Read City of God (Penguin Classics) Online
Authors: Saint Augustine
19.
The opinion that even heretics will escape punishment through participation in the Body of Christ
Similarly, there are others who promise freedom from eternal chastisement not indeed to all men as such, but only to those who have been washed in Christ’s baptism, who are partakers of his body, whatever may have been the manner of their life, in whatever heresy or impiety they have been involved. They base this belief on the saying of Jesus, ‘This is the bread which comes down from heaven; and so anyone who has eaten of this bread will not the. I am the living bread which has come down from heaven.’
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It follows, they say, that such people must needs be rescued from eternal death, and eventually be brought to eternal life.
20.
The belief that salvation is confined to Catholics, who will be pardoned in spite of crimes and errors
Again, there are others who do not promise this exemption to all who have received the sacrament of his body, but restrict it to Catholics, however evil their lives, because they have eaten the Body of Christ not only in the sacramental sign but in reality, because they have been established in that Body of Christ, of which the Apostle says, ‘We are many; but we are one loaf, one Body.’
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And so they may fall into some kind of heresy or even into pagan idolatry; and yet, simply because in the Body of Christ, the Catholic Church, they have received Christ’s baptism and have eaten Christ’s Body, they will not the eternally, but will in the end attain to life everlasting; and all their irreligion, whatever its degree of gravity, will not be enough to make their punishment eternal; it can only increase the length and severity of their chastisement.
21.
The belief that all who hold the Catholic faith are to be saved, however evil their lives
There are some who quote, ‘The man who stands firm to the end will be saved’;
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and make this the basis for their assurance that those who continue in the Catholic Church, and only those, will attain salvation, however evil their lives; they are to be saved through fire, to be sure, thanks to the foundation of which the Apostle speaks. ‘No one.’ he says,
can lay any other foundation than the one that has already been laid, that is Jesus Christ. For if anyone builds on that foundation in gold, silver, precious stones, or in timber, hay, or straw, the work done by each man will be revealed. For the day will bring it to light. The day will be revealed in fire, and the fire will test the quality of each man’s work. If a man’s work on that foundation stands up to the test, he will get his reward; if it is burnt down he will have to bear the loss; and yet he will be saved himself, like a man who has come through fire.
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Therefore, they say, the Catholic Christian, whatever the quality of his life, has Christ for his foundation, which no heresy, cut off from Christ’s Body, can have. And simply for that reason the Catholic Christian, even if he has lived an evil life, will, they suppose, be saved, just like the builders in timber, hay, or straw; like them, he will be saved ‘through fire’, that is, he will be set free after the pains of that fire which at the last judgement will be the instrument of punishment for the wicked.
22.
The suggestion that offences committed amongst works of mercy will not be called into condemnation
I have discovered that some people hold that the only sinners who will bum in an eternity of punishment are those who omit to perform works of mercy as a fitting atonement for their sins. They base this belief on the saying of the apostle James, that ‘the judgement will be merciless on one who has shown no mercy.’
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It follows, they say, that anyone who has shown mercy, even though he has not changed his behaviour for the better, but has lived a life of crime and sin even in the midst of his works of mercy, will be treated with compassion at the judgement, so that either he will escape condemnation to any chastisement, or he will be released after a time, short or prolonged, from the punishment to which he is condemned. That is why, they hold, the
Judge of the living and the dead chose to describe himself as speaking only about works of mercy performed or neglected when he addressed those on the right, to whom he was to grant everlasting life, and also those on the left whom he was to condemn to everlasting punishment.
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They also quote the daily petition in the Lord’s prayer as being relevant to this: ‘Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.’ For anyone who forgives another who has sinned against him, undoubtedly performs a work of mercy in pardoning the sin. And the Lord himself expresses approval of such an action when he says, ‘For if you forgive your fellow-men their sins, your Father will also forgive your sins; on the other hand, if you do not forgive your fellow-men, your Father in heaven will not forgive you.’
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Thus the saying of the apostle James that ‘judgement will be merciless on one who has shown no mercy’ has reference to works of mercy of this kind; and observe, they say, that the Lord did not say ‘great sins’ or ‘small sins’ but, ‘Your Father will forgive your sins, if you forgive your fellow-men.’ Relying on this, they hold that even those who live unprincipled lives until their dying day have all their sins forgiven every day, whatever their character or their magnitude, just as this prayer itself is repeated every day, provided only that they observe this condition, namely, that they forgive, from the bottom of their heart, those who have injured them by any kind of offence, when they ask pardon.
When I have replied to all these suggestions, with God’s help, this book will reach its end.
23.
Refutation of those who extend salvation to the devils
First we must seek to discover why it is that the Church has been unable to tolerate the suggestion that promises purification even to the Devil after pains of great severity and long duration, or even holds out hope of his free pardon. It was not that all those holy men, learned in the Scriptures of both estaments, grudged to angels, of whatever kind or in whatever numbers, the attainment of cleansing and of bliss in the Kingdom of Heaven, after chastisements of whatever kind and of whatever magnitude. It was rather that they saw that the sentence of the Lord could not be evacuated of meaning or deprived of its force; the sentence, I mean, that he, on his own prediction, was to pronounce in these words: ‘Out of my sight, accursed ones, into the eternal fire
which is prepared for the Devil and his angels’
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– a clear indication that the Devil and his angels are to burn in eternal fire.
The same holds good for this statement in the Apocalypse: ‘The Devil, who seduced them, was consigned to the lake of fire and sulphur, into which the beast and the false prophet had been cast; and they will be tortured day and night for ever and ever.’
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‘Eternal’ in the first passage is expressed in the second by ‘for ever and ever’, and those words have only one meaning in scriptural usage: the exclusion of any temporal end. And this is why there cannot conceivably be found any reason better founded or more evident for the fixed and immutable conviction of true religion that the Devil and his angels will never attain to justification and to the life of the saints. There can be, I say, no stronger reason than this: that the Scriptures, which never deceive, say that God has not spared them, that in fact he has already condemned them to be thrust into the prison of nether darkness, committed for safe keeping there and for their punishment at the last judgement
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when the eternal fire will receive them, in which they will be tortured for ever and ever.
This being so, how can all men, or even any men, be exempted from this eternity of punishment without the immediate weakening of the faith whereby we believe that the chastisement of the demons is to be everlasting? For if all or any of those ‘accursed ones’ will not be for ever in the fire, those who are to be told to get ‘out of my sight, into the eternal fire which is prepared for the Devil and his angels’, is there any reason for believing that the Devil and his angels will be in that fire for ever? Is it suggested that God’s sentence pronounced on all the wicked, angels as well as men, will be true in the case of angels, but false in respect of human beings? If so, then human surmise will prove more valid than the utterance of God! But since this cannot be, our friends who long to get rid of eternal punishment should cease to argue against God, and should instead obey God’s commandments, while there is still time.
Moreover, is it not folly to assume that eternal punishment signifies a fire lasting a long time, while believing that eternal life is life without end? For Christ, in the very same passage, included both punishment and life in one and the same sentence when he said, ‘So those people will go into eternal punishment, while the righteous will go into eternal life.’
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If both are ‘eternal’, it follows necessarily that either both are to be taken as long-lasting but finite, or both as endless
and perpetual. The phrases ‘eternal punishment’ and ‘eternal life’ are parallel and it would be absurd to use them in one and the same sentence to mean: ‘Eternal life will be infinite, while eternal punishment will have an end.’ Hence, because the eternal life of the saints will be endless, the eternal punishment also, for those condemned to it, will assuredly have no end.
24.
Refutation of the view that the guilty will be spared through the intercession of the saints
The same consideration suffices to refute those who in their own defence attempt to oppose God’s words with what purports to be a higher degree of compassion, making out that God’s words are true in the sense that men deserve to suffer what he has said they will suffer, not in the sense that they are in fact to suffer it. For he will grant them, they say, the prayers of his saints, who will even then be praying for their enemies, and praying all the more because they are now, to be sure, more holy, and their supplication is more effective and more worthy of God’s hearing since by this time they have no sin whatsoever. How can they help praying, in their entire sanctity, with their prayers of utter purity and complete compassion, prayers with the power to obtain every request – how can they help praying even for those angels for whom the eternal fire has been prepared, beseeching God to soften his sentence and alter it for the better, and to part those sufferers from that fire? And will there by any chance be anyone who will go so far as to assume that something more than this will happen? I mean, will anyone assert that the holy angels also will join with the holy men (who will then be ‘on the same footing as the angels of God’) in prayer for the angels, as well as the human beings, who are to be condemned? That they will entreat God that through his compassion these angels may not suffer what they deserved to suffer in accordance with his truth? No one of sound faith has ever said this, or will ever say it. Otherwise there is no reason why the Church should not pray even now for the Devil and his angels, seeing that God has bidden her to pray for her enemies!
In fact the reason which now prevents the Church from praying for the evil angels, whom she knows to be her enemies, is the same reason which will then prevent her at that time of judgement from praying, however perfect her holiness, for the human beings who are to be tormented in eternal fire. Her reason for praying now for her enemies among mankind is that there is time for fruitful penitence. For what
she chiefly prays for on their behalf is surely ‘that God’, in the Apostle’s words, ‘may grant them penitence, and that they may come to their senses and escape from the snare of the Devil, by whom they have been trapped and are held at his pleasure’.
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In fact, if the Church had such certain information about people as to know who were already predestined, although still under the conditions of this life, to go into the eternal fire with the Devil, then the Church would pray as little for them as it does for him. But she has not this certainty about anyone; therefore she prays for all her enemies, her human enemies, that is, while they are in the bodily state; but that does not mean that her prayers for all of them are heard and answered. In fact her prayers are heard only when she prays for those who, although they oppose the Church, are predestined to salvation so that the Church’s prayers for them are answered and they are made sons of the Church. But if any of them keep their heart impenitent up to their dying day, if they are not transformed from enemies into friends, are we to suppose that the Church still prays for them, that is, for the spirits of such men when they have departed this life? Of course not! And this is simply because anyone who has not been transferred to the side of Christ while he lives in the body is thereafter reckoned as belonging to the Devil’s party.
The reason then for not offering prayer at the time of judgement for those human beings who are consigned for punishment to the eternal fire is the same as the reason for not praying now for the evil angels. And likewise there is the same reason for praying at this time for human beings who are infidel and irreligious, and yet refusing to pray for them when they are departed. For the prayer of the Church itself, or even the prayer of devout individuals, is heard and answered on behalf of some of the departed, but only on behalf of those who have been reborn in Christ and whose life in the body has not been so evil that they are judged unworthy of such mercy, and yet not so good that they are seen to have no need of it. Likewise, after the resurrection of the dead there will still be some on whom mercy will be bestowed, after punishment suffered by the souls of the dead, so that they will not be consigned to the eternal fire. For it could not truthfully be said of some people that they will be forgiven neither in this age nor in the age to come,
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unless there were some who receive forgiveness in the age to come though not in this age.
Nevertheless, this is what has been said by the Judge of the living and the dead: ‘Come, you that have my Father’s blessing; take possession
of the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world’; and to the others, in contrast: ‘Out of my sight, you accursed ones, into the eternal fire, which is prepared for the Devil and his angels’; and, ‘these will go to eternal punishment, while the righteous will go to eternal life.’
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In view of this, it is excessively presumptuous to assert that there will be eternal punishment for none of those who, so God has said, will go to punishment which will be eternal, and by the persuasion of this presumptuous notion to produce despair, or at least doubt, about the eternity of the future life itself.
No one, therefore, should take this verse of the psalm: ‘Will God really forget to show mercy? Will he in his wrath restrain his compassion?’
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and interpret it in such a way as to suggest the notion that God’s sentence is true in respect of the good, but false in respect of the wicked, or true in respect of good human beings and evil angels, but false in respect of evil human beings. In fact, this verse of the psalm refers to the Vessels of mercy’ and the ‘sons of the promise’,
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one of whom was the prophet himself; and he first says, ‘Will God really “forget to show mercy”, in making his sun shine on the good and bad and then immediately continues, ‘Then I said: Now I have begun; this is an alteration of the right hand of God Most High.’ Here, obviously, he has explained what he meant by, ‘Will God in his wrath restrain his compassion?’ For this mortal life is itself part of God’s wrath, this life in which ‘man becomes like a piece of futility; his days pass by like shadows.’
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Yet even in this manifestation of his anger God does not ‘forget to show mercy’, in making his sun shine on the good and bad alike and sending rain on the righteous and the unrighteous,
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and in this way he does not in wrath restrain his compassion. And this is particularly true in what the psalmist expresses by saying, ‘Now I have begun; this is an alteration of the right hand of God Most High.’ For in this life, a life full of troubles, which is a manifestation of God’s wrath, God changes the ‘vessels of mercy’ into a better state (although his wrath still continues in the misery of this condition of decay) because even in his wrath he does not restrain his compassion.
Since, then, the truth of this inspired song is fully shown in this way, it is not necessary to take it as relevant to that situation where those who do not belong to the City of God will be punished by everlasting chastisement. But those who are determined to extend the scope of statement in the psalm to make it apply to the torments of the wicked, should even so take it in this sense; that while the wrath
of God persists (and its persistence in that eternal punishment is foretold) God does not ‘in his wrath restrain his compassion’ in that he causes those sinners to be tormented with less fierceness in the punishment than they deserve. It is not that they escape those punishments altogether nor even that the punishments eventually come to an end; but their sufferings are milder and lighter than their deserts. In this way the wrath of God will continue, and yet he will not in that wrath of his restrain his compassion. But it must not be supposed that I support this view because I do not contradict it.
But as for those who suppose that such sayings as ‘Out of my sight, you accursed into the eternal fire’, ‘these will go to everlasting punishment’, ‘they will be tormented for ever’, ‘their worm never dies and the fire will not be put our’,
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and others in the same strain, are uttered more by way of threat than as presentations of literal truth, such interpreters are rebutted and refuted not so much by me as by the evidence of Scripture itself, which is quite explicit and copious on the point. The Ninevites, to be sure, repented in this life, and their repentance was fruitful;
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they sowed, we might say, in the field in which God wishes the seed to be ‘sown in tears’ so that the crop may later be ‘reaped with joy’.
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And yet who will deny that God’s prediction was fulfilled in them? Any man who fails to notice how God overthrows not only in anger but also in mercy. For sinners are ‘overthrown’ in two different ways: either as the men of Sodom were overthrown, where it is men who are punished for their sins; or in the manner of Nineveh, where it is the sins of men that are destroyed by their repentance. Thus what God predicted came about: the Nineveh which was wicked was overthrown, and a good Nineveh was built, which did not exist before. For a city is overthrown by a collapse of morality, even though the walls and buildings are still standing. And so although the prophet was bitterly disappointed because the event did not happen, whose coming he had prophesied and the men of Nineveh had in consequence feared, nevertheless the event came about that God had predicted in his foreknowledge, since he who foretold it knew how it was to be fulfilled to better purpose.
However, if those exponents of a perverse compassion would care to know the reference of the verse which says, ‘How great is the abundance of your sweet kindness, Lord, which you have kept hidden for those who fear you’, they should read what follows: ‘You have brought it to fulfilment for those who put their hope in you.’
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Now
what is meant by ‘you have kept it hidden for those who fear you’, and ‘you have brought it to fulfilment for those who put their hope in you? Surely it can only mean that God’s righteousness is not sweet to those who wish ‘to establish their own righteousness’
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which depends on the Law. It is not sweet to them because they do not know it; they have not tasted it. For they put their hope in themselves, and not in God; and that is why the abundance of God’s sweet kindness is concealed from them; because they fear God, it is true, but with that servile fear which is not found in love, since’perfect love drives out fear’.
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Therefore it is for those who put their hope in him that he brings to fulfilment his kindness, by inspiring his own love in them so that when they boast, with holy fear (not the fear which is driven out by love, but the fear which lasts for ever and ever), they will be ‘boasting in the Lord’.
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This righteousness of God, which is the gift of grace without regard to merits, is unknown to those who wish to establish a righteousness of their own, and for that reason have not subjected themselves to the righteousness of God, which is Christ. It is in this righteousness that the abundant kindness of God is found; hence the psalm says, ‘Taste and see how sweet the Lord is.’
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This sweetness we do indeed taste in our pilgrimage, but we do not have our fill of it; instead, we ‘hunger and thirst’ for it, so that we may have our fill hereafter, when ‘we shall see him as he is’; and then the scriptural saying will be fulfilled: ‘I shall be satisfied, when your glory is made manifest.’
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Thus Christ ‘brings to fulfilment the great abundance of his kindness for those who put their hope in him’.
Furthermore, assuming that God ‘keeps hidden for those who fear him’ this – kindness of his (as these people imagine it) which he is to show in not condemning the wicked – keeping it hidden so that men may be unaware of it and therefore may live rightly for fear of damnation, and so that there may be those who will pray for people who do not live aright – on this assumption, how does God ‘bring it to fulfilment for those who put their hope in him’, seeing that (according to this dream of theirs) this kindness is going to prevent him from condemning those who do not put their hope in him? The upshot is that we should seek the kindness which he fulfils for those who put their hope in him, not the kindness which he is supposed to fulfil for those who scorn and blaspheme him. And so a man looks in vain, after he has quitted this mortal body, for something which he has not troubled to obtain while in the body.
There is also that statement of the Apostle, ‘God has confined them all in unbelief, so that he may show mercy to them all.’ Now the meaning of this is not that God is not going to condemn anyone; the purpose of the statement is made clear by what was said just before. For the Apostle was speaking to the Gentiles about the Jews who were destined to believe later; as we know, he wrote his epistles to Gentiles who were already believers. And this is what he says, ‘Just as you at one time did not believe in God, but you have now obtained mercy through their refusal to believe; so now, in the face of the mercy you enjoy, they have refused to believe, so that they also may obtain mercy.’
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He then adds the statement on which our friends, in their error, base their complacency: ‘For God has confined them all in unbelief, so that he may show mercy on them all.’ And by ‘all’ he can only mean those of whom he is speaking, as much as to say, ‘You and them.’ God, then, has confined in unbelief both Gentiles and Jews, those whom he ‘foreknew and predestined to become true likenesses of his Son’;
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and his purpose in this was that they should become ashamed, in their repentance, of the bitterness of their unbelief, and should turn to the sweetness of God’s mercy. And so they would cry out, in the words of the psalm, ‘How great is the abundance of your kindness, Lord, which you have kept secret for those who fear you; but you have brought it to fulfilment for those who put their hope’ – not in themselves but – ‘in you!’
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So we see that God has mercy on all the ‘vessels of mercy’; but what is meant by ‘all’? It must mean all those from among the Gentiles as well as all those of the Jews whom he predestined, called, justified, and glorified.
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He will not spare all men; but none of these will incur his condemnation.