Works (City of God, On the Trinity, etc.) 2

The most glorious City of God — whether in this passing course of time, as it lives by faith while sojourning among the impious, or in that stability of the eternal seat which it now awaits through patience, until 'righteousness shall be turned into judgment,' but which it shall thereafter attain by pre-eminence in final victory and perfect peace — I have undertaken to defend, in this work now begun and owed to you by my promise, against those who prefer their own gods to its Founder, dearest son Marcellinus: a great and arduous task, but God is our helper.

For I know what strength is needed to persuade the proud how great is the virtue of humility, by which it comes to pass that a loftiness surpassing all earthly summits — which totter in their temporal instability — is attained not through human pride usurped, but by divine grace bestowed. For the King and Founder of this City, of which we have set out to speak, has in the Scripture of His people revealed the sentence of the divine law, by which it is said: 'God resisteth the proud, but giveth grace to the humble.' Yet this, which belongs to God, the inflated spirit of the proud soul also affects, and loves to have said in its praises: 'To spare the subjected and to war down the proud.'

Hence, concerning the earthly city as well — which, though it strives to dominate, and though peoples serve it, is itself dominated by its own lust for domination — nothing that the plan of this undertaken work demands to be said is to be passed over in silence, if opportunity is given. For from this city arise the enemies against whom the City of God must be defended; yet many of them, having corrected the error of their impiety, become in it citizens quite fit; but many blaze against it with such fires of hatred, and are so ungrateful for the manifest benefits of its Redeemer, that today they would not move their tongues against it, had they not — while fleeing the enemy's sword — found in its sacred places the very life of which they boast.

Are not even those very Romans hostile to the name of Christ, whom for Christ's sake the barbarians spared? To this the shrines of the martyrs and the basilicas of the apostles bear witness, which in that devastation of the City received, as they fled to them, both their own and strangers. Up to those places the bloody foe raged; there the fury of the slayer received its limit; thither the pitying enemies led those whom, even outside those places, they had spared, lest they fall into the hands of others who had no such mercy. Even these same men, who elsewhere raged fierce and in hostile fashion, after they came to those places where what elsewhere the law of war would have permitted had been forbidden, then all their savagery of striking was reined in, and their greed for taking captives was broken.

Thus many escaped who now disparage these Christian times, and impute to Christ the evils that city endured; but the goods that were done to them, that they might live, for the honor of Christ, they impute not to our Christ but to their own fate — whereas rather, if they had any taste for what is right, they ought to attribute those harsh and hard things which they suffered at the enemy's hands to divine providence, which is wont to reform and grind down men's corrupted morals by wars, and likewise to exercise a just and praiseworthy human life by such afflictions, and, having proved it, either to transfer it to better things or to keep it still on this earth for other uses;

but as for the fact that the ferocious barbarians spared them — whether anywhere for the name of Christ, or in places most dedicated and most spacious to the name of Christ and, out of a more generous mercy, chosen for the capacity of a multitude — contrary to the custom of wars: this they ought to attribute to Christian times, hence to give thanks to God, hence truly to run to His name, that they may escape the punishments of eternal fire — that name which many of them falsely usurped, that they might escape the punishments of present destruction. For among those whom you see wantonly and impudently insulting the servants of Christ, there are very many who would not have escaped that ruin and slaughter, had they not feigned to be servants of Christ.

And now with ungrateful pride and most impious madness they resist His name with a perverse heart, so as to be punished with everlasting darkness — that name to which they fled, even with a deceitful mouth, that they might enjoy the temporal light. So many wars have been recorded, waged either before Rome was founded or from its rise and dominion: let them read and produce a case where a city was so taken by foreigners that the enemies who had taken it spared those whom they found to have fled to the temples of their gods, or where some barbarian leader commanded that, when the town was stormed, no one should be struck who was found in this or that temple. Did not Aeneas see Priam at the altars 'defiling with blood the fires which he himself had hallowed'?

Did not Diomedes and Ulysses, 'having slain the guards of the citadel's height, seize the sacred image and, with bloody hands, dare to touch the maiden fillets of the goddess'? Nor yet is what follows true: 'From that time the hope of the Greeks began to ebb and, gliding backward, to be carried away.' For afterward they conquered, afterward they destroyed Troy with sword and fire, afterward they cut down Priam as he fled to the altars. Nor did Troy perish because it lost Minerva. For what had Minerva herself first lost, that she should perish? Her guardians, perhaps? This indeed is true; for once they were slain, she could be carried off. For the men were not preserved by the image, but the image by the men.

How, then, was she worshipped to guard the fatherland and the citizens, she who was not able to guard her own guardians? Behold, to gods of what sort the Romans rejoiced to have entrusted the City to be preserved! O error too pitiable! And they are angry with us when we say such things of their gods; yet they are not angry with their own authors, whom they paid a fee to learn, and whose very teachers, besides, they held most worthy of public salary and honors. For instance, in Virgil — whom for this reason little children read, so that, of course, the great poet, of all the most illustrious and the best, drunk in by tender minds, cannot easily be effaced by forgetting, according to that saying of Horace:

'The jar, once it has fresh been steeped, will long keep the scent' — in this Virgil, then, Juno is brought in, hostile to the Trojans, saying to Aeolus, king of the winds, as she incites him against them: 'A race hateful to me sails the Tyrrhenian sea, carrying Ilium into Italy and its conquered household gods.' Was it then to these conquered household gods that they ought prudently to have entrusted Rome, lest she be conquered? But Juno said these things like an angry woman, not knowing what she was saying. What of Aeneas himself, so often called 'pious'? Does he not thus relate: 'Panthus, son of Othrys, priest of the citadel and of Phoebus, himself drags in his hand the sacred things and the conquered gods and his little grandson, and, frantic, rushes at a run toward the threshold'?

Does he not represent the gods themselves — whom he does not hesitate to call conquered — as entrusted to him rather than himself to them, when it is said to him: 'Troy commends to thee her sacred things and her household gods'? If, therefore, Virgil calls such gods both conquered and, so that even conquered they might in some way escape, entrusted to a man: what madness is it to think that Rome was wisely committed to these guardians, and that, unless it had lost them, it could not have been laid waste? Nay rather, to worship conquered gods as protectors and defenders — what is it but to hold not good divinities, but bad names? For how much more wisely is it believed, not that Rome would not have come to that ruin unless they had first perished, but rather that they would have perished long ago, unless Rome had preserved them as far as it could!

For who, when he considers, would not see with how much vanity it was presumed that the city could not be conquered under vanquished defenders, and that it therefore perished because it lost its guardian gods, when in fact the very having of guardians doomed to perish could have been the sole cause of its perishing? It was not, therefore, that when those things about the vanquished gods were written and sung the poets took pleasure in lying, but rather that truth compelled men of sense to confess. Yet these matters must be more opportunely and diligently and fully treated in another place. For now, let me briefly unfold as I can what I had set out to say concerning ungrateful men, who blasphemously impute to Christ those evils which they deservedly suffer for the perversity of their own ways;

but that even such men are spared for Christ's sake they do not deign to heed, and with sacrilegious madness of perversity they wield against His name those very tongues by which they lyingly usurped that same name in order to live, or those tongues which, in the places consecrated to Him, they held silent out of fear, so that where for His sake they had been kept unharmed by the enemy, thence they might leap forth against Him with hostile curses. Troy itself, as I said, the mother of the Roman people, could not, in the consecrated places of its own gods, protect its citizens from the fire and sword of the Greeks, who worshipped those very same gods; nay more, in the asylum of Juno chosen guards, Phoenix and dread Ulysses, kept watch over the plunder;

hither from every side is heaped the treasure of Troy, snatched from the burning shrines, the tables of the gods and bowls of solid gold, and captured raiment. Boys and trembling matrons in a long line stand round about. Doubtless a place consecrated to so great a goddess was chosen — not one from which it was unlawful to lead captives out, but one where it was permitted to shut captives in. Compare now that asylum of no common god of the rabble or of the crowd of the plebs, but of Jupiter's own sister and consort and queen of all the gods, with the memorial shrines of our apostles. Thither were carried the spoils torn from the burned temples and their gods, not to be given back to the vanquished, but to be divided among the victors; but hither was brought back, with honour and most religious devotion, even whatever elsewhere was found to belong to those holy places.

There liberty was lost, here it was preserved; there captivity was shut in, here it was forbidden; there men were held down to be possessed by their lording enemies, hither they were led to be set free by pitying foes: in short, that temple of Juno the avarice and pride of frivolous little Greeks had chosen for themselves, but these basilicas of Christ the mercy and humility of even savage barbarians. Unless perhaps the Greeks in that victory of theirs spared the temples of the common gods, and dared not to strike or capture the wretched and vanquished Trojans who fled thither, and Virgil in the manner of poets lied about these things. Nay rather, he described the custom of enemies overturning cities.

This custom Cato too, as Sallust writes — that historian of renowned truthfulness — does not omit to recall in his opinion, which he delivered in the senate concerning the conspirators: 'Virgins and boys are ravished, children are torn from the embrace of their parents, matrons suffer whatever has pleased the victors, shrines and homes are plundered, slaughter and burnings take place: in short, all things are filled with arms, corpses, blood, and mourning.' Here, had he been silent about the shrines, we might have supposed that enemies were wont to spare the seats of the gods. And it was not from foreign enemies, but from Catiline and his allies — the noblest senators and Roman citizens — that the Roman temples had this to fear. But these, no doubt, were desperate men and parricides of their fatherland.

Why then should our discourse range through many nations which have waged wars among themselves and nowhere spared the vanquished in the seats of their gods? Let us look at the Romans themselves; the very same, I say, let us call to mind and consider the Romans, of whose especial praise it was said: 'To spare the subjected and to war down the proud,' and that, when injury was received, they preferred to pardon rather than to pursue vengeance: when they stormed, captured, and overthrew so many and so great cities in order to rule far and wide, let it be read to us what temples they were accustomed to except, so that whoever fled to them should be set free. Or did they do this, and did the writers of these very deeds pass over it in silence?

Would those who especially sought out the things they might praise pass over these most illustrious tokens of piety according to their own judgement? The distinguished ornament of the Roman name, Marcus Marcellus, who took Syracuse, that most richly adorned city, is reported first to have wept over it as it was about to fall, and before shedding its blood to have poured out his own tears for it. He also took care that chastity should be preserved even in the enemy. For before he, as victor, had ordered the town to be assaulted, he established by edict that no one should violate a free person. Yet the city was overthrown after the manner of wars, and nowhere is it read that any command was given by so chaste and merciful a commander that whoever had fled to this or that temple should be held unharmed.

This assuredly would in no way have been passed over, since neither his weeping nor what he had decreed for the safeguarding of chastity could be kept silent. Fabius, the overthrower of the city of Tarentum, is praised for having abstained from the plundering of images. For when his secretary suggested to him what he would order to be done about the statues of the gods, many of which had been captured, he seasoned his self-restraint even with jesting. For he asked of what sort they were, and when it was reported to him that not only were many of them large, but even armed, he said: 'Let us leave the Tarentines their angry gods.' Since, therefore, the writers of Roman history could keep silent neither about the weeping of the one nor the laughter of the other, neither about the chaste mercy of the one nor the witty restraint of the other:

how could it have been passed over, if they had spared any men in honour of any of their gods in such a way as to forbid slaughter or captivity from taking place in any temple? Whatever devastation, slaughter, plundering, burning, and affliction therefore was committed in that most recent Roman calamity, this was done by the custom of wars; but what was done in a new manner — that with an unwonted appearance of things the barbarian ferocity appeared so mild that the most spacious basilicas were chosen and decreed to be filled with the people that were to be spared, where no one should be struck, whence no one should be carried off, whither many were led by pitying enemies to be set free, whence none were led away to be enslaved even by cruel foes:

whoever does not see that this is to be attributed to the name of Christ, to the Christian age, is blind; whoever sees it and does not praise it is ungrateful; whoever resists the one who praises it is mad. Far be it that any prudent man should impute this to the ferocity of the barbarians. He terrified, He bridled, He marvellously tempered those most truculent and savage minds, who through the prophet said so long before: 'I will visit their iniquities with the rod and their sins with scourges; but my mercy I will not scatter away from them.' Someone will say: 'Why then did this divine mercy reach even to the impious and the ungrateful?' Why do we think, except because He bestowed it who daily makes His sun to rise upon the good and the evil, and sends rain upon the just and the unjust?

For although some of them, pondering these things, correct themselves from impiety by repentance, while others, as the Apostle says, despising the riches of God's goodness and long-suffering, according to the hardness of their heart and an impenitent heart, treasure up unto themselves wrath in the day of wrath and of the revelation of the just judgement of God, who will render to every man according to his works: yet the patience of God invites the evil to repentance, just as the scourge of God trains the good in patience; and likewise the mercy of God embraces the good to cherish them, just as the severity of God lays hold of the evil to punish them. For it pleased the divine providence to prepare for the future good things for the just, which the unjust shall not enjoy, and evil things for the impious, with which the good shall not be tormented;

but these temporal goods and evils He willed to be common to both, that the good might neither be too greedily sought after, since the evil also are seen to possess them, nor the evil basely shunned, since the good also are for the most part afflicted by them. It makes a very great difference, however, of what sort is the use either of those things which are called prosperous, or of those which are called adverse. For the good man is neither exalted by temporal goods nor broken by temporal evils; but the evil man is for this reason punished by such misfortune, because he is corrupted by prosperity. Yet God often shows His working more evidently even in the distributing of these things. For if every sin were now visited with manifest punishment, it would be thought that nothing was reserved for the last judgement;

and again, if the deity now punished no sin openly, it would be believed that there was no divine providence. Likewise in prosperous things, if God did not with most evident bounty grant them to certain persons who ask, we should say that these things did not pertain to Him; and again, if He gave them to all who ask, we should think that He was to be served only for the sake of such rewards, nor would such service make us pious, but rather covetous and avaricious. Since these things are so, whoever, good and evil alike, have been afflicted together, are not on that account themselves undistinguished, because that which both have suffered is undistinguished. For the unlikeness of the sufferers remains even in the likeness of the sufferings, and though under the same torment, virtue and vice are not the same.

For just as under one and the same fire gold gleams red and chaff smokes, and under the same flail the straw is crushed and the grain is cleansed, nor is the lees confounded with the oil because it is pressed out by the same weight of the press: so one and the same force rushing in tests, purifies, and refines the good, but condemns, lays waste, and exterminates the evil. Hence in the same affliction the evil detest and blaspheme God, while the good pray and praise. So great a difference does it make, not what things a man suffers, but what sort of man suffers them. For stirred by the same motion, the mire exhales horribly and the ointment gives forth a sweet fragrance. What then did the Christians suffer in that devastation of things, which would not rather have availed for their advancement, if they faithfully considered these matters?

First, that pondering humbly those very sins by which God, being angered, filled the world with such great calamities — although they are far removed from wicked, shameful, and impious deeds — nevertheless they do not reckon themselves so wholly free from faults that they should judge themselves unworthy to suffer even temporal evils on their account.

For, setting aside the fact that each one, however praiseworthily he lives, yields in certain matters to carnal concupiscence — even if not to the enormity of crimes and the abyss of shameful deeds and the abomination of impiety, yet to some sins, whether rare or the more frequent the smaller they are — setting this aside, then, who is at last easily found who so regards those very men, on account of whose horrible pride and luxury and avarice and execrable iniquities and impieties God, as He foretold in threatening, crushes the earth, as they ought to be regarded? who so lives with them as one ought to live with such people?

For the most part, from the teaching and admonishing of such men, sometimes even from rebuking and correcting them, there is a wrong dissembling — whether because the labour is irksome, or because we are ashamed to offend their face, or because we shun enmities, lest they hinder and harm us in these temporal things, whether such as our cupidity still craves to acquire, or such as our weakness dreads to lose — so that although the life of the evil displeases the good, and therefore they do not fall with them into that damnation which after this life is prepared for such men, nevertheless, because they spare their damnable sins while they fear them in their own, though slight and venial matters, they are justly scourged together with them in time, though by no means punished for eternity; justly, when they are afflicted by God together with them, do they feel this life bitter, whose sweetness, in loving it, they were unwilling to be bitter toward those who sinned.

For if anyone refrains from rebuking and correcting those who act wickedly because he seeks a more opportune time, or fears for those very men lest they be made worse by it, or lest they hinder others, weak persons who are to be trained to a good and pious life, and oppress and turn them away from the faith: this does not seem to be an occasion of cupidity, but a counsel of charity. That is blameworthy, when those who live differently and shrink from the deeds of the wicked nevertheless spare the sins of others, which they ought to unteach or rebuke, while they beware of offending them, lest they harm them in those things which the good use lawfully and innocently, but more greedily than became those who are pilgrims in this world and carry before them the hope of the heavenly fatherland.

For not only do the weaker sort — leading a married life, having children or seeking to have them, possessing houses and households (whom the Apostle addresses in the churches, teaching and admonishing in what manner they ought to live, both wives with husbands and husbands with wives, children with parents and parents with children, servants with masters and masters with servants) — gladly acquire many temporal, many earthly things, and grieve to lose them, on account of which they dare not offend men whose most contaminated and most criminal life displeases them;

but even those who hold a higher grade of life, and are not entangled in the bonds of marriage, and use scanty food and clothing, for the most part, while they fear the plots and assaults of the wicked against their own reputation and safety, abstain from reproving them; and although they do not so fear them as to yield to any of their terrors and wickednesses so as to perpetrate like deeds, yet those very things which they do not perpetrate with them they are for the most part unwilling to rebuke, when perhaps they might by rebuking correct some of them — lest, if they should not succeed, their own safety and reputation come into danger and destruction; and not from that consideration by which they see their reputation and safety to be necessary for the profit of instructing men, but rather from that weakness by which the flattering tongue and man's day delights, and the judgement of the crowd is dreaded, and the torturing or destruction of the flesh; that is, on account of certain bonds of cupidity, not on account of the duties of charity.

It does not therefore seem to me a small cause why the good also are scourged together with the evil, when it pleases God to punish corrupt morals even with the affliction of temporal penalties. For they are scourged together, not because they lead an evil life together, but because they love the temporal life together — not indeed equally, yet together — which the good ought to despise, so that the others, being reproved and corrected, might attain the eternal life; and if they were unwilling to be their companions in attaining it, they should be borne with and loved as enemies, because so long as they live it is always uncertain whether they are going to change their will for the better. In which matter indeed those to whom it is said through the prophet have a cause not equal but far graver:

'He indeed shall die in his own sin, but his blood will I require at the watchman's hand.' For to this end are watchmen, that is, the overseers of the peoples, appointed in the churches, that they should not spare in rebuking sins. Nor yet on this account is he wholly free from a fault of this kind who, although he is not an overseer, yet in those persons with whom he is joined by the necessity of this life knows many things to be admonished or reproved and neglects them, avoiding their offence on account of those things which he uses in this life not undue, but in which he takes more delight than he ought. Then the good have another cause why they are afflicted with temporal evils, such as Job had:

that the human soul itself might be proved and known to itself, with how great a virtue of piety it loves God freely. These things being rightly considered and clearly perceived, mark whether any evil has befallen the faithful and the pious which was not turned to good for them — unless perhaps that apostolic sentence is to be thought void, where he says: 'We know that to those who love God all things work together for good.' They lost all that they had. Their faith? their piety? the goods of the inner man, who is rich before God? These are the riches of Christians, with which the Apostle, being wealthy, said: 'But godliness with contentment is great gain. For we brought nothing into this world, and neither can we carry anything out.'

'But having food and covering, with these let us be content. For those who wish to become rich fall into temptation and a snare and many foolish and hurtful desires, which drown men in destruction and perdition. For the root of all evils is avarice, which some coveting have strayed from the faith and entangled themselves in many sorrows.' To those, therefore, whose earthly riches perished in that devastation, if they held them in the manner in which they had heard from that man, poor without but rich within — that is, if they used the world as though not using it — it was possible to say what he, being grievously tried and by no means overcome, said: 'Naked came I out of my mother's womb, naked shall I return into the earth.'

'The Lord gave, the Lord hath taken away; as it hath pleased the Lord, so is it done; blessed be the name of the Lord' — so that the good servant might hold as his great substance his very Lord's will, following whom in mind he might grow rich, and not be saddened, living, by those things which, dying, he was soon to leave behind. But those weaker ones, who, though they did not prefer these earthly goods to Christ, yet clung to them with some little cupidity, felt by losing them how much they had sinned in loving them. For they grieved just so much as they had entangled themselves in griefs, as I recalled above that the Apostle said. For it was needful that there should be added to them the discipline of experiences also, by which the discipline of words had so long been neglected. For when the Apostle said:

'Those who wish to become rich fall into temptation' and the rest, he assuredly reproves cupidity in riches, not the possession, since he elsewhere commands, saying: 'Charge the rich of this world not to be high-minded, nor to hope in the uncertainty of riches, but in the living God, who giveth us all things abundantly to enjoy: let them do good, be rich in good works, give readily, communicate, treasure up for themselves a good foundation for the time to come, that they may lay hold on the true life.' Those who did these things with their riches have been consoled for light losses by great gains, and have rejoiced more over those things which by giving readily they more safely kept, than they have been saddened over those which by timidly retaining they more easily lost.

For that could perish on earth which one was loath to transfer hence. For those who received the counsel of their Lord who said: 'Lay not up for yourselves treasures on earth, where the moth and rust destroy, and where thieves dig through and steal; but treasure up for yourselves a treasure in heaven, whither the thief approaches not, neither does the moth corrupt; for where thy treasure is, there will thy heart be also' — these, in the time of tribulation, proved how rightly they had judged in not despising a most truthful teacher and a most faithful and most invincible guardian of their treasure. For if many rejoiced that they had their riches there, whither it happened that the enemy did not approach:

how much more certainly and securely could those rejoice who, by the admonition of their God, migrated thither whither the enemy could by no means approach at all! Whence our Paulinus, bishop of Nola, from a most opulent rich man voluntarily a most poor and most abundantly holy man, when the barbarians laid waste Nola itself, and he was held by them, thus prayed in his heart, as we afterwards learned from him: 'Lord, let me not be tortured on account of gold and silver; for where all my things are, Thou knowest.' For there he had all his things, where He who had foretold these evils to come upon the world had shown him to store up and treasure them.

And on this account, those who had obeyed their Lord admonishing them where and in what manner they ought to treasure up, did not lose even those earthly riches themselves when the barbarians rushed in. But those who repented of not having obeyed learned what ought to be done about such things, if not by preceding wisdom, at least by consequent experience. But indeed, some even good Christians were tortured that they might betray their goods to the enemy. Yet they could neither betray nor lose the good by which they themselves were good. But if they preferred to be tortured rather than to betray the mammon of iniquity, they were not good.

But those who suffered so much for gold ought to have been admonished how much was to be endured for Christ, that they might rather learn to love Him who would enrich with eternal felicity those who suffered for Him, and not gold and silver, for which it was most wretched to suffer, whether it was hidden by lying or betrayed by telling the truth. For indeed amid the torments no one lost Christ by confessing Him, no one saved gold except by denying it. Wherefore the torments were perhaps more useful, which taught that an incorruptible good was to be loved, than those goods which without any useful fruit tortured their owners by love of them. But some, even not having anything to betray, were tortured because they were not believed. And these perhaps wished to have it, and were not poor by a holy will;

to whom it had to be demonstrated that not their fortunes but their very cupidities were worthy of such torments. But if, by the resolve of a better life, they had no gold or silver stored away, I do not indeed know whether it happened to any such that he was tortured while believed to have it: yet even if it did happen, assuredly he who amid those torments confessed holy poverty was confessing Christ. Wherefore, although he did not deserve to be believed by the enemy, nevertheless the confessor of holy poverty could not be tortured without a heavenly reward. Many, they say, even Christians, a long-lasting famine devastated. This too the good faithful turned to their own uses by piously enduring it. For those whom the famine slew, it snatched from the evils of this life, as a bodily disease does:

but those whom it did not slay, it taught to live more sparingly, it taught to fast more prolongedly. But indeed many Christians also were slain, many were consumed by the foul variety of many kinds of death. If this is to be borne with difficulty, it is at any rate common to all who have been brought forth into this life. This I know, that no one has died who was not at some time going to die. But the end of life makes the same of a life as long as of a short one. For neither is one thing better and another worse, nor one thing greater and another shorter, which now equally is not. And what does it matter by what kind of death this life is ended, when he to whom it is ended is not compelled to die again?

But since to each of mortals, under the daily chances of this life, innumerable deaths in a manner threaten, so long as it is uncertain which one of them is going to come: I ask whether it is better to suffer one by dying, or to fear all by living. Nor am I ignorant how much more readily one chooses to live long under the fear of so many deaths, than by dying once to dread none thereafter. But it is one thing which the sense of the flesh, weakly timid, recoils from, another thing which the reason of the mind, diligently sifted out, convinces. That death is not to be thought evil which a good life has preceded. For nothing makes death evil except that which follows death. Those, therefore, who must necessarily die need not greatly care what happens to make them die, but whither dying they are compelled to go.

Since therefore Christians know that the death of the religious poor man amid the tongues of the licking dogs was far better than that of the impious rich man in purple and fine linen, what harm did those horrible kinds of death do to the dead who lived well? But indeed, in so great a slaughter of corpses, they could not even bury them. Yet pious faith does not too greatly dread this, holding fast the prediction that not even the devouring beasts will harm the bodies that are to rise again, of whom not a hair of the head shall perish. The Truth would in no way say: 'Fear not those who kill the body, but cannot kill the soul,' if anything that the enemies might wish to do to the bodies of the slain could injure the future life.

Unless perhaps someone is so absurd as to contend that those who kill the body ought not to be feared before death, lest they kill the body, and ought to be feared after death, lest they suffer the killed body not to be buried. Then is that false which Christ says: 'Those who kill the body, and afterward have nothing more that they can do,' if they have so many things which they can do to the corpses? Far be it that what the Truth has said should be false. It is said that they do something when they kill, because in the body there is sensation in the act of killing; but afterward they have nothing that they can do, because there is no sensation in the killed body.

And so the earth did not cover many bodies of Christians, but no one separated any of them from heaven and earth, all of which is filled by the presence of Him who knows whence to raise up again what He created. It is indeed said in the psalm: 'They have set the dead bodies of thy servants as food for the birds of heaven, the flesh of thy saints for the beasts of the earth; they have poured out their blood like water round about Jerusalem, and there was none to bury them' — but rather to exaggerate the cruelty of those who did these things, not to signify the unhappiness of those who suffered them. For although these things seem harsh and dreadful in the sight of men, yet 'precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of His saints.'

Accordingly, all these things — that is, the care of the funeral, the condition of the burial, the pomp of the obsequies — are rather solaces of the living than aids of the dead. If a costly burial profits the impious man anything, a cheap one or none at all will harm the pious man. The crowd of servants furnished splendid obsequies in the sight of men to that purple-clad rich man, but the ministry of angels furnished far more glorious ones in the sight of the Lord to that ulcerous poor man, who did not bear him up into a marble tomb, but lifted him up into Abraham's bosom. They laugh at these things, those against whom we have undertaken to defend the City of God. Yet even their own philosophers despised the care of burial.

And often whole armies, while they died for their earthly fatherland, cared not where they should afterward lie or for what beasts they should become food, and it was permitted the poets to say plausibly concerning this matter: 'He is covered by heaven who has no urn.' How much less ought they to insult over Christians concerning unburied bodies, to whom even the reformation of the very flesh and of all its members is promised to be restored and made whole in a point of time, not only from the earth, but even from the most secret bosom of the other elements, whither the dissolved corpses have withdrawn. Nor yet on that account are the bodies of the departed, and most of all of the just and faithful, to be despised and cast away, of which the Spirit made holy use as of organs and vessels for all good works.

For if a father's garment and ring, and anything of this kind, is dearer to posterity in proportion as the affection toward parents is greater: in no way are those bodies themselves to be spurned, which assuredly we wear far more familiarly and intimately than any garments whatever. For these do not pertain to ornament or to an aid which is applied from without, but to the very nature of man. Whence also the funerals of the ancient just were cared for with dutiful piety, and their obsequies celebrated, and their burial provided; and they themselves, while they lived, commanded their sons concerning the burying or even the transferring of their bodies; and Tobias is commended, by the witness of an angel, as having merited well with God by burying the dead.

The Lord Himself, too, about to rise again on the third day, proclaims the good work of the religious woman and commends it as worthy to be proclaimed, because she poured out precious ointment upon His members and did this toward His burial. And in the Gospel those are praised with commendation who took His body down from the cross and carefully and honourably cared for its covering and burial. But these authorities do not admonish us of this — that there is any sensation in corpses — but signify that the bodies also of the dead pertain to the providence of God, to whom even such offices of piety are pleasing, for the sake of establishing faith in the resurrection.

Here too we learn a wholesome lesson: how great the reward may be for the acts of mercy which we render to the living and the sentient, if not even this is lost in God's sight, namely the office and careful attention paid to the lifeless limbs of men. There are indeed other things which the holy patriarchs wished to be understood as spoken in a prophetic spirit concerning the burying or removing of their bodies; but this is not the place to treat of them at length, since what we have said suffices. Yet if those things which are necessary for the sustaining of the living, such as food and clothing, though their absence brings grievous affliction, do not break in good men the virtue of endurance and forbearance, nor uproot piety from the soul, but rather, having exercised it, make it more fruitful:

how much more, when there are lacking those things which are wont to be applied to the care of funerals and the burial of the dead, do they not make wretched those who are already at rest in the hidden abodes of the pious! And therefore, when these things were wanting to the corpses of Christians in that devastation of the great city, or even of other towns, it is neither the fault of the living, who were not able to provide them, nor the punishment of the dead, who cannot perceive them. But many, they say, even Christians, were led away captive. This indeed would be most wretched, if they could be led anywhere where they did not find their God. There are in the Holy Scriptures great consolations even for this calamity. There were in captivity the three young men, there was Daniel, there were other prophets; nor was God, the Consoler, absent.

Thus, then, He did not forsake His faithful ones under the dominion of a nation, barbarous though it was, yet human — He who did not forsake His prophet even in the belly of the beast. These things too those with whom we deal prefer to mock rather than to believe, though they believe in their own writings that Arion of Methymna, that most renowned harper, when he had been cast from a ship, was taken up on the back of a dolphin and carried to land. Truly that story of ours about the prophet Jonah is more incredible. Plainly more incredible because more marvelous, and more marvelous because it shows greater power. But these men have, among their own illustrious heroes, a most noble example of captivity to be endured even willingly for religion's sake. Marcus Regulus, a general of the Roman people, was a captive among the Carthaginians.

Since the Carthaginians preferred to have their own men restored to them by the Romans rather than to keep the Romans' captives, they sent this Regulus in particular, along with their own envoys, to Rome to obtain this, having first bound him by an oath that, if he did not accomplish what they wished, he would return to Carthage. He went, and in the senate advised the contrary, since he did not think it advantageous to the Roman commonwealth to exchange captives. Nor after this counsel was he compelled by his own people to return to the enemy, but because he had sworn, he willingly fulfilled it. And they put him to death with contrived and horrible tortures.

For they shut him up in a narrow wooden frame, where he was forced to stand, and which was pierced on every side with the sharpest nails, so that he could not lean toward any part of it without the most cruel torments; and thus they killed him even by keeping him awake. Rightly indeed do they praise a virtue greater than so great a misfortune. Yet he had sworn by those gods whose worship, they suppose, when forbidden, brings these disasters upon the human race. If, then, those who were worshiped precisely in order to make this present life prosperous either willed or permitted these punishments to be inflicted on one who swore truly, what worse could they have done in anger to a perjurer? But why should I not rather bring my reasoning to bear upon both alternatives?

He certainly worshiped the gods in such a way that, for the sake of keeping his oath, he neither remained in his fatherland nor went anywhere else, but did not in the least hesitate to return to his bitterest enemies. If he judged this to be advantageous to this life — this life of which he earned so horrible an end — beyond doubt he was deceived. For by his own example he taught that the gods profit their worshipers nothing toward that temporal felicity, since he, devoted to their worship, was both conquered and led away captive, and, because he refused to act otherwise than as he had sworn by them, was tormented and destroyed by a new and previously unheard-of and exceedingly horrible kind of torture.

But if the worship of the gods renders felicity as a reward after this life, why do they slander Christian times, saying that this calamity befell the City because it ceased to worship its gods, when it might, even while worshiping them most diligently, become as wretched as that Regulus was? Unless perchance, against the most manifest truth, someone should so struggle with the madness of astonishing blindness as to dare to contend that a whole city worshiping the gods cannot be wretched, but a single man can — namely, on the ground that the power of their gods is fit to preserve many rather than individuals, though a multitude is composed of individuals. But if they say that Marcus

Regulus, even in that captivity and those tortures of the body, could be blessed by the virtue of his soul — then let true virtue rather be sought, by which even a city can be blessed. For a city is not blessed from one source and a man from another, since a city is nothing else than a harmonious multitude of men. Wherefore I do not for the present dispute what sort of virtue there was in Regulus; it suffices now that by this most noble example they are compelled to confess that the gods are not to be worshiped for the sake of the body's goods or of those things which befall a man from without, since he preferred to be deprived of all these rather than to offend the gods by whom he had sworn. But what shall we do with men who boast that they had such a citizen as they dread to have their city become?

But if they do not dread it, then let them confess that something such as befell Regulus could also befall a city worshiping the gods as diligently as he did, and let them not slander the Christian times.

But since the question arose concerning those Christians who were also led into captivity, let those consider this and hold their peace who shamelessly and imprudently mock at the most wholesome religion on this account: that if it was no reproach to their gods that a most attentive worshiper of theirs, while keeping toward them his sworn faith, was deprived of his fatherland, having no other, and, a captive among his enemies, was slain by a lingering death in the torment of a novel cruelty — then far less is the Christian name to be blamed for the captivity of its consecrated ones, who, awaiting with truthful faith the heavenly fatherland, knew themselves to be pilgrims even in their own dwellings.

They think indeed that they are casting a great crime against the Christians when, exaggerating their captivity, they add also the outrages committed — not only upon others' wives and maidens about to marry, but even upon certain consecrated women. Here, in truth, it is not faith, nor piety, nor that very virtue which is called chastity, but rather our own discussion that is straitened by certain difficulties between modesty and reason. Nor do we here so much care to render an answer to strangers as to give consolation to our own people.

Let it therefore first of all be laid down and established that the virtue by which one lives rightly holds command from the seat of the soul over the members of the body, and that the body is made holy by the exercise of a holy will; and that, so long as this will remains unshaken and firm, whatever another may do with the body or in the body which cannot be avoided without one's own sin is beyond the fault of the sufferer. But since not only what pertains to pain, but also what pertains to lust, can be perpetrated upon another's body, whatever of such a kind is done, even though it does not shake out chastity retained by a most steadfast soul, yet inflicts shame, lest it be believed to have been done with the mind's consent as well, which perhaps could not be done without some pleasure of the flesh.

And on this account, both as regards those who killed themselves lest they should suffer anything of this kind — what human feeling would refuse to pardon them? — and as regards those who refused to kill themselves, lest by their own crime they might avoid another's disgrace, whoever shall lay this to their charge as a crime will himself not escape the charge of folly. For assuredly, if it is not lawful by private authority to kill a man even though guilty, whom no law grants license to slay, then surely he too who kills himself is a murderer, and becomes the more guilty in killing himself the more innocent he was in that cause for which he thought he ought to be killed.

For if we rightly detest the deed of Judas, and the truth judges that, when he hanged himself with a noose, he rather increased than expiated the guilt of that wicked betrayal, since by despairing of God's mercy in his deadly remorse he left himself no room for saving repentance — how much more ought he to abstain from his own destruction who has in himself nothing to punish by such a penalty! For Judas, when he killed himself, killed a wicked man, and yet he ended this life guilty not only of Christ's death but also of his own, since, though slain because of his own crime, he was slain by another crime of his own.

But why should a man who has done no evil do evil to himself, and by killing himself kill an innocent man, lest he suffer a guilty one at another's hands, and perpetrate upon himself his own sin, lest another's be perpetrated upon him? But indeed, it is feared lest another's lust should defile him even against his will. It will not defile, if it be another's; but if it defile, it is not another's. Yet since chastity is a virtue of the soul, and has fortitude for its companion, by which it resolves to endure any evils whatsoever rather than to consent to evil, and since no magnanimous and chaste person has it in his power what shall be done with his flesh, but only what he shall approve or refuse with his mind:

who, being of sound mind, would suppose that he loses his chastity, if perchance in his seized and overpowered flesh a lust not his own is exercised and satisfied? For if chastity perishes in this way, then assuredly chastity will not be a virtue of the soul, nor will it belong to those goods by which one lives well, but it will be numbered among the goods of the body, such as are strength, beauty, sound health, and anything of this kind; which goods, even if they be diminished, do not diminish at all the good and just life. But if chastity is something of this sort, why is labor undertaken for it, even at peril to the body, lest it be lost? But if it is a good of the soul, it is not lost even when the body is overpowered.

Nay more, when the good of holy continence does not yield to the uncleanness of the concupiscences of the flesh, the body itself is sanctified; and therefore, when it persists with unshaken intention in not yielding to them, the holiness is not lost even from the body itself, because the will to use it holily perseveres, and, so far as lies in the body, the capacity also. For the body is not holy because its members are intact, nor because they are touched by no contact, since in various mishaps they may even, when wounded, suffer violence, and physicians, sometimes rendering aid to health, do there things which the sight shudders at. A midwife, examining as it were by hand the maidenhood of a certain virgin, whether through malice or ignorance or accident, destroyed it while she inspected.

I do not suppose anyone is so foolishly wise as to think that anything was lost to this maiden even of her body's holiness, although the integrity of that member was now destroyed. Wherefore, the purpose of the soul remaining, through which the body also merited to be sanctified, the violence of another's lust does not take away holiness even from the body itself, which the perseverance of one's own continence preserves. But if, on the contrary, some woman, corrupted in mind and her purpose violated which she had vowed to God, should go to be defiled to her seducer, shall we call her, as she goes to this, holy even in body, that holiness of soul being lost and destroyed through which the body was being sanctified?

Far be this error from us, and let us rather be admonished by it that, just as the holiness of the body is not lost while the holiness of the soul remains, even when the body is overpowered, so the holiness of the body is lost when the holiness of the soul is violated, even when the body is untouched. Wherefore a woman who has been violently overpowered without any consent of her own, and oppressed by another's sin, has nothing in herself to punish by a self-inflicted death; how much less before this is done, lest a certain murder be committed while the outrage itself, though another's, is still in doubt and uncertain!

But will those men perhaps dare to contradict this clear reasoning, by which we say that, when the body is overpowered while the purpose of chastity is in no way changed by any consent to evil, the outrage belongs only to him who, in overpowering, has lain with her, not to her who, being overpowered, consented by no will to the one lying with her — those men against whom we defend not only the minds but also the holy bodies of Christian women who were overpowered in captivity? Lucretia, certainly, a noble matron and of ancient Rome, they extol with great praises of chastity.

When the son of King Tarquin had lustfully possessed her body, having violently overpowered it, she disclosed the crime of that most wicked youth to her husband Collatinus and to her kinsman Brutus, men most illustrious and most valiant, and bound them to avenge it. Then, sick at heart and impatient of the foul deed committed against her, she destroyed herself. What shall we say? Is she to be judged an adulteress or chaste? Who would think that any labor need be spent on this controversy? Excellently and truthfully did a certain one, declaiming on this, say: "Marvelous to tell, there were two, and one committed adultery." Splendidly and most truly.

For, looking upon the most defiled desire of the one and the most chaste will of the other in the union of two bodies, and attending not to what was done by the joining of members but to what was done by the diversity of souls, he said: "There were two, and one committed adultery." But what is this, that a heavier vengeance was taken upon her who did not commit adultery? For he was driven from his fatherland together with his father, but she was slain by the utmost penalty. If that is not unchastity by which one is overpowered against her will, then this is not justice by which a chaste woman is punished. I appeal to you, O laws and judges of Rome. Surely, after crimes had been perpetrated, you were unwilling that any criminal should be put to death uncondemned and unpunished.

If, therefore, anyone should bring this crime before your judgment, and it should be proved to you that a woman had been slain who was not only uncondemned but even chaste and innocent, would you not punish him who had done it with fitting severity? This is what that Lucretia did; she — she, that so-lauded Lucretia — slew the innocent, chaste Lucretia who had suffered violence. Pronounce your sentence. But if for this reason you cannot, because she does not stand present whom you might punish, why do you praise with such great acclaim the slayer of an innocent and chaste woman?

Certainly you cannot by any reasoning defend her before the infernal judges, even such as those chanted in the songs of your poets, she being placed, forsooth, among those "who guiltless wrought their own death by their hand, and, loathing the light, flung away their souls; for whom, though longing to return to the world above, fate stands in the way, and the dismal marsh with its unlovely water binds them fast." Or is she perhaps not there, because she slew herself not innocent, but conscious of evil within herself? For what if (a thing which she alone could know) — though the youth rushed upon her violently, she yet, enticed by her own lust, consented, and, punishing this in herself, so grieved that she thought it must be expiated by death? Although not even so ought she to have killed herself, if she could have practiced fruitful repentance before false gods.

But nevertheless, if perchance it is thus, and that saying is false that there were two and one committed adultery, but rather both committed adultery — the one by manifest invasion, the other by hidden consent — then she did not slay herself innocent, and therefore it can be said by her learned defenders that she is not among the infernal shades among those "who guiltless wrought their own death by their hand." But thus this case is straitened on both sides, so that, if the murder is extenuated, the adultery is confirmed; if the adultery is cleared, the murder is heaped up; nor is any way out found at all, where it is said: "If she was adulterous, why praised?

if she was chaste, why slain?" For us, however, in this so noble example of this woman, for the refuting of those who, alien from all thought of holiness, insult the Christian women who were violated in captivity, it suffices that among her illustrious praises it was said: "There were two, and one committed adultery." For such a Lucretia was believed by them to be one who could not have stained herself by any adulterous consent. Therefore, that she slew herself, being no adulteress, because she had endured an adulterer, is not the love of chastity, but the weakness of shame.

For she was ashamed of another's foulness committed upon her, even though not with her; and, being a Roman woman too greedy of praise, she feared lest she should be thought, if she lived, to have willingly endured what she had suffered by violence while she lived. Whence she thought that penalty must be applied before the eyes of men as a witness of her mind, to whom she could not demonstrate her conscience. For she blushed to be believed an accomplice of the deed, if she should bear patiently what another had foully done in her. Christian women did not do this: they, having suffered similar things, yet live, nor have they avenged upon themselves another's crime, lest they should add their own to others' wickedness, if, because enemies had committed rapes upon them in lusting, they should commit murders upon themselves in blushing.

For they have within the glory of chastity, the testimony of conscience; and they have it before the eyes of their God, and they seek nothing more, where there is nothing more that they can rightly do, lest they turn aside from the authority of the divine law while they wrongly seek to avoid the offense of human suspicion. For it can nowhere be found that in the holy canonical books it has been divinely commanded or permitted to us that we should inflict death upon ourselves, either for the sake of attaining immortality itself or for the sake of avoiding or escaping any evil. For we must understand that we are forbidden, where the law says: You shall not kill — especially since it did not add "your neighbor," as when it forbade false witness:

"You shall not," it says, "bear false witness against your neighbor." Nor yet on that account, if anyone should bear false witness against himself, should he think himself free from this crime, since the lover has received the rule of loving his neighbor from himself, seeing that it is written: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. Moreover, if he is no less guilty of false witness who bears false witness about himself than if he did this against his neighbor — although in that precept by which false witness is forbidden, it is forbidden against one's neighbor, and it might seem to those who do not understand rightly that it is not forbidden for anyone to stand as a false witness against himself —

how much more is it to be understood that it is not lawful for a man to kill himself, since in that which is written, You shall not kill, with nothing thereafter added, no one — not even, assuredly, he to whom the command is given — is to be understood as excepted! Whence some try to extend this precept even to beasts and cattle, so that from this it should be lawful to kill none of them either. Why not, then, also plants, and whatever is nourished and rooted in the soil? For this kind of thing too, although it does not feel, is said to live, and thereby can also die, and consequently, when force is applied, be killed. Whence the apostle also, when he was speaking of seeds of this sort: You, he says, what you sow is not made alive unless it die; and in the psalm it is written: He killed their vines with hail.

Shall we then, on this account, when we hear "You shall not kill," reckon it a sin to pull up a shrub, and most insanely acquiesce in the error of the Manichaeans? These deliriums, therefore, being set aside, when we read "You shall not kill," if we do not take this to have been said of shrubs, because they have no sense, nor of the irrational animals — flying, swimming, walking, creeping — because they are associated with us by no reason, which it was not given to them to have in common with us (whence, by the most just ordinance of the Creator, both their life and their death are subjected to our uses): it remains that we should understand of man what was said, You shall not kill — therefore neither another nor yourself. For he who kills himself kills nothing other than a man.

But that same divine authority made certain exceptions to the rule that it is not lawful for a man to be killed. But these being excepted whom God commands to be killed, either by a law given or by an express command directed to a particular person for a particular occasion — (for he does not himself kill who owes his ministry to the one commanding, as a sword is an aid to the one using it; and therefore they by no means acted against this precept by which it was said, You shall not kill, who, with God as their author, have waged wars, or who, bearing the person of the public power, according to His laws — that is, the command of most just reason — have punished the wicked with death; and Abraham was not only not blamed for the crime of cruelty, but was even praised in the name of piety, because he was willing to kill his son not wickedly but obediently;)

and it is deservedly asked whether it is to be held as done by God's command that Jephthah killed his daughter, who met her father, since he had vowed to sacrifice to God whatever should first meet him on his return victorious from battle; nor is Samson otherwise excused, that he crushed himself together with his enemies in the ruin of the house, except that the Spirit had secretly commanded this, the Spirit who was working miracles through him) — these, therefore, being excepted, whom either a just law generally, or God Himself, the very fountain of justice, specially commands to be killed, whoever kills a man, whether himself or any other, is entangled in the crime of murder. And whoever have perpetrated this upon themselves are perhaps to be admired for greatness of soul, but not to be praised for soundness of wisdom.

Although, if you consult reason more diligently, not even that will rightly be named greatness of soul, where anyone, from an inability to endure either any hardships or another's sins, has destroyed himself. For a mind is rather detected as weak which cannot bear either the harsh servitude of its own body or the foolish opinion of the crowd; and that is deservedly to be called the greater soul which can rather bear a life full of misery than flee from it, and which, in the light and purity of its conscience, despises human judgment, and most of all the vulgar judgment, which is for the most part wrapped in the fog of error.