. For from the same word are derived
agricolae
(cultivators),
celoni
(fanners) and íncolas (inhabitants); and the gods themselves are called
caelicolae
simply because they dwell in (
colunt
) heaven (
caelum) –
the verb here meaning, of course, ‘inhabit’, not ‘Worship’; they are, as it were, ‘colonists’ of heaven. They are not coloni in the sense in which the word is used of those whose lives are bound up with their native soil, which they cultivate under the authority of a land-owner, but in the sense in which one of the great Latin authors used it in the line,