The City of God, Volume I by Saint of Hippo Augustine
20. _Of the impiety of those who assert that the souls which enjoy
1723 words | Chapter 353
true and perfect blessedness, must yet again and again in these
periodic revolutions return to labour and misery._
What pious ears could bear to hear that after a life spent in so
many and severe distresses (if, indeed, that should be called a
life at all which is rather a death, so utter that the love of this
present death makes us fear that death which delivers us from it),
that after evils so disastrous, and miseries of all kinds have at
length been expiated and finished by the help of true religion and
wisdom, and when we have thus attained to the vision of God, and
have entered into bliss by the contemplation of spiritual light
and participation in His unchangeable immortality, which we burn to
attain,--that we must at some time lose all this, and that they who
do lose it are cast down from that eternity, truth, and felicity to
infernal mortality and shameful foolishness, and are involved in
accursed woes, in which God is lost, truth held in detestation, and
happiness sought in iniquitous impurities? and that this will happen
endlessly again and again, recurring at fixed intervals, and in
regularly returning periods? and that this everlasting and ceaseless
revolution of definite cycles, which remove and restore true misery
and deceitful bliss in turn, is contrived in order that God may be
able to know His own works, since on the one hand He cannot rest from
creating, and on the other, cannot know the infinite number of His
creatures, if He always makes creatures? Who, I say, can listen to
such things? Who can accept or suffer them to be spoken? Were they
true, it were not only more prudent to keep silence regarding them,
but even (to express myself as best I can) it were the part of wisdom
not to know them. For if in the future world we shall not remember
these things, and by this oblivion be blessed, why should we now
increase our misery, already burdensome enough, by the knowledge of
them? If, on the other hand, the knowledge of them will be forced
upon us hereafter, now at least let us remain in ignorance, that in
the present expectation we may enjoy a blessedness which the future
reality is not to bestow; since in this life we are expecting to
obtain life everlasting, but in the world to come are to discover it
to be blessed, but not everlasting.
And if they maintain that no one can attain to the blessedness of
the world to come, unless in this life he has been indoctrinated in
those cycles in which bliss and misery relieve one another, how do
they avow that the more a man loves God, the more readily he attains
to blessedness,--they who teach what paralyzes love itself? For who
would not be more remiss and lukewarm in his love for a person whom
he thinks he shall be forced to abandon, and whose truth and wisdom
he shall come to hate; and this, too, after he has quite attained
to the utmost and most blissful knowledge of Him that he is capable
of? Can any one be faithful in his love, even to a human friend, if
he knows that he is destined to become his enemy?[558] God forbid
that there be any truth in an opinion which threatens us with a
real misery that is never to end, but is often and endlessly to be
interrupted by intervals of fallacious happiness. For what happiness
can be more fallacious and false than that in whose blaze of truth
we yet remain ignorant that we shall be miserable, or in whose most
secure citadel we yet fear that we shall be so? For if, on the one
hand, we are to be ignorant of coming calamity, then our present
misery is not so shortsighted, for it is assured of coming bliss.
If, on the other hand, the disaster that threatens is not concealed
from us in the world to come, then the time of misery which is to be
at last exchanged for a state of blessedness, is spent by the soul
more happily than its time of happiness, which is to end in a return
to misery. And thus our expectation of unhappiness is happy, but of
happiness unhappy. And therefore, as we here suffer present ills, and
hereafter fear ills that are imminent, it were truer to say that we
shall always be miserable, than that we can some time be happy.
But these things are declared to be false by the loud testimony
of religion and truth; for religion truthfully promises a true
blessedness, of which we shall be eternally assured, and which cannot
be interrupted by any disaster. Let us therefore keep to the straight
path, which is Christ, and, with Him as our Guide and Saviour, let
us turn away in heart and mind from the unreal and futile cycles of
the godless. Porphyry, Platonist though he was, abjured the opinion
of his school, that in these cycles souls are ceaselessly passing
away and returning, either being struck with the extravagance of the
idea, or sobered by his knowledge of Christianity. As I mentioned in
the tenth book,[559] he preferred saying that the soul, as it had
been sent into the world that it might know evil, and be purged and
delivered from it, was never again exposed to such an experience
after it had once returned to the Father. And if he abjured the
tenets of his school, how much more ought we Christians to abominate
and avoid an opinion so unfounded and hostile to our faith? But
having disposed of these cycles and escaped out of them, no necessity
compels us to suppose that the human race had no beginning in time,
on the ground that there is nothing new in nature which, by I know
not what cycles, has not at some previous period existed, and is
not hereafter to exist again. For if the soul, once delivered,
as it never was before, is never to return to misery, then there
happens in its experience something which never happened before;
and this, indeed, something of the greatest consequence, to wit,
the secure entrance into eternal felicity. And if in an immortal
nature there can occur a novelty, which never has been, nor ever
shall be, reproduced by any cycle, why is it disputed that the same
may occur in mortal natures? If they maintain that blessedness is
no new experience to the soul, but only a return to that state in
which it has been eternally, then at least its deliverance from
misery is something new, since, by their own showing, the misery
from which it is delivered is itself, too, a new experience. And if
this new experience fell out by accident, and was not embraced in
the order of things appointed by Divine Providence, then where are
those determinate and measured cycles in which no new thing happens,
but all things are reproduced as they were before? If, however, this
new experience was embraced in that providential order of nature
(whether the soul was exposed to the evil of this world for the
sake of discipline, or fell into it by sin), then it is possible
for new things to happen which never happened before, and which yet
are not extraneous to the order of nature. And if the soul is able
by its own imprudence to create for itself a new misery, which was
not unforeseen by the Divine Providence, but was provided for in the
order of nature along with the deliverance from it, how can we, even
with all the rashness of human vanity, presume to deny that God can
create new things--new to the world, but not to Him--which He never
before created, but yet foresaw from all eternity? If they say that
it is indeed true that ransomed souls return no more to misery, but
that even so no new thing happens, since there always have been,
now are, and ever shall be a succession of ransomed souls, they must
at least grant that in this case there are new souls to whom the
misery and the deliverance from it are new. For if they maintain that
those souls out of which new men are daily being made (from whose
bodies, if they have lived wisely, they are so delivered that they
never return to misery) are not new, but have existed from eternity,
they must logically admit that they are infinite. For however great
a finite number of souls there were, that would not have sufficed
to make perpetually new men from eternity,--men whose souls were to
be eternally freed from this mortal state, and never afterwards to
return to it. And our philosophers will find it hard to explain how
there is an infinite number of souls in an order of nature which they
require shall be finite, that it may be known by God.
And now that we have exploded these cycles which were supposed to
bring back the soul at fixed periods to the same miseries, what can
seem more in accordance with godly reason than to believe that it is
possible for God both to create new things never before created, and
in doing so, to preserve His will unaltered? But whether the number
of eternally redeemed souls can be continually increased or not, let
the philosophers themselves decide, who are so subtle in determining
where infinity cannot be admitted. For our own part, our reasoning
holds in either case. For if the number of souls can be indefinitely
increased, what reason is there to deny that what had never before
been created, could be created? since the number of ransomed souls
never existed before, and has yet not only been once made, but will
never cease to be anew coming into being. If, on the other hand,
it be more suitable that the number of eternally ransomed souls be
definite, and that this number will never be increased, yet this
number, whatever it be, did assuredly never exist before, and it
cannot increase, and reach the amount it signifies, without having
some beginning; and this beginning never before existed. That this
beginning, therefore, might be, the first man was created.
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