City of God (Penguin Classics) (5 page)

Augustine starts, however, with the threefold division of philosophy into natural, rational and moral (Physics, Logic, Ethics), a division he attributes to Plato. He expounds briefly and commends the Platonist doctrines under these heads and complements them later with a Christian gloss (
Bk XI, 26–28
).

But he quickly moves on to Apuleius, whose ideas on demonology were familiar to Augustine and generally current, and which receive considerable attention in the
City of God
. It is likely that he got some ideas on demons from Porphyry too. For Augustine these demons were really the fallen angels, who did their best to attract men’s worship away from the one true God, were endowed with some qualities, deriving from their angelic nature, superior to those enjoyed by man, and so were capable of helping or hindering man according as he did or did not do sacrifice to them. Apuleius himself treats of their character and says that they are liable to the same emotional disturbances as human beings. They resent injury, they are mollified by flattery and by gifts, they delight in receiving honours, they enjoy all kinds of rites and ceremonies and they are annoyed at any negligence about these. Among their uses he mentions divination by means of auguries, haruspication, clairvoyance, and dreams; and he ascribes to them the remarkable feats of magicians. He gives this brief definition of demons: species, animal; soul, subject to passions; mind, rational; body, composed of air; life-span, eternal. Of those five attributes, they have the first three, says Apuleius, in common with us; the fourth is peculiar to them; the fifth they share with the gods.

Apuleius, according to Augustine, pronounces the demons worthy of divine honours. They are established ‘midway between the ethereal heaven and the earth, so that since ‘gods never mix with men (as Plato is reported as saying), they may carry the prayers of men to the gods and bring back to men the answers granted to their requests’ (
Bk VIII, 18
). In their beneficent character, therefore, they were mediators, and mediation was a very popular idea at the time. Their role, however, Augustine contends, in procuring eternal felicity for men was useless: by their very nature they were as subject to passions and miseries as were men but, unlike men, their miseries were eternal. It was absurd to believe that they could achieve eternal happiness for
men when they could not win it for themselves. Christ, on the other hand, was both eternal and in felicity: he was the true mediator.

The good angels, by contrast, do not seek that worship should be paid by men to themselves: they seek that it should be paid only to God.

Porphyry restricted the service that demons could render to us to the elevation of our ‘spirital’ soul, that is the soul by which we apprehend the images of material things – not the intellectual soul – and even about that, Augustine suggests, he was either ambiguous or unsure:

(Theurgy is the art of persuading divinities to do or not to do something according to one’s desire.)

Porphyry in fact was seeking some universal way for the soul’s deliverance. In his
Philosophy from Oracles
he had examined the claims of Christ to be such a deliverer, such a universal way. He accepted the Hebrew-Christian god as the true god; he accepted that Christ was a good man; but he rejected the claims of the Christians. Augustine insisted that pride and his truck with demons prevented him from accepting Christ’s incarnation and crucifixion. Were it not for these, Porphyry and his followers would accept the truth of Christianity.

Deliverance for the soul means not merely escape from this life: it means especially not returning to it again. Augustine agreed with Porphyry (as against Plato) in denying that in a cycle of births man’s soul would return to the body of an animal. It would return to a human body. But he disagreed with Porphyry and the Platonists on whether the soul returned at all. The soul could not be happy in the after-life if it was destined to return to life again. Christianity meant the substitution of the linear for the cyclical concept of human destiny.

There is a sense in which the
City of God
can be said to centre on Porphyry and his
Philosophy from Oracles
. On the one hand this book of Porphyry’s represented a serious challenge to Christianity, as is evidenced by the anxious attention it received from so many Christian apologists: Eusebius (died 339) in his
Praeparatio Evangelica
, the Africans Amobius (
fl. c
. 300) and Lactantius (
fl. c
. 304–317), Theo
doret (died
c
. 466), Claudianus Mamertus (died 474), Aeneas of Gaza (died
c
. 518), and Philoponus (died
c
. 565), as well as Augustine, in the City
of Cod
and elsewhere. Augustine compares the ‘oracles’ of the Scriptures to any others, including those of Porphyry, and avers that they are superior in every way: the ‘divine oracles’, expressed through the lips of the holy prophets and scattered by Augustine, as he says throughout the
City of God
, are more widely diffused, clear and frequent, summary, awesome, fearful but true; whereas the others are obscure and unknown, abstruse and rare. The comparison is made in a chapter (
Bk XIX, 23
) where Porphyry’s
Philosophy from Oracles
is in question and is explicitly named.

But Augustine also stresses how close Porphyry came to Christian truth – he believed in the existence of a spiritual Trinity, Providence and even something like grace. Only the demons and pride prevented him from accepting Christ, of whom the
Philosophy from Oracles
spoke highly, as God.

To win Porphyry, or rather his followers in the time of Augustine, to Christianity would not only eliminate the most worthy and serious opponents of Christianity; it would also fulfil the destiny of Greek philosophy. Even the difficulty that the immaterial Platonists might have about the possibility of an immortalized body in the Resurrection was solved by the declaration in Plato’s
Timaeus
that ‘this was a boon granted by the supreme God to the deities created by him, the assurance that they would never die, never, that is, be separated from the bodies with which he had linked them’ (
Bk XIII, 16
).

The inspiration for the idea of the city, of one kind or another, might have come from Plato’s or Cicero’s
Republic, or the Commentary on the Apocalypse
of his contemporary Tyconius, or from other sources. Augustine, however, tells us plainly that the reference of his title is to Psalm lxxxvi, 3: ‘Glorious things are said of thee, O city of God.’ The inspiration and character of the work is theological, not civic.

When he proceeds to describe what he means by ‘city’, he usually
calls it ‘society’ or ‘community’: ‘these two diverse and opposed communities of angels, in which we find something like the beginnings of the two communities of mankind’ (
Bk XI, 34
). ‘Society’ or ‘community’ is, however, not the only synonym he employs for ‘city’. He also uses, among others, the terms ‘house’ or ‘temple’ or ‘family’.
⁶
The term city means little more than an association held together by some common bond:

In fact the cities originated in the choice of the angels to serve or not to serve God. The human component exists to make up for the angels that rebelled, and originated with Seth and Cain, the slayer of Abel. The cities, therefore, are spiritual or mystical cities.

All men are born in the earthly city but can become, if they are predestined to it, members of the heavenly city. Entry to that city is through regeneration in Christ, but people other than Christians can be members of this city. The Erythraean Sibyl,
⁷
for example, is thought by Augustine to belong to it because she attacked the worship of false gods. It would seem that Augustine believed that the number of men that would belong to this city would be small. The character of the earthly city can be divined from its opposition to the heavenly.

The things used in common by the two eternal and mystical cities are good (all created natures – even the Devil – are, according to Augustine, good), but limited and temporal. They do not constitute a third city, for the cities in question have to do with only the wills of men and angels. These cities existed before earthly created nature and will exist when it is no more. In this earthly period, created nature is used by citizens of both cities who can share most things,
with the great exception of religion and worship: this is the great practical divide.

Ultimately, being a citizen of the city of God means salvation. Those who are still alive are on the ‘way’ to the fatherland; they are in the harbour whence they may pass to the fatherland itself. Here we see the persistence of Augustine’s earlier ideas on man’s destiny.

And what of the role of the Church in the
City of God
? In a very general way Augustine identifies the Church with the city of God on pilgrimage here below. Thus he speaks of the ‘City of God, that is to say, God’s Church’ (
Bk XIII, 16
). But there were serious reservations. First there were citizens of the city of God on earth before the Church was founded, as we have seen in the case of the Sibyl. The Hebrews foreshadowed the city of God and gave it members. The Gospel parables of the cockle among the good seed, the separation of the wheat from the chaff, and the mixed collection of fish in the net, led Augustine to conclude that many existing Church members would not be found to be members of the city of God. Similarly there were some who never belonged to the Church who would be found to be members of that city.

The
City of God
is formally neither a philosophical nor a theological treatise though it is mainly theological, since it deals with man’s salvation and happiness as related to the worship not of many gods but of the one true God and uses the Bible as its supreme authority. Nevertheless it treats of formal philosophical and theological matters
passim
.

Augustine’s general philosophical viewpoint is Platonic (
Bk VIII, 6–9
and Bk XI, 25). He accepts the traditional Platonic division of philosophy into physics, logic and ethics – in which he sees a vestige of the Trinity – but transforms it into a Theodicy in which God, ‘the cause of existence, the principle of reason and the rule of life’ (
Bk VIII, 4
), is the explanation of all.

His practical approach to physics, however, requires some explanation. Pierre Duhem judged that of all the Fathers of the Church Augustine alone did not disdain the doctrines of profane science. Galileo commended his ‘circumspection’ in the matter. Augustine depended for his scientific information on the works of Varro, Cicero, Pliny, Posidonius, Apuleius and the Neoplatonists. He seems to have a special acquaintance with mathematics, astronomy and medicine.
⁸
When there appeared to be a clear conflict between what he took to be the historical account of the Bible and an ascertained fact of rational science, he accepted the fact of science and understood the Bible allegorically. He was embarrassed by some fellow Christians: