Read City of God (Penguin Classics) Online
Authors: Saint Augustine
But we, in our measure, are made partakers of his peace; and so we know the perfection of peace in ourselves, peace among ourselves, and peace with God, according to our standard of perfection. Likewise the angels know it, in their measure. But human beings in their present state know it in a far lower degree, however highly developed may be their intellectual powers. We must remember what a great man it was who said, ‘Our knowledge is partial, and our prophesying is partial, until perfection comes’, and, ‘We now see a dim reflection in a mirror; but then we shall see face to face.’
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This is how the holy angels see already, those who are called our angels, because we have been rescued from the power of darkness, we have received the pledge of the Spirit, and have been transferred to the kingdom of Christ, and so we already begin to belong to those angls with whom we shall share the possession of that holy and most delightful City of God, about which I have already written all these books. Thus those angels of God are also
our
angels, in the same way as the Christ of God is
our
Christ. They are God’s angels because they have not abandoned God; they are our angels because they have begun to have us as their fellow-citizens. And the Lord Jesus said, ‘Take care not to despise any of these little ones; for I tell you that their angels in heaven always see the face of my Father who is in heaven.’
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Therefore we also shall see as they see already; but we do not as yet see like this. That is why the Apostle says, as I have already quoted, ‘Now we see a puzzling reflection in a mirror; but then we shall see face to face.’And so this vision is reserved for us as the reward of faith; and the apostle John speaks of the vision in these words: ‘When he is fully revealed, we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is.’
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Now we must take ‘the face’ of God as meaning his revelation and not the part of the body such as we have and to which we give that name.
Hence, if I am asked what will be the activity of the saints in that spiritual body, I cannot say that I see now; I can only say that I believe, as it says in the psalm, ‘I believed, and therefore I spoke.’
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And so I say that the saints will see God
in
the body; but whether they will see through the eyes of the body, in the same way as we now see the sun, moon, stars, sea and earth and all things on the earth – that is no easy question. It is, for example, hard to say that the saints will then have bodies of such a kind that they will not be able to shut and open their eyes at will; and yet it is more difficult to say that anyone who shuts his eyes there will not see God.
Now, the prophet Elisha, though not physically present, saw his servant Gehazi receiving the gifts from Naaman the Syrian, whom the prophet had healed from leprosy, while the wicked servant assumed that he had not been observed, since his master was not there to see. How much more then in that spiritual body will the saints see everything, not only if they close their eyes, but even when they are not present in the body! For that will be the time of the perfection of which the Apostle speaks when he says, ‘Our knowledge is partial and our prophesying is partial; but when perfection comes then all that is incomplete will disappear.’ St Paul then tries to find an analogy to express the difference between this life and the life that is to come, and not only the present life of ordinary people but even the life of those endowed with special sanctity. And he says,
When I was a child, I used to think like a child, to speak like a child, to reason like a child: but now that I have become a man I have put childish habits behind me. Now we see a puzzling reflection in a mirror; but then we shall see face to face. The knowledge I now have is partial; but then I shall know as clearly as I am known.
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Thus the prophetic power of men of wonderful powers in this life is as childhood to maturity, in comparison with the knowledge enjoyed in that life to come. And yet even in the conditions of this life Elisha saw his servant receiving those gifts, although he himself was not there. We must conclude then that when perfection has come, when ‘the corruptible body no longer weighs down the soul’,
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but when the body, freed from corruption, offers no hindrance to the soul, the saints will certainly need no bodily eyes to see what is there to be seen, since Elisha did not need them to see his servant when he himself was not present.
According to the Septuagint translation, the prophet said to Gehazi, ‘Did not my heart go with you, when the man turned back from his chariot to meet you, and you took the money.…’ But Jerome’s translation from the Hebrew is, ‘Was not my heart there present, when the man returned from his chariot to meet you?’
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It was therefore in his heart that the prophet saw what happened, as he himself said, with the miraculous assistance, as no one doubts, of the divine power. But how much more richly will all abound in that gift, when God will be all in all!
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Nevertheless, those physical eyes also will have their own function and the spirit will make use of them through the spiritual body. For the prophet did not need those bodily
organs to see his absent servant; but that did not mean that he did not use them to see things at hand, although he could have seen them by the spirit even if he had closed his eyes, in the same way as he saw things not present, when he was not in any physical relationship with them. So we must never think of saying that the saints in that life will not see God if their eyes are shut; for they will always see him in the spirit.
But the puzzle is, whether they will also see by means of the bodily eyes when they have them open. For if even those spiritual eyes will in this way have no more power in the spiritual body than the eyes which we now have, then without doubt it will not be possible to see God by their means. Therefore they will be possessed of a very different power, if that immaterial nature is to be seen by their means – that nature which is not confined to any space but is everywhere in its wholeness. For we say that God is in heaven and earth (as he himself says, through his prophet: ‘I fill heaven and earth’
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); but that does not mean that we are to say that he has part of himself in heaven and part in earth. He is wholly in heaven, wholly in earth, and that not at different times but simultaneously; and this cannot be true of a material substance. Therefore the power of those eyes will be extraordinary in its potency – not in the sense of being a sharper eyesight than that possessed, they say, by snakes and eagles (for however keen-sighted those animals may be, they can see only material things) – but in the sense of having the ability to see the immaterial. And it may be that this extraordinary power of sight was given for a time even in this mortal body to the eyes of the holy man Job, when he says to God, ‘I heard you before by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you. Therefore I am sunk in self-contempt and consumed with self-despair. I am dust and ashes in my own esteem.’
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Although there is nothing here to forbid its interpretation in the sense of the ‘eye of the heart’ referred to by the Apostle when he speaks of having ‘the eyes of the heart enlightened’.
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But no Christian doubts that it is with those eyes of the heart, or mind, that God will be seen, when he is seen. For every Christian accepts with faith the truth of the saying of God, his teacher, ‘Blessed are the pure in heart, because they will see God.’
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But the point in question is whether God will be seen also with physical eyes in that future life. Now we have the scriptural statement that ‘all flesh will see the salvation of God;’
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but this need
present no difficulty; it can be taken to mean that ‘everyone will see the Christ of God’, and he certainly has been seen in physical form, and he will be so seen when he comes to judge the living and the dead. And that he is the salvation of God is shown by the testimony of many scriptural passages; but the clearest of testimony is given in the words of the venerable old man Simeon, who took the infant Christ into his arms and said, ‘Now, Lord, you are releasing your servant in peace, according to your promise, because my eyes have seen your salvation.’
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And the words of Job, as given in a version based directly on the Hebrew, ‘and I shall see God in my flesh’,
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were undoubtedly prophetic of the resurrection of the flesh. And yet he does not say, ‘by
means of
my flesh I shall see God.’ Indeed, even if he had so put it, he could have been taken to mean ‘I shall see Christ, my God, who will be seen in flesh and through the medium of flesh.’ As it is, we may take it to mean, ‘I shall be in the flesh, when I shall see God.’
As for the Apostle’s phrase, ‘face to face’,
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that does not compel us to believe that we shall see God by means of this corporal face, with its corporal eyes. We shall see God by the spirit without any interruption. For if there was not also a ‘face’ of the inner man the same Apostle would not say, ‘But we, gazing at the glory of the Lord with face unveiled, are transformed into the same image from glory to glory, as it were by the Spirit of the Lord.’
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And we can give no other interpretation to the verse of the psalm which says, ‘Approach him and be enlightened; and your faces will not be ashamed.’
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For it is by faith that we approach God, and faith is a matter of mind and heart, not of the physical body. And yet we do not know what new qualities the spiritual body will have, for we are speaking of something beyond our experience. And so, when there are some things which are beyond our understanding, and on which the authority of holy Scripture offers no assistance, then we must needs be in the state described in the Book of Wisdom, in these words: ‘The thoughts of men are timorous and our foresight is uncertain.’
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Now the philosophers maintain that ‘intelligible’ things are seen by the mind’s vision, and ‘sensible’ things, that is, material things, are apprehended by the bodily senses, whereas the mind, they say, cannot observe intelligible things by means of the body, nor material things by its own unaided activity. If this reasoning could be established as certain, then indeed it would entail the certainty that God cannot be
seen at all by the eyes of the body, even of a spiritual body. But in fact this reasoning is shown up as ridiculous both by reason itself and by the authority of the prophets. For who could be so estranged from the truth as to dare to assert that God is ignorant of material things? But does it follow that for such knowledge he must have a body, so as to attain this knowledge by means of bodily eyes? Again, the story of the prophet Elisha, which we were discussing just now, shows quite clearly that material things can be apprehended by the spirit, without the help of the bodily organs. For when the servant Gehazi took the presents, that was certainly a material happening; yet the prophet saw it by the spirit, not by the bodily sense. It is agreed, then, that material things are apprehended by the spirit; why should there not likewise be such a mighty power in a spiritual body that the spirit may be perceived by such a body? For God is Spirit.
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Moreover, everyone is aware of his own life, the life with which he is now alive in the body, the life which makes those earthly members grow, and makes them living; everyone is aware of this life not by means of the eyes of the body but through the inward sense. However, the lives of others, although invisible, he sees by means of the body. For how do we distinguish living bodies from non-living except by observing bodies and lives simultaneously? We cannot see the lives except by means of the body and yet we do not observe with bodily eyes the lives apart from the bodies.
For such reasons it is possible, it is indeed most probable, that we shall then see the physical bodies of the new heaven and the new earth in such a fashion as to observe God in utter clarity and distinctness, seeing him present everywhere and governing the whole material scheme of things by means of the bodies we shall then inhabit and the bodies we shall see wherever we turn our eyes. It will not be as it is now, when the invisible realities of God are apprehended and observed through the material things of his creation, and are partially apprehended by means of a puzzling reflection in a mirror. Rather in that new age the faith, by which we believe, will have a greater reality for us than the appearance of material things which we see with our bodily eyes. Now in this present life we are in contact with fellow-beings who are alive and display the motions of life; and as soon as we see them we do not
believe
them to be alive, we
observe
the fact. We could not observe their life without their bodies; but we see it in them, without any possibility of doubt, through their bodies. Similarly, in the future Ufe, wherever we turn the spiritual eyes of our bodies we
shall discern, by means of our bodies, the incorporeal God directing the whole universe.
God then will be seen by those eyes in virtue of their possession (in this transformed condition) of something of an intellectual quality, a power to discern things of an immaterial nature. Yet it is difficult, if not impossible, to support this suggestion by any evidence of passages in holy Scripture. An alternative suggestion is easier to understand: perhaps God will be known to us and visible to us in the sense that he will be spiritually perceived by each one of us in each one of us, perceived in one another, perceived by each in himself; he will be seen in the new heaven and the new earth, in the whole creation as it then will be; he will be seen in every body by means of bodies, wherever the eyes of the spiritual body are directed with their penetrating gaze.
The thoughts of our minds will lie open to mutual observation; and the words of the Apostle will be fulfilled; for he said, ‘Pass no premature judgements’, adding immediately, ‘until the Lord comes. For he will light up what is hidden in darkness and will reveal the thoughts of the heart And then each one will have his praise from God.’
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