Awe

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The City of God

  469 Lecture 22 Transcript—Heaven: The Self Redeemed (Book 22) bodies will not be erased. Curly hair or no hair, eye color, face shapes, everything truly part of our bodies will be retained and transfigured. Even sex is not a problem. Women will be raised as women and men as men. Women’s sexual form is not a defect—some Christians thought that—but Augustine says it is natural as the man’s, and both are appropriate for the symmetry of aesthetic oppositions and the symbolic power of the way that male and female differentiation for Augustine, symbolizes Christ and the church. Now, there will be no sexual intercourse in heaven, for its essential purpose—that of reproduction—Augustine thinks is accomplished, but our manifold desires for intimacy and connection, desires that sex has served in history, those desires will still be real and still be met in the Kingdom, with God, and with our fellow humans, in far more profound ways than we could imagine now. Recall, he insists that people dislike not the body, but the body’s corruption, and that there are still many goods in this life—especially propagation and the conformation of body to body—which speak to the blessings that bodies are meant to convey. Furthermore, he says, even in this life, there is something miraculous and wondrous in the joining of immaterial soul and material body. He says, the amazing thing about our physical world is that it is intelligible, that brute physical matter has been made a fit home for divine meaning, the wet, sticky, bloody mass of meat that we are, this skin-bag of guts and gristle and brittle bone, this has been deemed a fit home for a soul and even for the absolute, Christ. How astonishing is that? Augustine says. And yet we know it must be true, since of the physical Incarnation of Jesus. Since Augustine says, Jesus was truly God enfleshed, and not just an especially convincing spiritual hologram that we see; we can recognize that at the end of time, this material world will be transfigured as worthy of bearing glorious and immortal permanence, and be seen as bearing God’s own impress. Now, as we’ve said repeatedly, this vision of materiality was by no means a universal opinion in Augustine’s age. Many non-Christians were quite clear that however it worked out, we would be saved from

• From The City of God

  459 Lecture 22—Heaven: The Self Redeemed (Book 22) in this life and that serves as a promise of what their true life in the world to come will be. „Augustine discusses three big topics in this book: the resurrection of the body and the significance of history, his vision of God that will occupy the blessed in the life to come, and his reflections on the nature of human agency in heaven, and in particular on the four stages of freedom humans experience over the course of history. Resurrection of the Body „At the end of time, all will be resurrected into bodies. The bodies will be flesh, but they will be spiritual flesh. Furthermore, this embodiment will be historical. We are our histories, and we are our bodies, and our eschatological happiness must be related to our past, which is not entirely happy. „Thus the details of our bodies will not be erased. Curly hair, eye color, face shapes, everything truly part of our bodies will be retained and transfigured. Even sex is not a problem. There will be no sexual intercourse in heaven, for its essential purpose of reproduction is accomplished; but our desires for intimacy and connection that sex served in history will be met in the kingdom in far more profound ways. „Even in this life, something miraculous and wondrous exists in the joining of immaterial soul and material body. The amazing thing is that our physical world is intelligible, that physical matter has been made a fit home for divine meaning. And yet we know it must be true, because of the physical Incarnation of Jesus. Because Jesus was truly God made flesh, we see that at the end of time, this material world will be transfigured as worthy of bearing glorious and immortal permanence.

• From The City of God

  521 maybe this tradition still influences the way we see the world today. So perhaps we have made a mistake about our real ancestors. It’s a disquieting thought, and I’ll leave you to be disquieted by it. Nonetheless, what insight we can glean from his substantial books seems substantial enough. All his lessons are powerful; all of them are relevant. And of course, our world is very different from Augustine’s, but there are some echoes. In America today, the nation is dealing with war in Afghanistan, just as Alexander the Great did 700 years before Augustine lived. The timeliness of this work is sometimes astounding. All this is true and good. It’s philosophically and theologically profound; politically acute and wise; culturally erudite. But for me, the central value of the work is the challenge it puts before your mind— what I’ve called the pedagogy of threat. Our minds are sharpened if we imagine that the work we are engaged with can answer back to us, can contradict us, show us to be bad readers, reveal us to be enmeshed in hypocrisies and contradictions. I said something earlier in these lectures that I want to return to now. It’s astonishing to me how much is known by people almost entirely by hearsay, and how much of that hearsay is demonstrably false—such is the case, as I’ve tried to show with Augustine and The City of God. Despite being so well-known, the book remains to an astonishing degree—perhaps because of its very well-knownness and its sheer scale—an unsummited alp and an undiscovered country. For you to do better, you have to learn to see Augustine not as fixed words on a page, but as a quicksilver mind behind it. For you to do better, that is, it helps to see Augustine not fundamentally as a book, but as a man. We know that Saint Augustine’s bones rest in the basilica in Pavia, alongside the bones of Boethius. He was a real human being. If you let yourself believe it, that vision can reshape you. That belief bespeaks a kind of awe, a kind of admiration, a kind of love. Lecture 24 Transcript—The City of God’s Journey through History

• From The City of God

  445 Lecture 21 Transcript—Augustine’s Vision of Hell (Book 21) is fitting for a temporal crime? And why is the fate of the damned, not a suitable object, in his mind, for our or God’s mercy? These are some of the questions we ask in this lecture. They are all really facets of one question that we may ask of Augustine, namely, why does he think that this doctrine of Hell is not only just, but itself gives us good reason to believe that Hell is a creation of God’s goodness? This question is one that Augustine might have understood but not felt to be as gripping as we do. In our world, belief in Hell has declined precipitously. We have a hard time imagining any reason why anyone would suffer endlessly in a lake of fire, for crimes they committed while on earth.In fact, the decline of belief in Hell in our world is a very new development, happening only in the past century, and scholars are interested in what caused this decline. So unlike most people in his own time, we face an initial blockage in struggling to see what Augustine was propounding and why he was propounding it. But we don’t want to overstate the distance between Augustine’s world and our own. Our questions are not ones Augustine would have found entirely strange. For it is the case that he begins this book by asking the basic question that we asked, which he apparently had heard as well, of why believe in Hell at all? He addresses this question straight off. Hell is to be addressed before Heaven, he says, precisely since Hell seems more incredible than Heaven to people. Thus we should acknowledge and engage peoples’ skepticism about Hell straightaway. Furthermore, he says, this order is consonant with the order of topics as given in scripture. Hell is discussed before Heaven by and large in the biblical texts. Does this mean, you might wonder, that dire threats are conceived as more focusing, maybe more initially mobilizing of our moral energies, than good promises? I’ll leave you to consider that. In addressing Hell, Augustine organizes the discussion into several distinct topics. First, he says, we should consider the nature of infernal punishment. How do the damned exactly experience hellfire?

• From House of Holes: A Book of Raunch (2011)

  That’s the person who is desi-gnated to put her hands on the two crotches that are going to be crossed. She completes the crotchal circuit.” “That sounds like it would be kind of fun,” said Mindy. “Oh, but doing tweenella is hard work, too,” said Dune. “You can only do it a few times because the sex plasma travels right through your arms and your chest and your heart. It can actually stop your heart for a moment, to have that much sex plasma traveling through you. They had a piece of hotness named Rianne doing it. They brought in a large stone bowl, and they poured some glowing blue liquid into it—looked like coolant—and Lila told Rianne to soak her hands in the bowl to get them all ready and sensitized for the transfer. She told me to sit in one chair and Marcie in another chair.” “You were naked?” Dune nodded. “From the waist down, with our feet in stirrups. And then Lila hauls out one of her breasts.” “Uh-oh!” “They are not small, let me tell you. She squirts some of her special magic titty milk on my balls, and she has Marcie hold open her pussy so that she can dribble some right in there, too. Well, that started to work almost immediately, started to burn, like my cock had had a shot of Everclear, and I started to feel that I had this special bond with Marcela. I said, ‘Hey, Marcie, are you sure you’re okay with the switch? I warn you, my dick can be a handful.’ And she said, ‘I can handle your dick fine. The real question is whether you can keep up with my cuntatious clit.’ So we were having our fun, and then Lila tells Rianne, ‘Okay, now take your hands out of the bowl and get to work. Grab their crotches and lean into them hard.’ Rianne’s sitting cross-legged between us, like a yoga master, and she grabs our crotches, which completes the circuit, and, foong, this ungodly flow of energy comes pouring through her arms, and at first I started to get a huge boner on, and I thought, Well this is nice. Then Rianne’s whole body started shaking, her tits are bopping around, but she kept her hands holding our crotches. And then I started to feel Marcie’s pussy flowing into me.” “Wow, go on.” Mindy checked the viewfinder, making turning gestures in the air to keep him talking. “I felt my own cock and balls starting to melt and flow, and I felt this channel widening inside me.

• From The City of God

  479 Lecture 22 Transcript—Heaven: The Self Redeemed (Book 22) distention of temporality, you fully you, you at 80 you at 20, a young child of 4 full of wonder and terror, an adult of 34 full of love and concern, you as a student and you as a teacher, a novice and an expert, you at every instant of your life, all at once and all together, all the million myriad individual yous, all will finally be brought together, as one finally allowed simply to be you. It is the oldest cliché in the world, at that the moment of your death your whole life flashes before your eyes. Well maybe on an Augustinian account that is entirely understandable. In any event, it is the image on which the City of God chooses to end. And thus, so will we. 480 The City of God as a Single Book A book worthy of study will engage a bewilderingly diverse set of issues—through characters and plot lines, perhaps, or through a complicated series of thematic issues. It will do so because life, as we experience it, is bewilderingly diverse. To be the composition of a reasonably coherent intelligence, the book will sustain a singularity of vision amid the diversity, and we ourselves, encountering the book, will find ourselves challenged to develop our intellectual and attentive muscles to be able to absorb its point of view as a singular point of view. „Augustine’s The City of God is such a book. It is a work so searching, so wide-ranging, so vast, and so remarkably coherent that it has few rivals as an achievement of the human mind. As an effort to come to grips with the inheritance of a civilization that raised you, but which you now find radically faulty, and as a way of coming to terms with the conversion of the world from one worldview to another, it knows few rivals for its diversity of views. „For Christians and those raised in Christian (or post-Christian societies), it is much more than this: it remains one of the most important and influential works of thinking about politics, human community, the shape of human life, and the nature and destiny of the world. Augustine and Politics „The work’s first great theme is Christianity as a political religion: the accusation that the Christians did not rightly care for Rome and could not properly care for worldly political life. Augustine replies with a threefold response that articulates his vision of Lecture 23

• From The City of God

  361 Lecture 17 Transcript—Augustine’s Scriptural History (Books 15–17) It’s in these books, then, that Augustine’s picture of history, and of the way humans should understand their experience of history, finally begins to come into view for us. Here, he offers us what we could call a geo-theo-political picture of history and the place of the human condition within it. It’s a picture of our world; but it’s also a picture which, if we try to learn to see this way, it works to form the self—and form the community, as well—in certain ways that make us more apt to see history, and our ongoing existence in historical time, in a way that both helps our current vision and aides our future perfection. This picture and what he thinks its effects on us should be is what this lecture will explore, and I want to do so in three big steps. First, I want to talk about this vision of the world—both about its details and the overall vision of history that undergirds and produces it. Second, I want to talk about how Augustine understands our self-formation through absorbing this vision and coming to inhabit it. And third and finally, I want to step back from the details of his argument and reflect a bit on how this is possible, discussing what we can call Augustine’s typological imagination, and his vision of theology, and the Christian life as it is intelligently inhabited as overall understandable through the metaphor of reading—life as a kind of reading. So first, consider, what is the nature of an Augustinian theology of history? This can sound paradoxical. Augustine’s often accused, of course, of being a profoundly anti-historical, anti-worldly thinker. He’s considered exemplary of—perhaps partially responsible for—a larger Christian view of history, and of life in the world in general, in which today we live in the after anything of any importance has already happened; an whose ending is already quite literally scripted. Now there’s something true about these suspicions. After all, the word epilogue means literally “after the word,” and we live after Christ to the word of God. And the Book of Revelation quite clearly means to offer the last word on everything. Augustine takes that book and the rest of scripture, as it were, as gospel.

• From The City of God

  474 Books That Matter: The City of God First, consider the question of knowledge. Augustine knows well the line “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” But what does this seeing God amount to? The saints in paradise will see God in the spirit, for they see God, Augustine says, even if their eyes are shut. Yet the seeing is not by means of the flesh, he says, although it is seeing in the flesh—it is me in my fleshly body who will see. And they will see, he says, face to face, that is, without interruption or intermediation, they will see God continually, truly, directly, raw. This vision is then the peace of God, that passeth all understanding— this is God's own peace, which we partake of in heaven, Augustine says, understood fully only by God. This kind of seeing then will be continuous in some way with vision as we experience it now, although it will be immeasurably more powerful and revealing, and the eyes will discern things of a greater immaterial nature. And the blessed will still see created things, but when they see created things they will not just see them, they will see God in them, they will see God as all in all, as manifest in the things of this world. This is very complicated, so let me unpack it a bit here. The objects of creation will not mask God; they will reveal God as integral to what they truly are—God’s creatures and God will use them to exhibit God’s glory in the particular ways that God has chosen to do so. This seeing of God here, in all things, is not a kind of x-ray vision, revealing what is more basically hidden, seeing through the camouflage of flesh that has no point but to mask the divinity inside—what a sad picture of materiality it is that we would begin with if we had that. It’s not that flesh is a merely mystifying cloak for creation, we see creation itself, but now, at last, we see creation, fully, seeing it as creation, as having a point, a purpose, as created matter speaking of its creator. In a way, he says, the immaterial will be more real than the material, so that we shall then see the physical bodies of the new Heaven and the new Earth in such a way that, wherever we look, and this is a big quote from Augustine here,

• From The City of God

  Chapter 7. --Of the Nature of the First Days, Which are Said to Have Had Morning and Evening, Before There Was a Sun. We see, indeed, that our ordinary days have no evening but by the setting, and no morning but by the rising, of the sun; but the first three days of all were passed without sun, since it is reported to have been made on the fourth day. And first of all, indeed, light was made by the word of God, and God, we read, separated it from the darkness, and called the light Day, and the darkness Night; but what kind of light that was, and by what periodic movement it made evening and morning, is beyond the reach of our senses; neither can we understand how it was, and yet must unhesitatingly believe it. For either it was some material light, whether proceeding from the upper parts of the world, far removed from our sight, or from the spot where the sun was afterwards kindled; or under the name of light the holy city was signified, composed of holy angels and blessed spirits, the city of which the apostle says, "Jerusalem which is above is our eternal mother in heaven;" [459] and in another place, "For ye are all the children of the light, and the children of the day; we are not of the night, nor of darkness. " [460]Yet in some respects we may appropriately speak of a morning and evening of this day also. For the knowledge of the creature is, in comparison of the knowledge of the Creator, but a twilight; and so it dawns and breaks into morning when the creature is drawn to the praise and love of the Creator; and night never falls when the Creator is not forsaken through love of the creature. In fine, Scripture, when it would recount those days in order, never mentions the word night. It never says, "Night was," but "The evening and the morning were the first day. "So of the second and the rest. And, indeed, the knowledge of created things contemplated by themselves is, so to speak, more colorless than when they are seen in the wisdom of God, as in the art by which they were made. Therefore evening is a more suitable figure than night; and yet, as I said, morning returns when the creature returns to the praise and love of the Creator. When it does so in the knowledge of itself, that is the first day; when in the knowledge of the firmament, which is the name given to the sky between the waters above and those beneath, that is the second day; when in the knowledge of the earth, and the sea, and all things that grow out of the earth, that is the third day; when in the knowledge of the greater and less luminaries, and all the stars, that is the fourth day; when in the knowledge of all animals that swim in the waters and that fly in the air, that is the fifth day; when in the knowledge of all animals that live on the earth, and of man himself, that is the sixth day. [461]

• From House of Holes: A Book of Raunch (2011)

  Harry shook his head despairingly. “The more porn we’ve sucked out of the world, the larger the monster has grown,” he said. “This wasn’t in our forecasts. We thought there might be small anomalies of spontaneous generation, of course. But this—this is a personification of polymorphousness unlike anything the world of human suck-fuckery has ever known. I used to work as a trainer at Ocean Playground. The squid show there was nothing compared to this.” At that moment an enormous arm reached out of the oily liquid, and a huge hand grasped at nothing in the air. Five penises hung dangling off the forearm—it looked like a bizarre bagpipe. The hand was made up of half a dozen clustered vaginas. “That’s gross,” said Rhumpa. Harry made a little fatalistic laugh. “They’re pumping so much porn in here that it’s just feeding and feeding, and it grows a new appendage every few days. It’s got about ten arms. One’s really long, but a lot of them are smaller.” “I can see that it’s not pretty,” Rhumpa said. “But is it good or is it evil?” “Nobody knows,” said Harry. “Nobody knows its language.” “I’m going to try to talk to it,” said Rhumpa. She put her hands to her mouth. “Hey, longdog!” she called with loud authority. “Jizm! Weeperhole!” The pornhand paused for a moment, ceased groping, then subsided under the vermilion waves of mingling smut imagery. “You really know languages,” said Harry, impressed. Rhumpa knew she could talk to the pornmonster given enough time and quiet. “I can’t engage with it here,” she said. “Do you have a side chamber where we can go?” “Sure,” said Harry. “The sluice gate has an overflow tank, and sometimes the monster goes in there to rest.” Suddenly, several fountains of what looked like sperm, but orchid and navel orange in color, jetted up from the froth. Rhumpa looked at Harry questioningly. “It masturbates constantly,” Harry said. “You’ll have to put on a wetsuit.” Rhumpa nodded. They went to the room off the overflow tank. Rhumpa shucked off her shirt and pants and stepped into the suit. “Be careful,” said Harry. “Our containment system is only as good as its weakest link.” “Do you think it can feel love?” asked Rhumpa. “I doubt it,” said Harry. “I was reading Hawking’s book about the first seconds of the universe. I think our monster is as close as I’ll ever come to knowing what that’s like.” Harry hesitated. He looked a little green around the gills. “I’m going to have to leave you on your own here. I’ll be watching on the monitor. Men can’t take pornfumes for very long without fainting. We need breathing equipment. Women seem more immune.” Harry withdrew. Rhumpa walked out onto the tiled edge of the ancillary holding tank. She called out, “Hey, pornmonster! Cuntcall! Here it is!” She cupped her crotch through the wetsuit.

• From The City of God

  387 events of Jonah’s life. His being called to Nineveh, his flight from that calling, his discovery that he cannot flee from God—he gets trapped in the belly of a whale, among other things—his preaching, Nineveh’s repentance, and his petulant response to God’s mercy. A second layer is the story of the ever-present, indeed relentless, mercy of God— first to Jonah, then to the whole city of Nineveh, and then to Jonah again. And then there’s a third level in which Jonah, for Augustine, prophesied Christ more by what he suffered than by what he said—so much Augustine—by the way he was taken up by God in a larger plan than he ever had for himself and used as a prominent tool of God’s providential governance of the world. In this final way, Jonah prefigures Christ, who is the preeminent and perfect example of God using Creation to govern Creation. Christ’s human nature is, in this way, prefigured by Jonah’s acts even as Christ’s divine nature is prefigured by God’s use of Jonah. Jonah’s just a character in this story, not the main actor at all. The primary actor in the story of Jonah is God. Now, the story of Jonah, and how Augustine handles it, shows how prefiguration works and also how God’s provenance will act. Augustine used this both because he thought it was spiritually powerful, but also because he needed to find a way to authorize his new community in terms of the antiquity of the histories surrounding it. Let’s consider again that Augustine lived in a civilization of remarkable continuity with the past, and his world privileged age in a way that our world does not. In such a setting, a true newcomer tradition like Christianity, whose oldest relative was the primitive desert tribe of the Israelites—that’s how the Greeks and the Romans saw them— was a very low-status proposition. So, Augustine sets out to show in this book as well that the prophets actually predate the pagan philosophers. And while the prophets, in turn, are not as old as the Greek theological poets—like Homer and Hesiod—those poets are, in turn, not as ancient as was Moses. Lecture 18 Transcript—Translating the Imperium (Book 18)

• From The City of God

  Chapter 16. --Whether Those Angels Who Demand that We Pay Them Divine Honor, or Those Who Teach Us to Render Holy Service, Not to Themselves, But to God, are to Be Trusted About the Way to Life Eternal. What angels, then, are we to believe in this matter of blessed and eternal life? --those who wish to be worshipped with religious rites and observances, and require that men sacrifice to them; or those who say that all this worship is due to one God, the Creator, and teach us to render it with true piety to Him, by the vision of whom they are themselves already blessed, and in whom they promise that we shall be so? For that vision of God is the beauty of a vision so great, and is so infinitely desirable, that Plotinus does not hesitate to say that he who enjoys all other blessings in abundance, and has not this, is supremely miserable. [410]Since, therefore, miracles are wrought by some angels to induce us to worship this God, by others, to induce us to worship themselves; and since the former forbid us to worship these, while the latter dare not forbid us to worship God, which are we to listen to? Let the Platonists reply, or any philosophers, or the theurgists, or rather, periurgists, [411] --for this name is good enough for those who practise such arts. In short, let all men answer,--if, at least, there survives in them any spark of that natural perception which, as rational beings, they possess when created,--let them, I say, tell us whether we should sacrifice to the gods or angels who order us to sacrifice to them, or to that One to whom we are ordered to sacrifice by those who forbid us to worship either themselves or these others. If neither the one party nor the other had wrought miracles, but had merely uttered commands, the one to sacrifice to themselves, the other forbidding that, and ordering us to sacrifice to God, a godly mind would have been at no loss to discern which command proceeded from proud arrogance, and which from true religion. I will say more. If miracles had been wrought only by those who demand sacrifice for themselves, while those who forbade this, and enjoined sacrificing to the one God only, thought fit entirely to forego the use of visible miracles, the authority of the latter was to be preferred by all who would use, not their eyes only, but their reason. But since God, for the sake of commending to us the oracles of His truth, has, by means of these immortal messengers, who proclaim His majesty and not their own pride, wrought miracles of surpassing grandeur, certainty, and distinctness, in order that the weak among the godly might not be drawn away to false religion by those who require us to sacrifice to them and endeavor to convince us by stupendous appeals to our senses, who is so utterly unreasonable as not to choose and follow the truth, when he finds that it is heralded by even more striking evidences than falsehood?

• From The City of God

  From this brief sketch, it will be seen that though the accompanying work is essentially an Apology, the Apologetic of Augustin can be no mere rehabilitation of the somewhat threadbare, if not effete, arguments of Justin and Tertullian. [10]In fact, as Augustin considered what was required of him,--to expound the Christian faith, and justify it to enlightened men:to distinguish it from, and show its superiority to, all those forms of truth, philosophical or popular, which were then striving for the mastery, or at least for standing-room; to set before the world's eye a vision of glory that might win the regard even of men who were dazzled by the fascinating splendor of a world-wide empire,--he recognized that a task was laid before him to which even his powers might prove unequal,--a task certainly which would afford ample scope for his learning, dialectic, philosophical grasp and acumen, eloquence, and faculty of exposition.

• From The City of God

  488 Books That Matter: The City of God encountering that book, will find ourselves challenged to develop our intellectual and attentive muscles so as to be able to absorb that point of view as a singular point of view to make it our own. That is one of the great blessings of works like these—an author whose vision of the world is perhaps in some ways more fine- grained, more matured, at least more encompassing than yours currently is. It gives you something of a ladder into their own brain, their own way of seeing the world. Reading books in this way is educative. It trains the mind not just to inhabit the view on offer, but to understand the obligation of the human to be intelligent in some way like this, to attempt to understand and inhabit some vision of the world that aspires to be all-encompassing and still dares to affirm it as a singular vision. The more fully we come to appreciate the depth, and breadth, and symphonic coherence of these kinds of works, the more they reveal the world to us in new ways and still retain a coherence of perspective that makes the experience of reading them a unified experience. We come to regard them with something akin to awe, and wonder, and reverence. A truly great book will help us understand the problem of the one and the many since it will embody a single solution to that problem for us. Now, not every book will do this, of course. Each of us has to meet the books that we are ready to encounter at the right time. And the book itself should be worthy of that attention, as well. But there are many books that are so worthy. From the Iliad and the Odyssey, through Austen, and Dickens, and Tocqueville, and Tolstoy, and Elliot, we’re gifted with hundreds of works that reward such scrutiny. Indeed, the chosen object of study needn’t even be a book; there are many human artefacts that are worthy of such attention—Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion, paintings, sculptures, Coppola’s first two Godfather movies—not the third—even perhaps Bob Dylan’s album Blonde on Blonde or The Basement Tapes. The capaciousness of comprehension, the profundity of investigation, the symphonic

• From The City of God

  Chapter 1. --That the Platonists Themselves Have Determined that God Alone Can Confer Happiness Either on Angels or Men, But that It Yet Remains a Question Whether Those Spirits Whom They Direct Us to Worship, that We May Obtain Happiness, Wish Sacrifice to Be Offered to Themselves, or to the One God Only. It is the decided opinion of all who use their brains, that all men desire to be happy. But who are happy, or how they become so, these are questions about which the weakness of human understanding stirs endless and angry controversies, in which philosophers have wasted their strength and expended their leisure. To adduce and discuss their various opinions would be tedious, and is unnecessary. The reader may remember what we said in the eighth book, while making a selection of the philosophers with whom we might discuss the question regarding the future life of happiness, whether we can reach it by paying divine honors to the one true God, the Creator of all gods, or by worshipping many gods, and he will not expect us to repeat here the same argument, especially as, even if he has forgotten it, he may refresh his memory by reperusal. For we made selection of the Platonists, justly esteemed the noblest of the philosophers, because they had the wit to perceive that the human soul, immortal and rational, or intellectual, as it is, cannot be happy except by partaking of the light of that God by whom both itself and the world were made; and also that the happy life which all men desire cannot be reached by any who does not cleave with a pure and holy love to that one supreme good, the unchangeable God. But as even these philosophers, whether accommodating to the folly and ignorance of the people, or, as the apostle says, "becoming vain in their imaginations," [369] supposed or allowed others to suppose that many gods should be worshipped, so that some of them considered that divine honor by worship and sacrifice should be rendered even to the demons (an error I have already exploded), we must now, by God's help, ascertain what is thought about our religious worship and piety by those immortal and blessed spirits, who dwell in the heavenly places among dominations, principalities, powers, whom the Platonists call gods, and some either good demons, or, like us, angels,--that is to say, to put it more plainly, whether the angels desire us to offer sacrifice and worship, and to consecrate our possessions and ourselves, to them or only to God, theirs and ours.

• From The City of God

  Chapter 23. --Of the Erythraean Sibyl, Who is Known to Have Sung Many Things About Christ More Plainly Than the Other Sibyls. [1146]Some say the Erythraean sibyl prophesied at this time. Now Varro declares there were many sibyls, and not merely one. This sibyl of Erythrae certainly wrote some things concerning Christ which are quite manifest, and we first read them in the Latin tongue in verses of bad Latin, and unrhythmical, through the unskillfulness, as we afterwards learned, of some interpreter unknown to me. For Flaccianus, a very famous man, who was also a proconsul, a man of most ready eloquence and much learning, when we were speaking about Christ, produced a Greek manuscript, saying that it was the prophecies of the Erythraean sibyl, in which he pointed out a certain passage which had the initial letters of the lines so arranged that these words could be read in them: 'Iesous Christos Theou uios soter, which means, "Jesus Christ the Son of God, the Saviour. "And these verses, of which the initial letters yield that meaning, contain what follows as translated by some one into Latin in good rhythm: IJudgment shall moisten the earth with the sweat of its standard, EEver enduring, behold the King shall come through the ages, S Sent to be here in the flesh, and Judge at the last of the world. OO God, the believing and faithless alike shall behold Thee UUplifted with saints, when at last the ages are ended. S Seated before Him are souls in the flesh for His judgment. ChHid in thick vapors, the while desolate lieth the earth. RRejected by men are the idols and long hidden treasures; E Earth is consumed by the fire, and it searcheth the ocean and heaven; IIssuing forth, it destroyeth the terrible portals of hell. S Saints in their body and soul freedom and light shall inherit; T Those who are guilty shall burn in fire and brimstone for ever. OOccult actions revealing, each one shall publish his secrets; S Secrets of every man's heart God shall reveal in the light. ThThen shall be weeping and wailing, yea, and gnashing of teeth; EEclipsed is the sun, and silenced the stars in their chorus. OOver and gone is the splendor of moonlight, melted the heaven, UUplifted by Him are the valleys, and cast down the mountains. UUtterly gone among men are distinctions of lofty and lowly. IInto the plains rush the hills, the skies and oceans are mingled. OOh, what an end of all things! earth broken in pieces shall perish; S. . . . Swelling together at once shall the waters and flames flow in rivers. SSounding the archangel's trumpet shall peal down from heaven, OOver the wicked who groan in their guilt and their manifold sorrows. TTrembling, the earth shall be opened, revealing chaos and hell. EEvery king before God shall stand in that day to be judged. R Rivers of fire and brimstone shall fall from the heavens.

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  [509] In Isa. xi. 2, as he shows in his eighth sermon, where this subject is further pursued; otherwise, one might have supposed he referred to Rev. iii. 1. [510] l Cor. xiii. 10. Chapter 32. --Of the Opinion that the Angels Were Created Before the World. But if some one oppose our opinion, and say that the holy angels are not referred to when it is said, "Let there be light, and there was light;" if he suppose or teach that some material light, then first created, was meant, and that the angels were created, not only before the firmament dividing the waters and named "the heaven," but also before the time signified in the words, "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth;" if he allege that this phrase, "In the beginning," does not mean that nothing was made before (for the angels were), but that God made all things by His Wisdom or Word, who is named in Scripture "the Beginning," as He Himself, in the gospel, replied to the Jews when they asked Him who He was, that He was the Beginning; [511] --I will not contest the point, chiefly because it gives me the liveliest satisfaction to find the Trinity celebrated in the very beginning of the book of Genesis. For having said "In the Beginning God created the heaven and the earth," meaning that the Father made them in the Son (as the psalm testifies where it says, "How manifold are Thy works, O Lord! in Wisdom hast Thou made them all" [512] ), a little afterwards mention is fitly made of the Holy Spirit also. For, when it had been told us what kind of earth God created at first, or what the mass or matter was which God, under the name of "heaven and earth," had provided for the construction of the world, as is told in the additional words, "And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep," then, for the sake of completing the mention of the Trinity, it is immediately added, "And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. "Let each one, then, take it as he pleases; for it is so profound a passage, that it may well suggest, for the exercise of the reader's tact, many opinions, and none of them widely departing from the rule of faith. At the same time, let none doubt that the holy angels in their heavenly abodes are, though not, indeed, co-eternal with God, yet secure and certain of eternal and true felicity. To their company the Lord teaches that His little ones belong; and not only says, "They shall be equal to the angels of God," [513] but shows, too, what blessed contemplation the angels themselves enjoy, saying, "Take heed that ye despise not one of these little ones:for I say unto you, that in heaven their angels do always behold the face of my Father which is in heaven. " [514]

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  [928] Gen. xvii. 5, 6, 16. [929] Heb. xi. 11. [930] Heb. xi. 12. Chapter 29. --Of the Three Men or Angels, in Whom the Lord is Related to Have Appeared to Abraham at the Oak of Mamre. God appeared again to Abraham at the oak of Mamre in three men, who it is not to be doubted were angels, although some think that one of them was Christ, and assert that He was visible before He put on flesh. Now it belongs to the divine power, and invisible, incorporeal, and incommutable nature, without changing itself at all, to appear even to mortal men, not by what it is, but by what is subject to it. And what is not subject to it? Yet if they try to establish that one of these three was Christ by the fact that, although he saw three, he addressed the Lord in the singular, as it is written, "And, lo, three men stood by him:and, when he saw them, he ran to meet them from the tent-door, and worshipped toward the ground, and said, Lord, if I have found favor before thee," [931] etc. ; why do they not advert to this also, that when two of them came to destroy the Sodomites, while Abraham still spoke to one, calling him Lord, and interceding that he would not destroy the righteous along with the wicked in Sodom, Lot received these two in such a way that he too in his conversation with them addressed the Lord in the singular? For after saying to them in the plural, "Behold, my lords, turn aside into your servant's house," [932] etc. , yet it is afterwards said, "And the angels laid hold upon his hand, and the hand of his wife, and the hands of his two daughters, because the Lord was merciful unto him. And it came to pass, whenever they had led him forth abroad, that they said, Save thy life; look not behind thee, neither stay thou in all this region:save thyself in the mountain, lest thou be caught. And Lot said unto them, I pray thee, Lord, since thy servant hath found grace in thy sight," [933] etc. And then after these words the Lord also answered him in the singular, although He was in two angels, saying, "See, I have accepted thy face," [934] etc. This makes it much more credible that both Abraham in the three men and Lot in the two recognized the Lord, addressing Him in the singular number, even when they were addressing men; for they received them as they did for no other reason than that they might minister human refection to them as men who needed it. Yet there was about them something so excellent, that those who showed them hospitality as men could not doubt that God was in them as He was wont to be in the prophets, and therefore sometimes addressed them in the plural, and sometimes God in them in the singular. But that they were angels the Scripture testifies, not only in this book of Genesis, in which these transactions are related, but also in the Epistle to the Hebrews, where in praising hospitality it is said, "For thereby some have entertained angels unawares. " [935]By these three men, then, when a son Isaac was again promised to Abraham by Sarah, such a divine oracle was also given that it was said, "Abraham shall become a great and numerous nation, and all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him. " [936]And here these two things, are promised with the utmost brevity and fullness,--the nation of Israel according to the flesh, and all nations according to faith.

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  Farther, what is added, "He raiseth up the poor from the earth," I understand of none better than of Him who, as was said a little ago, "was made poor for us, when He was rich, that by His poverty we might be made rich. "For He raised Him from the earth so quickly that His flesh did not see corruption. Nor shall I divert from Him what is added, "And raiseth up the poor from the dunghill. "For indeed he who is the poor man is also the beggar. [1003]But by the dunghill from which he is lifted up we are with the greatest reason to understand the persecuting Jews, of whom the apostle says, when telling that when he belonged to them he persecuted the Church, "What things were gain to me, those I counted loss for Christ; and I have counted them not only loss, but even dung, that I might win Christ. " [1004]Therefore that poor one is raised up from the earth above all the rich, and that beggar is lifted up from that dunghill above all the wealthy, "that he may sit among the mighty of the people," to whom He says, "Ye shall sit upon twelve thrones," [1005] "and to make them inherit the throne of glory. "For these mighty ones had said, "Lo, we have forsaken all and followed Thee. "They had most mightily vowed this vow.

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  Chapter 14. --That the One God is to Be Worshipped Not Only for the Sake of Eternal Blessings, But Also in Connection with Temporal Prosperity, Because All Things are Regulated by His Providence. The education of the human race, represented by the people of God, has advanced, like that of an individual, through certain epochs, or, as it were, ages, so that it might gradually rise from earthly to heavenly things, and from the visible to the invisible. This object was kept so clearly in view, that, even in the period when temporal rewards were promised, the one God was presented as the object of worship, that men might not acknowledge any other than the true Creator and Lord of the spirit, even in connection with the earthly blessings of this transitory life. For he who denies that all things, which either angels or men can give us, are in the hand of the one Almighty, is a madman. The Platonist Plotinus discourses concerning providence, and, from the beauty of flowers and foliage, proves that from the supreme God, whose beauty is unseen and ineffable, providence reaches down even to these earthly things here below; and he argues that all these frail and perishing things could not have so exquisite and elaborate a beauty, were they not fashioned by Him whose unseen and unchangeable beauty continually pervades all things. [407]This is proved also by the Lord Jesus, where He says, "Consider the lilies, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin. And yet I say unto you that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. But if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to-day is and to-morrow is cast into the oven, how much more shall He clothe you, O ye of little faith. ! " [408]It was best, therefore, that the soul of man, which was still weakly desiring earthly things, should be accustomed to seek from God alone even these petty temporal boons, and the earthly necessaries of this transitory life, which are contemptible in comparison with eternal blessings, in order that the desire even of these things might not draw it aside from the worship of Him, to whom we come by despising and forsaking such things. [407] Plotin. Ennead. III. ii. 13. [408] Matt. vi. 28-30.