City of God (Penguin Classics) (157 page)

In the same fashion, after first giving hope to the good about the day of judgement, the same prophet then proceeds to strike terror into the wicked. He says,

By ‘Jerusalem’, moreover, we must understand not the Jerusalem who is enslaved along with her children, but our free mother, the Jerusalem which, according to the Apostle, is eternal in the heavens.
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There, after the hardships of our anxieties and worries in this mortal state we shall be comforted like little children carried on the mother’s shoulders and nursed in her lap. For that unaccustomed bliss will lift us up, untrained and immature as we are, and support us with tenderest caresses. There ‘we shall see, and our heart will rejoice.’ The prophet does not expressly say what it is that we shall see; but what can it be but God? For thus the promise of the Gospel will be fulfilled in us, where it says, ’Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.’
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And we shall see all those things which we do not see now; but even now, because we believe, we imagine them, up to the poor capacity of our human minds; though our idea of them falls incomparably short of the reality. ‘And you will see’, says the prophet, ‘and your heart will rejoice.’ Here, you believe; there, you will see.

However, for fear that we should suppose, because he says, ‘Your heart will rejoice’, that the blessings of that Jerusalem belong exclus
ively to the spirit, he goes on to say, ‘And your bones will rise up like the grass’, thus touching on the resurrection of the body, as if repairing an omission; for this resurrection will not happen
after
we have seen: we shall see after it has taken place. He has, in fact, spoken earlier about the new heaven and the new earth in the course of his description of the things promised to the saints at the end, often repeated in many different images. ‘There will be a new heaven and a new earth; and they will not remember the former heaven and earth, and the memory of them will not come to their mind; but they will find joy and gladness in the new creation. See, I shall make Jerusalem a gladness and my people a joy; and I shall be glad in Jerusalem and rejoice in my people; and no more will there be heard in her the voice of weeping’
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, and the rest of the promises which some people try to refer to that life in the body during those thousand years. For metaphorical and literal expressions are intermingled, in the prophetic manner, so that a sober attentiveness may arrive at the spiritual meaning by a painstaking effort which is both useful and salutary; whereas the indolence of the flesh and the slowness of an uninstructed and untrained mind is content with the superficial, literal meaning and thinks that no inner meaning is to be sought. These remarks must suffice for the prophetic utterances in Scripture which precede the passsage under discussion.

To return to the passage from which we digressed: when the prophet says, ‘and your bones will rise up like the grass’, he is certainly describing the resurrection of the body, but he goes on to show that it is only the resurrection of the good that he is now speaking of. He does this by adding, ‘and the hand of the Lord will be known to his worshippers.’ This must surely mean the hand of one who distinguishes his worshippers from his despisers. He refers to the latter in the words that follow without a break. ‘And he will threaten the insolent’, he says, or, as another translator renders it, ‘the unbelieving’. At that time he will not threaten them: the words that are now spoken in menace will then be fulfilled in practice. ‘For see’, he says, ‘the Lord will come like a fire, and his chariots like a tempest, to execute vengeance in his indignation and devastation with the flames of fire. For by the fire of the Lord all the earth will be judged, and all mankind by his sword. Many will be wounded by the Lord.’ ‘Fire’, ‘whirlwind’, ‘sword’, all stand for the punishment of judgement; for the prophet says that the Lord himself will come as a fire, to those, of course, to whom his coming is to bring punishment. But the ‘chariots’ (the word
used is plural) we appropriately take as standing for the ministering angels. As for the statement that the whole earth and all mankind are judged by the fire and the sword of the Lord, we must understand the reference here to be not to the spiritual and holy but to the earthly and carnal, such people as are described as ‘having worldly wisdom’ and ‘carnally minded’, which is ‘death’; the people generally called ‘flesh’ by the Lord, when he says, ‘My spirit will not always remain in those men, because they are flesh.’
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The ‘wound’ referred to in the next statement, ‘Many will be wounded by the Lord’, is the ‘wound’ by which the second death will be effected. Now it is possible, to be sure, to take ‘fire’, ‘sword’ and ‘wound’ in a good sense. For the Lord said that he wanted ‘to send fire on the earth’; and the divided tongues ‘appeared to them to be flames of fire’ when the Holy Spirit came; and ‘I have not come’, said the Lord, ‘to send peace on earth, but a sword.’ And Scripture says that the word of God is a two-edged sword, because of its double edge, the two testaments; and in the Song of Songs the holy Church says that she is wounded by love, shot, as it were, by love’s arrow.
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But in the context of our passage, when we hear or read that the Lord is to come as an avenger, it is obvious how these words are to be understood.

Then, after a brief mention of those who will be destroyed in this judgement, where the sinners and the ungodly are symbolized by those who did not abstain from the foods forbidden by the old Law,
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the prophet gives a summary account of the grace of the new covenant from the first coming of the Saviour to the last judgement, which is our present subject. Thus he brings his discourse to an end. For he tells us that the Lord says that he is coming to assemble all the nations, and that they are to come and see his glory. ‘For’, as the Apostle says, ‘all men have sinned and lack the glory of God.’
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And the Lord says that he will leave signs on them – evidently in order that they may be amazed at them and come to believe in him; and that he will send out from their number men who have been saved, dispatching them to various peoples and to far-off islands, which have not heard his name or seen his glory; and that they will proclaim his glory among the nations and will bring in the brothers of those whom the prophet was addressing, that is, brothers in the faith of the chosen Israelites under God the Father; and that they will bring
from all the nations a gift for the Lord on beasts of burden and on vehicles (these ‘beasts’ and ‘vehicles’ are rightly interpreted as symbolizing the divine assistance by the two types of God’s ministers, angelic and human) bringing their gift to the Holy City of Jerusalem, which is now spread throughout the world in the persons of the faithful people of God.
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For where men receive divine assistance, that is where men believe; and where they believe, that is where they come.

Then the Lord compares these newcomers to the children of Israel offering him their sacrifices in his house with psalms, as the Church now does everywhere. And he promises that he will accept some of them to be his priests and Levites;
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and we now see that fulfilled in the same degree. For now we do not see priests and Levites chosen from a clan, related by flesh and blood, which was the rule according to descent from Aaron, but, as was rightly established under the new covenant (where the chief priest, ‘in the line of Melchizedech’,
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is Christ) each man is chosen in accordance with the merit bestowed on him by God’s grace. They are not to be valued merely for that title, which unworthy men often acquire, but for something which is not common to good men and bad, namely holiness.

After speaking of that unmistakable and well-known mercy of God, which is even now bestowed on the Church, the Lord gives a promise of the final states which will be reached when the final judgement has separated the good and the wicked. He speaks through the mouth of the prophet (or the prophet speaks as representing the Lord) and says,

This was the point at which the prophet ended his book, the point at which the world will come to an end. Some people, it is true, have given the translation ‘corpses of men’
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instead of ‘limbs of human beings’, meaning by ‘corpses’ the visible punishment of the body, although the word ‘corpse’ is normally used only of lifeless flesh, whereas those bodies will be alive, since otherwise they could not feel
any torments; unless perhaps those bodies also may without absurdity be called ‘corpses’ on the ground that they are the bodies of dead men, that is, of men who will fall into the second death – hence the words I have quoted above from the same prophet: ‘But the earth of the ungodly will fall.’
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Yet who could fail to see that
cadavera
(‘corpses’) are so called from falling (cadendo)?
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At the same time, it is obvious that those translators used ‘men’ to convey the same meaning as ‘human beings’. For no one is likely to assert that women who transgress will not incur that punishment! The fact is that both sexes are included under the more important sex, especially as that was the sex from which woman was created. But the point of the greatest relevance to our subject is that the words ‘all flesh will come’ refer also to the good, for God’s People will be made up of men of every race – though not all mankind will be there, since many will be enduring punishment. In fact (and this is the point I was establishing) ‘flesh’ is the word used in reference to the good as well as the bad, and ‘limbs’ or ‘corpses’ in reference to the wicked; and this makes it plain that the judgement by which the good and the wicked are separated into their appropriate final states will certainly follow the resurrection of the body, and thus our faith in this resurrection is strengthened by the use of these terms to describe the facts.