Read City of God (Penguin Classics) Online
Authors: Saint Augustine
26.
The promise of a son to Sarah, to be father of nations, the promise sealed by circumcision
After this, Ishmael was born of Hagar; and Abraham might have supposed that in him there was the fulfilment of the promise given when he had decided to adopt his house-born slave, and God said, ‘This man will not be your heir; but he who will issue from you, he will be your heir.’
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Therefore, to prevent the supposition that this promise had been fulfilled in the maid-servant’s son, when he was
already ninety-nine years old, the Lord appeared to him and said to him: ‘I am God; be pleasing in my sight, and be without blame, and I shall establish my covenant between me and you, and I shall increase you exceedingly.’ And Abram fell on his face. Then God spoke to him and said: ‘As for me, here is my covenant with you, and you will be the father of a multitude of nations. And your name will no longer be Abram, but Abraham,
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because I have appointed you as the father of many nations. And I shall increase you most exceedingly, and make you into nations, and kings will issue from you. And I shall establish my covenant between me and you and your seed after you, for their generations, to be an eternal covenant, so that I shall be your God, and the God of your descendants after you. And to you and to your descendants after you I shall give the land in which you are dwelling, all the land of Canaan for an eternal possession; and I shall be their God.’ Then God said to Abraham: ‘As for you, you will keep my covenant, you and your seed after you in their descendants. Now this is the covenant which you will keep between me and you and your descendants after you in their generations: Every male of yours shall be circumcised; and you shall be circumcised in the flesh of your foreskin, and this will be a token of the covenant between me and you. The boy of eight days shall be circumcised, every male in your generations. The slave born in your house and the slave bought from anyone of another nation, who is not of your seed, shall be circumcised, the house-slave and the bought slave; and my covenant will be in your flesh, to be an eternal covenant. And the male child who is not circumcised, who is not circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin on the eighth day, his soul will perish from his people, because he has broken my covenant.’
And God said to Abraham: ‘As for Sarai your wife, her name will not be called Sarai, but Sarah will be her name.
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Moreover, I shall bless her and give you a son by her, and I shall bless him, and he shall become nations, and kings of nations will issue from him.’ Then Abraham bowed down to the ground; and he laughed and said in his heart: ‘Will a child be born to
me, at the age of a hundred years? And will Sarah bear a child, at the age of ninety?’ Then Abraham said to God: ‘Let Ishmael here live in your sightl’ But God said: ‘It is true. Sarah your wife will bear you a son, and you will call his name Isaac. And I shall establish my covenant for him as an eternal covenant, to be his God and the God of his descendants after him. While as for Ishmael, see, I have listened to you; see, I have blessed him, and I shall increase him and multiply him greatly. He will be the father of twelve nations, and I shall make him into a great nation. But I shall establish my covenant with Isaac, the son that Sarah will bear to you at this time next year.
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Here are more explicit promises about the calling of the Gentiles in Isaac, that is, in the son of the promise, in whom grace, rather than nature, is symbolized, because he is promised as the son of an old man and a barren old woman. For though God is also at work in the natural process of procreation, nevertheless, where God’s operation is manifest, in a case where nature is decayed and failing, there his grace is more clearly recognizable. And since this was going to happen not by way of generation but by regeneration, that is why circumcision was commanded at this time, when a son was promised from Sarah. As for the fact that God orders the circumcision not only of all the sons, but of the house-born slaves and the purchased slaves as well, this is evidence that this grace pertains to all men. For what does circumcision symbolize but the renewal of nature by the sloughing off of old age? And what does the eighth day symbolize but Christ, who rose again after the completion of seven days, that is, after the Sabbath? The names of the parents are also changed. ‘Newness’ is the note struck in every detail; and the new covenant is presented, in a veiled manner, in the old. For what is the ‘Old Testament’ but a concealed form of the new? And what is the ‘New Testament’ but the revelation of the old? Abraham’s laughter is the exultation of the thankfulness, not the derision of incredulity. As for the words which he said in his heart, ‘Is a son to be born to me, at the age of a hundred years? And is Sarah to bear a child, at the age of ninety?’, these are not expressions of doubt, but of wonder.
If anyone is worried by the statement, ‘And to you and your seed after you I shall give the land in which you are dwelling, all the land of Canaan for an eternal possession’, and is puzzled about how this may be taken as being fulfilled, or whether its fulfilment is still to be awaited, since no earthly possession whatsoever can be eternal for any nation whatsoever; he should know that ‘eternal’ is used by our translators
to represent the Greek
aiônios
, which comes from the Greek word for ‘age’,
ai
ō
n
being the Greek equivalent of the Latin
saeculum
. But the Latin translators have not ventured to render it by ‘secular’, for fear of conveying a very different meaning. Many things, in fact, are called ‘secular’ which take place in this age (
saeculum
) in such a manner that they pass away even in a brief time. Whereas when a thing is called
aiônios
it means either that it has no end or that it lasts to the end of this age.
27.
The perishing of the male child, if not circumcised on the eighth day
Another question may cause perplexity. How are we to interpret the statement in this passage that ‘the male child who is not circumcised in the flesh of the foreskin on the eighth day, his soul will perish from his people, because he has broken my covenant’?
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Now this is in no way the fault of the infant whose soul is said to be doomed to perish; and it is not the infant himself who has broken the covenant of God; it is his elders, who have not taken care to circumcise him. That is, unless it is because even infants have broken the covenant, not in consequence of any particular act in their own life but in consequence of the origin which is common to all mankind, since all have broken God’s covenant in that one man in whom all sinned.
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Now it is true that many covenants are called God’s covenants, apart from the two principal ones, the Old and New, which anyone may get to know by reading, them. But the first covenant, made with the first man, is certainly this: ‘On the day you eat, you will surely die.’
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Hence the statement in the book called Ecclesiasticus. ‘All flesh grows old like a garment. For the covenant from the beginning is, “You will surely the.”’
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Now, seeing that a more explicit law was given later, and the Apostle says, ‘Where there is no law, there is no law-breaking’,
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how can the psalm be true, where we read, ‘I have counted all sinners on earth as law-breakers’?
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It can only be true on the assumption that those who are held bound by any sin are guilty of a breach of some law.
Therefore if even infants, as the true faith holds, are born sinners,
not on their own account, but in virtue of their origin (and hence we acknowledge the necessity for them of the grace of remission of sins), then it follows that just as they are sinners, they are recognized as breakers of the Law which was given in paradise. And so both passages in Scripture are true, ‘I have counted all sinners on earth as lawbreakers’, and ‘Where there is no law, there is no law-breaking.’ Thus the process of birth rightly brings perdition on the infant because of the original sin by which God’s covenant was first broken, unless the rebirth sets him free; and circumcision was instituted as a sign of rebirth. Therefore, those divine words must be interpreted as saying, in effect, ‘He who has not been reborn, his soul will perish from his people, because he broke God’s covenant’ when, in Adam, he himself also sinned, along with all the rest of mankind.
For if God had said ‘because he had broken this covenant of mine’ we should be forced to take it as referring exclusively to circumcision. As it is, since he did not explicitly say what sort of covenant the infant has broken, we are free to take it as referring to that covenant whose infringement could be connected with the child. If, on the other hand, anyone maintains that the saying applies exclusively to circumcision, on the ground that it was in the failure to be circumcised that the infant broke the covenant of God, he will have to find some way of stating it which could be interpreted, without absurdity, as meaning that the child has broken the covenant because it has been broken in his case, though not broken by him. Yet even so it must be observed that it would be unjust that the soul of an infant should perish, when the child itself was not responsible for the neglect of circumcision, if it were not that the child was under the bondage of the original sin.
28.
The change of names of Abraham and Sarah; the fertility granted to them
Now after this great promise, so clearly expressed, had been made to Abraham, the pair are thereafter no longer called Abram and Sarai in the Scriptures, as before, but Abraham and Sarah, as we have called them from the start, since these are the names in universal use. The promise was in these explicit terms, ‘I have appointed you as the father of many nations; and I shall increase you most exceedingly and make you into nations, and kings will come from you. And I will give you a son by Sarah, and I will bless him, and he will become nations, and kings of nations will issue from him.’
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This is a promise we
now see fulfilled in Christ. The reason for the change of Abraham’s name is thus given, ‘Because I have appointed you as the father of many nations.’ This must then be taken to be the meaning of Abraham, whereas Abram, his former name, is translated ‘exalted father’.
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‘No reason, however. is given for the change of Sarah’s name, but according to the statement of the writers who have recorded the meanings of the Hebrew names contained in the sacred writings Sarai means ‘my princess’, while Sarah means ‘strength’. Hence the statement in the Epistle to the Hebrews, ‘By faith also Sarah herself received strength to deliver an offspring.’
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For both of them had reached old age, on the evidence of Scripture, while Sarah was also sterile, and her menstruation had ceased, so that she was no longer capable of childbirth even if she had not been sterile. Moreover, even if a woman is advanced in years, so long as her normal menstruation continues, she can bear a child to a young man, but not to an old man; while the older man is still capable of begetting a child, but only by a young woman, as Abraham was able to have children by Keturah, after the death of Sarah, because he found her still in the vigour of youth. This, then, is what the Apostle emphasizes as miraculous, and this is why he says Abraham’s body was already ‘dead’,
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because by that time he was not capable of begetting a child from any and every woman who still had some final period of fertility left. For we must understand that his body was ‘dead’ in a particular respect, not in every way. For if it was dead in all respects it would not be the elderly body of a living man, but the corpse of a dead man. Although the problem is usually solved by the assumption that Abraham (‘dead’ as he was) had children by Keturah because the gift of procreation which he received from the Lord remained after the death of his wife. Nevertheless, the solution of the difficulty which I have adopted seems to me preferable for this reason: that although an old man, a centenarian, certainly cannot have a child by any woman in these days, this was not true at that period, when men were still living so long that a hundred years did not reduce a man to the decrepitude of senility.
29.
The appearance of the Lord to Abraham in the shape of three men, or angels, at the Oak of Mamre
God appeared again to Abraham by the Oak of Mamre in the shape of three men, who, without doubt, were angels, although some people suppose that one of them was the Lord Christ – maintaining that he had been visible even before he clothed himself in flesh. It is, to be sure, within the capacity of divine and invisible power, of incorporeal and immutable nature to appear to mortal sight, without any change in itself, not appearing in its own being, but by means of something subordinate to itself – and what is not subordinate? Now the reason for the assertion that one of those three was Christ is that Abraham, seeing three men, addressed the Lord in the singular (for the narrative says, ‘And behold three men stood by him, and seeing them he ran forward from the door of his tent to meet them, and he prostrated himself and said: “Lord if I have found favour in your sight…”’)
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But if this is so, why do they not observe this point also, that two of those men had gone to effect the destruction of the men of Sodom, while Abraham was still speaking to one of them, calling him Lord, and begging him not to destroy the just man along with the wicked in Sodom?
Moreover, Lot received those men in the same way, and he also called them Lord, in the singular, when he talked with them. For he first addressed them in the plural, when he said, ‘Look, my lords, turn aside into your servant’s house’;
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and so he does in the rest of the conversation in this passage. And yet later on the narrative continues,
And the angels took his hand, and the hand of his wife, and the hands of his two daughters, because the Lord was going to spare them. And it happened that, as soon as they had brought him out of doors, they said: ‘Save your life, do not look back, and do not stop anywhere in this district; go for safety on the mountains so that you may not be caught.’ Then Lot answered: ‘Lord, I beseech you, since your servant has found mercy in your sight…’
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