Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 483

 

 

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "City of God," by Augustine.

 

I am certain of this, that no one has died who was not going to die at some time, and the end of life reduces the longest life to the same condition as the shortest. When something has once ceased to exist, there is no more question of better or worse, longer or shorter. What does it matter by what kind of death life is brought to an end? When man's life is ended he does not have to die again. Among the daily chances of this life every man on earth is threatened in the same way by innumerable deaths, and it is uncertain which of them will come to him. And so the question is whether it is better to suffer one in dying or to fear them all in living.

In embarking on this treatise on the City of God, I have thought it right to begin by replying to its enemies who, in their pursuit of earthly joys and their appetite for fleeting satisfactions, blame the Christian religion - the only religion of truth and salvation - if among these pleasures they find" any unhappiness; yet this unhappiness is imposed on them by God's mercy for their admonition, rather than by God's severity for their punishment.

Stupidity glories in never yielding to the force of truth; that is how it effects the ruin of anyone who is under the dominion of this monstrous moral fault. It is a disease proof against all efforts to treat it, not through any fault in the physician, but because the patient is himself incurable. 

 

Now the reign of death has held mankind in such utter subjection that they would all be driven headlong into that second death, which has no ending, as their well-deserved punishment, if some were not rescued from it by the undeserved grace of God. The result is that although there are many great peoples throughout the world, living under different customs in religion and morality and distinguished by a complex variety of languages, arms, and dress, it is still true that there have come into being only two main divisions, as we may call them, in human society: and we are justified in following the lead of our Scriptures and calling them two cities.There is, in fact, one city of men who choose to live by the standard of the flesh, another of those who choose to live by the standard of the spirit. The citizens of each of these desire their own kind of peace, and when they achieve their aim, that is the kind of peace in which they live.

We see then that the two cities were created by two kinds of love: the earthly city was created by self-love reaching the point of contempt for God, the Heavenly City by the love of God carried as far as contempt of self. In fact, the earthly city glories in itself, the Heavenly City glories in the Lord. The former looks for glory from men, the latter finds its highest glory in God, the witness of a good conscience. The earthly lifts up its head in its own glory, the Heavenly City says to its God: ‘My glory; you lift up my head.’ In the former, the lust for domination lords it over its princes as over the nations it subjugates; in the other both those put in authority and those subject to them serve one another in love, the rulers by their counsel, the subjects by obedience. The one city loves its own strength shown in its powerful leaders; the other says to its God, ‘I will love you, my Lord, my strength.’

Rome worshipped her founder as a god in a temple when she was already built and dedicated, while our Jerusalem placed its Founder and its God, Christ, in its foundation of faith to the end that it might be built and dedicated. The one city, loving its founder, put faith in him as a god; the other believing its founder to be God, gave her love to him. 

It was in bearing witness to this faith that the martyrs endured the bitter enmity and the savage cruelty of the world; and they overcome the world not by resisting but by dying. For this faith they died; and they can now obtain these blessings from the Lord, for whose name they were slain.

It follows that what is needed for the soul’s life of bliss is not the escape from any kind of body but the possession of an imperishable body. And what imperishable body could be more fitting for their joy than the body in which, then it was perishable, they endured their sorrow? For in that condition they will not experience that ‘dread lust’ of which Virgil (following Plato) speaks, that makes them ‘once more desire to take a mortal body.’ I mean that in this state they will feel no desire to return to a mortal body, when they will possess the body to which they desire to return, and possess it in a way as never to relinquish that possession, never to be parted from that body by any death even for a brief moment.

 

The important thing is that the seventh will be our Sabbath, whose end will not be an evening, but the Lord’s Day, an eighth day, as it were, which is to last for ever, a day consecrated by the resurrection of Christ, foreshadowing the eternal rest not only of the spirit but of the body also. There we shall be still and see; we shall see and we shall love; we shall love and we shall praise. Behold what will be, in the end, without end, For what is our end but to reach that kingdom which has no end?