Read City of God (Penguin Classics) Online
Authors: Saint Augustine
22.
The fall of the sons of God and the consequent destruction by the Flood
It was this free choice of the will that produced the mingling of the two cities, as the human race progressed and increased. These cities became associated in wickedness, and the result was a kind of amalgam of the two communities. This evil owed its origin, once again, to the female sex, but not in the same way as the evil at the beginning of the world, for these women were not seduced by cunning so as to persuade their husbands to sin. What happened was that the women who had been depraved in morals in the earthly city, that is, in the community of the earth-born, were loved for their physical beauty by the sons of God,
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that is, the citizens of the other City, on pilgrimage in this world. Such beauty is certainly a good, a gift of God; but he bestows it on the evil as well as on the good for this reason, for fear that the good may consider it an important good.
Hence the abandonment of a greater good, one that is confined to good people, led to a fall towards a good of little importance, one that is not confined to good people, but common to good and bad alike. Thus the sons of God were captivated by love for the daughters of men, and in order to enjoy them as wives, they abandoned the godly behaviour they had maintained in the holy community and lapsed into the morality of the earth-born society. Now physical beauty, to be sure, is a good created by God, but it is a temporal, carnal good, very low in the scale of goods; and if it is loved in preference to God, the eternal, internal and sempiternal Good, that love is as wrong as the miser’s love of gold, with the abandonment of justice, though the fault is in the man, not in the gold. This is true of everything created; though it is good, it can be loved in the right way or in the wrong way – in the right way, that is, when the proper order is kept, in the wrong way when that order is upset. This is how I put the same thought in some verses in praise of the paschal candle:
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These are thy gifts; they are good, for thou in thy
goodness has made them.
Nothing in them is from us, save for sin when,
neglectful of order,
We fix our love on the creature, instead of on thee,
the Creator.
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But if the Creator is truly loved, that is, if he himself is loved, and not something else in his stead, then he cannot be wrongly loved. We must, in fact, observe the right order even in our love for the very love with which we love what is deserving of love, so that there may be in us the virtue which is the condition of the good life. Hence, as it seems to me, a brief and true definition of virtue is ‘rightly ordered love’. That is why in the holy
Song of Songs
Christ’s bride, the City of God, sings, ‘Set love in order in me.’
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Thus it was because the order of love (that is of attachment and affection) was disturbed, that the sons of God defected from God in their affection for the daughters of men.
These two descriptions are sufficient to show the difference between the two cities. It is not that ‘the sons of God’ were not sons of men by nature; but they began to have another name by virtue of grace. Indeed, in the same scriptural passage, where the sons of God are said to have fallen in love with the daughters of men, they are also called ‘angels of God’.
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For this reason many people suppose that they were not men but angels.
23.
Are we to believe that angels mated with women, and that the giants resulted from these unions
?
In the third book of this work we mentioned in passing the question whether angels, being spirits, could have physical connection with women, and we left the problem unresolved.
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Now Scripture says, ‘He makes spirits his angels.’
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that is, those who are by nature spirits he makes into his angels, by imposing on them the duty of carrying messages. For the Greek angelos, which becomes
angelus
in the Latin derivative, means
nuntius
, a ‘messenger’, in the Latin
language. But it is uncertain whether the writer refers to their bodies when he goes on to say, ‘and he makes a flaming fire his ministers’, or whether he means that his ministers ought to burn with love as with a spiritual fire.
Nevertheless it is the testimony of Scripture (which tells us nothing but the truth) that angels appeared to men in bodies of such a kind that they could not only be seen but also touched.
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Besides this, it is widely reported that Silvani and Pans,
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commonly called
incubi
, have often behaved improperly towards women, lusting after them and achieving intercourse with them. These reports are confirmed by many people, either from their own experience or from the accounts of the experience of others, whose reliability there is no occasion to doubt. Then there is the story that certain demons, whom the Gauls call Dusii, constantly and successfully attempt this indecency. This is asserted by so many witnesses of such a character that it would seem an impertinence to deny it. Hence I would not venture a conclusive statement on the question whether some spirits with bodies of air (an element which even when set in motion by a fan is felt by the bodily sense of touch) can also experience this lust and so can mate, in whatever way they can, with women, who feel their embraces.
In spite of this, I cannot possibly believe that the holy angels of God could thus have fallen at that time, or that it is to them that the apostle Peter refers when he says, ‘For if God did not spare the sinful angels, but thrust them into the dungeons of the darkness of hell, and handed them over to be kept for punishment at the judgement.’
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I should rather suppose that he is speaking of those who revolted from God and fell with the devil, their leader, who in envy brought the first man to his fall by the deceit of the serpent. Now the holy Scripture gives abundant witness that men of God were often entitled ‘angels’. For example, Scripture says of John, ‘Behold, I am sending my angel ahead of you, and he will prepare your way’
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and the prophet Malachi is called an ‘angel’ in virtue of a particular grace, that is, a grace particularly imparted to him.
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Some people, however, are worried by the statement in the Bible that the mating of those who are called ‘sons of God’ with the women
they loved resulted in offspring who were not like men of our own kind; they were giants. These critics seem to ignore the fact that even in our own time men have been born whose bodies far exceed the normal stature of men today; a fact that I have already mentioned.
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Was there not in Rome a few years ago, when the destruction of the city by the Goths was drawing near, a woman, living with her father and mother, who towered far above all other inhabitants with a stature which could be called gigantic? An amazing crowd rushed to see her, wherever she went. And what excited special wonder was the fact that both her parents were not even as tall as the tallest people that we see in our everyday experience.
Thus it is possible that giants were born even before the sons of God (also called ‘angels of God’) mated with the daughters of men, which means daughters of those who live by man’s standards – that is to say, before the sons of Seth married the daughters of Cain. In fact, this is what the canonical Scripture says in the book which gives this account. The passage runs as follows,
And it happened that after human beings had begun to multiply on the earth, and daughters were born to them, that angels of God saw that the daughters of men were good, and so they took wives for themselves from all those whom they chose. And the Lord said: ‘My spirit will not stay in those men for ever, because they are flesh; however, their days will be a hundred and twenty years.’ Now the giants were on the earth in those days, and afterwards, when the sons of God mated with the daughters of men and begot children for themselves. Those were the giants in the days of old, men of renown.
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Those words of the inspired book are sufficient indication that there had been giants on the earth when the sons of God took as wives the daughters of men, since they loved them because they were ‘good’, that is, beautiful; for it is customary in Scripture to apply the term ‘good’ also to those who are physically attractive. It is true that giants were also born after this happened; for the Scripture says, ‘Now the giants were on the earth in those days, and afterwards, when the sons of God mated with the daughters of men.’ Thus there were giants both before and after that time.
Then when Scripture says, ‘And they begot children for themselves’, it shows quite clearly that previously, before the sons of God fell in this way, they begot children for God, not for themselves; that means that lust for coition was not their master, but it was a servant, subordinate to duty of procreation. They did not procreate children to
found a family to minister to their pride but to produce citizens for the City of God, so that they, as angels of God, could give their children this message: that they must put their hope in God, like the son of Seth, the ‘son of the resurrection’, who ‘hoped to call on the name of the Lord God’. And in virtue of this hope they, with their posterity, would be co-heirs of eternal blessings, and brothers of their sons, under God the Father.
Now these sons of God were not angels of God in such a way that they were not also human beings as some people suppose. Scripture itself declares without any ambiguity that they were human; there can be no doubt about this. For after the statement that ‘the angels of God saw that the daughters of men were good, and they took wives for themselves from all those whom they chose’, it goes on immediately to say, ‘Then the Lord God said: “My spirit will not stay in those men for ever, because they are flesh.”’ It was indeed through God’s spirit that they had been made angels of God and sons of God, but in sinking to a lower level they are called ‘men’, a name denoting their nature, not God’s grace. They are also called ‘flesh’, because they deserted the spirit, and, in deserting, were themselves deserted.
In the Septuagint also they are certainly called ‘angels of God’ and ‘sons of God’ though it is true that this reading is not offered in all the texts, for some of them read only ‘sons of God’. While Aquila,
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whose translation the Jews prefer to all the others, gives neither ‘angels of God’ nor ‘sons of God’ his version gives ‘sons of gods’. In fact both renderings are correct. For they were sons of God, under whose fatherhood they were also brothers of their own fathers; they were sons of gods as being the offspring of gods, and together with them they themselves were gods, according to the passage in the psalm where it says ‘I said: “You are gods, and all of you sons of the Most High.” ’
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We are justified in supposing that the seventy’ translators received the spirit of prophecy; and so, if they altered anything by its authority and used expressions in their translation different from those of the original, we should not doubt that these expressions also were inspired by God.
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Although in fact it is said that the expression is ambiguous in the Hebrew, and admits of either ‘sons of God’ or ‘sons of gods’ as a translation.
We may then pass over the tales contained in the scriptures which are called ‘Apocrypha’ because their origin is obscure and was not
clear to the fathers, from whom the authority of the true Scriptures has come down to us by a well-defined and well-known line of succession. There is indeed some truth to be found in these Apocrypha; but they have no canonical authority on account of the many falsehoods they contain. Certainly, we cannot deny that Enoch (the seventh in descent from Adam) wrote a number of things by divine inspiration, since the apostle Jude says as much in a canonical epistle.
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But there was good reason for the exclusion of these writings from the canon of the Scriptures, which was preserved in the temple of the Hebrew people by the careful custody of the priestly succession. The reason was that these books were judged of doubtful reliability because of their antiquity; and it was impossible to discover whether they were what Enoch had written, since those who put them forward are not found to have preserved them with the due formality, that is, through an appointed succession. That is why responsible judges have decided that we should reject the attribution to Enoch of the documents put forward under his name, containing stories about giants who are said not to have had human fathers. Many other writings are similarly put forward under the names of other prophets, and more recent productions under the names of apostles. All these have been excluded from canonical authority as a result of careful examination, and are classed as Apocrypha.
Thus according to the canonical Scriptures, Hebrew and Christian, there is no doubt that many giants existed before the Flood, and that these were citizens of the earth-born society of men, whereas the sons of God, who by physical descent belonged to Seth’s lineage, sank down into this society, after abandoning righteousness. And it is not to be wondered at that their children also could be giants – not that all of them were in fact giants, but there were certainly more giants at that time than in all succeeding periods since the Flood. The Creator decided to create them for a specific purpose: to demonstrate in this way, as in others, that the wise man should not attach much importance either to physical beauty or to physical size and strength; for the wise man is blessed with the possession of goods far better and more lasting than these, spiritual and immortal goods, which are not the common property of the good and the bad alike, but the exclusive property of the good. This fact is underlined by another prophet when he says, ‘There were those renowned giants, who from the beginning were men of great stature, experts in war. It was not those whom the Lord chose, nor did he give them the way of knowledge, in fact they perished
because they had no wisdom; they disappeared through their lack of thought’
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