Works (City of God, On the Trinity, etc.) 20 part 2/5

How are those things not evils which overcome the good of fortitude and compel that same fortitude not only to yield to itself but even to rave, so that it calls the very same life blessed and yet persuades that it must be fled? Who is so blind as not to see that, if it were blessed, it would not be to be fled? But with the open voice of infirmity they confess it must be fled. What cause, then, is there why, with the neck of pride broken, they should not also confess it to be wretched? Was it, I ask, by patience or rather by impatience that the famous Cato slew himself? For he would not have done this had he not borne Caesar's victory impatiently. Where is fortitude? Surely it gave way, surely it succumbed, surely it was so overcome that it forsook, deserted, and fled the blessed life.

Or was it no longer blessed? Then it was wretched. How, then, were those things not evils which made life wretched and to be fled? Wherefore even those very men who confessed that these things are evils—as the Peripatetics did, as the old Academics whose school Varro defends—speak more tolerably; yet marvellous too is their error, in that they contend that amid these evils, even though they be so grievous that death, self-inflicted, must be fled to escape them, the life of him who suffers these things is nonetheless blessed. 'They are evils,' one says, 'the torments and torturings of the body, and they are the worse the greater they can be; to escape them one must flee from this life.' From what life, I ask?

'This life,' he says, 'which is weighed down by such great evils.' Surely, then, it is blessed amid those very evils on account of which you say it must be fled? Or do you call it blessed for this reason, that it is permitted you to depart from these evils by death? But what if you were held in them by some divine judgment, and neither permitted to die nor ever suffered to be without them? Surely then, at least, you would call such a life wretched. It is not, therefore, unwretched because it is quickly left behind. For if it were everlasting, it would be judged wretched even by your own self; and so it ought not to be reckoned no misery because it is brief, nor—what is more absurd—to be called blessedness for this reason, that it is a brief misery.

Great is the force in those evils which compel a man—even, according to these men, a wise man—to take away from himself that which he is a man; when they say, and say truly, that this is in a manner the first and greatest voice of nature, that a man be reconciled to himself and therefore naturally flee death, being so a friend to himself that he vehemently wills and craves to be a living being and to live in this conjunction of body and soul. Great is the force in those evils by which this feeling of nature is overcome, whereby death is shunned in every way with all one's strength and striving—and so overcome that what was shunned is chosen and craved, and, if it cannot come from elsewhere, is inflicted by the man upon himself. Great is the force in those evils which make fortitude a murderer;

if indeed it is still to be called fortitude, which is so overcome by these evils that it not only cannot guard through patience the man whom, as virtue, it undertook to rule and protect, but is itself moreover compelled to slay him. The wise man ought, indeed, to bear even death patiently, but a death that befalls from elsewhere. But if, according to these men, he is compelled to inflict it upon himself, then surely it must be confessed by them that these are not only evils, but even intolerable evils, which compel him to perpetrate this.

Life, therefore, which is either pressed down by the burdens or subject to the chances of such great and grievous evils, could in no way be called blessed—if only the men who say this, just as, being overcome by mounting evils, they yield to unhappiness when they bring death upon themselves, would likewise, being overcome by sure reasonings, deign to yield to truth when they seek the blessed life, and would not suppose that they must rejoice in the end of the supreme good in this mortality; where the very virtues, than which surely nothing better or more useful is found in man, the greater helps they are against the force of dangers, toils, and pains, so much the more faithful witnesses are they of miseries. For if they be true virtues—which cannot exist save in those in whom true piety dwells—

they do not profess that they can bring it about that the men in whom they are should suffer no miseries (for true virtues are not liars, that they should profess this), but rather that human life, which is compelled to be wretched by so many and so great evils of this world, should be blessed by the hope of the world to come, just as it is also saved. For how is that life blessed which is not yet saved? Whence also the apostle Paul, speaking not of imprudent, impatient, intemperate, and unjust men, but of those who lived according to true piety and therefore had, as the virtues they possessed, true virtues, says: 'For by hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is not hope; for what a man sees, why does he hope for it? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.'

As, therefore, we were saved by hope, so also we were made blessed by hope; and as we do not yet hold salvation as present but await it as future, so also blessedness—and this through patience, because we are amid evils which we ought patiently to endure, until we come to those goods where all things shall be that delight us ineffably, and there shall be nothing which we must any longer endure. Such salvation, which shall be in the world to come, shall itself be also the final blessedness. This blessedness these philosophers, because they do not see it and refuse to believe it, strive to fashion for themselves here—a most false one, by a virtue the more mendacious the prouder. But that they hold the life of the wise man to be social, we approve much more fully.

For whence would this City of God—of which we now handle in our hands the nineteenth book of this work—either take its beginning in its rising, or advance in its course, or attain its due ends, if the life of the saints were not social? But amid the affliction of this mortality, with how many and how great evils human society abounds, who is able to enumerate? who suffices to estimate? Let them hear, among their own comic poets, a man saying, with the sense and consent of all men: 'I took a wife; what misery I saw therein! Children were born—another care.' What likewise of those things which the same Terence recounts as the vices in love: 'wrongs, suspicions, enmities, war, and then peace again'—have they not everywhere filled human affairs?

Do they not for the most part occur even in the honourable loves of friends? Are not human affairs full of these on every side, where we feel wrongs, suspicions, enmities, war to be sure evils; but peace an uncertain good, since we do not know the hearts of those with whom we wish to keep it, and even if we could know them today, we should still be ignorant of what they would be tomorrow? Who, moreover, are wont, or ought, to be more friendly among themselves than those who are contained even within one household? And yet who is secure therein, when so often such great evils have arisen from their hidden treacheries—the more bitter as the peace was sweeter which was thought true, when it was most cunningly feigned? On which account that saying of Tully so touches the breasts of all as to force them into groaning:

'No treacheries are more hidden than those which lurk under the pretence of duty or under some name of kinship. For the man who is openly an adversary you can easily avoid by taking heed; but this hidden, inward, and domestic evil not only exists, but even overwhelms you before you can foresee and explore it.' On which account also that divine utterance:

'And a man's foes shall be they of his own household' is heard with great grief of heart; because, even if anyone be so brave that he bears it with equanimity, or so watchful that with provident counsel he guards against what a feigned friendship contrives against him, yet by the wickedness of those perfidious men, when he finds them to be most base—if he himself is good—he must needs be grievously tormented, whether they were always evil and feigned themselves good, or were changed into that malice out of goodness.

If, then, the home, the common refuge amid these evils of the human race, is not safe, what of the city, which, the greater it is, the more full is its forum of lawsuits both civil and criminal, even if there be no rest from seditions not only turbulent but often bloody, and from civil wars, from whose outcomes cities are sometimes free, but from whose perils never? What of the very judgments of men concerning men, which cannot be lacking in cities however great the peace that remains—of what sort do we think they are, how wretched, how lamentable? For those who judge cannot discern the consciences of those whom they judge. Whence they are often compelled by the tortures of innocent witnesses to seek out a truth pertaining to another's cause.

What of the case when someone is tortured in his own cause, and, while it is inquired whether he be guilty, he is tormented, and the innocent man pays most certain penalties for an uncertain crime—not because it is discovered that he committed it, but because it is not known that he did not commit it? And by this the ignorance of the judge is for the most part the calamity of the innocent. And what is yet more intolerable and more to be bewailed, and to be bathed, if it could be, in fountains of tears: when, for this reason, that the judge may not slay an innocent man unknowingly, he tortures the accused—it comes about, through the misery of ignorance, that he slays both the tortured and the innocent, whom he had tortured lest he should slay him innocent. For if, according to the wisdom of these men, the accused has chosen to flee from this life rather than to endure those torments longer, he says that he committed what he did not commit.

And when such a man has been condemned and slain, the judge still does not know whether he slew a guilty or an innocent man—the man whom he tortured lest he should unknowingly slay him innocent; and thus he both tortured the innocent in order to know, and, while he did not know, slew him. In these shadows of social life, will that wise judge sit in judgment, or will he not dare to? He will plainly sit. For human society constrains him and drags him to this office, which he deems it wickedness to forsake. For he does not deem it wickedness that innocent witnesses are tortured in the causes of others; that those who are accused, for the most part overcome by the force of pain and confessing falsehoods about themselves, are punished though innocent, after they have already been tortured though innocent; that, even if they be not punished with death, they for the most part die amid or from the very torments;

that sometimes even those very men who accuse, desiring perhaps to benefit human society lest crimes go unpunished, when the witnesses lie and the defendant himself holds out inhumanly against the torments and does not confess, though they have brought a true charge, being unable to prove what they allege, are condemned by an ignorant judge. These evils, so many and so great, he does not reckon to be sins; for the wise judge does not do these things with a will to harm, but from the necessity of not knowing, and yet, because human society compels him, from the necessity also of judging. This, then, is what we call the misery certainly of man, even if it be not the malice of the wise man.

But does he, from the necessity of not knowing and of judging, torture the guiltless, punish the guiltless—and is it too little for him that he is not guilty, if he be not moreover blessed as well? How much more considerately and worthily of a man does he acknowledge the misery in this necessity, and hate it in himself, and, if he is piously wise, cry out to God: 'Deliver me from my necessities'! After the city or town follows the world, in which they place the third degree of human society—beginning from the home, and thence coming to the city, and then advancing to the world; which world, like a heap of waters, the greater it is, the more full of perils. In this, first of all, the diversity of tongues estranges man from man.

For if two men, neither of whom knows the other's tongue, meet one another and, by some necessity, are compelled not to pass by but to be together, dumb animals, even of different kinds, more easily associate with one another than they, though both be men. For when they cannot communicate to one another the things they feel, by reason of the diversity of language alone, so great a likeness of nature avails nothing toward associating men, so that a man would more gladly be with his dog than with a foreign man. But, it is said, care has been taken that the imperial city should impose upon the subdued nations not only its yoke but also its language, through the peace of society, whereby there should be no lack—nay, even an abundance—of interpreters. True it is;

but with how many and how great wars, with how great a slaughter of men, with how great an outpouring of human blood was this procured? And when these were over, the misery of these same evils was nonetheless not ended. For although there have not been lacking, nor are lacking, foreign nations as enemies against whom wars have been and are being waged, yet the very breadth of empire has begotten wars of a worse kind—social, that is, and civil wars—by which the human race is more wretchedly shaken, whether when war is waged, that they may sometime rest, or when it is feared lest they rise up again. And if I should wish to speak, as is fitting, of the many and manifold disasters of these evils, the hard and dire necessities—though I could by no means do so as the matter demands—

what limit will there be to the lengthy disputation? But the wise man, they say, will wage just wars. As if, if he remembers that he is a man, he would not much rather grieve that the necessity of just wars has arisen for him; for unless they were just, he would not have to wage them, and thus for the wise man there would be no wars at all. For it is the iniquity of the opposing side that imposes just wars to be waged upon the wise man; which iniquity is surely to be grieved over by a man, because it is a man's iniquity, even if no necessity of warring were born from it. Whoever, then, considers with grief these evils, so great, so horrible, so savage, let him confess that this is misery; but whoever either endures them or thinks upon them without grief of soul, is by all means the more wretched for supposing himself blessed, precisely because he has lost even human feeling.

But if there does not befall a certain ignorance resembling madness—which nevertheless often befalls in the wretched condition of this life, so that one is believed to be a friend who is an enemy, or an enemy who is a friend—what consoles us in this human society, most full of errors and afflictions, save the unfeigned faith and mutual love of true and good friends? The more of these we have, and in the more places, the more widely and afar do we fear lest some evil befall them from the so great heaps of evils of this world. For we are anxious not only lest they be afflicted by famine, by wars, by diseases, by captivities—lest in that same servitude they suffer such things as we cannot even conceive;

but even—where the fear is much more bitter—lest they be changed into perfidy, malice, and wickedness. And when these things befall (the more assuredly, the more numerous they are) and are brought to our notice, by what lashes our heart is burned, who can perceive, save he who feels such things? For we would rather hear that they are dead, although even this we cannot hear without grief. For those whose life delighted us for the solace of friendship—whence can it come to pass that their death should bring us no sadness?

Let him who forbids this grief forbid, if he can, friendly conversations, let him interdict or cut off friendly affection, let him with unfeeling stupor burst asunder the bonds of all human ties of the mind, or let him decree that they are so to be used that no sweetness from them should suffuse the soul. But if this can in no way be done, how shall it come to pass that the death of one whose life is sweet to us should not be bitter to us? For hence it is that the mourning of a not inhuman heart is a kind of wound or ulcer, to whose healing dutiful consolations are applied. For it is not the case that there is nothing to be healed, merely because the better a soul is, the more quickly and easily it is healed therein.

Since, therefore, the life of mortals is afflicted—now more mildly, now more harshly—even by the deaths of those most dear to us, especially of those whose services are necessary to human society, we would nevertheless rather hear or see those whom we love dead than lapsed from faith or from good morals—that is, dead in the very soul. By which vast material of evils the earth is full, on account of which it is written: 'Is not the life of man upon the earth a trial?' and on account of which the Lord himself says: 'Woe to the world because of offences'; and again: 'Because iniquity has abounded,' he says, 'the love of many shall grow cold.'

Whence it comes to pass that we congratulate good friends when they die, and, though their death saddens us, that very thing more surely consoles us, since they have been freed from the evils by which, in this life, even good men are either worn down, or depraved, or endangered in both. But in the society of the holy angels—which those philosophers who wished the gods to be our friends placed in the fourth rank, as it were coming to the world from the earth, that they might thus in a manner embrace even heaven—we in no way fear lest such friends should sadden us either by their death or by their depravation.

But because they do not mingle with us in that familiarity with which men do (which itself also pertains to the afflictions of this life), and because sometimes Satan, as we read, transforms himself as it were into an angel of light, to tempt those whom it is either needful to instruct or just to deceive: great is the mercy of God that is necessary, lest anyone, while he supposes that he has good angels as friends, should have evil demons as feigned friends, and should suffer as enemies those the more harmful the craftier and more deceitful they are. And to whom is this great mercy of God necessary, save to great human misery, which is pressed down by so great an ignorance that it is easily deceived by the pretence of such beings?

And that those philosophers in the impious city, who said that the gods were their friends, fell in with malign demons, is most certain—demons to whom that whole city is subjected, and with whom it shall have everlasting punishment. For from their sacred rites, or rather sacrileges, by which they thought those beings were to be worshipped, and from the most filthy games in which their crimes are celebrated, by which they thought them to be appeased—the very beings being the authors and exactors of such and so great disgraces—it is made abundantly plain by them what those are who are worshipped. But neither are the holy and faithful worshippers of the one true and supreme God secure from their deceits and manifold temptation.

For in this place of infirmity and in these evil days, even this solicitude is not without use, that that security, where the peace is most full and most sure, may be sought with more fervent desire. For there shall be the gifts of nature—that is, those things which are bestowed upon our nature by the Creator of all natures—not only good but even everlasting, not only in the soul, which is healed through wisdom, but even in the body, which shall be renewed by resurrection; there shall be virtues, not contending against any vices or evils whatsoever, but possessing as the reward of victory an eternal peace which no adversary may disturb. For this itself is the final blessedness, this the end of perfection, which has no end that consumes it.

Here, indeed, we are said to be blessed when we have peace, however little of it can be had in this present good life; yet this blessedness, compared with that which we call final, is found to be sheer misery. When, therefore, we mortal men possess such peace as can be had here amid mortal things, if we live rightly, virtue rightly uses its goods; but when we do not possess it, virtue makes good use even of the evils which a man suffers. But then is virtue true when it refers both all the goods it uses well, and whatever it does in the good use of goods and evils, and its very self, to that end where there will be for us such and so great a peace that no better or greater can exist.

Wherefore we might say that the end of our goods is peace, just as we have said it is eternal life, especially since it is said to the very City of God, concerning which this most laborious discussion of ours is engaged, in the holy psalm: 「Praise the Lord, O Jerusalem; praise thy God, O Zion. For he hath strengthened the bars of thy gates; he hath blessed thy children within thee; who hath set thy borders in peace.」 For when the bars of her gates shall have been strengthened, none shall any more enter into her, nor shall any go out from her. And on this account we ought here to understand her borders to be that peace which we wish to show to be final. For the very mystical name of the city itself, that is, Jerusalem, which we have already said before, is interpreted 「the vision of peace.」

But since the name of peace is frequently used even in these mortal affairs, where assuredly there is no eternal life, on that account we have preferred to speak of the end of this city, where its highest good will be, as eternal life rather than as peace. Concerning this end the Apostle says: 「But now being made free from sin, and become servants to God, ye have your fruit unto sanctification, and the end everlasting life.」

But again, since eternal life may be taken by those who are not familiar with the Holy Scriptures to mean even the life of the wicked—either according to certain philosophers on account of the immortality of the soul, or even according to our own faith on account of the unending punishments of the impious, who assuredly could not be tormented for ever unless they also lived for ever—the end of this city, in which it will possess its highest good, must therefore be called either peace in eternal life or eternal life in peace, so that it may more easily be understood by all. For so great is the good of peace that even in earthly and mortal affairs nothing is wont to be heard with more welcome, nothing more longingly desired, nothing, in short, that can be found better.

And if we choose to speak of this at somewhat greater length, we shall not, I think, be burdensome to our readers, both on account of the end of this city of which we are speaking, and on account of the very sweetness of peace, which is dear to all. Anyone who observes human affairs and our common nature in any degree will recognize this along with me; for just as there is no one who does not wish to rejoice, so there is no one who does not wish to have peace. For even those who wish for wars wish for nothing else than to conquer; therefore by warring they desire to arrive at a glorious peace. For what is victory but the subjugation of those who resist? And when this has been done, there will be peace.

With the intention of peace, therefore, wars too are waged, even by those who are eager to exercise warlike valor by command and by battle. Whence it is evident that peace is the desired end of war. For every man seeks peace even by waging war, but no one seeks war by making peace. For even those who wish the peace in which they live to be disturbed do not hate peace, but desire to have it changed according to their own will. They do not therefore wish that there be no peace, but that it be such as they desire. Finally, even if by sedition they have separated themselves from others, they do not accomplish what they intend unless they maintain some kind of semblance of peace with their fellow conspirators or confederates.

Accordingly, robbers themselves, in order to be more fiercely and safely hostile to the peace of others, wish to have peace among their associates. And even if some one man be so pre-eminent in strength and so wary of accomplices that he trusts himself to no partner, but, lying in wait alone and prevailing, plunders those whom he can overpower and destroy, yet at least with those whom he cannot kill and from whom he wishes to hide what he does, he maintains some shadow of peace. And in his own house, with his wife and children, and any others he may have there, he certainly strives to be at peace; for he is doubtless delighted when they obey his beck and call.

For if this is not done, he is angry, he rebukes, he punishes, and he composes the peace of his own house, if it be necessary, even by cruelty; for he perceives that it cannot exist unless all the rest in that same domestic society are made subject to a certain head, which he himself is in his own house. And therefore, if the servitude of a greater number, whether of a city or a nation, were offered to him, so that they should serve him just as he wished to be served in his own home, he would no longer hide himself as a robber in dens, but would exalt himself as a conspicuous king, though the same greed and malice remained in him. Thus all men desire to have peace with their own people, whom they wish to live according to their own will. For even those against whom they wage war they wish, if they can, to make their own, and to impose upon them, once subjected, the laws of their own peace.

But let us imagine some being such as poetic and fabulous narrative sings of, whom perhaps on account of his very unsociable savagery they preferred to call a half-man rather than a man. Although, then, the kingdom of this creature was the solitude of a dreadful cave, and his malice so singular that from it a name was found for him (for in Greek what is evil is called kakos, which was what he was named), though no wife brought and returned to him a tender word, though he neither played with any little children nor gave commands to older ones, though he enjoyed the conversation of no friend, not even of his father Vulcan (in which respect alone he was not a little happier than his father, because he himself did not beget such a monster), though he gave nothing to anyone, but took whatever he wished from whomever he could, whenever he could, from whomever he chose:

nevertheless, in that solitary cave of his, whose ground, as it is described, was always warm with fresh slaughter, he wished for nothing else than peace, in which no one should trouble him, and no man's violence or terror should disturb his quiet. In short, he desired to have peace with his own body, and as much as he had of it, so much was well with him. For he ruled his obedient members; and that he might pacify with all the haste he could his own mortality, rebelling against him out of want and stirring up the sedition of hunger to sever the soul from the body and shut it out, he seized, he slew, he devoured; and monstrous and savage though he was, he yet took counsel, monstrously and savagely, for the peace of his own life and safety;