Letters & Polemics (CSEL) 3 part 39/87

For from this especially do these men err, so that they prefer to walk in a false circle rather than by the true and straight path, because they measure the divine mind — which is wholly unchangeable, capable of any infinity whatsoever, and numbering all things innumerable without any alternation of thought — by their own human, mutable, and narrow mind; and that happens to them which the Apostle says: For comparing themselves with themselves, they understand not. For because, whenever anything new to be done comes into their mind, they do it by a new counsel (for they bear mutable minds): assuredly, thinking not of God, whom they cannot conceive, but of themselves in His stead, they compare not Him, but themselves, and not to Him, but to themselves. But for us it is not lawful to believe that God is affected in one way when He is at rest, in another when He works;

because He is not even to be said to be affected, as though something should come to be in His nature which was not there before. For he suffers who is affected, and everything is mutable that suffers anything. Let not therefore in His rest sluggishness, sloth, inactivity be thought; just as neither in His work labour, effort, industry. He knows how to act while resting and to rest while acting. He can apply to a new work not a new, but an eternal counsel; nor did He begin to do what He had not done out of repentance, because He had previously ceased. But even if He previously ceased and afterwards wrought (which I know not how it can be understood by man): this without doubt, which is called previously and afterwards, was in things previously not existing and afterwards existing;

but in Him no following will changed or took away a preceding one; rather by one and the same eternal and unchangeable will He brought it about, regarding the things which He founded, both that they should formerly not exist, so long as they did not exist, and that they should afterwards exist, when they began to be — thereby perhaps wondrously showing, to those who can behold such things, how He did not need them, but founded them out of gratuitous goodness, since without them, from eternity without a beginning, He remained in no less blessedness. CHAPTER XIX. Against those who say that the things which are infinite cannot be comprehended even by the knowledge of God. But that other thing which they say, that not even by the knowledge of God can the things which are infinite be comprehended:

it remains for them to dare to say, and to plunge themselves into this deep abyss of impiety, that God does not know all numbers. That these are infinite is most certain; since at whatever number you may think an end is to be made, that same number, I say not merely can be increased by adding one, but, however great it be and however vast a multitude it contain, in the very principle and science of numbers can not only be doubled but even multiplied. Yet each number is so bounded by its own properties, that none of them can be equal to any other whatsoever. Therefore they are both unequal among themselves and diverse, and each single one is finite, and all are infinite.

Does God then, on account of their infinity, not know all numbers, and does the knowledge of God reach up to a certain sum of numbers, while He is ignorant of the rest? Who, even the most demented, would say this? Nor will these men dare to despise numbers and to say that they do not pertain to the knowledge of God, among whom Plato with great authority commends God as fashioning the world by numbers. And among us it is read to have been said to God: Thou hast ordered all things in measure and number and weight; of whom also the prophet says: Who bringeth forth the world by number; and the Saviour in the Gospel: The hairs, He says, of you all are numbered. Far be it therefore that we should doubt that every number is known to Him, of whose understanding, as is sung in the psalm, there is no number.

The infinity of number, therefore, although there is no number of infinite numbers, is nevertheless not incomprehensible to Him of whose understanding there is no number. Wherefore, if whatever is comprehended by knowledge is bounded by the comprehension of the one knowing: assuredly all infinity also is in some ineffable way finite to God, because it is not incomprehensible to His knowledge. Wherefore, if the infinity of numbers cannot be infinite to the knowledge of God by which it is comprehended: who at last are we poor little men, that we should presume to fix limits to His knowledge, saying that, unless the same temporal things be repeated through the same cycles of times, God cannot either foreknow all the things which He makes in order to make them, or know them when He has made them?

whose wisdom, simply manifold and uniformly multiform, comprehends all incomprehensible things with so incomprehensible a comprehension, that, whatever new and dissimilar consequent things following upon antecedent ones He should ever wish to make, He could not have them disordered and unforeseen, nor would He foresee them from the time near at hand, but would contain them in His eternal foreknowledge. CHAPTER XX. Of the ages of ages. Whether He so acts, and whether those things which are called the ages of ages are coupled in a continuous connection joined to one another, yet running on in one and another ordered dissimilarity, while those at least who are freed from misery remain without end in their blessed immortality;

or whether they are so called the ages of ages, that there be understood ages abiding with unshaken stability in the wisdom of God, as the efficient causes of those ages which pass away with time — I do not dare to define. For perhaps that may be called an age which are the ages, so that nothing else be alleged to be the age of an age than the ages of ages, just as nothing else is called the heaven of heaven than the heavens of heavens. For God called the firmament heaven, above which are the waters; and yet the psalm says: And let the waters which are above the heavens praise the name of the Lord.

Which therefore of these two it is, or whether besides these two something else can be understood of the ages of ages, is a most profound question, nor does it hinder what we are now treating, if it be meanwhile deferred undiscussed; whether we may be able to define something in it, or whether the more diligent treatment itself may make us more cautious, lest in so great an obscurity of things we should dare rashly to affirm anything. For now we dispute against the opinion by which those cycles are asserted, by which the same things are thought necessarily to be repeated at intervals of times. But whichever of those sentences concerning the ages of ages be true, it pertains nothing to these cycles;

since, whether the ages of ages be not the same things repeated, but one running on from another in a most ordered connection, while the blessedness of the freed remains most certain without any recurrence of miseries, or whether the ages of ages be eternal, as it were ruling over the temporal subjects — those cycles which roll round the same things have no place, which the eternal life of the saints especially refutes. CHAPTER XXI. Of the impiety of those who assert that souls partaking of the highest and true blessedness are to return again and again, through the cycles of times, to the same miseries and toils.

For whose pious ears could endure that, after a life passed through so many and so great calamities (if indeed this is to be called a life, which is rather a death, so grievous that the death which frees from it is feared out of love of this death), after such great and so many and horrible evils at length at some time expiated and ended through true religion and wisdom, one should so come to the sight of God and so become blessed by the contemplation of the incorporeal light through participation in His unchangeable immortality, for the obtaining of which we burn with love, that it must at some time necessarily be forsaken, and that those who forsake it, cast down from that eternity, truth, and felicity, should be entangled in infernal mortality, in foul folly, in execrable miseries, where God is lost, where truth is held in hatred, where blessedness is sought through unclean wickednesses; and this likewise again and again, without any end of former and later, done and to be done at fixed intervals and measures of ages;

and this for the reason, that God may, through cycles defined as ever going and returning, be able to have His own works known to Him through our false blessednesses and true miseries — alternately indeed, but with an unceasing revolution, everlastingly — since He can neither rest from making nor by knowing track down the things which are infinite? Who would hear these things? who would believe them? who would endure them? If they were true, they would not only be more prudently kept silent, but also (that I may say what I will in whatever way I can) be more learnedly left unknown. For if we shall not have these things in memory there, and therefore shall be blessed, why is our misery here weighed down the more by the knowledge of them?

But if we are necessarily going to know these things there, let us at least here be ignorant of them, so that here the expectation may be happier than there the attainment of the highest good; since here eternal life is awaited as to be obtained, but there a life blessed indeed, yet not eternal, is known as one day to be lost. But if they say that no one can attain to that blessedness, unless in the schooling of this life he has come to know those cycles in which blessedness and misery alternate by turns: how then do they confess that, the more anyone has loved God, the more easily he will attain to blessedness — they who teach the very things by which love itself grows torpid?

For who would not love more remissly and tepidly Him whom he thinks he must necessarily forsake, and feel contrary to His truth and wisdom, and this when he shall have attained, according to his capacity, to the full knowledge of His blessedness in perfection? For no one can even faithfully love a man as friend, whom he knows he is to be an enemy to. But far be it that those things be true which threaten us with a true misery never to be ended, but often and endlessly to be broken by the interpositions of a false blessedness. For what is more false and more deceitful than that blessedness, where either, in so great a light of truth, we should be ignorant that we are to be miserable, or, in the highest citadel of felicity, we should fear it?

For if we are going to be ignorant of the coming calamity, our present misery here is the more knowing, where we know the coming blessedness; but if the impending disaster will not lie hidden from us there, the miserable soul passes more blessedly the times which, when ended, it is raised up to blessedness, than the blessed soul passes those which, when ended, it is rolled back into misery. And thus the hope of our unhappiness is happy, and that of our happiness unhappy. Whence it comes to pass that, because here we suffer present evils, there we fear impending ones, we can more truly be always miserable than at some time blessed.

But since these things are false, with piety crying out and truth convicting (for to us is truly promised that true felicity, whose certain security is to be retained for ever and to be broken by no unhappiness): following the right way, which is Christ for us, with Him as guide and Saviour let us turn away the journey of faith and our mind from the vain and foolish cycle of the impious.

For if concerning these cycles and the ceaselessly alternating goings and returnings of souls, Porphyry the Platonist was unwilling to follow the opinion of his own school — whether moved by the very vanity of the thing or already standing in awe of Christian times — and (as I mentioned in the tenth book) preferred to say that the soul was given to the world for the sake of knowing evils, so that, freed and purged from them, when it has returned to the Father, it may suffer nothing further of the kind: how much more ought we to detest and shun that falsehood, hostile to the Christian faith!

But these cycles having been emptied out and frustrated, no necessity compels us therefore to suppose that the human race, from when it began to be, has no beginning of time, on the ground that through I know not what cycles there is nothing new in things which has not both before existed at fixed intervals of times and afterwards is to be in the future. For if the soul is freed, not to return to miseries, as it was never freed before, there comes to be in it something which never before came to pass, and this indeed very great, namely an eternal felicity which shall never cease. But if in an immortal nature there comes to be so great a novelty, repeated by no cycle, to be repeated by no cycle, why is it contended that it cannot come to pass in mortal things?

If they say that no newness of blessedness comes to be in the soul, because it returns to that state in which it always was, yet surely the liberation itself comes to be as something new, since the soul is freed from a misery in which it never was; and this very newness of misery came to be in the soul which had never been in it before. But if this newness does not enter into the order of things which are governed by divine providence, but rather happens by chance, where then are those fixed and measured cycles in which nothing new comes to be, but the same things that were are merely repeated? If, however, this newness too is not excluded from the ordering of providence, whether the soul was given or whether it fell, then new things can come to be which were neither done before nor yet are foreign to the order of things.

And if the soul could, through imprudence, make for itself a new misery which was not unforeseen by divine providence—so that providence both included this within the order of things and not unprovidently freed the soul from it—by what rashness of human vanity do we then dare to deny that the Godhead can make things new, not to itself but to the world, things which it neither made before nor ever held as unforeseen? But if they say that the souls once freed will indeed not return to misery, yet that when this happens nothing new comes to be in things, since always some souls and others have been, are being, and will be freed: this at least they concede, if it be so, that new souls come into being, for which there is both a new misery and a new liberation.

For if they say these souls are ancient and eternal in the backward direction, and that from them new men are daily made—men from whose bodies, if they have lived wisely, they are so freed as never to be rolled back into misery—then they will be obliged consequently to say that the souls are infinite in number. For however great a finite number of souls there might have been, it could not suffice for the infinite ages of the past, so that from it men should always be made whose souls were always to be freed from this mortal state and never thereafter to return to it. Nor will they by any means explain how, in things which they wish to be finite so that they may be known to God, the number of souls can be infinite.

Wherefore, since those cycles have now been exploded—the cycles by which the soul was thought necessarily to return to the same miseries—what remains more fitting to piety than to believe that it is not impossible for God both to make new the things which He never made, and yet, in His unspeakable foreknowledge, to have no changeable will? As for whether the number of souls that have been freed and will never again return to misery can always be increased, let those see to it who dispute so subtly about the restraining of infinity; but we, for our part, bound our reasoning on either side.

For if it can be increased, what reason is there to deny that what was never created before could be created, if the number of freed souls, which never before existed, was not only made once, but will never cease to be made? But if it is necessary that there be some fixed number of freed souls who will never return to misery, and that this number be not further increased: then this very number too, whatever it shall be, certainly never existed before; and it surely could not grow and arrive at the limit of its own quantity without some beginning; which beginning in that manner never existed before. That this might exist, therefore, man was created, before whom there was none. CHAPTER 22. On the condition of the one first man, and in him of the human race.

This most difficult question having been explained, as far as we could, concerning the eternity of God who creates new things without any newness of will, it is not hard to see that it was far better that what was done should be done—namely, that from one man, whom He first founded, He should multiply the human race—than if He had begun it from several. For while He established some living creatures as solitary and in a manner wandering alone, that is, such as rather seek solitude—as are eagles, kites, lions, wolves, and whatever are of that sort—and others as gregarious, which prefer to live gathered together and in flocks, as are doves, starlings, deer, roe-deer and the rest of this kind: yet neither kind did He propagate from single individuals, but bade many to exist at once.

But man, whose nature He was founding in a manner intermediate between the angels and the beasts—so that, if he should remain subject to his Creator as to his true Lord and keep His precept with pious obedience, he would pass over into angelic fellowship, attaining a blessed immortality without end and without the intervention of death;

but if, using his free will proudly and disobediently, he should offend the Lord his God, he would, being consigned to death, live like a beast, a slave to lust and destined after death to eternal punishment—man He created one and single, not indeed to be left alone without human society, but that in this way the unity of that very society and the bond of concord might be more strongly commended to him, if men were bound together not only by the likeness of nature among themselves, but also by the affection of kinship; since it pleased Him not even to create the woman herself, to be joined to the man, as He created the man himself, but from the man himself, that altogether the human race might be spread out from one man. CHAPTER 23.

That God foreknew that the man whom He first founded would sin, and at the same time foresaw how great a people of the godly He would, by His grace, transfer from that man's race into angelic fellowship. Nor was God ignorant that man would sin and, being now subject to death, would beget those who would die, and that mortals would advance to such monstrousness of sinning that the beasts of their own kind—devoid of rational will, whose more numerous origin sprang from the waters and the earth—would live more safely and peaceably among themselves than men, whose race was propagated from one in order to commend concord. For never have lions among themselves, nor dragons among themselves, waged such wars as men do.

But He also foresaw by His grace the people of the godly, to be called into adoption, and, their sins being remitted, to be justified by the Holy Spirit and joined to the holy angels in eternal peace, the last enemy, death, being destroyed; to which people the consideration of this matter would be profitable, namely, that God had established the human race from one man, in order to commend to men how pleasing to Him is unity even in the many. CHAPTER 24. On the nature of the human soul created in the image of God. God therefore made man in His own image. For He created for him such a soul that by reason and understanding he should be more excellent than all the animals of the earth, the waters, and the air, which did not have a mind of this kind.

And when He had formed the man from the dust of the earth, and had given him, by breathing, such a soul as I have spoken of—whether one He had already made, or rather had made by the very breathing—and had willed that breath, which He made by breathing (for what else is it to breathe than to make a breath?), to be the soul of the man, He also, as God, made him a wife from his side, a bone being drawn out, as a helper for begetting. For these things are not to be conceived after the manner of the flesh, as we are accustomed to see craftsmen fashioning bodily members out of any earthly material whatever, whatever the industry of their art could effect. The hand of God is the power of God, who works even visible things invisibly.

But those who measure the virtue and wisdom of God—by which He both knows and is able even without seeds to make seeds themselves—by these usual and daily works, think these things fabulous rather than true; and the things which were first instituted, because they do not know them, they faithlessly regard; as though these very things which they do know about human conceptions and births, if they were narrated to the inexperienced, would not seem more incredible; although most men assign even these very things rather to the corporeal causes of nature than to the works of the divine mind. CHAPTER 25. Whether the angels can be called the creators of any creature, even the least. But with those who do not believe that the divine mind makes or cares for these things, we have no business in these books.

But those who believe their Plato, that not by that supreme God who fashioned the world, but by other lesser gods—whom indeed He Himself created—all mortal animals were made, by His permission or command, among which man held the chief place and one akin to those gods themselves: if they be free from the superstition by which they seek some ground whereby they may seem justly to offer sacred rites and sacrifices as to their founders, they will easily be free also from the error of this opinion. For it is not lawful to believe or to say that anyone is the creator of any nature, however least and mortal, except God; and before this can even be understood.

But the angels, whom those men more readily call gods, even if they apply their operation, whether bidden or permitted, to the things that are born in the world, we no more call them the creators of living things than we call farmers the creators of crops and trees. CHAPTER 26. That every nature and every form of the whole creation is made and shaped by no other than the work of God. For whereas there is one kind of form which is applied from without to any bodily material whatever—as potters and smiths and craftsmen of that sort work, who also paint and fashion forms resembling the bodies of animals;

but there is another kind, which has its efficient causes from within, from the secret and hidden will of a nature that lives and understands, which makes—while it itself is not made—not only the natural forms of bodies, but also the very souls of living creatures: let that form first mentioned be attributed to any craftsmen whatever; but this other kind to none save the one Craftsman, the Creator and Founder, God, who made the world itself and the angels without any world and without any angels. For by what divine and, so to speak, effective power—which does not know how to be made, but to make—did the roundness of the heavens and the roundness of the sun receive their form, when the world came into being?

By the same divine and effective power—which does not know how to be made, but to make—the roundness of the eye and the roundness of the apple, and the rest of the natural figures which we see in all things that are born, received their form, applied not from without, but by the inmost power of the Creator, who said: 'I fill heaven and earth,' and whose wisdom it is that 'reaches mightily from end to end and orders all things sweetly.' Therefore what manner of ministry the angels, first made, furnished to the Creator as He made the rest, I do not know; nor do I dare to attribute to them what perhaps they cannot do, nor ought I to deny them what they can.

Nevertheless the creation and founding of all natures, by which it comes about that natures exist at all, I attribute—even with the angels themselves favoring it—to that God, to whom they themselves know, with the giving of thanks, that they owe their very being. We therefore not only do not call farmers the creators of any fruits, since we read: 'Neither he that planteth is anything, nor he that watereth, but God that giveth the increase'; but we do not call even the earth itself the creator, although it seems the fruitful mother of all things, which promotes the things that burst forth in shoots and holds firm what is fixed by roots, since likewise we read: 'God giveth it a body as He hath willed, and to each of the seeds its own body.' So neither ought we to call the woman the creatress of her own offspring, but rather Him who said to a certain servant of His:

'Before I formed thee in the womb, I knew thee.' And although the soul of a pregnant woman, being affected in this way or that, may avail to clothe the fetus, as it were, with certain qualities—as Jacob did with the parti-colored rods, so that the cattle were born of varied color—yet the nature itself which is begotten, she no more made than she made herself. Whatever corporeal or seminal causes, therefore, are applied to the begetting of things—whether by the operations of angels, or of men, or of any animals, or by the minglings of males and females; whatever desires also or movements of the mother's soul may avail to sprinkle some traces of features or colors upon the tender and soft conceptions:

the natures themselves altogether, which are thus or thus affected in their own kind, none makes save the supreme God, whose hidden power, penetrating all things by an undefilable presence, makes everything that in any way is, to be, in so far as it is; for unless He made it, it would not be of such or such a kind, but could not exist at all. Wherefore, if in that form which craftsmen impose from without upon bodily things, we say that the city of Rome and the city of Alexandria had as their founders not the smiths and architects, but the kings by whose will, counsel, and command they were built—the one, Romulus; the other, Alexander:

how much more ought we to call none save God the founder of natures, who neither makes anything out of any material which He Himself has not made, nor has any workmen save those whom He Himself has created; and if He were to withdraw His, so to speak, fabricating power from things, they would no more be than they were not before they came to be. But I say 'before' in respect of eternity, not of time. For who else is the creator of times, save He who made those things by whose motions the times run their course? CHAPTER 27. On the opinion of the Platonists, by which they thought that the angels indeed were founded by God, but that they themselves are the makers of human bodies.

Indeed Plato held that the lesser gods, made by the supreme God, were the makers of the other animals, in such a way that they took the immortal part from Him, while they themselves added on the mortal part. Accordingly he was unwilling that they should be the creators of our souls, but of our bodies. Hence, since Porphyry, for the sake of the soul's purgation, says that every body is to be fled, and at the same time, along with his Plato and other Platonists, holds that those who have lived immoderately and dishonorably return, for the paying of penalties, to mortal bodies—Plato indeed even to the bodies of beasts, but Porphyry only to those of men: