Transcript

The following is a legacy recording from the archives of the C.S. Lewis Institute. While the audio quality of these recordings may vary, the content remains vital to the mission of the Institute to develop disciples who can articulate, defend, and live faith in Christ through personal and public life.

The City of God is the first thoroughly reasoned, thoroughly biblically grounded, comprehensive Christian philosophy of history. The philosophies of history of recent centuries are, for example, Vico or Hegel or Marx or Spengler or Toynbee. And we may include in this connection H.G. Wells in his attempt at a sweeping view of world history, where all is either idealistic or naturalistic or humanistic or positivistic or atheistic or some combination of these persuasions. But, what is Christian? A Christian philosophy of history bases itself on the Bible and on the illumination of the Holy Ghost. Augustine would certainly repeat here with Paul, "Let God be true, but every man a liar." He is interested in the meaning of history according to the testimony of God's revelation and not according to the testimony of human reason. He probably would not object to the latter as a commendable exercise of reason, but he would not take it seriously. Augustine would say, "If revelation were our guide, there would be no conflict with reason. But if reason were our guide, which could not possibly comprehend the whole, indeed the most decisive truth of God, conflict could arise between it and revelation, unless it should forego its proud self-sufficiency, which would then bring it back to the standpoint of revelation."

It follows that any Christian, any Christian, if he knows what it means to be a Christian, or any Christian thinker who takes the same position as that of Augustine and Paul in this regard, and how could he be a Christian if he did not, cannot oppose Augustine on rationalistic, humanistic grounds, but on Christian biblical grounds. Opposition in this case is not worldly opposition at all, but godly discussion, mutually enriching, in the meek spirit of the love of Jesus Christ.

The first ten books of the City of God refute in great detail the claims of paganism, both about this life and the next. They are fascinating reading, if for no other reason than to acquire some idea of the exquisite arts of polemics and apology as practiced by a saint. The émigrés among the Roman nobility who flocked to North Africa after the sack of Rome in 410 were attacked in their salons for Christianity, and they were all rich people, and they had lots of salons and lots of clubs and meetings in North Africa. They were all attacked for Christianity as itself responsible for their disaster. Christianity presented a handy scapegoat. The same scapegoat was hit upon by Edward Gibbon, 13 centuries afterwards, and by Nietzsche last century. It was Christianity, boring and undermining and questioning and profaning the noble Roman virtues they claimed, which caused the great catastrophe. In this connection, I might observe that modern historical scholarship completely supports the Augustinian contention and has absolved Christianity of any responsibility for the disintegration and downfall of the Roman Empire, the claims of paganism, Gibbon and Nietzsche notwithstanding. Rather, it was such matters as, according to modern historical scholarship, rather it was such matters as the failure due partly to recurrent drought of the granaries of the empire in Egypt and Syria to supply Rome with the requisite suit, rising difficulties of transportation and communication, problems of inflation, confusion and insubordination in the ranks of the armed forces, rebellions in the outlying districts, mounting incursions by the barbarians, piracy in the Mediterranean, and so forth.

It was such factors that combined to doom the eternity of the eternal city, which does not mean that these causes by themselves brought about the decline and fall of the greatest empire in history. In Augustine's view, which is the Christian view, the ultimate cause behind all these proximate causes, as Aristotle would call them, was the inherent political, moral and spiritual corruption and decay of the Roman soul itself.

Polemicly, Augustine answered these émigrés who came to him in North Africa from Rome and who were all the time grumbling and complaining and attacking Christianity. Polemicly, Augustine answered that Roman pagan morality was rotten to the core from the very beginning, as is evidenced by the fact that long before the advent of Christ, Romulus, the founder of Rome, murdered his own brother Remus, that the gods, whom the Romans were worshipping and therefore emulating, indulged in the most outrageous, immoral acts, such as murder. The gods were murdering each other, such as murder and revenge and conspiracy and treachery and rape and incest. The gods were doing that. That the most shameful obscenities were practiced in honor of the mother of the gods by her worshippers. And when you study that and compare the mother of the gods to the Romans, with the mother of our God, Mary, you will see the difference. And that the finest Greek and the Roman thinkers themselves, some long before Christ, such as Plato and Aristotle, some essentially or so before him, such as Varro and Sallust and Cicero and even the two Gracchi, were themselves attacking the pagan gods and pagan morality.

Here's a little quotation about a very small one of hundreds that can be read to you. He was referring to the quarrel between Caesar and Pompey. He says the war of Caesar and Pompey, this is book three, chapter thirteen. The war of Caesar and Pompey took place between only one father-in-law and his one son-in-law, and that after Caesar's daughter Pompey's wife was dead. Yet how loud, how justly, prompted by grief, Lucan, a pagan author, cries out, and here are a little two verses, "The battle on Emathia's plains in worse than civil war, and crime thus legalized we think." That's a verse descriptive of the situation.

Then Augustine continues. The Romans conquered therefore, you recall Pompey and Caesar, the Romans conquered therefore with the result that they used hence bloody with the gore of their fathers-in-law to wrest from unhappy daughters the embraces of love, while daughters did not dare lay men to the death of fathers for fear of offending victorious husbands. And while the fight was still progressing anew, while the fight was still progressing anew, which do pray for the daughters? This is polemicly.

Apologetically, it was the easiest thing in the world for Augustine to demonstrate the incomparable superiority of Christianity to even the finest in pagan thought and morals. And he goes at this thing at length. But now Augustine himself, a Roman, of course recognized the sterling quality of the Romans at their best: their valor, their heroism, their cultivation of the virtues of honor and nobility, their universalism, their sense of law and order, their genius of acquiring and holding their vast empire for centuries. But, and this is how he puts it to them.

He is now exhorting the Romans. Augustine exhorting the Romans. This book two, chapter 29, the final chapter, exhorting the Romans to abandon the worship of the gods. This is how he exhorts them. Desire rather these things, O admirable Roman character. Desire rather these things, O offspring, O men like Regulus, Scaevola, the Scipios, and Fabricius. Desire rather these things: the teaching of Holy Scripture, instruction in righteousness, the fellowship of Christ, the communion of saints, piety, the knowledge of the true God, eternal life. Desire rather these things; segregate them from that utterly vile inanity and utterly deceptive malignity of the demons.

If there is in your nature any special merit, and there is plenty of merit in them, as I enumerated, if there is in your nature any special merit, true religion alone can refine and bring it to a perfect state. But every false religion drowns it out and consigns it to punishment. To this fatherland, the city of God, to this fatherland, I'm still quoting from him, book two, chapter 29. To this fatherland, we invite you and urge you to join the roster of the citizens of the city that offers its own asylum, so to speak, in a genuine remission of sins. Do not hearken to your degenerate sons who asperse Christ and Christians, and denounce their era, the Christian era, as if the times were bad, since the times they require are not a time of peaceful living, but of carefree frivolity. You never approved such a goal, even for your earthly fatherland. Lay hold without delay on the heavenly fatherland, which will cost you but the slightest spoil, and will enable you to reign in the true sense and forever.

Do not pursue those false and fallacious gods, now my dear friends, gods and demons, he uses them here quite copiously, and in our language, in our psychology, which is not superior to his. Apollo, I think of them in terms of our subjectivistic interpretation of life. Gods are values, all of you know what values are. Demons are evils, all of you know what evils are. The difference between the outlook of an Augustinian or a medievalist, and the outlook of modern times, is that these things, in the mind of Augustine, are all embodied in being. Not mere ideas up in the air, values, the value of honesty. Where does honesty exist, except in an honest human being? And ultimately in the gods who were honest. And the gods, of course, all the gods of the pagans are demons, but the gods of the Christians are the angels. Therefore, and the angels are beings, they are not ideas, they are qualities, they are beings. So, when he says gods, interpret them in our own language, which is not superior to that of Augustine, as values, but values that are incarnate in beings, which exist in substantial beings, which exist.

Do not pursue false and fallacious gods, namely the demons; abandon them, rather, and despise them; break away into true liberty. They are not gods; they are malignant spirits, for whom your eternal happiness, notice this wonderfully phrased, they are malignant spirits, for whom your eternal happiness is their punishment. Namely, they hate nothing more than to see you eternally happy. Incomparably fair is that heavenly city, where victory is truth, where dignity is holiness, where peace is happiness, where life is eternity.

Before Augustine takes up the question of the two cities, the problem arose which he had to face as a result. This is the problem of the angels. It is strange that there is no mention of the angels in any of the six days of creation in the first chapter of Genesis. And yet, the angels play a critical role in the Christian dispensation. And I may have told you in one of my previous lectures that Billy Graham had written a book entitled "Angels, Angels, Angels" and it describes at length his own view of angels. And I may also tell you that Saint Thomas Aquinas is called the angelic doctor because he stressed so much the reality of angels and at the end of his life he must have spent a hundred preachers on angels. Just think. So, it's very strange that angels are not even mentioned in the six days of creation in the first chapter of Genesis. And yet, the angels play a critical role in the Christian dispensation. We hear about them everywhere as messengers of God. Angels sent to Abraham and Lot. The angels announcing the birth of the child Jesus to the shepherds. The son of man coming in his glory with the holy angels in the last days. The comparison between Christ and the angels in the first two chapters of Hebrews. And in the book of Revelation alone, the angels are mentioned 68 times.

When did these beings come into being? They must have been created, obviously. Otherwise, they would be co-eternal with God, which is impossible. And yet there is no explicit mention of them in any of the six days of creation. And so, to resolve this difficulty, which is a real difficulty, Augustine has to turn to the first chapter on which he dedicated days and weeks and months. The first chapter only of Genesis to see how we can get around that difficulty.

Now we read the first chapter. "In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth." Beginning, the most important beginning. The affirmation of God the creator. Completely unlike everything in paganism, as I told you in my first lecture, that the pagans begin with "in the beginning chaos." We begin with "in the beginning the fruitfulness of being," which is God. "In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, 'Let there be light, and there was light." Now, the most striking thing about these three verses is that already in them you have the holy trinity fully explicitly stated. "In the beginning, God created." The act of creation is done as we learn in the third verse through his word. "He said." So, in the beginning there is God. In the beginning there is something he said. That's his word. And in the beginning was the spiritual God which moved upon the face of the waters. The holy trinity is fully expressed in these three verses.

But now, the strangest thing is that the strangest thing, which gave a clue to Augustine as to how to resolve the problem of the angels. The strangest thing is that the third verse says, "And God said, 'Let there be light,' and there was light."

Now, it's in the fourth day. In the fourth day that the sun and the moon and the stars are created. What does this verse then mean when it says, "He said, 'Let there be light.' And there was light"? Well, the Augustine interpretation, which is adopted by Christian theology, is that the light intended here is... well, obviously then there are two kinds of light: the physical light, which is what was created on the fourth day, and here this spiritual light, which is the realm of the angels. The angels were created and they were given the name of light, the kingdom of light, the realm of light. And then it says later on, "And God separated." And God... This is the fourth verse. "And God saw the light that it was good." And God divided the light from the darkness. All of this before the sun and the moon and the stars were created. So here we are dealing with two things: with a spiritual realm of light and a spiritual realm of darkness. And the two realms are the holy angels and the fallen angels. And later on you find in the New Testament the play on light and darkness by Paul and by Christ Himself. Here are the children of light and not the children of darkness. You can show that light, that the motif of light and darkness is the most important motif in the New Testament.

So now, what we have then is that in the very first day of creation God created the angels, the realm of the spirit, the angels. Now, the whole plenum, the whole range of the whole spectrum of beings, of created beings is complete. We start from the uncreated creator, who is the Holy Trinity, and then we proceed successively through the angels. And we end with man being created on the sixth day.

Now, the two cities originated one in heaven and one on earth. The city of God was originated in heaven and the city of man on earth. How did they originate? The city of God came into being when after Satan fell into the domain of darkness, many angels remained still attached to God and did not fall. That is the beginning, the unfallen, the obedient angels who were created, who did not choose to fall, were the beginning of the city of God in heaven. My dear friend, Augustine is not talking idealistically about ideas. He is talking about beings. There are beings which are angels, which are close to the supreme being, who is God. That's what he's talking about. The city of God in heaven and the city of man on earth, the rebellion of the angels, the devil, through disobedience and pride, gave rise to the realm of darkness. He had lots of devils following him, which is hell. Hell is the realm of darkness. And God divided the light from the darkness. That's the first act of division between the city of man, of fallen man, as you shall see in a moment, and the city of God. So the realm of light is equivalent to the holy angels and the realm of darkness to the fallen angels, the devils, the demons. Both were created beings. Both were created beings: the demons and the holy angels. One obeyed and kept its place. These are the holy angels. This is all in heaven. And the other disobeyed and sought to usurp the place of God.

The beginning of the city of God then, my dear friend. Now, I hope you won't make fun of these things, saying they're being mythological, they're being old fashioned and not appearing in the book that has just appeared in theology from some strange seminary in beauty car somewhere. The beginning of the city of God then is the realm of light where the holy angels abide by their pure free will, by their pure free will.

They come to God. Others by their own free will departed from God. This is the beginning of the city of God in heaven. And what was the beginning of the city of God on earth? Or city of man on earth? On earth, the city of man started originally when man, in the person of the first man, Adam, deceived by the devil who had already fallen, disobeyed God and later, definitively, when Cain murdered his brother Abel from sheer envy. And this sentence is one of the most important sentences I am saying today: how the city of man originated by the fall of Adam and Eve and by the envy and the murder of Abel by Cain.

Now, the theological significance of the original sin of disobedience is painted by Augustine right here. I read it very simply. This is book 14, chapter 12. "But in God's," now this is very fine, very fine, "but in God's command," he's talking about paradise and Adam and Eve and the eating of the apple and all this sort of thing, "but in God's command, obedience was enjoyment. And this virtue, obedience, is in a sense the mother and guardian of all virtues in a rational creature, inasmuch as man has been naturally so created that it is advantageous for him to be submissive, but to ruin us, to follow his own will and not the will of his creator. This command, 'Do not eat from this tree,' the food of this tree, this command, which forbade the eating of one kind of food for a great abundance of other kinds, lay close at hand, was as easy to observe as it was brief to remember, especially since the will was not yet then opposed by desire. Such a position arose later as punishment for the transgression. Consequently, the crime of violating the command was all the greater in proportion to the ease with which it could have been heeded and upheld."

Augustine's mind then is determined throughout by the following 16 categories. I shall not discuss them, I shall only enumerate. One, God the Creator. This is his mind. His mind is composed of these 16 categories. One, God the Creator, the Holy Trinity, the fullness of being. Matheseviot scales. One, God the Creator, the Holy Trinity, the fullness of being. Two, the creature from nothing, both visible, namely material, and invisible, namely immaterial, namely the angels and the demons. Three, the will. Four, freedom, which is a great mystery. Five, individual moral responsibility. Six, obedience. Seven, pride and rebellion and curiosity. And eight, envy and inordinate ambition. And nine, keeping one's ontological place. Ten, providence. Eleven, election and predestination. Twelve, grace. Salvation is impossible without grace. Thirteen, longing for the city of God. Fourteen, hope. Fifteen, faith. Sixteen, love. The three theological virtues. It is, my dear friends, longing in hope based on faith suffused with ineffable love that constitutes the essence of the city of God. Let me repeat. It is longing in hope based on faith suffused with ineffable love that constitutes the essence of the city of God.

Envy, the envy of Cain, envy and self-glorification are, my dear friends, at the basis of everything in human history. Envy and self-glorification are at the basis of everything in human history. The interpreters of history in terms of economics and material conditions only, only are either stupid or they are liars. If they do not know the role of envy, which is a holy spiritual determination of the will behind all revolution and war, they are stupid. If they know it and cover it up because the devil, for reasons of his own, has hardened their heart, they are liars.

Cain's sin, whereby he murdered his brother because of his envy, that Abel's offering was accepted by God while his was not, all these things, you see, are types. They are pre-figurements of what happened in our life, each one of us. I should come to that in a moment, in one Christ sentence. Cain's sin, whereby he murdered his brother because of his envy, that Abel's offering was accepted by God while his was not, despite while his was not, led to the rise of some seventy kingdoms upon the earth as computed by Augustine on the basis of revival. Despite Augustine's holy ingenuity, I find it difficult to follow him, to follow him on this point. This sin, however, became, with the passage of time, more and more satanic until, in the Tower of Babel, man dared stone heaven itself, a repetition on the human scale of Satan's own original sin, whereupon man was confounded by the confusion of tongues. From that moment on, things began to deteriorate rapidly until it became unavoidable for God to destroy, through the flood, the whole world, so unbelievably dripping with iniquity and sin and rebellion, but for righteous Noah and his household, eight persons.

Abraham was then chosen and given three promises: that in time the land of Canaan will be his, that his wife Sarah, though barren and though past the age of giving birth to children, will nevertheless bear him a son Isaac, and that in Isaac, all the nations, all the nations of the world, will be blessed. This last promise, that in Isaac, all the nations of the world will be blessed, became the dominant theme throughout all subsequent sacred history. The most important point about Abraham is that he believed and obeyed, and today Jews, today Jews, Christians and Muslims call him the father of the faithful. You cannot understand man and history, unless you fathom the character of Abraham as biblically given. Everything that is happening in the world today, especially in the Middle East, between Judaism, Christianity and Islam, is grounded in the mystery of Abraham.

Everywhere in sacred history, the ultimate principle of causation, as I said more than once, is moral, spiritualist existential, and economic, natural, political. This truth must be fully grasped. The biblical story, the biblical story from Abraham until the coming of Christ is familiar to you. Its principal features are the liberation of Israel from the bondage of Egypt, the schooling of Israel in the wilderness, the granting of the law by Moses, the faithfulness of God, the faithlessness of the people, David and the Psalms, the Babylonian captivity, the eschatological age of prophecy, the fact that the closer we come to the advent of our Savior, the sharper becomes the prophetic outline of his features. As in biology, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, so in the life of each one of us, as well as in the life of humanity in history, there is a mysterious recapitulation of all these stages in the history of Israel. We, each one of us, is in a sense, Israel, and we belong to some kind of a community, of a political body, of a city of man, which in some sense is itself also Israel. Israel is man, writ large. Therefore, God's interest, this time, by this time I mean after Christ came, the forgotten interest this time, after all the trials of the past, is not an earthly perishable city, but eternal life in the eternal city of God himself. If this is true, and assured, who would then think of belonging to an earthly city, Eloi?

Augustine did not only work out the fortunes of the city of God in the form of the chosen people of Israel, down to the advent of our Savior, he also drew up a chronological parallelism between the people of Israel and the two existing empires at the time, as principally representatives of the city of man: the Assyrian Empire in the east, and the Roman Empire in the west, from Abraham to Christ. You can read Matthew, between Abraham and the birth of Jesus, you remember them all by heart. I hope you do. We read them, word by word, in my church, every Christmas at midnight, and we memorize these generations. They sing his views on the three divisions of generations of the first chapter of Matthew, between Abraham and the birth of Jesus, and on the six days of creation of the first chapter of Genesis. Augustine conceives world history as composed of six ages, or eons, or eras. The sixth, his age, which is still our age, until the second coming of Christ. Each one of these ages, my friends, has its own special characteristics. Our age, which is the same as his, he calls the Christian era. It is the age between the times. It's the interim they're excited about, as the Germans say, namely between the incarnation and the second coming of Christ.

But upon the Day of Judgment, which you described at great length in Book 21, upon the Day of Judgment by the Lord himself, when he returns and separates the wheat from the tares and the sheep from the goats, a seventh day, a seventh age, will set in: the Sabbath of the saints, the post-historical age of eternity, a real age, a real eternity, a real life, an existing being, not ideas. When the city of God will be consummated after the resurrection of the body, and saints and holy angels will be living together, eternally, in the presence of God, seeing him face to face. When our sixth day terminates, an eternal life in the seventh day begins. That is, when he returns, when these things happen, no one will know, for it is not for you to know the times or the seasons which the Father has put in his own power.

Augustine hints in a couple of sentences at the very end of this entire work, at the very, very end of Book 22, he hints at the very end of this entire work, in a couple of sentences, that there is still an eighth day. He does not discuss this mysterious eighth day or age. He only says, "We must pass from the seventh day, which is the Sabbath of the Jews, to the Lord's day, an eighth eternal day, sanctified by the resurrection of Christ, which prefigures the eternal rest of both spirit and body." And then he concludes the entire work with this third sentence: "For this seventh day will be our Sabbath, and its end will not be an evening, but the Lord's day, an eighth eternal day, sanctified by the resurrection of Christ, which prefigures the eternal rest of both spirit and body, that we shall be still and see, shall see and love, shall love and praise."

This is all for today. Next time, tomorrow, I shall take up with you in the concluding lecture the theme: the relevance of Augustine to ourselves, the relevance of Augustine to ourselves. What does Augustine mean to us concretely? This I take up with you tomorrow. Now we have at least half an hour, and I am wholly at your service in a period of question time. Yes, sir. Would you please give us a ninth category on the 9th line? You can have that. The 9th of the 16th. What's the 9th? Keeping one's ontological place. I do it too, just enough. I'm so glad you're playing in the... 9th?