Read City of God (Penguin Classics) Online
Authors: Saint Augustine
City of God (Penguin Classics) (158 page)
The ‘seed’, then, and the ‘name’ will stand fast in that blessed condition of the saints – the seed mentioned by John when he says, ‘his seed remains in him’, and the name referred to in another message delivered by Isaiah: ‘I will give them an everlasting name.’
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‘Month will follow month, Sabbath will follow Sabbath’ is as much as to say, ‘Moon after moon, rest after rest’. And the good will have both ‘moon’ and ‘rest’ when they pass from these old shadows of time into the new lights of eternity.
In the punishment of the wicked, on the other hand, the unquenchable fire and the undying worm are differently explained by different authorities. Some people, in fact, refer both to the body; others refer both to the soul. Yet others refer the fire to the body in the literal sense, and the worm to the soul in the metaphorical sense, and this interpretation seems more credible. But there is no time to discuss this difference at the moment; for the subject I have undertaken to deal with in this book is the last judgement, which effects the separation between the good and the wicked; their actual rewards and punishments have to be discussed in greater detail at another time.
23.
Daniel’s prophecies about Antichrist, the judgement, and the reign of the saints
Daniel prophesies about the last judgement in such a way as to predict also the prior coming of Antichrist, and to continue his narrative as far as the eternal reign of the saints. He begins with his prophetic vision of the four beasts, symbolizing four kingdoms, and the fourth of these is overcome by a king who is recognized as Antichrist. This is followed by the eternal reign of the Son of Man, who is understood to be Christ; and then Daniel says, ‘As for me, Daniel, my spirit shuddered in my dwelling, and the visions of my head disturbed me. And I approached one of the bystanders, and asked him the truth about all those things; and he told me the truth.’
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Daniel then tells what he heard from him of whom he had inquired about all those matters, putting it as if it were the bystander giving
explanation to him. ‘These four beasts: four kingdoms will arise on earth, which will be removed; and the saints of the Most High will receive the kingdom and will possess it for ever, for ever and ever. Then I enquired carefully’, he says,
about the fourth beast, which was different from every other beast, far more terrible, with iron teeth and bronze claws, chewing and crushing to pieces and trampling underfoot what remained. And I asked about the ten horns on his head, and about the other horn which came up and struck down three of the former horns; this horn had eyes and a mouth uttering great boasts, and it looked bigger than the rest of them. I watched it making war on the saints, and getting the better of them, until the Ancient One came and gave the kingdom to the saints of the Most High, when the time came for the saints to take possession of the kingdom.
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This, says Daniel, is the question he asked. And he goes on to give the reply he received. ‘Then he said’ (that is, the man questioned gave this reply),
The fourth beast is the fourth kingdom which will be on the earth. It will prevail over all kingdoms: and it will devour the whole earth, and trample on it and destroy it. And the ten horns: ten kings will arise. And after them will arise another who will surpass in wickedness all who preceded him. He will humble three kings, and will speak insulting words against the Most High; and he will harass the saints of the Most High, and will conceive the notion of changing times and laws. And power will be given into his hand for a time and times and half a time. Then a court will sit, and they will take away his sovereignty, to be destroyed and finally brought to nothing. Then the kingdom and the power and the might of all the kings under the whole heaven will be given to the saints of the Most High. His kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and all principalities will serve and obey him.
‘Here’, says Daniel, ‘the discourse ended. As for me, Daniel, my thoughts greatly disturbed me, and my appearance was altered. But I kept those words to myself.’
Some commentators have interpreted those four kingdoms as the Assyrians, the Persians, the Macedonians, and the Romans. Those who would like to know how appropriate this interpretation is should read the commentary on Daniel by the presbyter Jerome, a most learned and detailed study. Yet anyone who reads the passage in Daniel, even if half-asleep, cannot conceivably doubt that the reign of Antichrist is to be endured, if only for a brief space of time, with its bitter savagery against the Church, until by the final judgement of God the saints receive their everlasting kingdom. It is, we know, abundantly
clear, from the number of days given in a later passage,
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that ‘a time and times and half a time’ stand for ‘a year, two years, and half a year’ – three and a half years, though in the Scriptures this is often given in months. For although ‘times’ in Latin looks like an indefinite expression, the original word is dual, a form not found in Latin: but Greek has the dual form, and so, it is said,
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does Hebrew. Hence ‘times’ means here ‘two times’. I confess, indeed, that I fear we may be mistaken in respect of the ten kings whom Antichrist, as it seems, is to find, who are ostensibly ten men; I am afraid, that is, that Antichrist may come unexpectedly, seeing that there are not as many kings as that in existence in the Roman world. But it may be suggested that the number ten signifies the total number of kings after whom he is to come, in the same way as totality is frequently signified by a thousand, or a hundred, or seven,
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or by several other numbers – there is no need to give a list of them here.
There is another passage in Daniel which runs as follows:
Then there will be a time of distress unparalleled from the first beginning of mankind on the earth until that time. When that time comes all your people will be preserved who are found recorded in the book. And many of those who are sleeping in the heaped-up earth will rise up, some to eternal life, some to shame and eternal disgrace. Then those who understand will shine like the brightness of the vault of heaven, and many of the just will shine like the stars for all eternity.
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This passage closely resembles the statement in the Gospel quoted earlier,
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at least in regard to the resurrection of the dead. For those who are described there as being ‘in the graves’ are here described as ‘in the heaped-up earth’, or, as others translate it, ‘in the dust of the earth’; and as it is said there that ‘they will come out’, so here ‘they will rise up’; there it says that ‘those whose actions have been good will come out to the resurrection of life, but those whose actions have been evil, to the resurrection of judgement’, and in this passage, similarly, ‘some to eternal life, some to shame and eternal disgrace’. And it must not be regarded as a discrepancy that the Gospel mentions ‘all who are in the graves’, while the prophet, instead of saying ‘all’, says ‘
many
of those who are sleeping in the heaped-up earth’. For Scripture often puts ‘many’ for ‘all’. For example, it was said to Abraham: ‘I have appointed you as the father of
many
nations’, but, in another place, ‘In your descendants all nations will be blessed.’
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On the subject of the resurrection thus described the prophet Daniel receives a personal message a little later on, when he is told, ‘You also come and rest: for there is still a day before the completion of the consummation, and you will rest, and will rise again to receive your share at the end of time.’
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24.
Prophecies in the psalms about the end of the world and the last judgement
The psalms contain many references to the last judgement, most of them being brief statements made in passing. But I shall certainly not fail to mention the most explicit statement in the psalms about the end of this world. ‘In the beginning you founded the world, Lord, and the heavens are the work of your hands. They will perish, but you endure; and they will all grow old like a piece of clothing, and you will change them like a garment, and they will be changed. But you are always the same, and your years will never end.’
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Why is it that though Porphyry praises the devotion of the Hebrews in their worship of a God who is great and true and terrible even to the divine powers,
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he charges the Christians with supreme folly in asserting that this world is doomed to perish? He supports the charge with quotations from the oracles of his gods. But observe this statement from the sacred Scriptures of the Hebrews. It is addressed to the God whom even the divinities themselves regard with dread; and it says, ‘The heavens are the work of your hands; they will perish.’
Now, are we to suppose that the world will not perish, when the heavens perish? For the heavens are the higher and the more secure part of the world. If this statement is displeasing to Jupiter, on whose oracle, as being of higher authority, the philosopher bases his attack on the credulity of Christians, why does he not make the same attack on the wisdom of the Hebrews, as being folly? For it is in their religious literature that the statement is found. Moreover if Porphyry so much approves of this Hebrew wisdom that he proclaims its merits by the utterances of his gods, as well as with his own voice, and if the statement that the heavens are doomed to perish occurs in that wisdom, why does his delusion reach such a pitch of futility as to cry out against this tenet of the Christian faith? Why condemn, along with the rest of that faith, or even above the rest, the belief that the world is to perish, which is necessarily entailed by the belief that the heavens will pass away? It is true that in the sacred books, which are
the special property of us Christians, and are not shared by us with the Hebrews, that is, in the Gospels and the apostolic writings, one finds such statements as: ‘The form of this world is transitory’; ‘The world is passing away’; ‘Heaven and earth will pass away.’
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But I regard ‘transitory’ and ‘pass away’ as somewhat milder expressions than ‘perish’.
In the epistle of the apostle Peter, also, in which it is said that the world which then existed perished under the Flood of water, it is quite clear what part of the world is signified by the whole, and to what extent it is said to have perished, and what heavens were kept in store, to be reserved for the fire until the day of judgement and of the destruction of wicked men.
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Then he says, a little later, ‘The day of the Lord will come unexpectedly, as a thief comes; and on that day the heavens will pass away in a mighty rush, and the elements will blaze up into disintegration, and the earth and all things on the earth will be burnt up’; and he adds, ‘Since all things are to perish, consider what kind of people you ought to be.’
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Now these heavens which are doomed to perish may be taken to be the heavens which are, according to Peter, ‘kept in store, to be reserved for the fire’, and the elements which are to ‘blaze up’ may be taken to be those stormy, turbulent elements in this lowest section of the world, in which, he says, those same heavens are kept in store, while the higher heavens, in whose vault the stars are stationed, remain unharmed and continue in their own inviolate condition. In fact, even the scriptural statement that ‘the stars are to fall from heaven’
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– leaving aside the fact that it can much more plausibly be taken in another sense – demonstrates rather that the heavens are going to remain, if the stars are indeed to fall from them! For either this expression is metaphorical (the more probable interpretation) or else it describes something which will occur in this lowest heaven, albeit an event certainly more amazing than any phenomenon of these days. Something of this kind is that star in Virgil that
Trailing its torch coursed with bright light through heaven and ‘hid itself in the forest of Ida’.
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What I have quoted from the psalm, on the other hand, seems to leave none of the heavens outside the scope of this future destruction. For it says, ‘The heavens are the work of your hands; they will perish.’ And as none of them is outside the scope of God’s work, so none of
them is withdrawn from the scope of the destruction. And yet our philosophers will not deign to support the piety of the Hebrews approved by the oracles of their gods, by quoting the expressions of the apostle Peter, whom they bitterly hate. They might, at least, avoid the supposition that it is the whole of the world that is to perish, by the argument that in the psalmist’s statement, ‘they shall perish’, the whole stands for the part, because it is only the lowest heavens that are to perish. This would be in line with the apostle’s use of ‘the whole for the part’ in his epistle, where he says that the world perished in the Flood, whereas in fact it was only the lowest part of it that perished, along with its own region of the heavens. But since, as I said, they will not condescend to approve Peter’s view, and to ascribe to the final conflagration only so much effect as we attribute to the Deluge – for they maintain that waters or flames could never wipe out the whole human race – their only course is to declare that the reason why their gods praised the wisdom of the Hebrews is that the gods had failed to read that particular psalm!
Again, in the forty-ninth psalm we see a reference to the last judgement of God in these verses: ‘God will come in manifest presence; he will not be silent. Fire will blaze before him; and around him will be a mighty tempest. He will summon the heaven above, and the earth, to judge among his people. Assemble his righteous ones before him, who put his covenant above sacrifices.’
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This we take as describing our Lord Jesus Christ, whose coming from heaven we await, to judge the living and the dead. For he will come in manifest presence, to execute just judgement on the just and the unjust – he who first came secretly, to be judged unjustly by the unjust. He, I repeat, ‘will come in manifest presence; he will not be silent’; this means that he will make his presence known by the voice of his judgement, he who when he first came in secret was silent before his judge, when he ‘was brought like a sheep to be slaughtered, and was speechless like a lamb in the presence of the shearer’, as we read in Isaiah’s prophecy of him,
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and as we see in the fulfilment of that prophecy in the Gospel story. As for the fire and the tempest, I have already said how those are to be understood when I treated of a similar passage in the prophecy of Isaiah. And as for ‘he will summon the heavens above’, the saints and the just are properly called ‘heaven’, and so this doubtless means what the apostle is describing when he says, ‘We shall be caught up
along with them in the clouds into the air, to meet Christ.’
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For, if we take the superficial meaning, what is meant by the summoning of heaven ‘above’, as if it could be anywhere else than ‘above’? And as for the words following, ‘and the earth, to judge among his people’, if we take this with ‘he will summon’, that is, ‘he will summon the earth also’, instead of connecting it also with ‘above’, this seems to give a meaning in harmony with sound faith, in that ‘heaven’ is taken to mean those who will be associated with Christ in judging, while ‘earth’ means those who are to be judged. Thus we are to take ‘will summon the heaven above’ as meaning ‘he will summon the angels in the high exalted realms, and with them he will descend to execute judgement’; then ‘and he will summon the earth’ will mean ‘summon the men on earth to submit to judgement’. But if we have to take both ‘he will summon’ and ‘above’ with ‘and the earth’, the meaning will be: ‘He will summon the heaven above, and the earth above’; and in that case it is best, I think, to understand it as describing all those who will be caught up into the air to meet Christ, but ‘heaven’ will refer to their souls and ‘earth’ to their bodies.
Then ‘to judge among his people’ can surely only mean that he will separate by his judgement the good from the wicked, the ‘sheep’ from the ‘goats’. Then he turns to speak to the angels: ‘Assemble his righteous ones before him’, for a matter of such importance must needs be carried out by the ministry of the angels. If we ask further who those ‘righteous ones’ are whom the angels are to assemble, we have the answer in ‘those who put his covenant above sacrifices’. This is the whole life of the righteous, to put the covenant of God above sacrifices. For either it is the deeds of mercy which are ‘above sacrifices’, that is are to be preferred to sacrifices, in harmony with God’s declaration that he ‘desires mercy rather than sacrifice’;
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or, if ‘above sacrifices’ is taken to mean ‘
in
sacrifices’ in the same way as something which certainly happens
in
the world is said to be done ‘
upon
earth’, then in that case it is just those deeds of mercy that are undoubtedly the sacrifices which are pleasing to God – a point which I recollect having made in the tenth book of this work;
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and in those deeds of mercy the righteous ‘set up God’s covenant’ because they do them in view of the promises contained in the new covenant. Hence, when his righteous ones have been assembled and stationed on his right hand in the last judgement, Christ will undoubtedly say to them, ‘Come, you that have my Father’s blessing, take possession of the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I
was hungry, and you gave me food to eat
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and so on – a public statement of the good deeds of the good, and the everlasting rewards which will be given them by the last sentence pronounced by the Judge.