Read City of God (Penguin Classics) Online
Authors: Saint Augustine
There are here twenty-seven verses; and twenty-seven is the cube of three. For three times three is nine; multiply nine by three – so that the figure may add height to length and breadth – and we arrive at twenty-seven. Now if you connect the initial letters of those five Greek words,
Iêsous
CHreistos THeou Uios Sôtêr (Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Saviour) you have the Greek word
ichthus
, which means ‘fish’,
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and the allegorical meaning of this noun is Christ, because he was able to remain alive – that is, without sin – in the abyss of our mortal condition, in the depths, as it were, of the sea.
Now this Sibyl – whether the Sibyl of Erythrae or, as some are inclined to believe, of Cumae – has nothing in her whole poem, of which this is a tiny fragment, relating to the worship of false or created gods. In fact, she attacks them and their worshippers so strongly that she is evidently to be counted among those who belong to the City of God. Lactantius also inserts in his work some prophecies concerning Christ uttered by the Sibyl, though he does not state which Sibyl.
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He quotes them separately; but I have decided that they should be set consecutively, as if the many brief statements he records made one lengthy prophecy. ‘Hereafter’, he says,
he will come into the wicked hands of unbelievers; and they will deal God blows with their polluted hands and spit their poisoned spittle from their unclean mouths; but he in his simplicity will offer his holy back to their strokes. And he will be silent as he receives the blows, so that no one may know that he comes as the Word, or whence he comes, so that he may speak to those in the underworld and be crowned with a crown of thorns. While for his food they have given him gall, and vinegar for his thirst; this is the
table of inhospitality they will display. For you
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yourself in your foolishness have not recognized your God when he mocked the minds of mortals; no, you even crowned him with thorns, and mixed for him the repulsive gall. But the veil of the temple will be rent; and at midday there will be the utter darkness of night for three hours. And he will fall asleep and die in truth for three days; and then he will be the first to return from the underworld and come to the light, showing to those who have been recalled the beginning of the resurrection.
Lactantius produced those Sibylline testimonies piece by piece, at various stages in his discussion, as the points he was bent on establishing seemed to require. I have made it my business to arrange the quotations in one continuous series, and to mark the breaks between passages simply by capitals – assuming that the copyists are careful not to omit them.
It should be added that some authorities state that the Erythraean Sibyl was contemporary not with Romulus, but with the Trojan War.
24.
The Seven Sages contemporary with Romulus: The deportation of Israel at this time: Romulus deified
It is generally said that the Thales of Miletus
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lived when Romulus was on the throne. He was one of the Seven Sages, who came after the ‘theological poets’ (among whom Orpheus won the greatest renown) and were called
sophoi
, which means ‘wise men.’ At about the same time the ten tribes, which were called Israel in the divisions of the people, were crushed by the Chaldeans and taken away to captivity in Chaldean territory.
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Meanwhile the other two tribes, which were called by the name of Judah, remained in Judaea and had Jerusalem as the seat of their kingdom. On the death of Romulus, when he too vanished from sight, the Romans, as everybody well knows, enrolled him among the gods. This practice had so far fallen into abeyance in Cicero’s time – and when it was later resumed, in the time of Caesar, it was simply a matter of flattery, not of mistaken belief – that Cicero regards it as the highest tribute to Romulus that he won this honour not in times of primitive ignorance, but in what was already an age of culture and education, even though philosophy had not yet erupted in a teeming flood of subtle and ingenious loquacity.
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Yet even if later periods did not establish dead men as gods, still
they did not abandon the worship of those established by the men of old, and they continued to regard them as gods. Indeed, they went further, by increasing the allurement of empty and irreverent superstitions by means of images which the people of antiquity did not possess. This was due to the activity of foul demons at work in their hearts, deceiving them by misleading oracles as well as in other ways, so that although legends of the gods’ misdeeds were not being made up in a more polished age, the existing stories were obscenely enacted in their shows as an act of homage to those false divinities.
Romulus was succeeded by Numa, who conceived the idea that the city needed the defence of a large number of gods – false gods, of course – but did not himself win the honour of enrolment in that multitude. It seems that he was reckoned to have packed heaven so tight with the hordes of divinities that he could find no room there. It is alleged that the Samian Sibyl was contemporary with Numa’s reign at Rome, and with the beginning of the reign among the Hebrews of Manasseh, an impious king and, according to tradition, the murderer of the prophet Isaiah.
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25.
Eminent philosophers contemporary with Tarquinius Priscus, king of Rome, and Zedekiah, king of the Hebrews, the capture of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple
Now when Zedekiah was king of the Hebrews, and Tarquinius Priscus was reigning at Rome, as successor to Ancus Martius, the people of the Jews were led away into captivity in Babylonia,
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after the overthrow of Jerusalem and of the famous Temple built by Solomon. For the prophets who rebuked the Jews for their acts of wickedness and impiety had foretold that this would happen to them, and especially Jeremiah, who even stated the precise number of years of the exile.
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It was at that period that Pittacus of Mitylene, another of the Seven Sages, is said to have lived. And Eusebius writes that the other five, who are added to Thales, already mentioned, and this Pittacus, to make up the number of seven, lived at the time when the people of God were kept in captivity in Babylonia. Their names are: Solon of Athens, Chilon of Sparta, Periander of Corinth, Cleobulus of lindus, and Bias of Priene.
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All these ‘Seven Sages’ attained to
fame, after the time of the ‘theological’ poets, because they excelled the rest of mankind in respect of a praiseworthy quality in their way of life, and because they enshrined a number of moral precepts in short aphorisms. But they did not leave to posterity anything in the way of literary memorials, except that Solon is reported as having laid down certain laws for the Athenians; Thales was a natural scientist, and he left books containing his teachings. During the same period of the Jewish captivity Anaximander, Anaximenes and Xenophanes were also renowned as students of nature. At that time also Pythagoras flourished, and from then onwards such thinkers began to be called ‘philosophers’.
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26.
The end of the Jewish captivity coincides with the liberation of Rome from the royal tyranny
At the same period Cyrus, king of Persia, who was also ruling over the Chaldeans and the Assyrians, brought a considerable relaxation of the captivity of the Jews, and caused 50,000 of them to return, in order to restore the Temple.
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But they only made a beginning, with the first foundations, and built an altar. For when their enemies raided them they were by no means strong enough to make progress with the work of building, and the task was postponed until the time of Darius. During this period occurred the events described in the Book of Judith, though the Jews, to be sure, are said to have excluded that book from their canon. Under King Darius of Persia then, on the completion of the seventy years foretold by Jeremiah the prophet, the captivity was ended and freedom restored to the Jews.
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This was when Tarquin, the seventh king of Rome, was on the throne. After Tarquin’s expulsion the Romans themselves also began to be free from the tyranny of their kings.
Up to this time the people of Israel had had prophets. Although there were many of these it is only a few whose writings are retained as canonical among the Jews and also among us. When I brought my last book to an end I promised that I would make some remarks about those prophets in this present book, and I recognize that it is now time for me to fulfil that undertaking.
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The prophets at the time of the fall of Assyria and the rise of Rome. The calling of the Gentiles foretold
Now in order to survey the period of those prophets we must go back to a slightly earlier time. At the beginning of the book of the prophet Hosea, placed first of the twelve prophets, we find these words: ‘The word of the Lord which was given to Hosea in the reigns of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah.’ Amos also writes that he prophesied in the reign of Uzziah; he adds the name of Jeroboam, king of Israel, whose reign was about the same time. Isaiah too, lists at the beginning of his book the same four kings mentioned by Hosea, and says, by way of preface, that he prophesied in their reigns. Isaiah was the son of Amos, whether of Amos the prophet just mentioned or, as is more generally supposed, another man of the same name who was not a prophet. Michah also records this period, after the reign of Uzziah, as the time of his prophecy. For he names the three following kings, named also by Hosea: Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah. These men are found by their own statements to have prophesied simultaneously at this period. To them are added Jonah, also in Uzziah’s reign, and Joel, when Jotham, Uzziah’s successor, had by now ascended the throne. The dates of those two prophets can be found in the
Chronicle
,
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not in their own books, since they say nothing about their times. Those times extend from Procas, king of Latium, or his predecessor Aventinus, to Romulus, now a king of Rome, or even to the opening of the reign of Numa Pompilius, his successor, seeing that Hezekiah, king of Judah, reigned up to that time. So we see that those men, two springs, as it were, of prophecy, gushed out together, at the time when the Assyrian Empire failed, and the Roman Empire started. It was obviously designed that, just as in the first period of the Assyrian Empire, Abraham made his appearance and to him were given the most explicit promises of the blessings of all nations in his descendants, so in the initial stages of the Western Babylon, during whose dominion Christ was destined to come, in whom those promises were to be fulfilled, the lips of the prophets should be opened, those prophets who in their writings as well as by their spoken words gave testimony to this great event in the future. For although there was scarcely any time from the beginning of the monarchy when the people of Israel had been deprived of prophets, those prophets had been solely for the benefit of the Israelites, with no message for the Gentiles. However, when a beginning was made of writings with a more openly prophetic
import, prophecies that would be of value to the Gentile nations at some later date, the appropriate time for that beginning was when this city of Rome was being founded, which was to have dominion over the nations.
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The prophecies of Hosea and Amos concerned with the good news of Christ
Now, to take the prophet Hosea, he certainly has profound things to say, but his message is difficult of penetration in proportion to its profundity. But we must select some part of his work and quote it here, in fulfilment of our promise. ‘And it will happen’, he says, ‘that in the place where they were told: “You are not my people”, they, even they, will be called “sons of the living God”.’
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The apostles also understood this as a prophetic testimony to the calling of the people of the Gentile nations, who did not previously belong to God.
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And because the people of the Gentile nations themselves are spiritually among the children of Abraham and for that reason are correctly called Israel, he therefore goes on to say, ‘And the sons of Judah and the sons of Israel will be assembled in the same place, and they will appoint for themselves one head and they shall ascend from the earth.’
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If we were to attempt to explain this saying here and now, the flavour of its prophetic eloquence would be diluted. Nevertheless, let us call to mind that cornerstone and the two walls, one made up of Jews, the other of Gentiles;
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and let us recognize them as ‘ascending from the earth’, the former under the name of ‘sons of Judah’ the latter under that of ‘sons of Israel’, and both supported ‘in the same place’ by the same ‘one head.’
Again, the same prophet testifies that the Israelites by physical descent who now refuse to believe in Christ will afterwards believe; that is, their sons will believe – for, to be sure, those unbelievers will go ‘to their own place’
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when they die. He proclaims this when he says, ‘Because the sons of Israel will dwell for many days without king, without leader, without sacrifice, without altar, without priest, without the outward ceremonies of their religion.’ Who could fail to see that the Jews are now in this state? But let us listen to what he adds: ‘And later the sons of Israel will return and seek the Lord their God and David their king, and they will be astonished before the Lord and his goodness in the last days.’
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Nothing could be plainer than
this prophecy, since the name of King David is interpreted as signifying Christ, for, as the Apostle says, ‘He came of the line of David by physical descent’
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This prophet foretold also that Christ’s resurrection would happen on the third day, in the hidden manner suitable for such a prophecy, when he says, ‘He will heal us after two days: on the third day we shall rise again.’
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For it is in harmony with this that the Apostle says to us, If you have risen with Christ, look for the things that are above.’
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Amos also prophesies on this subject when he says, ‘Prepare to call on your God, O Israel: for look, I am he that gives strength to the thunder, and creates the wind and announces to mankind their Christ.’
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And in another place he says, ‘In that day I shall raise up the tabernacle of David that has fallen down; and I shall rebuild its fallen ruins, and I shall raise up the parts destroyed, and rebuild it as it was in days of old; so that the residue of mankind may seek me out, and all the nations on whom my name is invoked. The Lord says this, and he puts it into effect.’
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