The City of God: Book 11

The city of God we are speaking of is the same city that Scripture bears witness to, a Scripture that surpasses the writings of every nation by its divine authority, and has drawn all kinds of minds under its influence, not through some random intellectual movement, but clearly through deliberate providential design. There it is written, "Glorious things are spoken of thee, O city of God." Another psalm reads, "Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised in the city of our God, in the mountain of His holiness, increasing the joy of the whole earth." A little further on in that same psalm: "As we have heard, so have we seen in the city of the Lord of hosts, in the city of our God. God has established it forever." And in yet another: "There is a river the streams of which shall make glad the city of our God, the holy place of the tabernacles of the Most High. God is in the midst of her; she shall not be moved." From these and similar testimonies, which would take too long to cite in full, we have come to know that there is a city of God, and its Founder has kindled in us a love that makes us long to be citizens of it. The citizens of the earthly city prefer their own gods to this Founder of the holy city, not recognizing that He is the God of gods. He is not the God of false gods, that is, of impious and arrogant gods who, stripped of His unchangeable and freely given light and thereby reduced to a kind of desperate, diminished power, greedily clutch at their own private privileges and demand divine honors from their deluded followers. Rather, He is the God of the pious and holy gods, who are far more content to submit themselves to the One than to bring many into submission to themselves, and who would rather worship God than be worshipped as God. We have already replied to the enemies of this city in the ten preceding books, as best we could and with the help our Lord and King provided. Now, fully aware of what is expected of me and mindful of the promise I made, and trusting in that same help, I will endeavor to trace the origin, the progress, and the deserved destinies of the two cities, the earthly and the heavenly, which, as I have said, are in this present world intermingled and, in a sense, bound up together. I will begin by explaining how the foundations of these two cities were originally laid, in the division that arose among the angels.

It is a rare and remarkable achievement for a person, after contemplating the whole of creation, both physical and spiritual, and recognizing its mutability, to move beyond it entirely. To soar, by sustained effort of the mind, toward the unchanging substance of God, and then, at that height of contemplation, to learn from God Himself that He alone has made everything that is not of the divine essence: this is rarer still. God does not speak to a person through some audible creature that rings in the ears, where vibrations in the air connect the one who produces the sound with the one who hears it. Nor does He speak through a spiritual being that takes on the appearance of a body, as we encounter in dreams or similar states; for even in that case, God would be speaking as if to the body's ears, since He would be using the semblance of a body and the appearance of real spatial distance. Visions, after all, are representations of physical objects. God does not speak through any of these means. He speaks through truth itself, to anyone who is prepared to hear with the mind rather than with the body. He speaks to that part of a person which surpasses everything else within them, and which only God Himself surpasses. Since we understand, or at least *believe*, that humanity is made in God's image, it is precisely this higher part of us, the part that rises above what we share with animals, that draws us closest to the Supreme. Yet the mind itself, though naturally capable of reason and understanding, is crippled by deep-rooted and long-established vices. These vices don't merely prevent it from resting in God's unchanging light; they prevent it from even tolerating that light, until the mind has been gradually healed, renewed, and made capable of such joy. It therefore had to be filled with faith first, and through faith, purified. And so that it might advance more confidently toward the truth within that faith, Truth itself, God, God's Son, took on humanity without surrendering His divinity, and in doing so established and grounded this faith: that there might be a path for humanity to reach its God through a God who became human. This is the Mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus. It is precisely as a man that He is the Mediator and the Way. If a road lies between the traveler and the destination, there is hope of arrival; but if there is no road, or if the traveler doesn't know where it is, what good is it to know where he wants to go? The only way that is absolutely secure against all error is when the very same person is at once God and man: God as our destination, and man as our road.

This Mediator, having said what He judged sufficient, first through the prophets, then through His own words, and afterward through the apostles, also gave us what is called the canonical Scripture. This Scripture carries supreme authority, and we submit to it on all matters we need to know but cannot discover on our own. Consider how we come to know things: for objects within reach of our senses, whether perceived inwardly or outwardly, we rely on our own direct experience. But for things beyond the reach of our senses, we depend on the testimony of others, since we cannot perceive those things ourselves, and we trust the people who have actually encountered them. Just as we trust eyewitnesses for visible things we haven't seen ourselves (and the same principle applies to everything perceived through the senses), so too with things grasped by the mind and spirit, things that lie beyond our own inner perception. In those cases, we should trust those who have seen them in that incorporeal light, or who contemplate them without ceasing.

Among all visible things, the world is the greatest; among all invisible things, the greatest is God. We can see that the world exists; we believe that God exists. And when it comes to believing that God made the world, there is no more trustworthy source than God Himself. But where have we heard Him speak? Nowhere more clearly than in the Holy Scriptures, where His prophet declared, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" (Gen 1:1). Was the prophet present when God made the heavens and the earth? No. But the wisdom of God, through whom all things were made, was present, and that wisdom works its way into holy souls, making them friends of God and His prophets, quietly revealing to them the nature of His works. They are also taught by the angels of God, who continually behold the face of the Father and announce His will to those who need to hear it. Among these prophets was the one who spoke and wrote, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" (Gen 1:1). He was so fitting a witness to God that the same Spirit who revealed these things to him also enabled him, long before the fact, to predict that our faith would one day come into being.

But why did God choose to create the heavens and earth at that particular moment, having made nothing before it? Those who raise this question may be trying to argue that the world is eternal and without beginning, and therefore not created by God at all. If so, they are profoundly mistaken, lost in a kind of willful blindness that no argument can cure. Even if the prophets had never spoken a word, the world itself would still testify to its own origins. Its orderly changes and movements, and the beauty visible in all created things, bear witness both that it was made and that only God could have made it, God whose greatness and beauty surpass all description and lie beyond all sight. Then there are those who do acknowledge that God made the world, yet insist that its beginning was not a beginning in time but only a beginning in the sense of dependence on a creator, so that in some barely intelligible way the world has always existed as a created thing. They seem to think this position protects God from the charge of acting arbitrarily, or of suddenly conceiving a brand-new idea, or of changing His will on a whim despite being unchangeable. But I don't see how their position holds up when examined carefully, and least of all when it comes to the soul. If they argue that the soul is co-eternal with God, they will find it impossible to explain how the soul ever came to experience misery that had not existed through all the preceding eternity. If they say that happiness and misery alternate endlessly in the soul's experience, they must also say this alternation will go on forever, which leads to an obvious absurdity: a soul described as blessed cannot truly be blessed if it can foresee its own coming misery and degradation. And if it cannot foresee it, and believes it will never suffer disgrace or wretchedness but will remain blessed forever, then its blessedness rests on a delusion, which is perhaps the most foolish claim anyone could make. But suppose they argue instead that while misery and bliss have alternated throughout the soul's eternal past, the soul, once set free, will never return to misery again. Even then, they are forced to admit that the soul was never truly blessed before, and is only now beginning to enjoy a happiness that is both new and, by their own logic, unprecedented. In other words, they must concede that something new and momentous is happening to the soul, something that never happened to it across the whole of its eternal past. If they then deny that God's eternal purpose included this new experience, they are denying that He is the author of the soul's blessedness, which is a position of breathtaking impiety. If, on the other hand, they say that the soul's future blessedness results from a new decree of God, how do they escape the charge of divine mutability that they themselves find so objectionable? Furthermore, if they grant that the soul was created in time but will never perish in time, that it has, like a number, a beginning but no end, and that having once experienced misery and been delivered from it, it will never return to that misery again, then they must surely admit that all of this happens without any violation of God's unchanging purpose. Let them apply the same reasoning to the world itself, and believe that it too could have been made in time without God in any way altering His eternal design.

Next, we need to consider what can be said in response to those who accept that God is the Creator of the world, but struggle with the question of *when* it was created, and also what we might say in response to questions about *where* it was created. Those who imagine infinite stretches of time before the world, during which God supposedly could not have been idle, should by the same logic imagine infinite stretches of space beyond the world, in which God equally could not have rested from His work. If someone insists that the Almighty cannot refrain from creating throughout that boundless expanse, doesn't it follow that they must embrace Epicurus's fantasy of countless worlds? The only difference would be this: Epicurus held that those worlds form and dissolve through the random collisions of atoms, while these thinkers would have to say they are made by God's hand, and, since they cannot be destroyed, that they persist forever throughout the limitless immensity of space stretching endlessly in every direction beyond our world. The people we are addressing here are those who, like us, believe that God is spiritual and the Creator of everything that exists apart from Himself. As for others, it is something of a concession even to debate religion with them, since they have earned their reputation only among those who worship multiple gods, and they stand out from other philosophers for no better reason than that, while still far from the truth, they are at least closer to it than most. Now, these thinkers do not confine, limit, or divide the divine substance into parts; rather, as befits a proper understanding of God, they hold that it is wholly and spiritually present everywhere. Will they then claim that this same divine substance is somehow absent from the vast spaces beyond the world, and is occupied solely within one region (a very small one compared to the infinity surrounding it), namely the region where the world exists? I don't think they will push their argument to that absurdity. Since they hold that there is only one world, enormous in material size yet still finite, occupying a definite position, and that it was made by God's creative work, they should apply the same reasoning to God's rest during the infinite time before the world as they apply to His rest in the infinite space beyond it. Just as it doesn't follow that God placed the world in its particular location by accident rather than by divine reason, even though no human mind can grasp why that location was chosen and no merit in the spot itself made it preferable to the infinite alternatives, so it equally doesn't follow that God was guided by chance when He created the world at a particular moment rather than an earlier one, even though time had been running on through an infinite past and no one moment seemed distinguishable from any other. But if they say that imagining infinite spaces beyond the world is pointless, since there is no place outside the world, then we can say exactly the same thing in return: imagining infinite stretches of time before the world during which God rested is equally pointless, since there was no time before the world existed.

If eternity and time are properly distinguished by the fact that time cannot exist without movement and transition, while eternity involves no change at all, then it's clear that time could not have existed unless some creature had been made whose motion could produce change. The various parts of that motion and change cannot occur simultaneously; they must follow one another in sequence, and it is precisely in these shorter or longer intervals of duration that time begins. Since God, in whose eternity there is no change whatsoever, is the Creator and Ordainer of time, I cannot see how anyone could say He created the world after stretches of time had already passed, unless we suppose that some creature existed before the world, whose movement could mark the passage of time. And if the sacred and trustworthy Scriptures say that in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, meaning that He had made nothing previously (for if He had made anything before the rest, that thing would rightly be called what was made "in the beginning"), then the world was made not in time, but simultaneously with time. Whatever is made in time is made both after something past and before something future. But there could have been no past at that point, since there was no creature whose movements could measure any duration. The world was made at the same moment as time itself, if indeed change and motion were created along with the world's creation, as the account of the first six or seven days strongly suggests. In those days, morning and evening are counted in sequence until, on the sixth day, everything God had made was complete, and on the seventh day His rest was marked in a way that is both mysterious and profound. What kind of days these actually were is extremely difficult, perhaps even impossible, for us to grasp, let alone to put into words.

We can see that our ordinary days have no evening without the setting of the sun, and no morning without its rising. Yet the first three days of creation passed without any sun at all, since Scripture tells us the sun was made on the fourth day. In the beginning, light was created by the word of God; God separated it from the darkness, calling the light Day and the darkness Night. But what kind of light this was, and by what recurring movement it produced evening and morning, lies beyond the reach of our senses. We cannot fully understand it, yet we must believe it without hesitation. It was either some form of physical light, whether emanating from the upper regions of the universe far beyond our sight or from the place where the sun would later be set, or the name "light" was used to signify the holy city itself, composed of holy angels and blessed spirits. This is the city the apostle describes when he writes, "Jerusalem which is above is our eternal mother in heaven," and again, "For you are all children of the light, and children of the day; we are not of the night, nor of darkness." In a certain sense, we can also speak fittingly of a morning and evening belonging to this kind of day. The knowledge a creature has of itself is, compared to the knowledge of the Creator, little more than twilight. It dawns and brightens into morning when the creature turns toward the praise and love of the Creator, and night never falls as long as the Creator is not abandoned in favor of love for the creature. Significantly, when Scripture recounts those days in sequence, it never uses the word "night." It never says "Night was," but rather "The evening and the morning were the first day," and the same holds for the second day and all the rest. The knowledge of created things considered on their own terms is, so to speak, paler and less vivid than when those same things are seen in the wisdom of God, as in the very art by which they were made. This is why evening is a more fitting image than night. And yet, as I said, morning returns whenever the creature returns to the praise and love of the Creator. When this happens through knowledge of itself, that is the first day; when through knowledge of the firmament, the name given to the sky stretched between the waters above and those below, that is the second day; when through knowledge of the earth, the sea, and everything that grows from the earth, that is the third day; when through knowledge of the greater and lesser lights and all the stars, that is the fourth day; when through knowledge of every creature that swims in the waters or flies through the air, that is the fifth day; and when through knowledge of every creature that lives on the earth, and of humanity itself, that is the sixth day.

When Scripture says that God rested on the seventh day from all His works and hallowed it, we should not picture this in any childish way, as though work were a burden to the One who "spoke and it was done" (speaking through an eternal, spiritual word, not an audible or passing one). God's rest, rather, signifies the rest of those who find their rest in Him, just as the joy of a house means the joy of those inside it who are rejoicing. The house itself doesn't produce the joy; something else does. And yet how much more fitting the expression becomes when the house itself, through its own beauty, actually makes its inhabitants glad. In that case, we're using not only the figure of speech in which the container stands for the thing contained (as when we say "the theaters applaud" or "the meadows low," meaning the people inside the one are applauding and the cattle in the other are lowing), but also the figure in which a cause is described as though it were the effect, as when a letter is called joyful because it brings joy to those who read it. It is entirely appropriate, then, that the sacred narrative says God rested, meaning by this that those who are in Him, and whom He brings to rest, do rest. The prophetic narrative also holds out this same promise to the people it addresses and for whom it was written: that they themselves, after those good works which God accomplishes in and through them, will enjoy eternal rest in Him, provided they have drawn near to God through faith in this life. This was prefigured for the ancient people of God by the rest commanded in their sabbath law, a subject I will address more fully in its proper place.

Since I have undertaken to write about the origin of the holy city, beginning with the holy angels who make up a large part of it (and indeed its more blessed part, since they have never been driven into exile), I will take up the task of explaining, with God's help and as far as seems appropriate, what the Scriptures say on this point. Where Scripture describes the creation of the world, it does not state plainly whether or when the angels were created. If they are mentioned at all, it is indirectly, either under the name of "heaven" in the phrase "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" (Gen 1:1), or perhaps under the name of "light," which I will address shortly. I cannot bring myself to believe they were left out entirely, because Scripture tells us that on the seventh day God rested from all the work He had done, and this same book opens with "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth," suggesting that God made nothing before heaven and earth. Since He began with the heavens and the earth, and the earth itself was at first, as Scripture adds, invisible and formless, with no light yet made and darkness covering the face of the deep (that is, covering an undefined chaos of earth and sea, for where there is no light there must be darkness), and since all things recorded as completed in six days were then created and arranged, how could the angels have been left out, as though they were not among the works from which God rested on the seventh day? The fact that the angels are God's work is not omitted from Scripture, even if it is not stated explicitly here. Elsewhere, however, Holy Scripture asserts it with complete clarity. In the Hymn of the Three Children in the Furnace, we read, "O all ye works of the Lord, bless ye the Lord," and among the works listed in detail afterward, the angels are named. And in the Psalms it is written: "Praise the Lord from the heavens, praise Him in the heights. Praise Him, all His angels; praise Him, all His hosts. Praise Him, sun and moon; praise Him, all ye stars of light. Praise Him, ye heaven of heavens, and ye waters that be above the heavens. Let them praise the name of the Lord, for He commanded, and they were created" (Ps 148:1-5). Here the angels are explicitly and by divine authority declared to have been made by God, for it is said of them among the other heavenly things, "He commanded, and they were created." Who, then, would be bold enough to claim that the angels were made after the six days of creation? If anyone is so reckless, that claim is refuted by a passage of equal authority, where God says, "When the stars were made, the angels praised me with a loud voice" (Job 38:7). The angels therefore existed before the stars, and the stars were made on the fourth day. Should we then say the angels were made on the third day? Certainly not, for we know what was made that day: the earth was separated from the water, each element took its own distinct form, and the earth brought forth everything that grows on it. On the second day, then? Not that either, for on the second day the firmament was made between the waters above and below, and was called "Heaven," and it was within that firmament that the stars were placed on the fourth day. There is no question, then, that if the angels are included among God's works during these six days, they are that light which was called "Day," whose unity Scripture marks by calling that day not the "first day" but "one day." The second day, the third, and the rest are not separate days in kind; rather, the same "one" day is repeated to complete the number six or seven, so that both God's works and His rest might be known. For when God said, "Let there be light, and there was light" (Gen 1:3), if we are right to understand in this light the creation of the angels, then they were certainly created as participants in the eternal light that is the unchangeable Wisdom of God, through whom all things were made, and whom we call the only-begotten Son of God. Being illumined by the Light that created them, they themselves became light and were called "Day," sharing in that unchangeable Light and Day who is the Word of God, through whom both they and everything else were made. "The true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world" (John 1:9), this same Light illumines every pure angel, so that he is light not in himself but in God. If an angel turns away from that Light, he becomes impure, as are all those called unclean spirits, who are no longer light in the Lord but darkness in themselves, cut off from participation in the eternal Light. For evil has no positive nature of its own; it is simply the name we give to the absence of good.

There is, then, a good that is uniquely simple and therefore uniquely unchangeable, and that good is God. All other good things have been created by this Good, but they are not simple, and therefore not unchangeable. "Created," I say, meaning made, not begotten. For what is begotten of the simple Good is itself simple, and is the same as that Good. These two we call the Father and the Son; and both together with the Holy Spirit are one God. The title "Holy" is, in Scripture, particularly associated with the Spirit. He is distinct from the Father and the Son, being neither the one nor the other. I say "distinct," not "a different thing," because He is equally with them the simple Good, unchangeable and co-eternal. This Trinity is one God, and no less simple for being a Trinity. We do not say that the nature of the good is simple because the Father alone possesses it, or the Son alone, or the Holy Spirit alone. Nor do we say, as the Sabellian heretics claimed, that the Trinity is a Trinity in name only, with no real distinction of persons. Rather, we call it simple because it is what it has, with the sole exception of the relations between the persons. Regarding those relations, it is true that the Father has a Son, yet is not Himself the Son; and the Son has a Father, yet is not Himself the Father. But considered in Himself, apart from His relation to the others, each person is what He has. He is in Himself living, for He has life, and He is Himself the very Life He possesses.

This is why the nature of the Trinity is called simple: it possesses nothing that it can lose, and it is not one thing while its contents are another, the way a cup differs from the liquid inside it, or a body from its color, or the air from the light and heat it carries, or a mind from its wisdom. None of these things actually *is* what it *has*. The cup is not the liquid, the body is not its color, the air is not the light and heat, and the mind is not its wisdom. Because of this separation, each of these things can be stripped of what it holds and transformed into different qualities and states: the cup can be emptied, the body can lose its color, the air can go dark, and the mind can grow foolish. The incorruptible body promised to the saints at the resurrection cannot, of course, lose its quality of incorruption; yet even there, the bodily substance and the quality of incorruption are not the same thing. Incorruption resides fully in each individual part, no greater in one part than in another, since no part is more incorruptible than any other. The body itself is greater as a whole than in any single part, and one part may be larger than another, yet the larger part is no more incorruptible than the smaller. The body, then, which is not entirely itself in each of its parts, is one thing; incorruptibility, which is complete throughout, is another. Every part of an incorruptible body, however unequal to the others in size or form, is equally incorrupt. The hand, for example, is not more incorrupt than the finger simply because it is larger; though the finger and the hand are unequal in size, their incorruptibility is equal. So while incorruptibility is inseparable from an incorruptible body, the substance of the body remains one thing and the quality of incorruption remains another. The body, therefore, is not the same as what it possesses. The soul itself, even though it will always be wise (as it will be eternally once redeemed), will be so only by participating in the unchangeable wisdom of God, which the soul itself is not. Even if the air were never stripped of the light diffused through it, that would not make the air and the light the same thing. I am not suggesting that the soul is air, as some have supposed who could not conceive of a spiritual nature; but despite all the differences between them, there is a kind of likeness that makes the comparison useful. Just as the immaterial soul is illumined by the immaterial light of God's simple wisdom, so the material air is lit up by material light; and just as the air, when that light is taken away, becomes dark (since material darkness is nothing other than air without light), so the soul, when deprived of the light of wisdom, falls into darkness.

According to this, then, the things that are essentially and truly divine are called simple because in them quality and substance are identical. They are divine, wise, and blessed in themselves, requiring nothing from outside to complete them. In Holy Scripture, the Spirit of wisdom is called "manifold" because it contains many things within itself; but what it contains, it also is, and being one, it is all these things at once. There are not many wisdoms, but one, in which lie untold and infinite treasures of intellectual reality, containing all the invisible and unchangeable reasons behind the visible and changeable things that were created through it. For God made nothing without knowing it; not even a human craftsman can be said to work in ignorance. But if He knew everything He made, then He made only those things He had already known. From this flows a striking but undeniable conclusion: this world could not be known to us unless it existed, but it could not have existed unless it had first been known to God.

And since this is the case, the spirits we call angels were never at any point, or in any sense, darkness. From the moment they were created, they were made light. Yet they were not created merely to exist and live in whatever way they pleased; they were illuminated so that they might live wisely and blessedly. Some of them turned away from that light and never attained the wise and blessed life, which is certainly eternal and accompanied by a sure confidence in its own eternity. They still possess a life of reason, but it is darkened by folly, and this they cannot lose even if they wished to. Yet who can say with any certainty how much they shared in that wisdom before they fell? And how could we claim they participated in it equally with those who, through that same wisdom, are truly and fully blessed, resting in a certain knowledge of eternal happiness? If they had shared equally in that true knowledge, then the evil angels would have remained eternally blessed alongside the good, since they would have had the same confident expectation of it. For however long a life may be, it cannot truly be called eternal if it is destined to end. It is called life insofar as it is lived, but eternal only because it has no end. Therefore, while not everything eternal is blessed (hell-fire, after all, is eternal), if no life can be truly and perfectly blessed unless it is eternal, then the life of those fallen angels was not blessed, because it was doomed to end and therefore was not eternal, whether they knew it or not. In one case, fear prevented blessedness; in the other, ignorance did. And even if their ignorance was not so complete as to give them an entirely false expectation, but left them wavering in uncertainty about whether their good would last forever or eventually come to an end, that very doubt about so momentous a destiny was incompatible with the fullness of blessedness we believe the holy angels enjoyed. We do not restrict the word "blessedness" so narrowly as to apply it to God alone, though He is certainly so truly blessed that no greater blessedness is conceivable; and compared to His blessedness, what is that of the angels, even when they are, according to their own capacity, perfectly blessed?

The angels are not the only members of the rational and intellectual creation we call blessed. Who would dare to deny that the first humans in Paradise were blessed before they sinned? Yes, they were uncertain how long their blessedness would last, and whether it would be eternal (though eternal it would have been, had they not sinned). Even now, we quite reasonably call those people blessed whom we see living righteous and holy lives in hope of immortality, people who carry no agonizing guilt of conscience and who readily receive God's forgiveness for the ordinary failings of this life. These people know with certainty that they will be rewarded if they persevere, yet they cannot be certain that they will actually persevere. After all, what person can know that he will hold on to the end, growing in grace, unless God Himself has revealed it to him? For in His just and mysterious judgment, God deceives no one, yet He discloses this particular assurance to very few. So in terms of present comfort, the first man in Paradise was more blessed than any righteous person living in this uncertain world. But when it comes to hope for the future, consider the person who doesn't merely suppose but knows with certainty that he will enjoy the most high God forever, in the company of angels, beyond the reach of all evil. That person, no matter what physical suffering he endures, is more blessed than Adam was, even in the great happiness of Paradise, where his ultimate fate remained unknown to him.

From all this, it becomes clear that the happiness an intelligent being rightly seeks comes from two things working together: the uninterrupted enjoyment of the unchangeable good, which is God, and the certain knowledge that this enjoyment will last forever. We rightly believe this is the condition of the angels of light. As for the fallen angels, reason compels us to conclude that they did not enjoy this true happiness even before they sinned, since they lost the light through their own fault. Yet if they existed for any length of time before their fall, we must grant them some form of happiness, even if it lacked the assurance of permanence. Or, if it seems difficult to believe that when the angels were created, some were left uncertain about whether they would persevere or fall while others were fully assured of eternal happiness, and if it seems hard to accept that they were not all on equal footing from the beginning until those who are now evil willfully turned away from the light of goodness, then it is far harder still to believe that the holy angels are now uncertain about their eternal happiness and know less about themselves than we have been able to learn about them from Scripture. What Catholic Christian doesn't know that no new devil will ever arise among the good angels, just as he knows that the present devil will never return to the fellowship of the good? The gospel promises the saints and the faithful that they will be equal to the angels of God, and it is also promised that they will "go away into life eternal." But if we can be certain we will never fall from eternal happiness while the angels cannot, then we would not be their equals but their superiors. Since the truth never deceives, and since we will be their equals, the angels must be certain of their happiness. And because the evil angels could not have had that certainty, since their happiness was destined to end, it follows either that the angels were never truly equal, or that if they were equal, the good angels received assurance of their eternal happiness after the others fell. Unless, perhaps, someone argues that the Lord's words about the devil, "He was a murderer from the beginning, and did not abide in the truth" (John 8:44), should be understood to mean not only that he was a murderer from the beginning of the human race, when man was created as someone he could destroy through deception, but also that he never abided in the truth from the moment of his own creation. On this reading, he was never blessed alongside the holy angels at all; instead, he refused to submit to his Creator, swelled with pride as though he ruled some private domain of his own, and was thus both deceived and deceiving. For the dominion of the Almighty cannot be escaped. Whoever refuses to submit humbly to reality as it is will proudly pretend otherwise, and will only end up mocking himself with a fiction. This makes the words of the blessed Apostle John intelligible: "The devil sins from the beginning" (1 John 3:8), meaning that from the moment of his creation he refused the righteousness that only a will humbly submitted to God can truly enjoy. Whoever holds this view at least parts ways with the heretical Manichees and with any other destructive sect that supposes the devil derived his nature from some opposing evil principle. These people are so thoroughly misled that, even though they accept the authority of the Gospels alongside us, they fail to notice that the Lord did not say "the devil was by nature a stranger to the truth," but rather "the devil did not abide in the truth" (John 8:44), by which He meant us to understand that the devil had fallen away from a truth he once possessed. Had he remained in it, he would have shared in it and continued in happiness alongside the holy angels.

It is as though our Lord anticipated the question of why the devil did not remain in the truth, and answered it directly: "because the truth is not in him." Of course, the truth would have been in him if he had remained in it. The phrasing here is unusual, however. As the sentence stands, "He abode not in the truth, because the truth is not in him," it sounds as if the absence of truth in him caused his departure from it, when in fact the reverse is true: his departure from the truth is what caused the truth to be absent from him. We find the same kind of construction in the psalm: "I have called upon Thee, for Thou hast heard me, O God" (Ps 17:6), where we might expect the order to be reversed, "Thou hast heard me, O God, for I have called upon Thee." But after saying "I have called," the psalmist, as if anticipating a skeptic who demands proof, demonstrates the sincerity and urgency of his prayer by pointing to its result, God's answer. The logic runs: the proof that I truly prayed is that You heard me.

When John says that "the devil sinned from the beginning," those who take this to mean the devil was created with a sinful nature have misread it entirely. If sin is built into a creature's nature, it isn't really sin at all. And how do such interpreters handle the prophetic evidence? Isaiah, speaking of the devil through the figure of the king of Babylon, writes, "How art thou fallen, O Lucifer, son of the morning!" (Isa 14:12). Ezekiel says, "Thou hast been in Eden, the garden of God; every precious stone was thy covering" (Ezek 28:13), which clearly implies a time when the devil existed without sin. A few lines later, the point is made even more explicitly: "Thou wast perfect in thy ways" (Ezek 28:15). If these passages can't reasonably be read any other way, then we must understand the statement "He abode not in the truth" (John 8:44) to mean that he was once in the truth but chose not to remain there. As for "the devil sinned from the beginning," this doesn't mean he sinned from the first moment of his existence; it means he sinned from the beginning of his sinning, that is, from the moment his pride first led him into transgression. There is also a passage in Job where the devil is the subject: "This is the beginning of the creation of God, which He made to be a sport to His angels" (Job 40:19), which echoes the psalm where it says, "There is that dragon which Thou hast made to be a sport therein" (Ps 104:26). But neither of these passages should lead us to conclude that the devil was originally created to be the angels' plaything. Rather, this became his punishment after he sinned. His origin, then, is the work of God, because there is no creature in existence, not even the smallest and most insignificant of the beasts, that was not made by Him from whom all measure, all form, and all order proceed, and without whom nothing can be planned or conceived. How much more, then, must this angelic nature, which surpasses in dignity everything else He has made, be the handiwork of the Most High?

Among all things that exist, and that are not of the essence of God the Creator, those with life rank above those without it; those capable of reproduction, or even of desire, rank above those lacking such capacities. Among living things, those with sensation rank higher than those without it, just as animals rank above trees. Among sentient creatures, those with intelligence rank above those without it, as humans rank above cattle. And among intelligent beings, the immortal, such as angels, rank above the mortal, such as humans. These are the gradations according to the natural order. But when it comes to the practical value each person finds in a thing, standards of worth vary considerably, so much so that we often prefer certain things without sensation to certain sentient beings. This preference can run so strong that, if we had the power, we would remove the latter from existence entirely, whether because we don't understand their place in the natural order, or because, understanding it perfectly well, we sacrifice it to our own convenience. Who, for instance, would not rather have bread in his house than mice, or gold than fleas? There is little reason to be surprised by this, given that even when humans themselves are being valued (and human nature is certainly of the highest dignity), a horse is often worth more than a slave, and a jewel more than a servant girl. The reasoning of someone contemplating nature therefore produces very different judgments from those driven by the needs of the poor or the appetites of the self-indulgent. The contemplative mind asks what value a thing holds in the scale of creation; necessity asks only how well it meets an immediate need. Reason seeks what the light of the mind will recognize as true, while pleasure seeks whatever pleasantly stimulates the bodily senses. But in rational natures, the weight of will and love carries such consequence that, although angels rank above humans in the natural order, good humans are, by the scale of justice, of greater worth than wicked angels.

When Scripture says, "This is the beginning of God's handiwork," we should understand this as referring to the devil's nature, not his wickedness. Without question, wickedness can only be a flaw in something whose nature was originally uncorrupted. Vice is so fundamentally opposed to nature that it cannot help but damage it. This means that turning away from God would not even count as a vice unless the nature in question was originally meant to remain with God. In this sense, even a wicked will serves as powerful evidence of the goodness of the nature it has corrupted. God is the supremely good Creator of good natures, but He is also the perfectly just Ruler over evil wills; so while evil beings misuse good natures, God turns even evil wills to good purpose. Accordingly, He caused the devil (good by God's creation, wicked by his own choice) to be cast down from his high position and made a spectacle for His angels. In other words, God turned the devil's temptations into something that ultimately benefits the very people the devil intends to harm. God was certainly not ignorant of the devil's future malice when He created him, and He foresaw the good He would bring out of that evil. This is why the psalm says, "This leviathan whom You have made to be a sport therein" (Ps 104:26): so that we can see that even while God in His goodness created the devil as a good being, He had already foreseen and arranged how He would make use of him once he turned wicked.

God would never have created any being, whether angel or human, whose future wickedness He foreknew, unless He had equally known how to turn that wickedness to good use on behalf of the righteous, thereby adorning the course of the ages like a magnificent poem enriched by antitheses. Antitheses, after all, are among the most elegant ornaments of speech. In Latin they might be called "oppositions," or more precisely "contrapositions," though that second term isn't commonly used among us, even though Latin and every other language make use of the same rhetorical device. The Apostle Paul employs antithesis with particular grace in his Second Epistle to the Corinthians, where he writes: "By the armour of righteousness on the right hand and on the left, by honour and dishonour, by evil report and good report: as deceivers, and yet true; as unknown, and yet well known; as dying, and, behold, we live; as chastened, and not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing all things" (2 Cor 6:7-10). Just as these contrasts lend beauty to language, so the beauty of the world's unfolding history is achieved through the opposition of contraries, arranged by an eloquence that speaks not in words but in things themselves. This point is stated plainly in the book of Sirach: "Good is set against evil, and life against death: so is the sinner against the godly. So look upon all the works of the Most High, and these are two and two, one against another" (Sir 33:14-15).

The obscurity of divine Scripture does carry a genuine benefit: it generates many competing interpretations, each reader drawing out some fresh meaning from the text. Even so, whatever anyone claims an obscure passage means should either be confirmed by clear, observable facts or supported by other, less ambiguous texts. This obscurity proves useful in either of two ways: the true meaning of the author eventually emerges after many interpretations have been weighed and tested, or, even if that meaning stays hidden, the discussion itself brings other truths to light. It seems entirely consistent with the way God works, to my mind, if we understand that the angels were created when that first light came into being, and that the separation between the holy and the unclean angels took place when, as Scripture records, "God divided the light from the darkness; and God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night" (Gen 1:4-5). Only He could make that distinction, since He alone was able, even before they fell, to foreknow that they would fall and that, stripped of the light of truth, they would remain in the darkness of pride. As for the day and night we know from ordinary experience, He assigned the visible lights of heaven to mark that division: "Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven, to divide the day from the night" (Gen 1:14). And shortly after: "And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: the stars also. And God set them in the firmament of the heaven, to give light upon the earth, and to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness" (Gen 1:16-18). But the other division, the one between that light which is the holy company of angels shining with the illumination of truth, and that opposing darkness which is the corrupt spiritual condition of the angels who turned away from righteousness, only God Himself could make. The wickedness of those angels, rooted not in their nature but in their will, could not be hidden from Him or remain uncertain, even when it was still only a future possibility.

We must not move past this passage of Scripture without noting something important. When God said, "Let there be light, and there was light," the text immediately adds, "And God saw the light that it was good." But no such expression follows the statement that He separated the light from the darkness and called the light Day and the darkness Night. The reason is clear: God's seal of approval was not meant to rest on that darkness as it did on the light. When darkness is not itself the subject of disapproval, as when the heavenly bodies divide it from the visible light our eyes perceive, the statement that God saw it was good does appear, though only after the division is recorded, not before. The passage reads: "And God set them in the firmament of the heaven, to give light upon the earth, and to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good." He approved of both, because both were without fault. But where the text says, "Let there be light, and there was light; and God saw the light that it was good," and then continues, "and God divided the light from the darkness: and God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night," the phrase "And God saw that it was good" is conspicuously absent. Had it been included there, it would have designated both as good, when in fact one of them was evil, not by nature, but by its own choice. For that reason, only the light received the Creator's approval in that moment, while the angelic darkness, though it had been brought into being, was never endorsed.

What else could that repeated phrase, "And God saw that it was good," possibly mean, if not the approval of each work as it matched its original design, which is nothing less than the wisdom of God? God did not finish creating something and then discover, after the fact, that it was good. On the contrary, nothing would ever have been made if He had not already known it to be good before making it. So when He sees that something is good, something that would never have existed had He not already perceived its goodness before creating it, it becomes clear that He is not making a discovery. He is offering a lesson.

Plato was bold enough to claim that when the universe was completed, God was, as it were, filled with joy. Plato was not so foolish as to mean that God became more blessed because of the novelty of His creation; rather, he wanted to convey that the finished work met with its Maker's approval, just as it had when it was still only a design. This is not to say that God's knowledge operates in different modes, knowing things that don't yet exist in one way, things that currently exist in another, and things that have passed in yet another. He does not look ahead to the future, attend to the present, or look back on the past the way we do; His manner of knowing is entirely different, infinitely removed from our way of thinking. He does not move from one thought to the next in sequence. Instead, He beholds all things with absolute, unchanging clarity, so that while temporal things emerge as future, present, or past from our perspective, He grasps all of them together in His stable and eternal presence. Nor does He perceive in one way through sight and another through thought, since He is not composed of mind and body. His present knowledge does not differ from what it always was or always will be, because the shifts of time, past, present, and future, which alter our knowledge, do not affect His. He is one "with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning" (Jas 1:17). There is no progression from thought to thought in His mind, since His spiritual vision embraces everything He knows all at once. Just as He moves all temporal things without any movement that time can measure, He knows all times with a knowledge that time cannot measure. He therefore saw that what He had made was good at the very moment He saw that it was good to make it. When He saw it completed, His knowledge of it did not double or increase in any way, as though He had known it less fully before making it. He could not be the perfect craftsman He is if His knowledge were the kind that needed to be supplemented by the finished product. If the only purpose had been to tell us who made the light, it would have been enough to say, "God made the light." If the intent had also been to explain the means by which it was made, it would have been sufficient to say, "And God said, Let there be light, and there was light" (Gen 1:3), so that we would know not only that God made the world, but that He made it by His word. But because it was right that three essential truths about creation be conveyed to us, namely who made it, by what means, and for what reason, it is written: "God said, Let there be light, and there was light. And God saw the light that it was good" (Gen 1:3-4). If we ask who made it, the answer is God. If we ask by what means, He spoke, and it was. If we ask why He made it, the answer is that it was good. There is no author more excellent than God, no power more effective than the word of God, and no better reason for creation than that good things should be made by a good God. Plato himself identified this as the most compelling reason for the creation of the world: that a good God would produce good works. Whether he arrived at this by reading the relevant texts, by learning from those who had read them, by the penetrating insight of his genius working from visible, created things toward spiritual and invisible realities, or by instruction from those who had already discerned these truths, we cannot say with certainty.

Some heretics have failed to recognize the goodness of God as the cause of a good creation, a cause so just and fitting that, when weighed carefully and with reverence, it resolves every controversy about the origin of the world. They reject it because there are things in the world, such as fire, frost, and wild beasts, that seem hostile to our frail and thin-blooded mortal flesh, which is currently under just punishment. What they fail to see is how admirable these things are in their proper settings, how excellent they are in their own natures, how beautifully they fit within the rest of creation, and how much they contribute to the beauty of the whole, the way individual citizens contribute to a commonwealth. These things are even useful to us, provided we understand how to use them rightly. Even poisons, which kill when used carelessly, become healing medicines when applied according to their proper qualities and purpose. Conversely, things that bring us pleasure, such as food, drink, and sunlight, prove harmful when used in excess or at the wrong time. Divine providence, then, is urging us not to condemn things foolishly, but to investigate their usefulness with care. Where our minds fall short or our understanding fails, we should trust that a purpose exists, even if it's hidden, just as we've discovered hidden purposes in other things we nearly overlooked. The concealment of a thing's usefulness is itself either an exercise in humility or a check on our pride. No nature is evil in itself; "evil" is simply a name for the absence of good. From earthly things to heavenly ones, from the visible to the invisible, some things are better than others, and this inequality exists precisely so that everything can exist at all. God is as great a craftsman in small things as He is in great ones. Small things should not be measured by their own size, which is negligible, but by the wisdom of their Designer. Consider the visible appearance of a man: if one eyebrow is shaved off, almost nothing is removed from the body in terms of mass, yet the loss to his beauty is considerable. Beauty doesn't come from bulk; it comes from the proportion and arrangement of the parts.

It's no great surprise, of course, that people who believe some evil nature was generated and spread by an opposing principle of its own refuse to accept that a good God created a good world. They believe God was driven to create out of urgent necessity, compelled to push back against an evil that was attacking Him, and that He mixed His own good nature with evil in order to restrain and overcome it. According to this view, His nature was shamefully polluted, cruelly oppressed, and held captive, and He labors to cleanse and free it, yet despite all His efforts He never fully succeeds. Whatever portion of His nature cannot be purified from that corruption is then said to serve as a prison and chain for the defeated and imprisoned enemy. The Manicheans would not babble, or rather rave, in this way if they truly believed that God's nature is, as it actually is, unchangeable and absolutely incorruptible, and incapable of being harmed. And they would not rave this way if they also held, with the sober clarity of Christian teaching, that the soul, which is capable of being changed for the worse by its own will and corrupted by sin and thereby cut off from the light of eternal truth, is not a part of God, nor of the same nature as God, but is created by Him and is vastly different from its Creator.

It is far more surprising, however, that even some who share our belief in a single source of all things, and who agree that no non-divine nature can exist apart from that Creator, have refused to accept a reason for the world's creation that is both good and straightforward: namely, that a good God made it good, and that created things, being distinct from God and therefore lesser than Him, were nonetheless good because He made them. Instead, these thinkers argue that souls, though not parts of God but created by Him, sinned by turning away from God; that in proportion to their various sins they earned different degrees of descent from heaven to earth, along with different bodies serving as prisons; and that this is the world, and this is the reason it was created, not to produce good things, but to contain evil ones. Origen is rightly criticized for holding this view. In the books he titled *περὶ ἀρχῶν* (On First Principles), this is his position and his teaching. I cannot adequately express my astonishment that a man so learned and so deeply versed in the church's literature failed to notice, first of all, how sharply this contradicts the clear meaning of Scripture, which, in describing each of God's works, consistently adds, "And God saw that it was good," and, when all were finished, includes the words, "And God saw everything that He had made, and, behold, it was very good." Wasn't the intended meaning obvious? There was no other reason for the world's creation than that a good God should make good creatures. In this creation, had no one sinned, the world would have been filled and adorned with nothing but good natures throughout; and even though sin exists, it does not follow that everything is saturated with sin, since the vast majority of the heavenly inhabitants preserve the integrity of their nature. And the sinful will, though it disrupted the order of its own nature, did not thereby escape the laws of God, who justly orders all things toward good. Just as the beauty of a painting is enhanced by skillfully placed shadows, so the universe, to the eye trained to perceive it, is made more beautiful even by sinners, though when sinners are considered on their own terms, their corruption is a genuine and grievous flaw.

Second, Origen and all who share his view should have recognized a serious problem with their position. If the world was truly created so that souls could be assigned bodies as a form of punishment for their sins, with lighter and more ethereal bodies going to lesser sinners and heavier, more degraded bodies going to the worst offenders, then it would follow that devils, being the most wicked of all, should receive earthly bodies rather than even wicked human beings, since earthly bodies are the densest and least ethereal in existence. But the reality is quite the opposite, and this contrast exists precisely so we can see that the worth of souls cannot be judged by the nature of their bodies. The most wicked devil possesses an ethereal body, while humanity, sinful to be sure but far less so than the devil, received a body of clay even before the first sin was committed. And what could be more absurd than claiming that God did not design our sun to benefit the material creation, or to illuminate and enhance its beauty, and that He therefore created only one sun for this one world, but that it simply happened that only one soul had sinned in exactly the right degree to deserve being enclosed in such a body? Following that logic, if not one but two, or ten, or a hundred souls had sinned in the same way and to the same degree, this world would have a hundred suns. The reason there is only one sun, on this view, would have nothing to do with the wise foresight of the Creator arranging the safety and beauty of the material world, but would simply be a coincidence: only one soul happened to sin in precisely the way that merited such a body. Those who hold such opinions would do well to confine not souls, about which they clearly have no idea what they are saying, but themselves, lest they fall, as they would rightly deserve, very far from the truth. As for the three answers I previously recommended when questions arise about any created thing, namely who made it, by what means, and why, with the answers being God, through the Word, and because it was good: it remains genuinely uncertain whether the Trinity itself is mystically indicated here, that is, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, or whether there is some other sound reason for reading the passage that way. That question is open, and no one can be expected to explain everything in a single volume.

We believe, maintain, and faithfully proclaim that the Father begat the Word, that is, Wisdom, through whom all things were made: the only-begotten Son, one as the Father is one, eternal as the Father is eternal, and equally with the Father, supremely good. We also proclaim that the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of both Father and Son, consubstantial and co-eternal with both; and that this whole is a Trinity by reason of the distinctness of the persons, and one God by reason of the indivisible divine substance, and likewise one Almighty by reason of the indivisible omnipotence. Yet when we consider each person individually, each is rightly called God and Almighty; and when we speak of all three together, we do not say there are three Gods or three Almighties, but one God Almighty. Such is the indivisible unity of these Three, which requires precisely this way of speaking. Whether the Holy Spirit, who proceeds from the Father and the Son (both of whom are good), can properly be called the goodness of both because He is common to both, I will not presume to decide hastily. I would, however, be less hesitant to say that He is the holiness of both, not merely as a divine attribute, but as the divine substance itself, the third person of the Trinity. I am the more confident in saying this because, although the Father is a spirit and the Son is a spirit, and the Father is holy and the Son is holy, the third person is distinctively called the Holy Spirit, as though He were the substantial holiness that is consubstantial with the other two. But if divine goodness is nothing other than divine holiness, then it is a reasonable and careful inquiry, not a presumptuous intrusion, to ask whether this same Trinity is not hinted at in a kind of enigmatic language designed to stimulate our thinking, when Scripture tells us who made each creature, by what means, and for what purpose. It is the Father of the Word who said, "Let there be." What came into being when He spoke was made through the Word. And in the words "God saw that it was good," we are given a clear indication that God made what He made not out of necessity, nor to supply any lack, but solely from His own goodness, that is, because it was good. This is stated after the act of creation, so that there could be no doubt that what was made satisfied the goodness for the sake of which it was made. If we are right to understand that this goodness is the Holy Spirit, then the whole Trinity is revealed to us in the creation. Here, too, is the origin, the illumination, and the blessedness of the holy city above, among the holy angels. If we ask where it comes from, God created it; if we ask where its wisdom comes from, God illumined it; if we ask where its blessedness comes from, God is its joy. It has its form by subsisting in Him; its enlightenment by contemplating Him; its happiness by abiding in Him. It exists; it sees; it loves. In God's eternity is its life; in God's truth, its light; in God's goodness, its joy.

As best one can judge, this is the same reason philosophers aimed at a threefold division of knowledge, or rather, came to recognize that such a division already existed (since they discovered it rather than invented it). One part is called physical, another logical, and the third ethical. The Latin equivalents of these terms have since become standard in the writings of many authors, so that these divisions are known as natural, rational, and moral, which I touched on briefly in the eighth book. I don't mean to suggest that these philosophers, in proposing this threefold division, had any conscious thought of a Trinity in God, even though Plato is said to have been the first to discover and articulate this framework, and he did recognize that God alone could be the author of nature, the source of intelligence, and the kindler of the love by which life becomes good and blessed. What is certain, however, is that even though philosophers disagree about the nature of things, the proper method of investigating truth, and the highest good toward which all our actions should tend, all of their intellectual energy is spent on these three great questions. And while there is a bewildering diversity of opinion, with every thinker striving to establish his own view on each of these questions, not one of them doubts that nature has some cause, knowledge has some method, and life has some end and aim. There are also three things every craftsman must possess if he is to accomplish anything: nature, education, and practice. Nature is judged by capacity, education by knowledge, and practice by its results. I recognize that, strictly speaking, fruit is what one enjoys and use is what one employs as a means. The difference between them seems to be this: we are said to *enjoy* what delights us in itself, apart from any further end, and it is through such enjoyment that a blessed life is attained. The natural corresponds to nature, the rational to education, and the moral to practice. If we were ourselves the authors of our own nature, we would have generated knowledge within ourselves and would have no need to acquire it through education, that is, by learning it from others. Our love, too, proceeding from ourselves and returning to us, would be sufficient to make our lives blessed, requiring no enjoyment from outside ourselves. But as things actually stand, since our nature requires God as its author, it is certain that we must have Him as our teacher if we are to be wise, and Him as the one who dispenses spiritual sweetness to us if we are to be blessed.

We do recognize in ourselves the image of God, that is, of the supreme Trinity. This image is not equal to God, and in fact falls far short of Him: it is neither co-eternal with Him nor, to put it plainly, of the same substance as Him. Yet it stands closer to Him in nature than anything else He has made, and it is destined to be restored so that it may resemble Him more fully still. For we exist, we know that we exist, and we take delight in our existence and in that knowledge. What's more, none of these three things is disturbed by any convincing illusion. We don't arrive at them through the bodily senses the way we perceive the world around us: colors through sight, sounds through hearing, smells through smell, tastes through taste, hard and soft things through touch. With all those sensory objects, what we actually hold in the mind and memory are images resembling them, not the things themselves, and it is those images that stir our desire for the real objects. But without any deceptive images or phantoms, I am absolutely certain that I exist, that I know, and that I delight in both. On these truths, I have no fear whatsoever of the Academic philosophers who ask, "But what if you are deceived?" For if I am deceived, I exist. A being that does not exist cannot be deceived, and the very fact that I can be deceived proves that I am. Since I exist even if I am deceived, how can I be deceived about believing that I exist? It is certain that I exist precisely because I can be deceived. Therefore, even as the one being deceived, I would still be; and so I am not deceived in knowing that I exist. It follows that I am not deceived in knowing that I know, either. Just as I know that I exist, I know that I know. And when I love these two things, I add a third to them: my love itself, which carries equal weight. I am not deceived about loving, because I am not deceived about the things I love. And even if those things were false, it would still be true that I loved false things. After all, how could I rightly be blamed and told not to love false things, if it were itself false that I loved them? But since these things are true and real, who can doubt that the love of them, when it arises, is equally true and real? Finally, just as there is no one who does not wish to be happy, there is no one who does not wish to exist. For how could anyone be happy if he were nothing at all?

The very fact of existing carries such a natural appeal that even miserable people are, for no other reason, unwilling to perish. When they feel the weight of their wretchedness, they don't wish to be wiped out of existence; they wish their misery would be. Consider those who are utterly wretched by any measure, people regarded as such not only by wise men who recognize their foolishness, but also by those who count themselves fortunate and pity the wretched for being poor and destitute. If someone were to offer these people an immortality in which their misery would never end, and then offered them the alternative of being annihilated entirely, existing nowhere and in no condition whatsoever, they would joyfully, even eagerly, choose to exist forever in that same misery rather than not exist at all. The familiar behavior of such people proves this point. When we see that they fear death and will endure great misfortune rather than end it by dying, isn't it obvious how deeply nature recoils from annihilation? And when they know death is coming, they beg as a great favor to be allowed a little longer in that same misery, just to delay the end. In doing so, they prove beyond any doubt how gladly they would accept immortality, even one that guaranteed them endless suffering. And what of all the irrational animals, creatures incapable of such reasoning, from the largest dragons down to the smallest worms? Don't they all testify to their desire to exist by fleeing death through every movement available to them? Even plants and shrubs, which lack the kind of life that would let them flee destruction through visible movement, still strive in their own way to preserve their existence: they root themselves ever deeper into the earth to draw nourishment, and they push healthy branches upward toward the sky. And finally, even lifeless bodies, which have neither sensation nor the capacity for growth, still seek their natural place, whether rising toward the air, sinking into the depths, or settling into some middle position, all so that they may persist in the condition most suited to their nature.

How deeply human nature craves the knowledge of its own existence, and how fiercely it recoils from deception, becomes clear from a simple observation: every person would rather grieve with a sound mind than rejoice in madness. This remarkable instinct belongs to human beings alone among all living creatures. Some animals have sharper eyesight than we do for perceiving the physical world, yet they cannot reach that spiritual light by which our minds are somehow illuminated, enabling us to form sound judgments about all things. Our capacity for judgment is directly proportional to how fully we receive that light. The irrational animals, while lacking true knowledge, do possess something that resembles it; material things, by contrast, are called "sensible" not because they themselves have senses, but because they are the objects of our perception. Among plants, the processes of nourishment and reproduction bear some resemblance to the life of sensation. Yet both plants and all material things keep their causes hidden within their own nature, while their outward forms, which lend beauty to the visible structure of the world, are open to our senses, as though they wish to compensate for their own lack of knowledge by offering knowledge to us. We perceive them through our bodily senses, but we do not judge them by those senses alone. We possess another and far superior sense, belonging to the inner person, by which we discern what is just and what is unjust: the just through an intelligible idea, the unjust through the absence of one. This inner sense receives no assistance from sight, hearing, smell, taste, or any form of physical touch. Through it, I am certain both that I exist and that I know I exist; I love both of these things, and I am equally certain that I love them.

We have said enough, within the scope of this work, about these two things: our existence and our knowledge of it, how deeply we love them, and how even in lower creatures we find a kind of likeness to these things, though with significant differences. We have yet to address the love with which they are loved, and to ask whether that love itself is also loved. It clearly is, and here is the proof: when we rightly love other people, what we are really loving is the love within them, because a person is not truly called good simply for knowing what is good, but for loving it. Isn't it obvious, then, that we love in ourselves the very love with which we love whatever good we love? There is also a love with which we love what we should not love, and that misguided love is hated by anyone who loves the kind of love that is properly directed. Both can exist in the same person at once, and this tension is actually good for us, because it means the love that leads us toward a well-lived life can grow while the love that pulls us toward evil can diminish, until our whole life is fully healed and transformed into good. If we were animals, we would love the life of the flesh and the senses, and that would be enough for us; when things went well on that level, we would want nothing more. If we were trees, we couldn't love anything in the strict sense, yet we would seem to reach toward whatever might make us more abundantly and vigorously fruitful. If we were stones, or waves, or wind, or flame, or anything of that kind, we would lack both sensation and life, yet we would still possess a kind of pull toward our proper place and natural order. The weight of a body is, in a sense, its love: heavy things are carried downward, light things upward. Just as a body is moved by its weight, the spirit is moved by its love, wherever that love leads. But we are human beings, created in the image of our Creator, whose eternity is true and whose truth is eternal, whose love is eternal and true, and who is Himself the eternal, true, and adorable Trinity, without confusion and without separation. As we survey all the works He has established, we can detect something like His footprints, now more clearly and now less so, even in things beneath us, since those things could not so much as exist, take shape, or follow any ordering principle had they not been made by Him who supremely is, and is supremely good and supremely wise. Yet when we behold His image in ourselves, let us, like the younger son in the Gospel, come to our senses, rise, and return to Him from whom we departed through sin. There, our existence will know no death, our knowledge no error, our love no loss. For now, though we are certain we possess these three things (not on anyone else's testimony, but through our own direct awareness of them, seen with our own most truthful inner vision), we cannot know on our own how long they will last, whether they will ever cease, or where their good or bad use will ultimately lead us. So we look to others who can tell us these things, if we have not already found them. The question of how trustworthy those witnesses are will be addressed later, not here. In this book, let us continue as we have begun, with God's help, to speak of the city of God: not in its state of pilgrimage and mortality, but as it exists forever immortal in the heavens. That is, let us speak of the holy angels who remain faithful to God, who never were and never will be apostates, and between whom and those who abandoned eternal light and became darkness, God, as we have already noted, made a separation from the very beginning.

The holy angels come to know God not through spoken words, but through the direct presence of immutable truth to their souls, that is, through the only-begotten Word of God Himself. They know this Word, and the Father, and the Holy Spirit, and they understand that this Trinity is indivisible, that its three persons share one substance, and that there are not three Gods but one. Moreover, they know this more clearly than we know ourselves. In the same way, they know creation not by looking at it directly, but by the better path: through the wisdom of God, as though through the original design by which everything was made. As a result, they know themselves more truly in God than in themselves, though they possess this latter knowledge as well. They are created beings, after all, and therefore distinct from their Creator. In Him, their knowledge is like noon light; in themselves, it is more like twilight, as we explained earlier. There is a profound difference between knowing something through the design according to which it was made and knowing it simply as it stands on its own. The straightness of lines and the precision of geometric figures, for instance, are known one way when grasped in the mind and another way when drawn on paper. Justice is known one way in unchangeable truth and another way in the character of a just person. The same principle applies to everything else: the firmament dividing the waters above from those below, which was called heaven; the gathering of the lower waters and the uncovering of dry land; the growth of plants and trees; the creation of the sun, moon, and stars; the bringing forth of living creatures from the waters, including birds, fish, and the great sea monsters; and every creature that walks or creeps on the earth, including humanity itself, which surpasses all earthly life. All these things are known by the angels in one way through the Word of God, in whom they see the eternal causes and reasons according to which everything was made, and in another way by observing the created things themselves. The first kind of knowledge is clearer and deeper; the second is dimmer, touching more on the bare surface of the works than on the intention behind them. Yet when these works are turned toward the praise and adoration of the Creator, it is as though morning breaks across the minds of those who contemplate them.

Scripture records that God completed His works in six days (the same day repeated six times) because six is a perfect number. This doesn't mean God needed an extended period of time, as though He couldn't have created everything at once and then set it all in motion; rather, the perfection of the works is signified by the number six itself. Six is the first number that equals the sum of its own factors: its sixth part (one), its third part (two), and its half (three), which together add up to six. In this way of thinking about numbers, the "parts" of a number are those fractions that divide it evenly, such as a half, a third, or a fourth. For example, four is a part of nine, but not an aliquot part (that is, not an exact divisor); one is, because it is the ninth part; and three is, because it is the third part. Yet these two parts, one and three, fall well short of the total, nine. Similarly, in the number ten, four is a part but doesn't divide it evenly; one is an aliquot part, being a tenth; two is a fifth; and five is a half. But these three parts added together (one, two, and five) give us eight, not ten. With twelve, the situation reverses: the aliquot parts actually exceed the whole. Twelve has a twelfth (one), a sixth (two), a fourth (three), a third (four), and a half (six). Add those together and you get not twelve but sixteen. I have laid all this out to illustrate the perfection of the number six, which is, as I said, the first number that equals exactly the sum of its own factors, and it is in that number of days that God completed His work. We should not, therefore, dismiss the study of numbers. In many passages of Scripture, it proves genuinely valuable to the careful reader. It is not without reason that among God's praises we find the words, "You have ordered all things in number, and measure, and weight."

On the seventh day (that is, the same day repeated seven times, a number that is also perfect, though for a different reason), God's rest is described, and this is the first time we hear of a day being made holy. God did not choose to hallow this day through His works, but through His rest, which has no evening, because it is not a created thing. Known one way in the Word of God and another way in itself, it produces a twofold kind of knowledge: daylight and dusk, day and evening. Much more could be said about the perfection of the number seven, but this book is already long enough, and I'm afraid of looking like someone who seizes any excuse to show off a thin layer of learning in a way that's more childish than useful. I must speak with restraint and dignity, then, so that in chasing too eagerly after "number," I'm not accused of forgetting "weight" and "measure." Let it suffice to say here that three is the first whole odd number, four is the first whole even number, and seven is composed of these two. For this reason, seven is often used to stand for all numbers together, as in: "A just man falls seven times and rises again" (Prov 24:16), meaning that no matter how often he falls, he will not be destroyed (and this was meant to refer not to sins, but to the kinds of hardships that produce humility). Similarly, "Seven times a day will I praise You" (Ps 119:164) is expressed elsewhere as "I will bless the Lord at all times" (Ps 34:1). Many such examples appear throughout Scripture, in which the number seven is, as I said, commonly used to express wholeness or the completeness of something.

The Holy Spirit, of whom the Lord says, "He will teach you all truth," is represented by this number. In it lies the rest of God, the rest His people find in Him. Rest belongs to wholeness, that is, to perfect completeness, while labor belongs to the partial. And so we labor as long as we know only in part; "but when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away." Even our searching of the Scriptures themselves involves toil. But the holy angels, toward whose company and fellowship we long while enduring this weary pilgrimage, already dwell in their eternal home and enjoy both perfect clarity of knowledge and the fullness of rest. They help us without difficulty, because their spiritual movements are pure, free, and entirely without strain.

But if someone objects to our view and argues that the holy angels are not what is meant by "Let there be light, and there was light" (Gen 1:3); if he supposes or teaches that some material light was created at that moment, and that the angels were made not only before the firmament that divided the waters and was called "heaven," but even before the moment described in the words "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth" (Gen 1:1); if he further argues that the phrase "In the beginning" does not mean nothing existed before it (since the angels did), but rather that God made all things through His Wisdom or Word, who is called "the Beginning" in Scripture, just as Christ Himself told the Jews when they asked who He was (John 8:25): I will not press the argument. My main reason is that I find the greatest satisfaction in seeing the Trinity celebrated at the very opening of Genesis. When the text says "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth," this means the Father made them through the Son, as the psalm confirms: "How manifold are Your works, O Lord! In Wisdom have You made them all" (Ps 104:24). Then, a little further on, the Holy Spirit is fittingly brought into the picture as well. After we are told what kind of earth God first created, or what the formless mass of matter was that God, under the name of "heaven and earth," had prepared as the raw material of the world, as the next words describe: "And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep" (Gen 1:2), the mention of the Trinity is completed immediately: "And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters" (Gen 1:2). Let each reader interpret this as he sees fit, for it is so profound a passage that it naturally invites many opinions, none of them straying far from the rule of faith. At the same time, no one should doubt that the holy angels in their heavenly dwelling places are, though not co-eternal with God, nonetheless secure in the certain possession of eternal and true happiness. The Lord teaches that His little ones belong to their company, and not only says "They shall be equal to the angels of God" (Luke 20:36), but also reveals what blessed contemplation the angels themselves enjoy: "Take heed that you despise not one of these little ones, for I say to you that in heaven their angels do always behold the face of my Father who is in heaven" (Matt 18:10).

That certain angels sinned and were cast down to the lowest regions of this world, where they are held, as it were, in confinement until their final judgment, the Apostle Peter states plainly when he says that "God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to hell, and delivered them into chains of darkness to be reserved unto judgment." Who, then, can doubt that God, whether in foreknowledge or in action, separated these fallen angels from the rest? And who would dispute that the remaining angels are rightly called "light"? Even we who still live by faith, hoping for but not yet sharing in their equality, are already called "light" by the apostle: "For ye were sometimes darkness, but now are ye light in the Lord." As for the apostate angels, anyone who understands or believes them to be worse than unbelieving men knows well that they are called "darkness." Now, while the words "light" and "darkness" are to be taken in their literal sense in those passages of Genesis where it says "God said, Let there be light, and there was light" and "God divided the light from the darkness," we nonetheless see in them a picture of two communities of angels: one delighting in God, the other swollen with pride; one addressed by the words "Praise ye Him, all His angels," the other whose prince declares "All these things will I give Thee if Thou wilt fall down and worship me"; one burning with holy love for God, the other reeking with the corrupt desire for self-advancement. And since, as it is written, "God resisteth the proud, but giveth grace unto the humble," we may say further that one community dwells in the highest heaven while the other was cast out and now rages through the lower regions of the air; one rests in the calm brightness of true devotion, the other is storm-tossed by darkening desires; one tenderly ministers and justly avenges at God's pleasure, the other is driven by its own pride and seethes with the urge to dominate and destroy; one serves God's goodness to the full extent of its willing obedience, the other is restrained by God's power from inflicting all the harm it would wish; the former laughs at the latter when persecution is turned, against its will, to good ends, while the latter envies the former as it gathers in its pilgrims. These two angelic communities, then, are utterly unlike and opposed to one another: one good by nature and upright by will, the other good by nature but corrupted by will. As they are described more explicitly elsewhere in Scripture, so I believe they are represented in Genesis under the names of light and darkness. And even if the author of Genesis intended something different, our reflection on this obscure passage has not been wasted. Though we may not have uncovered his precise meaning, we have held to the rule of faith, which the faithful can verify from other passages of equal authority. For even if the material works of God are what Genesis is primarily describing, they clearly correspond to spiritual realities, so much so that Paul can write, "Ye are all the children of light, and the children of the day: we are not of the night, nor of darkness." If, on the other hand, the author of Genesis did see in these words what we see, then our discussion arrives at an even more satisfying conclusion: that this man of God, so profoundly and divinely wise, or rather the Spirit of God who through him recorded the works completed in six days, may well have included some reference to the angels, whether by the word "beginning" (since God made them first) or, more likely, because He made them in the only-begotten Word. Under the names "heaven and earth," the whole of creation is signified, either as divided into the spiritual and the material (which seems the more probable reading) or as the two great parts of the world containing all created things, so that creation is first presented as a whole and then its parts are laid out according to the sacred number of the days.

Some have supposed that the angelic hosts are somehow referred to under the name of "waters," and that this is what is meant by "Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters." On this reading, the waters above signify the angels, while those below represent either the visible waters, or the multitude of wicked angels, or the nations of humanity. If that interpretation is correct, then this passage tells us nothing about when the angels were created, only when they were separated. There have also been men foolish and wicked enough to deny that the waters were made by God at all, simply because nowhere in the text do we read, "God said, Let there be waters." By that same logic, they might say the same about the earth, since nowhere do we read, "God said, Let the earth be." But, they will say, it is written: "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth."

Yes, and the water is meant there too, since both are included in the same word. "The sea is His," as the psalm says, "and He made it; and His hands formed the dry land" (Ps 95:5). But those who interpret the waters above the skies as referring to angels run into a problem with the specific gravity of the elements: they worry that water, given its fluidity and weight, could not exist in the upper regions of the world. If they were to construct a human body according to their own principles, they would leave out any moist humors, or "phlegm" as the Greeks call it, which functions as the watery element within our bodies. Yet in God's actual design, the head is precisely where phlegm resides, and quite fittingly so. By their reasoning, however, this is absurd. If we didn't already know this to be true, and someone simply told us on the basis of Scripture that God had placed a moist, cold, and therefore heavy humor in the uppermost part of the human body, these self-appointed weighers of the world would refuse to believe it. And if confronted with the authority of Scripture, they would insist that the words must mean something else entirely. But if we were to work through every detail written in this divine book about the creation of the world, we would have far too much to say and would stray far from the purpose of this work. Having now said what seemed necessary about these two distinct and opposing communities of angels, in which we also find the origin of the two human communities we intend to discuss shortly, let us bring this book to a close.