Read City of God (Penguin Classics) Online
Authors: Saint Augustine
9.
The nature of the kingdom of the saints
,
lasting a thousand years
;
and its difference from the eternal kingdom
In the meantime, while the Devil is bound for a thousand years, the saints reign with Christ, also for a thousand years; which are without doubt to be taken in the same sense, and as denoting the same period, that is, the period beginning with Christ’s first coming. We must certainly rule out any reference to that kingdom which he is to speak of at the end of the world, in the words, ‘Come, you that have my Father’s blessing, take possession of the kingdom prepared for you’;
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and so, even now, although in some other and far inferior way, his saints must be reigning with him, the saints to whom he says, ‘See, I am always with you, right up to the end of the world’;
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for otherwise the Church could surely not be called his kingdom, or the kingdom of heaven. For it is obviously in this period that the scribe is ‘instructed in the kingdom of God’, the scribe, whom we mentioned above, who ‘brings out of his store things new and old’.
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And it is from the Church that the reapers are to collect the tares which the Lord allowed to grow together with the wheat until the harvest, as he explains when he says, ‘The harvest is the end of the world, and the reapers are the angels. And so, just as the tares are collected and burned in the fire, that is what will happen at the consummation of the age. The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will collect from his kingdom all stumbling-blocks.’
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Can he here be speaking of a kingdom where there are no stumbling-blocks? If not, then they must be collected from this kingdom which is the Church in this world.
Moreover, Christ says, ‘Anyone who breaks one of the least of those commandments, and teaches other people, will be called the least in the kingdom of heaven, whereas anyone who keeps the commandments, and teaches others to do the same, will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.’
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He speaks of both men as being in the kingdom of heaven, the man who does not keep the commandments which he teaches (for the meaning of ‘to break’ is ‘not to observe’, ‘not to carry out’) and the man who carries them out, and teaches others to do the same; but he calls one ‘least’ and the other ‘great’. And immediately
he goes on to add, For I tell you that unless your righteousness far exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees’, that is, of those who break what they teach (for he says of the scribes and Pharisees in another place, ‘For they talk, but they do not practise’
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) – unless ‘your righteousness far exceeds theirs’, that is, unless you do not break, but instead carry out, what you teach, ‘you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.’
So then we must understand the kingdom of heaven in one sense as a kingdom in which both are included, the man who breaks what he teaches, and the man who practises it, though one is the least and the other is great in the kingdom, while in another sense it is a kingdom into which there enters only the man who practises what he teaches. Thus where both are to be found we have the Church as it now is; but where only the one kind will be found, there is the Church as it will be, when no evil person will be included. It follows that the Church even now is the kingdom of Christ and the kingdom of heaven. And so even now his saints reign with him, though not in the same way as they will then reign; and yet the tares do not reign with him, although they are growing in the Church side by side with the wheat. For those people reign with Christ who do what the Apostle speaks of when he says, ‘If you have risen again with Christ, show a taste for the higher wisdom, where Christ is seated at God’s right hand; let your aspirations rise to that higher realm, and do not confine them to this earthly sphere.’
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Of such people he also says that ‘their true home is in heaven.’
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Ultimately, those people reign with him who are in his kingdom in such a way that they themselves
are
his kingdom. But in what way can those people be the kingdom of Christ who, to mention nothing else, although they are included in it until the collection and removal of all stumbling-blocks at the end of the world, are nevertheless seeking their own interests in that kingdom, and not the interests of Jesus Christ?
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It is therefore of this kingdom at war, in which conflict still rages with the enemy, that the Apocalypse is speaking in the passage we are considering. In this kingdom sometimes there is fighting against vices that attack us, though sometimes they submit to being ruled, until that kingdom of perfect peace comes where the King will reign without opposition. And so the passage is also concerned with the first resurrection, which is now in being. For the apostle first says that the Devil is bound for a thousand years, and afterwards unloosed for a
short time; and then he gives a summary of what the Church does during those thousand years, or what is done in it, when he says, ‘I saw thrones, and those who sat on them, and judgement was given.’
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This must not be supposed to refer to the last judgement The thrones are to be interpreted as the seats of the authorities by whom the Church is now governed, and those sitting on them as the authorities themselves. And it seems clear that the best interpretation of the judgement given is that referred to in the words: ‘Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven; and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.’
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Hence the Apostle says, ‘What have I to do with judging those outside? As for those inside, surely you yourselves judge their cases?’
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And the Apocalypse continues, ‘The souls of those who were slain because of their witness to Jesus and because of the word of God’, and we take this with the words that follow later: ‘reigned with Jesus for a thousand years’.
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These are, clearly, the souls of the martyrs, their bodies being not yet restored to them.
For the souls of the pious dead are not separated from the Church, which is even now the kingdom of Christ. Otherwise they would not be commemorated at the altar of God at the time of the partaking of the body of Christ, nor would it be of any avail to have recourse to the Church’s baptism in time of peril, for fear that this life should end without baptism, nor to have recourse to reconciliation at such time, if it happens that one is separated from this body under penance or through one’s own bad conscience. Why are such steps taken, unless it is because the faithful are still members of this body, even when they have departed this life? And therefore their souls, even though not yet with their bodies, already reign with him while those thousand years are running their course. That is why we read, in another place in the same book: ‘Blessed are the dead who the in the Lord. Yes, indeed, says the Spirit, from henceforth they may rest from their toils: for their deeds go with them.’
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And so the Church now begins to reign with Christ among the living and the dead. For ‘this is the reason’, says the apostle, ‘why Christ died, that he might be Lord of both the living and the dead.’
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But this reign after death belongs especially to those who struggled on truth’s behalf even to death; and that is why it is only the souls of the martyrs that are mentioned in the Apocalypse. Nevertheless we take the part as implying the whole,
and interpret it as meaning that the rest of the dead also belong to the Church, which is the kingdom of Christ.
The narrative continues, ‘And any who had not worshipped the beast or his image or received his mark on their foreheads or their hands’,
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and we ought to understand this as referring to the living and the dead alike. The next question, what this beast stands for, needs more careful investigation; it would not, however, be repugnant to the true faith to understand the beast to represent the godless city itself, and the people of the unbelievers, contrasted with the people of the faith and the City of God. ‘His image’, to be sure, seems to me to stand for ‘his pretence’, the pretence shown, that is, in those people who profess the faith but live the lives of unbelievers. For they put up a show of being what they are not, and they are called Christians, not because of a truthful representation of Christianity, but because of an illusory resemblance to it. For it is not only the open enemies of the name of Christ and his most glorious City who belong to this beast; there are also the tares which are to be gathered at the end of the world and taken from Christ’s kingdom, that is, from the Church. And who else can be meant by ‘those who do not worship the beast or his image’ except those who follow the instruction of the apostle by not ‘taking the yoke with the unbelievers’?
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For ‘do not worship’ means ‘do not consent’, ‘are not subordinate to’. And ‘do not receive his mark’ refers to the sign of guilt, ‘on their foreheads’ because of their profession, ‘on their hands’ because of their activities. Those who have no part in those evil practices, therefore, whether they are still alive in the mortal body, or have departed this life, are reigning even now with Christ, in a way appropriate to this period, during all the intervening time, symbolized by the number of the years – a thousand.
‘The rest of them’, it says, ‘did not come to life.’
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For ‘the time has already come when the dead hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear shall live.’
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The rest of them, it follows, will not live. But the next words in the Apocalypse, ‘until the thousand years are ended’.must be taken to imply that they did not come to life when they should have done so, that is, by passing over from death to life. That is why, when the day comes on which the resurrection of the body also is effected, they will come out of the grave not to life but for judgement,
to the condemnation, that is, which is called the second death. For anyone who has not come to life until the end of the thousand years – anyone, that is, who during the whole of that period when the first resurrection is going on has not heard the voice of the Son of God, and passed over from death to life – will pass, at the second resurrection, the resurrection of the body, into the second death, with his body. For John goes on to add, ‘This is the first resurrection. Blessed and holy is the man who has a part in this first resurrection’,
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that is, who participates in it. Now the man who participates in it is the man who not only comes to life again from the death of sin, but continues in this condition of new life.’Over them’, says the Apocalypse, ‘the second death has no power.’ This implies that death has power over the rest, who were described earlier as ‘those who did not come to life until the end of the thousand years’.
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For in all that period of time, which John calls ‘a thousand years’, however long the life of any of those people in the body during that time, they did not come to life again from the death in which their impiety held them. This coming to life again would have made them sharers in the first resurrection; and then the second death would have had no power over them.
10.
The notion that resurrection has reference only to the body
,
not to the soul
Some people have the idea that ‘resurrection’ can only mean the resurrection of the body, and they maintain that this first resurrection also will be that of the body. For, they say, only what can fall can rise again; now bodies fall when they the, in fact, corpses are called
cadavera
from the fact that they fall (
cadendo
). Consequently, they say, there cannot be a resurrection of souls, only of bodies. But what have they to say in reply to the Apostle, who speaks of such a resurrection? For when he says, ‘If you have risen with Christ, show a taste for the higher wisdom’,
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he was surely addressing those who had risen again in the ‘inner man’, not the outer. He expresses the same thought elsewhere in different words, when he says, ‘So that, just as Christ rose again from the dead in the glory of the Father, we also may walk in a new way of life.’
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The same idea underlies this saying, ‘Awake, you sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.’
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Now as for their statement that only those who fall can rise, and their consequent assumption that resurrection refers only to bodies, why do they not listen to such sayings as, ‘Do not depart from him, for fear you may fall’,
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and, ‘in relation to his own Master he stands or falls’,
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and, ‘Anyone who thinks he is standing firm should beware in case he may fall’?
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For the fall that we should beware of is, I imagine, the fall of the soul, not that of the body. If, therefore, resurrection is of things that fall, and if souls also fall, then assuredly it is to be admitted that souls rise again.
One further point on this passage: the statement that ‘death has no power over them’ is followed by these words: ‘But they will be priests of God and of Christ, and will reign with him for a thousand years.’
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This clearly does not mean only the bishops and presbyters, who are now called by the distinctive name of ‘priests’ in the Church; but just as we call all Christians ‘Christs’ in virtue of their sacramental anointing (
chrisma
) so we call them all ‘priests’ because they are members of the one Priest. And the apostle Peter says of them that they are ‘a holy people, a royal priesthood’.
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It is to be observed that in this passage John conveys the suggestion, though briefly and in passing, that Christ is God, when he says, ‘priests of God and Christ’, that is of the Father and the Son, although it was in respect of the ‘form of a servant’
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and as Son of Man that Christ was ‘made a priest for ever in the line of Melchisedech’.
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This is a point I have mentioned more than once in this work.
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