Read City of God (Penguin Classics) Online
Authors: Saint Augustine
City of God (Penguin Classics) (160 page)
29.
The coming of Elijah before the judgement, for the conversion of the Jews
Malachi thus admonishes his people to remember the Law of Moses, for he foresaw that for a long time yet they would not interpret it spiritually, as they ought to have done; and he continues, ‘See, I shall send you Elijah the Tishbite, before the great and splendid Day of the Lord; and he will turn the heart of the father to the son and the heart of a man to his neighbour, so that in my coming I may not utterly shake the earth.’
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The belief that in the final period before the judgement this great and wonderful prophet Elijah will expound the Law to the Jews, and that through his activity the Jews are destined to believe in our Christ, this is a very frequent subject in the conversation of believers, and a frequent thought in their hearts. The expectation that he will come before the coming of the Saviour in judgement is certainly not without good reason, since there is good reason for the belief that he is still alive; for he was carried up from the world of men in a fiery chariot, as holy Scripture testifies most explicitly.
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Well then, when he comes, he will explain in a spiritual sense the Law which the Jews now take in a material sense, and by so doing he will ‘turn the heart of the father toward the son’, that is, the hearts of the fathers towards the children – for the seventy translators have used the singular for the plural. The meaning, then, is that the sons, that is, the Jews, will interpret the Law as their fathers – that is, the prophets, including Moses himself – interpreted it. For it is thus that the heart of the fathers will be turned towards the children when the understanding of the fathers is brought to the understanding of the children. And ‘the hearts of the children will be turned to the fathers’ when children share the views of their fathers. The Septuagint here says, ‘the heart of a man to his neighbour’ – for fathers and sons are the closest of neighbours.
However, another and a more attractive meaning can be found in the words of the seventy translators, who translated in the manner of prophets.
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This meaning is that Elijah is to turn the heart of God the Father towards the Son, not, of course, by causing the Father to love the Son, but by teaching men that the Father loves the Son, so that the Jews also, who first hated the Son, will love this same Son, who is our Christ. For now, in the thought of the Jews, God keeps his heart turned away from our Christ, for that is what they suppose. And so in their thought God’s heart will be turned towards the Son when they themselves have their hearts turned by conversion, and
have learnt of the love of the Father for the Son. The next words, ‘and the heart of a man to his neighbour’ – that is, Elijah will also turn the heart of a man to his neighbour – are surely best understood as meaning the turning of a man’s heart to the man Christ. For though Christ is our God ‘in the form of God’, he condescended to take ‘the form of a servant’
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and so to become our neighbour. This then, is what Elijah will achieve ‘so that, in my coming, I may not utterly shake the earth’. For ‘the earth’ stands for those whose wisdom is earthly, as to this day is the wisdom of the Jews, who are Jews only in the racial sense. It is from this defect that those complaints against God have arisen, when people say, ”The wicked have God’s approval’ and ‘The man who serves God is a fool.’
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30.
The Old Testament prophecies of judgement give no explicit mention of Christ. But some passages, where God is the speaker, make it clear that he is identified with Christ
There are many other passages of holy Scripture witnessing to the last judgement of God, and to collect them all would be an excessively lengthy task. It must suffice that I have proved that judgement to have been foretold by both the Old and the New Testaments. What is not so explicitly expressed in the Old Testament as in the New is that this judgement is to be administered by Christ, that is, that Christ is to come from heaven as judge; and the reason for this uncertainty is that when in the Old Testament the Lord God says that he is going to come, or when it is said of him that he will come, it does not immediately follow that Christ is meant; for the Lord God means the Father or the Son or the Holy Spirit. But this is a question which we must not leave without examining the evidence. In the first place we have to show how Jesus Christ speaks in the prophetic books in the character of the Lord God, and yet it is abundantly clear that Jesus Christ is speaking; so that in other places also when this is not immediately apparent, and yet it is said that the Lord God is come for that last judgement, it may be understood that Jesus Christ is meant.
There is a passage in the prophet Isaiah which clearly demonstrates the point I am making. For God says, through the mouth of the prophet,
Listen to me, Jacob, Israel whom I call. I am the first, and I am for all eternity. My hand laid the foundations of the earth, and my right hand
established the heaven. I shall call them, and they will stand together, and they will all be assembled and will listen. Who has announced this to him? It is for love of you that I have performed your will upon Babylon, so that I might remove the offspring of the Chaldeans. I have spoken, and I have called him. I brought him hither and prospered his plans. Draw near to me and listen to this. From the beginning I have not spoken to you in secret; when these things were happening, I was there. And now the Lord God has sent me; and so has his Spirit.
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It is certainly Christ himself who is speaking; yet it would not be understood to be Jesus Christ, had he not added, ‘And now the Lord God has sent me; and so has his Spirit’. For he said this ‘in the form of a servant’, using here a past tense to describe a future event, a usage we find in the same prophet when he says, ‘He was led
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like a lamb to be slaughtered’, not ‘he will be led’, thus employing a past tense for an event in the future. And prophecy continually uses this mode of speaking.
There is another passage, in Zechariah, which plainly shows the Almighty sending the Almighty; and who can these be except God the Father sending God the Son? The passage runs, ”This is what the Lord Almighty says: “After glory he has sent me to the nations who despoiled you; for whoever has touched you is as if he touched the pupil of his eye. See, I shall raise my hand over them, and they will be plunder for those who had been their slaves; and you will know that the Lord Almighty has sent me.” ’
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Observe that the Lord Almighty says that he was sent by the Lord Almighty. Who would dare to take these words as representing anything but an utterance of Christ, speaking, obviously, to ‘the lost sheep of the house of Israel’, for he says in the Gospel, ‘I have been sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.’
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And here he compares them to the pupil of God’s eye because of God’s special feeling of affection for them; the apostles themselves were sheep of this kind. But after the glory, that is, of course, after his resurrection (for before the resurrection, as the evangelist says, ‘Jesus was not yet glorified’
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) he was sent to the Gentiles also in the persons of his apostles, and so the saying in the psalm was fulfilled: ‘You will rescue me from the opposition of the people, you will set me at the head of the Gentiles.’
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The result was that those who had despoiled the Israelites, those by whom the Israelites had been enslaved when they were subject to the Gentiles, were not
merely to be despoiled in their turn in the same way; they were to become themselves the spoil of the Israelites. This, in fact, is what Christ promised to his disciples in saying, ‘I shall make you fishers of men’, and to one of them, ‘From now on you will be catching men.’
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Thus they did indeed become spoil, but for their good, as property snatched from that ‘strong man’, a strong man bound with greater strength.
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Similarly, the Lord speaks through the same prophet and says,
When that day comes, I shall seek to remove all the nations who come against Jerusalem; and I shall pour out over the house of David and over the inhabitants of Jerusalem the spirit of grace and mercy. Then they will look at me because they have gloated over me; and they will mourn for him as if for one very dear, and they will grieve as men grieve for an only son.
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Now can we think that it is in the power of anyone but God to remove all the nations hostile to the holy city of Jerusalem and all who ‘come against her’, that is, are opposed to her, or, as others translate it, ‘come over her’, that is, to subject her to themselves? And ‘to pour out over the house of David and the inhabitants of that city the spirit of grace and mercy’? This is without doubt an act of God, and the words are spoken, through the prophet, in the person of God; and yet Christ demonstrates that he is the God who achieves this great act, those divine acts, by adding, ‘Then they will look at me because they gloated over me, and they will mourn for him as for one very dear, and they will grieve as men grieve for an only son.’
For on that day even the Jews will certainly repent, even those Jews who are to receive ‘the spirit of grace and mercy’. They will repent that they gloated over Christ in his suffering, when they look at him as he comes in his majesty, and recognize him as the one who formerly came in humility, whom they mocked at in the persons of their parents; however, those parents themselves, who committed that great impiety, will rise again and see him, but now for their punishment, no longer for their correction. And so it is not the parents who are to be taken as meant in the passage when it says, ‘and I shall pour out upon the House of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem the spirit of grace and mercy: and they will look at me because they gloated over me’; it is, nevertheless, those who come from their stock that are meant, those who are to believe at that time through the work of
Elijah. But just as we say to the Jews, ‘You put Christ to death’, although it was their parents who did this, so they will grieve for having in a sense done themselves what was actually done by those from whose stock they have descended. Thus, although they have received the spirit of grace and mercy and, being now members of the faith, will not be condemned along with their impious parents, they will nevertheless grieve as if they themselves had done what was done by their parents. They will grieve, therefore, not because they feel guilty of this crime, but because they feel the emotions of true religion.
It is true that where the Septuagint has ‘they will look at me because they gloated over me’, a translation directly from the Hebrew gives ‘they will look on me whom they pierced’; and this yields a more explicit description of the crucified Christ. And yet the ‘gloating’ which the seventy translators preferred to give as their rendering was in evidence in the whole of his passion. For they did in fact gloat over Christ when he was arrested, when he was bound, when he was judged, when he was clothed with humiliating garments as an insult, and was crowned with thorns; when he was struck on the head with a reed, and received homage on bended knees in mockery; when he carried his cross, and when in the end he hung upon that cross. Thus it is not by following one translation only but by joining together both translations, by reading ‘pierced’ as well as ‘gloated’, that we recognize here in greater detail the reality of the Lord’s passion.
So when we read in the prophetic books that God is to come to execute the last judgement we are bound to take it that Christ is meant, even though there is no other indication of him, simply because it is the judgement; because, although the Father will judge, it is through the coming of the Son of Man that he will execute judgement. For the Father himself in his own manifest presence ‘judges no one; he has entrusted all judgement to the Son’.
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And the Son will be manifested as man for his execution of judgement, just as it was as a man that he was judged. For can anyone else than Christ be meant when God speaks in similar terms through Isaiah, using the name of Jacob and Israel, from whose line Christ received his body? This is what the Scripture says:
Jacob is my servant; I shall lift him up: Israel is my chosen one; my Spirit has taken him to himself. I have given my Spirit to him; he will bring forth judgement for the nations. He will not cry out, nor will he cease to speak,
and his voice will not be heard outside. He will not break a crushed reed, and he will not quench a smoking wick; but he will bring forth judgement in truth. He will shine and will not be broken down, until he establishes judgement on the earth. In his name the nations will put their hope.
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In the Hebrew the names ‘Jacob’ and ‘Israel’ are not found, but simply ‘my servant’. Doubtless the seventy translators wished to warn the reader of the full meaning to be given to this phrase, to point out, that is, the reference to ‘the form of a servant’ in which the Most High showed himself in utter humility; and so, to signify him, they put in the name of the man from whose line Christ took that ‘form of a servant’.
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”The Holy Spirit was given’ to him, as was shown by the appearance of a dove, according to the testimony of the evangelist.
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He ‘brought forth judgement to the nations’, because he foretold the judgement to come which had been hidden from them. In his gentleness Tie did not cry our’, and yet ‘he did not cease to speak’ in his proclamation of the truth; but his voice was not, and is not, ‘heard outside’ because he is not obeyed by those who are outside and are cut off from his body. And it was the Jews themselves that ‘he did not break’, or ‘quench’, those persecutors of his, who are likened to a ‘crushed reed’ which has lost its perfection, and a ‘smoking wick’ which has lost its light; he did not break or quench them, because he spared them, since he had not yet come to judge them but to be judged by them. He certainly ‘brought forth judgement in truth’ by predicting to them the judgement, when they were to be punished if they persisted in their malignity. His face ‘shone’ on the mountain;
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his fame shone in the whole world. He is not ‘broken’, or crushed, because neither in his own person nor in his Church has he yielded to his persecutors so as to cease to be. And so that event has not happened of which his enemies have spoken, or still speak, when they say, ‘When will he the and his name perish?’
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– nor will it happen before ‘he establishes judgement on the earth’.
Here it is, then, made manifest, the hidden thing for which we were looking. This, in fact, is the last judgement which he will establish on the earth when he himself comes from heaven. And we now see fulfilled the last words of the prophecy about him: ‘In his name the nations will put their hope.’ This, at least, cannot be denied; and its truth should lead to a belief in that statement which
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shamelessly denied. For who would have expected an event which even those who
still refuse to believe in Christ now see in process, along with us, and because they are unable to deny it, they ‘gnash their teeth and waste away’?
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Who would have expected that the nations would put their hope in the name of Christ, at the time when he was arrested, bound, scourged, ridiculed, crucified; when even his disciples had lost the hope in him which they had by then begun to have? The hope that was then held scarcely by the one thief on the cross is now held by nations scattered far and wide, who are signed with the sign of that very cross on which he died, so that they may not the for ever.
There is no one therefore who denies or doubts that the last judgement, as it is foretold in holy Scripture, is to be executed by Jesus Christ, unless it is someone who, with an unbelievable kind of animosity or blindness, does not believe in those sacred writings, which have by now demonstrated their truth to the whole world. And so in that judgement, or in connection with that judgement, we have learnt that those events are to come about: Elijah the Tishbite will come; Jews will accept the faith; Antichrist will persecute; Christ will judge; the dead will rise again; the good and the evil will be separated; the earth will be destroyed in the flames and then will be renewed. All those events, we must believe, will come about; but in what way, and in what order they will come, actual experience will then teach us with a finality surpassing anything our human understanding is now capable of attaining. However, I consider that these events are destined to come about in the order I have given.
Two books relating to our task remain for the fulfilment, with God’s help, of my promises. One of them will treat of the punishment of the wicked; the other of the felicity of the righteous. In them, as God shall grant, I will in particular refute the human arguments which some wretched creatures gnaw over, pluming themselves on their own wisdom, in disparagement of the divine predictions and prophecies, while they despise, as false and laughable, the wholesome nourishment of the faith. Those, on the other hand, who are wise by God’s standards hold to the truth and the omnipotence of God as the strongest proof of things which seem incredible to men, and yet are included in the holy Scriptures, whose truth has already been vindicated in so many ways. Such people are convinced that God could not conceivably have lied in the Scriptures, and that he can do what to the unbeliever is impossible.