Read City of God (Penguin Classics) Online
Authors: Saint Augustine
4.
The diversity of languages and the beginning of Babylon
Now those nations, according to the narrative, possessed ‘their own languages’. But despite that statement the narrator goes back to the time when all men had the same language; and then he explains how the diversity of languages arose. ‘The whole earth.’ he says,
had one language and all men had the same way of speaking. Then it happened that, as they migrated from the East, they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. And one man said to the next man: ‘Come, let us make bricks and bake them in the fire.’ And so bricks were used for stone, and they had bitumen for mortar; and they said: ‘Come, let us build a city for ourselves, and a tower, whose top will reach to the sky; and let us make a name for ourselves, before we are scattered over the face of all the earth. And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the sons of men had built. And the Lord God said, ‘Behold, the people are one race, and all of them have one language; and they have begun to build, and from now on they will not fail to achieve anything they may try to do. Come, let us go down and bring confusion in their speech, so that no one may understand what the next man says.’ Then the Lord dispersed them from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city and the tower. That is why the name ‘Confusion’ was given to the city; because it was here that the Lord confused the languages of all the earth.
And the Lord God dispersed them from there over the face of all the earth.
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This city which was called ‘Confusion’ is none other than Babylon, whose marvellous construction is praised also by pagan historians. The name ‘Babylon’ means, in fact, ‘confusion’.
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Hence it may be inferred that Nimrod ‘the giant’ was its founder, as was briefly suggested earlier. For when the Scripture mentions him, it says that ‘the beginning of his empire was Babylon’, that is, Babylon was the city which had the pre-eminence over all the others, where the king’s dwelling was, in the metropolis, so to speak; although it was not finished on the great scale which their arrogant impiety had in mind. For their plan provided for an enormous height, to ‘reach to the sky’, as was said; whether this referred to a single tower, which was designed as the principal structure among others, or to all the towers, denoted by the collective singular (as ‘the soldier’ is used, to mean thousands of soldiers, and ‘the frog’ or ‘the locust’ to designate a multitude of frogs or locusts in the plagues with which Moses smote the Egyptians
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).
But what could the empty presumption of man have achieved, no matter how vast the structure it contrived, whatever the height to which that building towered into the sky in its challenge to God? What though it should overtop the mountains and escape beyond the region of this cloudy atmosphere? When all is said, what harm could be done to God by any spiritual self-exaltation or material elevation however high it soared? The safe and genuine highway to heaven is constructed by humility, which lifts up its heart to the Lord, not against the Lord, as did that giant who is called ‘a hunter against the Lord’. Some interpreters have misunderstood this phrase, being deceived by an ambiguity in the Greek, and consequently translating it as ‘before the Lord’, instead of ‘against the Lord’.
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It is true that the Greek
enantion
means ‘before’ as well as ‘against’. For example, we find the word in one of the psalms: ‘Let us lament before (
ante
) the Lord who made us’;
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and also in the Book of Job, where it says, ‘You have burst into fury against (
ante
) the Lord.’
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It is in the latter sense that we must take it in the description of Nimrod; that giant was ‘a
hunter against the Lord’. For the word ‘hunter’ can only suggest a deceiver, oppressor and destroyer of earth-born creatures. Thus he, with his subject peoples, began to erect a tower against the Lord, which symbolizes his impious pride. Now it is right that an evilly affected plan should be punished, even when it is not successfully effected. And what kind of punishment was in fact imposed? Since a ruler’s power of domination is wielded by his tongue, it was in that organ that his pride was condemned to punishment. And the consequence was that he who refused to understand God’s bidding so as to obey it, was himself not understood when he gave orders to men. Thus that conspiracy of his was broken up, since each man separated from anyone whom he did not understand, and only associated with those to whom he could talk. And so the nations were divided by languages, and were scattered over the earth. Such was God’s design; and he achieved it by ways that are to us inscrutable and incomprehensible.
5.
The Lord’s descent to confuse the language of those who were building the tower
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Let us consider the statement, ‘And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower built by the sons of men’ – not, be it noted, by the sons of God, but by that society which lives by man’s standards, the society we call ‘the earthly city’. Now God is present everywhere in his entirety, and so does not move from one place to another; but he is said to ‘come down’ when he performs an action which is miraculous in being contrary to the ordinary course of nature, and thus in some way points to his presence. Again, he can never be unaware of anything; and so he does not learn the facts by seeing them at a particular time. But he is said to ‘see’ and to discover’ at a particular time anything which he causes to be seen and discovered. Thus the city had not so far been seen in the way in which God caused it to be seen when he made it clear how much it displeased him. On the other hand, God can be understood as coming down to the city in the sense that his angels, in whom he dwells, did so descend. And so the next passage, where it says, ‘And the Lord God said: “Behold the people are one race, and they all have the same language” ’, and so on; and the following words, ‘Come, let us go down and bring confusion in their speech’, are a recapitulation
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which shows how the action described by ‘the
Lord came down’ was effected. If, in fact, he had already come down, what is the point of the words, ‘Come, let us go down and bring confusion’ (which is taken as said to the angels) except that he was present in the angels when they descended and thus came down himself through his agents? And it is appropriate that he does not say, ‘Come, go down and bring confusion’ but, ‘Come, let us bring confusion on their speech’; for in this way he shows that he works through his servants, so that they themselves are also God’s fellow-workers; as the Apostle says, ‘we are fellow-workers with God.’
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6.
The mode of God’s speech with the angels
There is another passage which might have been interpreted with reference to the angels; it is the place where, at the creation of man, God said, ‘Let us make man’,
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instead of ‘Let me make man.’ However, since this is followed by ‘in our image’, and since it is unthinkable that we should believe man to have been made in the image of the angels, or that the angels and God have the same image, the plural here is correctly understood to refer to the Trinity. Nevertheless, the Trinity is one God, and therefore even after the words ‘Let us make’ the narrative proceeds: ‘And God made man in the image of God.’ It does not say, ‘The gods made’ or, ‘in the image of the gods’.
Now the passage we are discussing might also be understood as referring to the Trinity, as if the Father said to the Son and the Holy Spirit, ‘Come, let us go down and bring confusion on their speech’, if there had been anything to prevent our understanding this in reference to the angels. But it is more appropriate that the angels should ‘come’ to God with holy movements, that is to say, with reverent thoughts; for it is with reverent thoughts that they consult the changeless Truth, as the law which is established eternally in that heavenly court of theirs. For they themselves are not the truth for themselves; they are partakers of the creative Truth, and move towards it, as to the fountain of life,
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to receive from it what they do not possess of themselves. And this movement of theirs is a stable movement, by which they approach without withdrawing.
And God does not speak to the angels in the same way as we speak to one another, or to God, or to the angels, or as the angels speak to us. He speaks in his own fashion, which is beyond our describing. But his speech is explained to us in our fashion. God’s speech, to be sure, is on a higher plane; it precedes his action as the changeless reason of the
action itself; and his speaking has no sound, no transitory noise; it has a power that persists for eternity and operates in time. It is with this speech that he addresses the holy angels, whereas he speaks to us, who are situated far off, in a different way. And yet, when we also grasp something of this kind of speech with our inward ears, we come close to the angels. Therefore I do not have to be continually explaining about God’s acts of speaking in this present work. For unchanging Truth either speaks by itself, in a way we cannot explain, to the minds of rational creatures, or it speaks through a mutable creature, either to our spirit by spiritual images, or to our physical sense by physical voices.
Certainly the words, ‘And from now on they will not fail to achieve anything they try to do’,
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were not put as an assertion but as a question. This is frequently the way men express a threat, as when a speaker says,
Shall they not take up arms and then pursue
From the whole city?
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Accordingly, the passage quoted must be interpreted as if God said, Will not they fail to achieve everything they try to do?’ The quotation as given would not in itself suggest a threat. But I have added the particle –
ne
, for the benefit of the slow-witted, to read
nonne
, since a tone of voice cannot be indicated in writing.
We now see that from those three men, Noah’s sons, seventy-three nations – or rather seventy-two, as a calculation will show – and as many languages came into being on the earth, and by their increase they filled even the islands. However, the number of nations increased at a greater rate than the languages. For even in Africa we know of many barbarous nations using only one language.
7.
Whether the remotest island received all kinds of animals from those preserved in the ark
There can be no doubt that men could have crossed over by boat to inhabit the islands, after the human race had multiplied. But there is a problem about beasts of all kinds which are not looked after by human beings, and are not, like frogs, brought into life from the earth,
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but only as a result of the intercourse of male and female, such as wolves
and the other animals of that kind. How could they have existed on the islands, as well as on the mainland, after the Flood in which all creatures were wiped out, except for those in the ark? For we have to assume that they could be restored only from those whose species was preserved, in both sexes, in the ark. It is credible, to be sure, that they crossed to the islands by swimming, but that could only be true of the nearest islands; and there are some islands situated so far from the mainlands that it is clearly impossible for any beasts to have swum to them. But if we assume that men captured beasts and took them with them, and in this way established the species where they lived, because they were interested in hunting, this could give a credible explanation of the facts. On the other hand, it would be wrong to rule out the possibility that they were transported by activity of angels, either at God’s command or with his permission. If, however, they sprang from the earth, as at their first origin, when God said, ‘Let the earth produce the living soul’,
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then it becomes much more apparent that all species were in the ark not so much for the purpose of restoring the animal population as with a view to typifying the various nations, thus presenting a symbol of the Church. This must be the explanation, if the earth produced many animals on islands to which they could not cross.
8.
The origin of recorded monstrosities
There are accounts in pagan history
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of certain monstrous races of men. If these are to be believed, the question arises whether we are to suppose that they descended from the sons of Noah, or rather from that one man from whom they themselves derived. Some of those monsters are said to have only one eye, in the middle of their forehead;
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others have the soles of their feet turned backwards behind their legs;
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others have the characteristics of both sexes,
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the right breast being male and the left female, and in their intercourse they alternate between begetting and conceiving. Then there are men without mouths,
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who live only by inhaling through their nostrils; there are others whose height is only a cubit – the Greeks call them
‘Pygmies’,
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from their word for a cubit. We are told in another place that there are females who conceive at the age of five and do not live beyond their eighth year.
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There is also a story of a race who have a single leg attached to their feet;
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they cannot bend their knee, and yet have a remarkable turn of speed. They are called
Sciopods
(‘shadow-feet’) because in hot weather they lie on their backs on the ground and take shelter in the shade of their feet. There are some men without necks, and with their eyes in their shoulders; and other kinds of men or quasi-men portrayed in mosaic on the marine parade at Carthage, taken from books of ‘curiosities’, as we may call them.