Read City of God (Penguin Classics) Online
Authors: Saint Augustine
13.
The invisible God makes himself visible, according to the capacity of the beholders
We ought not to be disturbed by the fact that, although he is invisible, God is reported as having often shown himself in visible form to our ancestors. Just as the uttered sound which makes audible the thought that has its existence in the silence of the understanding, is not the same as that thought, so the visible form in which God – who exists in his invisible substance – became visible was not identical with God himself. For all that, he was seen in that material form, just as the thought is heard in the sound of the voice. And those patriarchs were well aware that they were seeing the invisible God in a material form, though God himself was not material. For God spoke to Moses, and Moses spoke to him in reply; and yet Moses said to him, ‘If I have found favour in your sight, show me yourself, so that I may see you and know you.’
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Now it was necessary that the Law of God should be given, under the form of decrees proclaimed by angels,
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in awe-inspiring circumstances, and given not to one man, not to a few sages, but to the whole nation, an immense people; and therefore great portents happened on the mountain in the sight of that people; and there the Law was given through the agency of one man, while the multitude beheld the fearful and terrible happenings. For the belief of the people of Israel in Moses was something quite different from the Spartans’ belief in Ly-curgus,
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when he told them that he had received from Jupiter or from Apollo the laws which he laid down. When the Hebrew people received the Law that prescribed the worship of one God, marvellous signs and commotions of nature occurred in the sight of the people, to the extent which divine providence judged sufficient, which made it apparent that for the giving of that Law the creation was serving the purpose of the Creator.
14.
God is to be worshipped as well for temporal as for eternal benefits
The experience of mankind in general, as far as God’s people is concerned, is comparable to the experience of the individual man. There is a process of education, through the epochs of a people’s history, as through the successive stages of a man’s life, designed to raise them from the temporal and the visible to an apprehension of the eternal and the invisible. But even at the time when visible rewards were promised by divine revelation, man was commanded to worship one God, lest, even for the sake of the earthly benefits of this transient life, man should subject his mind to any being other than the Creator and Master of his soul. For all things which men can receive at the hands of either angels or men, are in the power of the one Omnipotent: and anyone who does not admit this is insane.
Plotinus the Platonist has a discussion about providence,
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in which he proves, by the beauty of flowers and leaves, that providence extends from the supreme God, whose beauty is inteligible and ineffable, as far as those lowly things of earth. All those castaways, so to speak, doomed to perish so swiftly, could not, he maintains, display such perfection of graceful harmony in their shapes, were it not that they received their form from the eternal abode of the intelligible and changeless ‘form’
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which contains them all together in itself. This is what the Lord Jesus tells us in the passage where he says,
Consider the lilies of the field: they do not work, or spin. Yet I tell you, Solomon in all his splendour was not clothed like one of those. Now if this is how God dresses the grass of the countryside, which is here today and tomorrow is put in the stove; how much more will he clothe you, you men of small faith?
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Now the soul of man is still weak because of its earthly desires, and in this temporal existence it craves for those inferior goods of this world which, although essential for this transitory life, are to be despised in comparison with the eternal blessings of that other life. Even so, it is altogether right that the soul should learn to look for those temporal blessings from God, and from him alone, so that even in longing for them it should not withdraw from the worship of that God. whom it only reaches by despising them and turning away from them.
15.
The ministry of the holy angels as instruments of God’s providence
Thus it pleased divine providence to arrange the course of the ages in such a way that, as I have said, and as we read in the
Acts of the Apostles
, the Law concerning the worship of the one true God was given in decrees communicated by angels.
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God’s own substance always remains invisible to corruptible eyes: and yet in those edicts the person of God himself became manifest by unmistakable signs, through the medium of created things in subjection to the Creator. God, in his own nature, so to say, neither begins nor ceases to speak; he speaks not temporally, but eternally; not corporally but spiritually; not to the senses but to the understanding. Yet through his created beings he spoke in successive syllables, following one another in transitory intervals of time. His ministers and messengers enjoy his unchanging truth in their immortal blessedness, and they hear his language in its purity, with the ear of the mind, not of the body; and when what they hear demands to be put into action and to be brought into the sphere of the visible and the sensible, then they put it into effect without delay or difficulty.
Now in this arrangement of the successive ages, the Law was given so as to offer, to begin with, the promise of the good things of this world. But these good things were intended to stand for the eternal blessings; and this was the meaning of the outward and visible rites which were celebrated by all the people, but understood by few. For all the words of that Law and all the acts enjoined by it united in the clearest testimony to teach the worship of one God – not one of a host of gods, but the one God who made heaven and earth, and every soul and every spirit which exists outside himself. He is the creator, and all the rest are created, and for their being, and for their well-being, they have need of him by whom they have been created.
16.
For the attainment of happiness we should listen to the angels who teach that worship should be offered only to the one God
Which angels are we then to believe, in the matter of the life of blessedness and eternity? What is our decision? Is it to be those who wish to receive for themselves the worship of religious ceremonies, and demand from mortals the performance of rites and sacrifices in
their honour? Or those who say that all this worship is due to God, the sole creator of all things, and who teach with true piety that it is to be rendered to him, the contemplation of whom gives them the happiness which they promise it will bring to us in the future? For this vision of God is a vision of such beauty and altogether deserving of such a love, that Plotinus says without hesitation that a man who fails of it is altogether unfortunate, no matter how richly endowed he may be with any other kind of goods.
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Thus by various signs and wonders we are invited by angels of one sort to devote our worship in the highest sense of the word to this one God, by angels of another sort to devote that worship to themselves – with this difference, that the former forbid the worship of the second while the latter sort do not dare to forbid the worship of God. Which sort are we to believe? Let us have an answer from the Platonists, from the philosophers of all the schools, from the theurgists (though ‘periurgists’ – ‘superstitious meddlers’ – would be a more appropriate term for them), and let us have an answer also from ordinary men, if any sense of their nature, as created capable of reason, remains alive in them in any degree. Let them tell us, I say, if we should sacrifice to those gods or angels who demand sacrifices for themselves, or to him alone to whom sacrifice is to be offered, according to the commands of those who forbid the offering of sacrifice to themselves or to the other angels.
If neither the one sort nor the other had performed any miracles, but had only given instructions, the one prescribing sacrifice to themselves, the other forbidding those sacrifices, but insisting that they should be offered only to the one God; even so, piety by itself should have sufficed to decide which of those commands derived from arrogant pride, and which from true religion. I would go further; if it had been only those who demand sacrifices for themselves who had astonished the souls of men by their miraculous feats, while those who forbid such sacrifices and order that they should be reserved for God alone, had not deigned to perform any visible miracles; even so, the authority of the latter certainly ought to have carried the day, not by the verdict of the bodily senses but in the judgement of the reasoning mind. But in fact God has decided to support the oracles of his truth by performing miracles through those immortal messengers who proclaim not their own arrogance but the majesty of God; and their miracles are greater, more certain, more impressive than all the others. The purpose of those wonders was to prevent those angels who demand sacrifices for themselves from finding it easy to persuade men
of unstable piety to a false religion just by making a prodigious display to their senses. In view of those miracles, surely no one would like to be such a fool as not to choose to recognize the truth that he should follow, where he finds more to excite his wonder?
When I speak of the miracles of the gods of the Gentiles, which history vouches for, I am not referring to accidental prodigies which occur at long intervals by the interplay of mysterious causes at work in this world, causes which nevertheless are fixed and ordained under the rule of divine providence – such things, I mean, as the birth of extraordinary animals, unusual phenomena in the sky and on the earth, whether merely frightening or harmful as well, all of which, according to the claim put out by the crafty deceit of the demons, can be conjured up or controlled by demonic rites. What I am talking about are the phenomena which are quite evidently the result of the force and power of demons: like the story that the images of the Penates, carried from Troy by Aeneas in his flight, removed themselves from one place to another;
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the feat of Tarquinius in cutting a whetstone with a razor;
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the serpent from Epidaurus accompanying Aesculapius on his voyage to Rome;
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the ship which conveyed the image of the Phyrgian Mother, which stuck fast and resisted all the efforts of men and oxen, but was set in motion and drawn along by one mere woman, with her girdle attached to it – a testimony to her chastity;
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the Vestal Virgin, under suspicion of violation of her vows, who put an end to the question by filling a sieve with water from the Tiber without losing any.
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Such miracles as those are in no way comparable in power and grandeur with those performed, as we read, among the people of God. How much less comparable are the performances prohibited and punished by the laws of the nations who worshipped gods of this kind, I mean the feats of magic or theurgy! Most of those are mere appearance, deceiving men’s senses by extravagant illusions: such things as ‘bringing down the moon’
Until she flings her foam upon the grass
That spreads below her,
as Lucan says.
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It is true that some of those miracles may seem in externals to equal many of those performed among true worshippers; the distinction lies
in the difference of the end, and here our miracles show incomparable superiority. For the former give us added reason for refusing sacrifice to those multiple gods, with a resolution proportional to the insistence of their demands; the latter bear witness to the one God, who has no need of such rites, as he shows by the evidence of his Scriptures, as also by the later abolition of the same sacrifices.
And so, if any angels claim sacrifice for themselves, we must prefer to them those who claim it not for themselves but for the God whom they serve, the creator of all things. In this way they show the sincerity of their love for us, since by such sacrifice they wish to subject us not to themselves, but to him. For they find their own happiness in the contemplation of him, from whom they have never departed; and they desire that we also should come to him. If, on the other hand, there are angels who desire that sacrifice should be offered to many gods, and not only to one, while not asking sacrifice for themselves but for those gods whose angels they are, even so we ought to hold them inferior to those who are the angels of the one God of gods, and who command sacrifice to be offered to him, while forbidding its offering to any other, since none of these other angels forbids sacrifice to the God whose angels command sacrifice to him alone. And if angels show, by their arrogance and deceit, that they are not good angels, nor angels of good gods, but evil demons, whose aim is that sacrificial worship should be offered to themselves and not to the one supreme God, what more potent defence against them can we choose than that of the one God, whom the good angels serve? And the good angels command us to offer the service of sacrifice not to themselves but to him to whom we owe the sacrifice of ourselves.
17.
The Ark of the Testimony and the miracles performed to support the authority of the Law and the promise
The Law of God was given in decrees conveyed by angels,
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and it prescribed the worship of the one God of gods in religious rites, and forbade the offering of such worship to any other beings. This Law was placed in an ark (a chest), which was called the Ark of the Testimony. The meaning of this title is quite evident. It is not that God, who was worshipped in all those ceremonies, was habitually confined and enclosed in a place, although his replies were given from the place where the Ark was and certain miracles were there presented to
human senses; but the testimonies of his will were said to come from there, because the Law itself was inscribed on tablets of stone and deposited, as I said, in this Ark. During the period of wandering in the desert the priests carried the Ark with all proper reverence, together with the tent which was similarly entitled the Tent of the Testimony. There was also a sign, a cloud which appeared in the daytime and glowed like a fire by night. When this cloud began to move, they struck camp; when it halted, they pitched camp.
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