The City of God: Book 12

The preceding book has already shown how the two cities first arose among the angels. Before I turn to the creation of man and trace how those same cities emerged within the race of rational mortals, I need to first establish, as clearly as I can, that it is entirely fitting to speak of a single society composed of both angels and men together. This means there are not four cities or societies (two belonging to the angels and two to humanity), but rather only two in total: one made up of the good and the other of the wicked, whether angel or human.

That the opposing tendencies of good and evil angels arose not from any difference in their nature or origin is beyond dispute. God, the good Author and Creator of all things, made both kinds of angels. The difference lies entirely in their wills and desires. Some stood firm in the good that all shared, namely God Himself, along with His eternity, truth, and love. Others, however, became captivated by their own power, as though they could be sufficient unto themselves. They turned away from that higher, blessed good which belonged to everyone and retreated into a private good of their own making. In doing so, they traded the noble dignity of eternity for the swollen pride of self-importance, exchanged certain truth for the cunning of vanity, and replaced unifying love with divisive rivalry. They became proud, deceived, and envious. The source of the good angels' blessedness, then, is their adherence to God. And the source of the others' misery follows naturally from the opposite: their refusal to adhere to God. So when we ask why the good angels are blessed, the right answer is that they cling to God; and when we ask why the fallen angels are miserable, the right answer is that they do not. From this it follows that there is no true good for any rational or intellectual creature except God alone. Not every creature is even capable of blessedness, since beasts, trees, stones, and things of that kind have no such capacity. But even those creatures that do have this capacity cannot achieve blessedness on their own, since they were created out of nothing and can only be blessed through the One who created them. They are blessed by possessing that whose loss would make them miserable. The One who is blessed not through another but through Himself, however, can never be miserable, because He can never lose Himself.

We hold, then, that there is no unchangeable good except the one, true, blessed God. The things He made are genuinely good, because they come from Him; yet they are mutable, because they were made not out of Him but out of nothing. They are not the supreme good, since God is a greater good, but those mutable things that can cling to the immutable good and thereby be blessed are very good indeed. He is so completely their good that without Him they cannot be anything but wretched. The other created things in the universe are not superior simply because they cannot be miserable. No one would argue that the other members of the body are better than the eyes because they cannot go blind. Just as a sentient nature, even one that feels pain, is superior to a stone that feels nothing, so a rational nature, even a wretched one, is more excellent than something that lacks reason and feeling entirely and therefore cannot experience misery at all. Given this, consider the nature that has been created so magnificently that, though mutable in itself, it can secure its own blessedness by clinging to the immutable good, the supreme God. Since that nature is not satisfied unless it is perfectly blessed, and cannot be perfectly blessed except in God, it follows plainly that for such a nature, failing to cling to God is a fault. And every fault damages the nature it belongs to, and is therefore contrary to that nature. The creature that cleaves to God differs from those who do not, not in nature, but in fault; and yet that very fault proves the nature itself to be noble and admirable. A nature is rightly praised precisely when its fault can be justly blamed, because we blame the fault only because it mars something praiseworthy. When we say that blindness is a defect of the eyes, we are confirming that sight belongs to the nature of the eyes; when we say that deafness is a defect of the ears, we are confirming that hearing belongs to their nature. In the same way, when we say it is a fault of the angelic creature that it does not cleave to God, we are declaring as plainly as possible that cleaving to God belongs to its nature. And who can adequately conceive or express what a glory it is to cleave to God: to live for Him, to draw wisdom from Him, to delight in Him, and to enjoy so great a good without death, error, or grief? Since every vice is an injury to the nature it corrupts, the very vice of the wicked angels, their departure from God, is itself sufficient proof that God created their nature so good that being without God is an injury to it.

This should be enough to prevent anyone from assuming, when we speak of the apostate angels, that they could have had a different nature drawn from some other origin apart from God. We can free ourselves from the great impiety of that error more readily and easily the more clearly we understand what God spoke through the angel when He sent Moses to the children of Israel: "I am that I am." Since God is the supreme existence, that is to say, He exists in the highest possible sense and is therefore unchangeable, the things He made He empowered to exist, but not to exist supremely as He does. To some He granted a fuller existence, to others a more limited one, and in this way He arranged the natures of all beings in a hierarchy of ranks. Just as the Latin word for wisdom (*sapientia*) derives from the word for discernment (*sapere*), so the word for essence (*essentia*) derives from the word for being (*esse*). This is admittedly a newer coinage that the old Latin writers did not use, but it has since become established in our language so that we have a proper equivalent for the Greek term for being (*ousia*), which *essentia* translates word for word.

It follows, then, that to the nature which exists supremely and which created everything else that exists, no nature stands in opposition except nonexistence itself. Nonexistence is the only true contrary of existence. There is therefore no being that stands contrary to God, the Supreme Being and Author of all beings whatsoever.

In Scripture, those who oppose God's rule are called His enemies, not because of their nature, but because of their moral corruption. They have no power to harm Him; they can only harm themselves. They are His enemies not through any ability to hurt Him, but through their willful opposition to Him. God is unchangeable and entirely beyond injury. Therefore, the corruption that drives those called His enemies to resist Him is not an evil against God but against themselves. And it is an evil to them precisely because it corrupts the good of their own nature. It is not nature, then, but vice that stands opposed to God. What is evil is contrary to what is good, and who would deny that God is the supreme good? Vice, therefore, stands against God as evil stands against good. Furthermore, the nature that vice corrupts is itself a good, and so vice is contrary to that good as well. But while vice opposes God only as evil opposes good, it opposes the nature it corrupts in two ways: as evil and as something genuinely harmful. No evil can harm God, but it can harm natures that are changeable and corruptible, natures that were, as the very existence of vice testifies, originally good. If they were not good, vice could not harm them at all. And how does vice harm them? By stripping away their integrity, beauty, health, virtue, and whatever other natural good vice tends to diminish or destroy. If there were no good to take away, no injury could be done, and therefore no vice could exist. A harmless vice is simply impossible. From this we can conclude that while vice cannot injure the unchangeable good, it can injure nothing except good, because it cannot exist where it causes no injury. We can state this plainly: vice cannot exist in the highest good, and it cannot exist at all except within something good. Things that are purely good can therefore exist in some circumstances; things that are purely evil never can. Even those natures corrupted by an evil will are, to the extent they are corrupted, evil, but to the extent they remain natures at all, they are good. And when a corrupted nature is punished, it retains not only the good of being a nature, but also the good of not going unpunished, since punishment is just, and everything just is a good. No one is punished for the nature they were born with, only for the vices they have chosen. Even a vice that has hardened through long habit into something resembling a second nature originally took root in the will. For we are speaking here of the vices of a nature that possesses the mental capacity for the kind of moral understanding that distinguishes what is just from what is unjust.

It is absurd to condemn the flaws of beasts, trees, and other mortal and changeable things that lack intelligence, sensation, or life, even when those flaws lead to their own decay. These creatures were given, by the will of their Creator, an existence suited to their purpose: passing away and making room for others, thereby securing the lowest form of beauty, the beauty of seasons, which has its own essential place in the world. Earthly things were never meant to equal heavenly ones, but neither were they, inferior as they are, to be left out of the universe entirely. In the places where such things belong, some perish to make way for others that are born in their place; the lesser yield to the greater, and what is overcome is transformed into the nature of what prevails. This is the appointed order of all things that pass away. We don't perceive the beauty of this order because our mortal frailty implicates us in only a fragment of it, leaving us unable to see the whole, within which even the parts that trouble us are fitted together with perfect harmony and precision. Where we cannot clearly perceive the wisdom of the Creator, we are rightly called to trust it, lest the vanity of human presumption lead us to find fault with the work of so great a Maker. At the same time, if we look carefully even at the flaws of earthly things, flaws that are neither chosen nor punitive, they seem to highlight the excellence of the natures themselves, all of which were originated and created by God. What pleases us in a given nature is precisely what we regret losing when a flaw destroys it, unless the natures themselves displease us, as often happens when they become harmful. In such cases, people judge them not by their nature but by their usefulness, as with the swarms of animals that punished the pride of the Egyptians. By that same logic, one could find fault with the sun itself, since certain criminals and debtors are sentenced by judges to be exposed to it. creatures bring glory to their Maker not by how convenient or inconvenient they are to us, but by what they are in themselves. Even the nature of eternal fire, punitive as it is for the condemned, is genuinely worthy of praise. What is more beautiful than fire as it flames, blazes, and shines? What is more useful than fire for warming, restoring, and cooking, even though nothing is more destructive than fire when it burns and consumes without restraint? The same thing, applied one way, destroys; applied appropriately, it benefits beyond measure. Who could begin to enumerate its uses throughout the whole world? We should not listen to those who praise the light of fire while complaining about its heat, judging it not by its nature but by their own comfort. They want to see by it without being burned by it. They forget that the very light they find so pleasant disagrees with and injures weak eyes, and that the heat they find disagreeable provides exactly the conditions some animals need to live and thrive.

All natures, then, simply by virtue of existing, possess their own rank, their own distinct form, and a kind of internal coherence. This makes them genuinely good. When they occupy the places assigned to them by the natural order, they maintain whatever kind of being they have received. Those things that were not made to last forever are changed for better or worse, adapting to the needs and movements of those other things to which the Creator's law has made them subordinate. In this way, divine providence directs everything toward the end that is built into the larger design governing the universe. Even when corruption destroys things that are temporary and perishable, bringing them to complete dissolution, it does not prevent them from producing whatever result they were meant to produce. Given all this, God, who exists in the highest and most complete sense, and who therefore created every being that does not share that supreme existence (since what was made from nothing could not be equal to Him, and in fact could not exist at all without Him), cannot rightly be blamed for the faults of His creatures. He deserves praise for the natures He has made.

Thus, the true cause of the good angels' blessedness turns out to be this: they hold fast to the One who exists in the fullest and most perfect sense. And if we ask what caused the bad angels' misery, the answer comes readily enough. They are miserable because they abandoned the One who supremely exists and turned inward toward themselves, who possess no such fullness of being. What else do we call this vice but pride? As Scripture says, "pride is the beginning of sin." They were unwilling to preserve their strength by remaining in God, and since their attachment to Him was precisely what gave them a richer existence, they diminished that existence by choosing themselves over Him. This was their first failure, their first impoverishment, the first crack in a nature that had not been created as the supreme being, but had found its happiness in enjoying the Supreme Being. By abandoning Him, that nature did not cease to exist altogether, but it became something lesser, a nature with a diminished existence, and therefore a miserable one.

If someone asks what was the efficient cause of an evil will, the answer is: there is none. What could possibly make a will bad, when it is the will itself that makes an action bad? The bad will is the cause of the bad action, but nothing is the efficient cause of the bad will. If something were its cause, that something either has a will or it doesn't. If it has a will, that will is either good or bad. If good, who could seriously argue that a good will makes another will bad? That would mean a good will is the cause of sin, which is absurd. On the other hand, if this hypothetical cause has a bad will, we need to ask what made it bad, and rather than regress indefinitely, we should ask directly: what made the *first* evil will bad? The first evil will cannot be one that was corrupted by some prior evil will; the first must be one that became evil without any other will causing it. If some earlier will caused it to become evil, then that earlier will was actually the first. But if someone replies, "Nothing made it evil; it always was evil," we must ask whether it existed within some nature. If not, it didn't exist at all. If it did exist within some nature, then it corrupted and damaged that nature, and in doing so, stripped it of good. Therefore, an evil will cannot exist within an already evil nature; it can only exist within a nature that is both good and capable of change, a nature that this corruption could actually harm. If it did no harm, it was no corruption at all, and the will containing it could not rightly be called evil. But if it did cause harm, it did so by taking away or diminishing good. There could not have been, as the suggestion implies, an eternally evil will within something that previously possessed a natural good, since the evil will could only function by corrupting and diminishing that good. If it was not eternal, then who made it? The only remaining suggestion is that something without a will caused the will to become evil. But then we must ask whether that something was superior, inferior, or equal to the will it supposedly corrupted. If superior, it is better than the will, so how could it lack a will entirely, let alone a good one? The same logic applies if it was equal; two things equally possessing a good will cannot produce an evil will in each other. That leaves only the possibility that what corrupted the will of the angelic nature that first sinned was something inferior and without a will. But even the most lowly, earthly thing is itself good, since it is a nature and a being with its own form and place within its own kind and order. How, then, can a good thing be the efficient cause of an evil will? How can good be the cause of evil? When a will abandons what is above itself and turns toward what is lower, it becomes evil, not because the lower thing is evil, but because the turning itself is wrong. It is not the inferior thing that made the will evil; the will made itself evil by wrongly and excessively desiring something inferior.

Consider two men who are alike in both body and character. They both see the same physical beauty. One is stirred by the sight to pursue an illicit desire, while the other firmly keeps his will in check. What accounts for the evil will in one and not the other? What produces it in the man who has it? Not the physical beauty, since it was equally visible to both and yet did not produce an evil will in both. Did the flesh of the one man generate the desire as he looked? Then why not the flesh of the other? Was it his disposition? Then why not the disposition of both, since we are assuming they were alike in body and soul? Should we say that one was prompted by a secret suggestion from an evil spirit? As if it were not by his own will that he consented to that suggestion and to whatever else enticed him. That consent, that evil will he brought to the evil influence pressing on him, what caused it? Rather than getting lost in the difficulty, let us put it plainly: if both men are tempted equally, and one yields while the other stands firm, what other explanation is there except that one is willing and the other unwilling to abandon chastity? And what causes that difference, in cases like the one we are describing where the temperament is identical? The same beauty was equally visible to both; the same hidden temptation pressed on both with equal force. No matter how carefully we examine the situation, we cannot find anything that caused the one man's will to become evil. If we say the man himself made his will evil, what was he before his will turned evil but a good nature created by God, who is the unchangeable good? Here are two men who, before the temptation, were alike in body and soul. One yielded to the tempter's persuasion; the other could not be persuaded to desire the beautiful body that stood equally before both their eyes. Do we say that the man who was successfully tempted corrupted his own will, given that he was certainly good before his will became bad? Then why did he do it? Was it because his will is a nature, or because it was made from nothing? We will find it is the latter. For if a nature is the cause of an evil will, we are left saying that evil arises from good, or that good is the cause of evil. And how can it be that a nature, good though capable of change, should produce any evil at all, meaning, should make the will itself wicked?

Don't look for an efficient cause of the evil will, because there isn't one. The evil will is not efficient but deficient: it is not the production of something but the absence of something. To fall away from that which supremely exists toward that which has less being is precisely what it means to begin having an evil will. Searching for the causes of these defections, which are, as I have said, not causes of production but causes of absence, is like trying to see darkness or hear silence. And yet we do know both of these things: darkness is known by the eye alone, and silence by the ear alone, but neither is known through any positive quality they possess. Both are known through the absence of such quality. So let no one ask me to explain what I know I don't know, unless he wants to learn how to be ignorant of something that simply cannot be known. Things that are known not through their presence but through their absence are known, if I may put it this way, by not knowing them, so that in knowing them we arrive at not-knowing. When the eye scans the objects around it, it encounters darkness only where sight begins to fail. In the same way, only the ear can perceive silence, and it perceives it only by the failure to hear. So too, the mind grasps intelligible forms by understanding them; but when those forms are deficient, it knows them by not knowing them. As the Scripture asks, "who can understand defects?" (Ps 19:12).

This much I know with certainty: the nature of God can never, in any place or in any way, be defective, while natures made from nothing can be. Yet even among these lesser natures, the more being they possess and the more good they produce (for in doing good they accomplish something real), the more they reflect efficient causes; but to the degree that they fall short in being and consequently do evil (for what else is their work but emptiness?), they reflect deficient causes. I also know that the will could not have become evil unless it had been willing to become so, and therefore its failures are justly punished, since they are not necessary but voluntary. For the will's failures are not movements toward evil things; they are themselves evil. That is to say, the will does not turn toward things that are naturally and inherently evil; rather, the turning itself is the evil, because it runs contrary to the order of nature and abandons what has supreme being in favor of what has less. Greed, for instance, is not a flaw in gold itself, but in the person who loves gold without restraint, to the ruin of justice, which should be held in incomparably higher regard. Likewise, indulgence is not the fault of beautiful and charming things, but of the heart that pursues sensual pleasure without discipline, neglecting temperance, which binds us to things more beautiful in their spiritual nature and more satisfying in their incorruptibility. Vanity, too, is not the fault of human praise, but of the soul that craves the applause of others and dismisses the voice of conscience. Pride is not the fault of the one who grants power, nor of power itself, but of the soul that is excessively in love with its own strength and contemptuous of a higher authority's more rightful rule. It follows, then, that whoever loves without restraint the good that any created nature possesses, even if he obtains it, becomes evil in the very act of pursuing that good, and miserable for having lost something greater.

There is no natural efficient cause, and if the expression is permitted, no essential cause, of the evil will. The evil will is itself the origin of evil in mutable spirits, through which the good of their nature is diminished and corrupted. The will becomes evil through nothing other than a turning away from God, and the cause of that turning away is itself deficient. But when it comes to the good will, we must be careful not to suggest that the good will of the good angels is uncreated and co-eternal with God, simply because we cannot identify an efficient cause for it. If the angels themselves were created, how could their good will be eternal? And if it was created, was it created alongside them, or did they exist for a time without it? If it was created alongside them, then it was clearly created by the same One who created them, and from the very moment of their creation they attached themselves to their Creator through the love He had placed within them. They remain separated from the company of the fallen angels because they held fast to that good will, while the others turned toward a different will, an evil one, precisely because it was a turning away from the good. And we should add: they would never have fallen away had they been unwilling to do so. But if the good angels existed for a time without a good will and then produced it in themselves without any involvement from God, it would follow that they made themselves better than He had made them. That idea must be rejected entirely. For without a good will, what were they but evil? Or if they were not evil, because they had neither an evil will nor a good one (since they had not yet turned away from something they had not yet begun to enjoy), then they were certainly not as good as they became once they possessed a good will. And if they could not make themselves better than He who is surpassed by no one in His work had made them, then clearly they could not have arrived at the good will that made them better without His help. Their good will led them not to turn inward toward themselves, whose existence was more limited, but to turn toward Him who supremely and fully is. United to Him, their own being was enlarged, and they lived wisely and blessedly through what He communicated to them. But what does this demonstrate, if not that their will, however good it may have been, would have remained helplessly longing for Him, had not the One who made their nature out of nothing, yet capable of enjoying Him, first stirred it to desire Him, then filled it with Himself, and so made it better?

Beyond this, we need to ask another question: when the good angels made their own will good, did they do so with or without will? If without, then it wasn't really their doing at all. If with, was that will good or bad? If it was bad, how could a bad will produce a good one? If it was already good, then they already possessed a good will. And who gave them that will in the first place, if not the One who created them with a good will, or with that pure love by which they cleaved to Him, simultaneously creating their nature and endowing it with grace in a single act? This reasoning compels us to believe that the holy angels never existed without a good will or the love of God. The angels who were created good but are now evil became so entirely through their own choice. Their good nature didn't make their will evil; only their voluntary turning away from good did that, because good is never the cause of evil. The cause of evil is a departure from good. These fallen angels, then, either received less of the grace of divine love than those who remained faithful, or, if both groups were created equally good, the ones who stood firm were more abundantly helped and reached such a height of blessedness that they became certain they could never fall from it, as we have already shown in the preceding book. We must therefore acknowledge, with all due praise to the Creator, that not only of holy men but also of the holy angels it can be said that "the love of God is poured into their hearts by the Holy Spirit, who is given to them" (Rom 5:5). And it is true not only of men but first and foremost of angels, as it is written, "it is good to draw near to God" (Ps 73:28). Those who share this good together have a holy fellowship both with Him whom they approach and with one another, and together they form one city of God: His living sacrifice and His living temple. I see now that, having spoken of the rise of this city among the angels, it is time to speak of the origin of that part of it which will one day be united with the immortal angels. This part is currently being gathered from among mortal human beings, and is either living out its pilgrimage on earth or, in the case of those who have already died, resting in the hidden places and dwellings of disembodied spirits. For from a single man, whom God created as the first, the entire human race descended, according to the faith of Holy Scripture, which rightly holds a wonderful authority among all nations throughout the world. Among its many true statements, it predicted through divine foresight that all nations would come to trust it.

Let us set aside the guesswork of those who don't actually know what they're talking about when they speak of the nature and origin of the human race. Some hold the same view about humanity that they hold about the world itself: that both have always existed. Apuleius, for instance, describes our race this way: "Individually they are mortal, but collectively, and as a race, they are immortal." When pressed on how, if humanity has always existed, they can defend the accuracy of their histories (histories that record who invented what, who first established the liberal arts and other disciplines, who first settled this or that region or island), they offer the following explanation. Most lands, if not all, were periodically devastated by fire and flood, reducing human populations to a fraction of their former size. From those survivors, the population gradually recovered to its previous numbers, and so a new beginning was made at intervals. The things that had been interrupted and wiped out by these catastrophes were simply renewed, even though they appeared to be entirely new inventions. As for humanity itself, they maintain that human beings could only ever come from other human beings. But in saying all this, they are telling us what they believe, not what they know.

They are also misled by those thoroughly dishonest documents that claim to record the history of many thousands of years, even though the sacred writings, when calculated carefully, show that fewer than 6,000 years have yet elapsed. Rather than spending many words exposing the groundlessness of these documents, with their vast invented timelines and wholly inadequate sources, let me point to a single example: the letter Alexander the Great wrote to his mother Olympias, in which he recounted what an Egyptian priest had told him, drawn from the sacred archives of Egypt, concerning kingdoms that the Greek historians also mention. In this letter, Alexander assigns a span of more than 5,000 years to the kingdom of Assyria, while Greek history counts only 1,300 years from the reign of Bel himself, whom both Greeks and Egyptians agree was the first king of Assyria. Then, for the empires of Persia and Macedonia, this Egyptian priest assigned more than 8,000 years, counting up to the time of Alexander himself; yet among the Greeks, only 485 years are assigned to the Macedonians up to Alexander's death, and only 233 years to the Persians, reckoning to the end of his conquests. The Greek figures, then, are far smaller than the Egyptian ones, and in fact, even if you tripled the Greek chronology, it would still fall short of the Egyptian. This is because the Egyptians are said to have once counted only four months to a year, meaning that one year by the fuller and more accurate reckoning now used among them, as among us, would have covered three of their old years. But even accounting for this, as I noted, the Greek chronology still does not align with the Egyptian. The Greek account therefore deserves greater trust, since it does not exceed the true timeline of the world as our own documents, which are genuinely sacred, record it. Furthermore, if this celebrated letter of Alexander diverges so sharply from any plausible and credible chronology, how much less should we trust those other documents, stuffed as they are with fabulous and invented antiquities, which their proponents would set against the authority of our well-known and divinely inspired scriptures? Those scriptures predicted that the whole world would come to believe them, and the whole world has indeed believed them. They also proved the truth of their account of the past by predicting future events, which have come to pass with remarkable precision.

Some thinkers, while rejecting the idea that this world is eternal, hold one of two positions: either that countless worlds exist alongside this one, or that this single world repeatedly dies and is reborn at fixed intervals, cycling through this process endlessly. Either way, they are forced to acknowledge that the human race must have come into existence without any prior human beings to produce it. They cannot fall back on the argument that some people might have survived the world's destruction, the way survivors might outlast a flood or a fire. That kind of reasoning works for thinkers who believe such catastrophes are only partial, leaving enough people alive to repopulate the earth. But for those who believe the entire world is destroyed and then reconstituted from its own raw material, the only consistent conclusion is that the human race itself was generated fresh from those elements, and that only afterward did human beings begin reproducing as all other animals do, through ordinary descent from parents.

As for those who constantly ask why humanity wasn't created during the countless ages of the infinitely extended past, and why we appeared so recently that, according to Scripture, fewer than 6,000 years have passed since our beginning, I would answer them on the question of human creation the same way I answered those who refuse to believe the world had a beginning rather than existing eternally. Even Plato himself stated this plainly, though some think his statement didn't reflect his true opinion. If they're troubled by how short the time since humanity's creation appears to be, and how few years our sources record, let them consider this: nothing that has a limit is truly long. All the ages of time are finite, and when set against endless eternity, they amount to very little, or really to nothing at all. So even if the time since humanity's creation were not five or six thousand years, but sixty or six hundred thousand, or sixty times that, or six hundred thousand times that, or any number too large to express, the same question could still be raised: why weren't we made sooner? The boundless past during which God refrained from creating humanity is so vast that no matter how enormous a span of time you compare it to, as long as that span has a definite end, the comparison is less meaningful than setting a single drop of water against the ocean that surrounds the entire globe. At least in that case, both things being compared are finite, one simply much smaller than the other. But when you compare any stretch of time that has a beginning and an end, however immense, against something that has no beginning at all, I'm not sure whether to call it infinitesimally small or simply nothing.

Consider it this way: take any finite period of time and subtract from its end the briefest possible moments, one by one, as you might count back through a person's life day by day from today to the day of their birth. No matter how many moments you must subtract, and the number may be beyond any word to express, that process of subtraction will eventually bring you to the beginning. But now try the same with a duration that has no beginning. Don't subtract brief moments one by one; subtract hours, days, months, years, or spans of years so immense that no mathematician could name them. Subtract stretches as large as the entire finite period you imagined consuming moment by moment, and do it not once or twice but endlessly, always. What do you accomplish? What does your subtraction achieve, when you can never arrive at a beginning that doesn't exist? This means that whatever question we raise now, after five thousand-odd years, our descendants could raise with equal curiosity after six hundred thousand years, assuming these generations of mortal human beings continue that long in their cycle of dying and being renewed, and assuming that posterity remains as limited and uncertain as we are. The same question could have been asked by those who lived before us, when humanity was even newer on the earth. The very first human being could have asked, on the day after his creation or even on the day itself, why he hadn't been created sooner. And no matter how much earlier or later he had been created, the debate over the beginning of this world's history would have presented exactly the same difficulties it presents now.

Some philosophers have found no better solution to this problem than to propose cycles of time, in which the order of nature endlessly renews and repeats itself. They argue that these cycles will recur without end, each one giving way to the next. They don't even agree among themselves, however, on whether a single permanent world passes through all these cycles, or whether the world periodically dies and is reborn, replaying the same sequence of events, so that past and future ultimately coincide. And from this endless revolving wheel, they spare not even the immortal soul that has achieved wisdom, condemning it to perpetual transmigration between illusory happiness and genuine suffering. For how can any state truly be called blessed if it carries no guarantee of lasting forever? Such a soul is either ignorant of the truth, blind to the misery drawing near, or it knows what's coming and lives in dread. If, on the other hand, the soul does pass into genuine happiness and leaves all misery behind for good, then something genuinely new has entered time, something that time will never bring to an end. Why, then, couldn't the same be true of the world itself? Why couldn't the same be true of humanity? By following the straight path of sound doctrine, we avoid the elaborate detours invented by thinkers who were themselves deceived and who went on to deceive others.

Some have also cited Solomon in support of these recurring cycles that supposedly restore all things to their original state. From Ecclesiastes they quote: "What is that which has been? It is that which shall be. And what is that which is done? It is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun. Who can speak and say, See, this is new? It has been already of old time, which was before us." Solomon said this either about the specific things he had just described, namely the succession of generations, the orbit of the sun, the course of rivers, or else about all kinds of creatures that are born and die. Men existed before us, exist alongside us, and will exist after us; and the same is true of every living thing and every plant. Even strange and irregular births, though each differs from the others and some are reported as one-of-a-kind, still resemble one another in a general sense, in that they are all remarkable and unusual. In this sense, such things have existed before, will exist again, and are nothing truly new under the sun. Some readers, however, take these words to mean that all things have already existed in the foreknowledge of God, and that this is why there is nothing new under the sun. But whatever interpretation one prefers, no true believer should take Solomon's words as support for those philosophical cycles in which the same periods and events repeat themselves endlessly. According to that theory, the philosopher Plato taught in the school at Athens known as the Academy, and countless ages before, at long but fixed intervals, this same Plato, the same school, and the same disciples all existed before, and will exist again through the countless cycles still to come. Far from us, I say, to believe any such thing. For Christ died for our sins once, and once only; and rising from the dead, He dies no more. "Death has no more dominion over Him" (Rom 6:9); and we ourselves, after the resurrection, will be "ever with the Lord" (1 Thess 4:17), to whom we now say, as the sacred psalmist teaches us: "Thou shalt keep us, O Lord, Thou shalt preserve us from this generation" (Ps 12:7).

And what follows is, I think, equally fitting: "The wicked walk *in a circle*" (Ps 12:8); not because their life will recur through these cycles, as these philosophers imagine, but because the path their false doctrine travels is one long, winding loop.

No wonder they find neither entrance nor exit, trapped as they are in these circles. They cannot grasp how the human race, and our mortal condition, came into being, nor how it will end, because they cannot penetrate the inscrutable wisdom of God. Though He Himself is eternal and without beginning, He caused time to have a beginning. He made humanity, which had not previously existed, within time, not through some sudden new resolution, but through His unchanging and eternal purpose. Who can search out the unfathomable depth of that purpose? Who can examine the inscrutable wisdom by which God, without any change of will, brought into being a creature who had never existed before, gave him a life in time, and multiplied the human race from a single individual? The Psalmist himself, after saying "Thou shalt keep us, O Lord, Thou shalt preserve us from this generation for ever" (Ps 12:7), and after rebuking those whose foolish and impious teaching denies the soul any eternal deliverance or blessedness, immediately adds, "The wicked walk in a circle" (Ps 12:8). Then, as if someone had pressed him with the question, "What do you believe, then? What do you know? Are we to suppose that it suddenly occurred to God to create humanity, having never done so across an eternal past, God to whom nothing new can occur and in whom there is no changeableness?" the Psalmist answers as though speaking directly to God: "According to the depth of Thy wisdom Thou hast multiplied the children of men" (Ps 12:8). Let people imagine whatever they like, he seems to say; let them speculate and debate to their hearts' content. But You have multiplied the children of men according to the depth of Your wisdom, which no one can fully comprehend. And this is indeed the depth of it: that God has always existed, and yet the humanity He had never made before, He chose to make in time, and did so without altering His design or His will in the slightest.

For my part, I dare not claim there was ever a time when the Lord God was not Lord, yet I should not doubt that humanity had no existence before time and was first created within time. But when I consider what God could have been Lord over if there had never been any creature, I pull back from making any firm claim, mindful of my own limitations and of what is written: "What man is he that can know the counsel of God? or who can think what the will of the Lord is? For the thoughts of mortal men are timid, and our devices are but uncertain. For the corruptible body presses down the soul, and the earthly tabernacle weighs down the mind that muses upon many things." I certainly do muse on many things in this earthly tabernacle, because among all those musings I cannot find the one thing that is true. So, among these many thoughts, suppose I say that there have always been creatures for Him to be Lord over, since He is and always has been Lord, but that these creatures have not always been the same ones, each generation giving way to the next. (I would not want to suggest that any creature is co-eternal with the Creator, a claim rejected by both faith and sound reason.) Even then, I must be careful not to stumble into the absurd and ignorant error of insisting that through these successions and changes mortal creatures have always existed, while immortal creatures only came into being with our own world, when the angels were created. This is true at least if the angels are what is meant by the light made first, or rather by the heaven spoken of in the words, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." The angels, at any rate, did not exist before they were created; to say they always existed would be to make them co-eternal with the Creator. On the other hand, if I say the angels were not created in time but existed before all time as the creatures over whom God, who has ever been sovereign, exercised His rule, then the question arises: if they were created before all time, could they, as creatures, have possibly existed always? One might reply: why not always, since whatever exists throughout all time can quite reasonably be said to exist "always"? And it is true enough that the angels have existed throughout all time, given that they were created even before time began, if indeed time began with the heavens and the angels existed before the heavens. Now, if time existed even before the heavenly bodies, not yet measured by hours, days, months, and years (for these divisions of time, which we commonly and properly call "times," clearly began with the movement of the heavenly bodies, which is why God said when He appointed them, "Let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and for years"), if, I say, time existed before the heavenly bodies by virtue of some changing movement whose successive phases could not coexist simultaneously, and if some such movement among the angels made time necessary and required that from their very creation they be subject to temporal change, then they have existed throughout all time, since time itself came into being alongside them. And who would dare say that what existed throughout all time did not exist always?

But if I make such a reply, someone will ask: how, then, are the angels not co-eternal with the Creator, if He and they have always existed? And how can they even be said to have been created, if we understand them to have always existed? What should we say to this? Can we say that both things are true: that they have always existed, since they have been present throughout all time (having been created alongside time, or time alongside them), and yet that they were also genuinely created? We can make this same argument about time itself. We will not deny that time was created, even though no one doubts that time has existed throughout all time. For if time had not existed throughout all time, then there was a time when there was no time. But no one, however foolish, could seriously claim that. We can reasonably say there was a time when Rome did not exist, a time when Jerusalem did not exist, a time when Abraham did not exist, a time when humanity did not exist, and so on. In short, if the world was not made at the very beginning of time but only after some time had passed, we can say there was a time when the world did not exist. But to say there was a time when time did not exist is just as absurd as saying there was a man when no man existed, or that this world existed when this world did not exist. If we are not referring to the same object, the form of expression can work: for instance, there was another man when this particular man did not yet exist. Similarly, we can reasonably say there was another time when this particular time did not exist; but not even the simplest mind could say there was a time when no time existed at all. So just as we say time was created, while also saying it has always existed (since it has been present throughout all time), it does not follow that if the angels have always existed, they were therefore not created. We say they have always existed because they have been present throughout all time; and we say they have been present throughout all time because time itself could not exist without them. Where there is no creature whose changing movements allow for succession, there can be no time at all. Consequently, even if the angels have always existed, they were still created; and their having always existed does not make them co-eternal with the Creator. He has always existed in unchangeable eternity, while they were created and are said to have always existed only because they have been present throughout all time, time itself being impossible without the creature. But time, which passes away through its changefulness, cannot be co-eternal with changeless eternity. And so, though the immortality of the angels does not pass away in time (it does not become past as though it were now gone, nor does it have a future as though it were not yet here), their movements, which form the very basis of time, do pass from future to past. They therefore cannot be co-eternal with the Creator, in whose movement we cannot say that something has been which is no longer, or that something will be which does not yet exist. If God has always been Lord, then He has always had creatures under His dominion: creatures not begotten of Him, but created by Him out of nothing; not co-eternal with Him, for He existed before them, though never without them, since He preceded them not by the passage of time but by His abiding eternity. But if I offer this reply to those who ask how He was always Creator and always Lord if there was not always a subject creation, or how creation was genuinely created rather than co-eternal with its Creator if it always existed, I fear I may be accused of recklessly asserting what I do not actually know, rather than teaching what I do know. I return, therefore, to what our Creator has seen fit for us to know; and those things He has permitted wiser minds to understand in this life, or has reserved for the perfected saints to know in the next, I freely acknowledge to be beyond my capacity. I have thought it worthwhile, however, to explore these questions without making definitive claims, so that readers may be warned against reckless speculation and may not assume themselves equal to every question. Let them instead strive to follow the sound counsel of the apostle, who says: "For I say, through the grace given to me, to every man among you, not to think of himself more highly than he should think; but to think soberly, according as God has dealt to every man the measure of faith" (Rom 12:3). For when an infant receives nourishment suited to its strength, it grows capable of taking more as it develops; but if its strength and capacity are overtaxed, it withers away instead of growing.

I admit that I don't know how many ages passed before the human race was created, yet I have no doubt that nothing created is co-eternal with the Creator. Even so, the apostle speaks of time as eternal, and he does so with reference not to the future but, more surprisingly, to the past. He writes: "In hope of eternal life, which God, who cannot lie, promised before the eternal times, but has in due times manifested His word" (Titus 1:2). Notice that he says eternal times existed in the past, yet those times were not co-eternal with God. And since God, before these eternal times, not only existed but also "promised" eternal life, which He then revealed at the proper moment, what else could that promise be but His word? For His word is eternal life itself. But then, how did He promise? The promise was made to human beings, and yet no human beings existed before eternal times.

Does this not mean that, within His own eternity and in His co-eternal Word, everything that would unfold in its appointed time was already predestined and fixed?

I have no doubt, either, that before the first man was created, there had never been a man at all. Not this same man returning through some unknowable cycle after countless revolutions, and not any other man of similar nature. I am not shaken from this belief by philosophical arguments, including the one considered most acute: the claim that the infinite cannot be grasped by any mode of knowledge. From this premise, the philosophers argue that God holds in His mind only finite conceptions of the finite things He makes. They then insist that His goodness could never have been idle, because if it were, we would have to attribute to Him a kind of awakening in time after an eternity of doing nothing, as though He grew dissatisfied with a laziness that had no beginning and therefore decided to start working. Given all this, they conclude that the same things must always repeat themselves, cycling back as they pass away, whether the world remains constant through all these changes (a world that has always existed and yet was created), or whether the world perpetually dies and renews itself through these revolutions. For if we point to a moment when God's works began, they say, it would appear that He regarded His eternal prior leisure as inert and worthless, and condemned and abandoned it as something displeasing to Himself. But if God is thought to have always been making temporal things, each different from the last, one after another, until He finally made man (whom He had never made before), then it might seem that He made man not through knowledge (since, on their view, no knowledge can grasp an infinite succession of creatures), but on a sudden impulse, a chance change of mind in the moment. On the other hand, they say, if we accept these cycles and suppose that the same temporal things repeat themselves while the world either stays the same through all its rotations or dies and is renewed, then God is credited with neither the sluggish ease of an eternal past nor a reckless and unforeseen act of creation. And if the same things are not repeated in cycles, then their endless diversity cannot be grasped by any science or foreknowledge. Even if reason could not refute these arguments, faith would simply smile at them, for they are the tools the godless use to pull our simple piety off the right path and make us walk with them "in a circle." But with the help of the Lord our God, even reason, and without much difficulty, shatters these revolving circles that conjecture has built. What leads these men astray, causing them to prefer their own circles to the straight path of truth, is that they measure the divine mind by their own human intellect: changeable, narrow, and limited. God's mind, by contrast, is absolutely unchangeable, infinitely capacious, and counts all things without number, without any succession of thought. So the apostle's words prove true of them: "comparing themselves with themselves, they do not understand" (2 Cor 10:12). Because they themselves, whenever some new idea strikes them, act on a new purpose (their minds being changeable), they assume God does the same. In doing so, they compare not God (for they cannot conceive of God, and when they think of Him they imagine someone like themselves), but themselves, and not with Him, but with themselves. For our part, we would never presume to think that God is in one state when He works and another when He rests. In fact, to say He is in any state at all is a misuse of language, since it implies that something comes to exist in His nature that was not there before. Whatever is affected is acted upon, and whatever is acted upon is changeable. In His rest, therefore, there is no laziness, no sluggishness, no inactivity; and in His work there is no labor, no effort, no strain. He can act while He reposes and repose while He acts. He can begin a new work with an eternal (not a new) design, and what He has not made before He does not now begin to make because He regrets His former rest. When we speak of His former rest and subsequent action (and I am not sure how anyone can fully grasp these things), the words "former" and "subsequent" apply only to the created things themselves, which formerly did not exist and subsequently came into being. In God, however, no earlier purpose is overturned or replaced by a later and different one. By one and the same eternal, unchangeable will, He determined two things regarding the things He created: that formerly, as long as they did not exist, they should not exist; and that subsequently, when the time came, they should come into existence. In this way, perhaps, He shows with striking clarity to those with eyes to see it how entirely independent He is of what He makes, and how purely from His own generous goodness He creates, since from eternity He dwelt without any creatures in a blessedness no less perfect than what He has now.

Their other claim, that God's knowledge cannot comprehend infinite things, leads logically to one conclusion: if they want to follow this argument to its darkest end, they must say that God does not know all numbers. And yet it is absolutely certain that numbers are infinite. No matter where you suppose the sequence to end, that number can be not merely increased by adding one more, but however large it is, however vast the quantity it scientifically and rationally expresses, it can be doubled or even multiplied further. Beyond that, each number is so defined by its own distinct properties that no two numbers are equal. Numbers are therefore both unequal and different from one another; and while each individual number is finite, the whole collection is infinite. Does God, then, fail to know numbers because of this infinity? Does His knowledge reach only so far up the number line before it runs out? Who could be so abandoned to foolishness as to say so? Nor can they easily dismiss numbers as irrelevant to God's knowledge, since Plato, their great authority, describes God as constructing the world on numerical principles. Our own scriptures say to God, "You have ordered all things in number, measure, and weight." The prophet says, "He brings out their host by number" (Isa 40:26). And the Savior says in the Gospel, "The very hairs of your head are all numbered" (Matt 10:30). Let us never doubt, then, that all number is known to Him "whose understanding," as the Psalmist says, "is infinite" (Ps 147:5). The infinity of numbers, though infinite numbers cannot themselves be counted, is not beyond the reach of the One whose understanding is infinite. And so, if everything that is comprehended is in some sense defined and made finite by the act of comprehension, then all infinity is made finite to God in a way that surpasses our ability to describe, because it falls entirely within the reach of His knowledge. If, then, the infinity of numbers is not actually infinite to the knowledge of God, who are we, poor creatures that we are, to presume to set limits on what He knows? Who are we to say that unless the same temporal events repeat themselves in the same periodic cycles, God cannot foreknow His creatures in order to make them, or know them once He has made them? God, whose knowledge is at once utterly simple and infinitely varied, comprehends all incomprehensible things with a comprehension that is itself incomprehensible. Even if He chose always to make His later works entirely new and unlike anything that came before, He could not produce them without order and foresight, nor could He conceive them as sudden improvisations; they would still arise from His eternal foreknowledge.

I won't presume to settle whether God works in this way, or whether these periods called "ages of ages" form a continuous, unbroken sequence, each succeeding the last with a kind of ordered variety, while leaving untouched only those who have been freed from misery and dwell forever in blessed immortality. Nor will I presume to settle whether they are called "ages of ages" so that we might understand these ages as remaining fixed and unchanging within God's eternal wisdom, serving as the underlying causes, so to speak, of the ages that unfold in time.

It's also possible that "ages" is simply another way of saying "age," so that "ages of ages" means no more than "age of age," just as "heavens of heavens" means no more than "heaven of heaven." After all, God called the firmament above the waters "Heaven," and yet the psalm says, "Let the waters that are above the *heavens* praise the name of the Lord." Which of these two meanings we should attach to "ages of ages," or whether there is some other and better meaning altogether, is a deeply profound question. The subject we are currently handling presents no obstacle to setting that discussion aside for now, whether we ultimately manage to resolve it or simply find ourselves made more cautious by further examination, deterred from making rash claims about something so obscure. For what we are presently arguing against is the view that affirms the existence of those periodic cycles in which the same events endlessly repeat at fixed intervals of time. Now, whichever interpretation of "ages of ages" turns out to be correct, it does nothing to support those cycles. Whether the ages of ages refer not to a repetition of the same world but to different worlds succeeding one another in an ordered sequence, with redeemed souls resting in secure and lasting joy without any return to misery, or whether the ages of ages refer to the eternal causes that govern what happens in time, either way it follows equally that those cycles bringing the same things around again simply do not exist. And nothing refutes them more decisively than the fact of the eternal life of the saints.

What faithful ears could endure hearing this: that after a life spent in so many severe hardships (if such an existence can even be called a life, rather than a kind of death so complete that our love for this present dying makes us fear the very death that would free us from it), and after disasters and miseries of every kind have finally been atoned for and ended through true religion and wisdom, and when we have at last attained the vision of God and entered into blessedness through the contemplation of spiritual light and participation in His unchangeable immortality, which we so desperately long to reach, we must at some point lose all of it? And that those who lose it are cast down from that eternity, truth, and joy into an infernal mortality and shameful foolishness, plunged into accursed suffering in which God is lost, truth is despised, and happiness is sought in corrupt impurities? And that this will happen again and again without end, recurring at fixed intervals in regularly returning cycles? And that this everlasting, ceaseless revolution of predetermined periods, which alternately strips away true misery and restores a deceptive bliss, is arranged so that God might come to know His own works, since He can neither stop creating nor comprehend an infinite number of creatures if He is always in the act of making them? Who, I ask, could listen to such things? Who could accept them, or even allow them to be spoken? If they were true, it would be not only wiser to stay silent about them, but even (to put it as plainly as I can) it would be the mark of wisdom never to have known them at all. For if in the world to come we will not remember these things, and are blessed precisely because of that forgetting, why should we now add to our already heavy misery by knowing them? If, on the other hand, this knowledge will be forced on us in the life to come, then at least let us remain ignorant of it now, so that in our present expectation we may enjoy a blessedness that the future reality will not actually provide. For in this life we are hoping to obtain everlasting life, only to discover in the world to come that it is blessed, but not everlasting.

But if they insist that no one can reach the blessedness of the world to come without first passing through these cycles in which bliss and misery take turns, how can they also claim that the more a person loves God, the more readily he attains blessedness? Their own teaching destroys the very love they praise. Think about it: who wouldn't grow cold and half-hearted in loving someone he knows he will eventually be forced to abandon, someone whose truth and wisdom he will one day come to despise, and this after he has reached the fullest and most blissful knowledge of God he is capable of? Can anyone remain genuinely faithful in love, even toward a human friend, if he knows that friend is destined to become his enemy? God forbid that there be any truth in a view that threatens us with a real misery that never truly ends, but is only interrupted, again and again, by stretches of hollow happiness. For what kind of happiness is more hollow and false than one in which, even while basking in the full light of truth, we remain unaware that misery is coming, or in which, even from what should be the most secure place imaginable, we still live in fear of it? Consider both possibilities. If we are to remain ignorant of the calamity ahead, then our present misery is actually less shortsighted than that future happiness, because at least our misery is certain that joy is coming. If, on the other hand, the coming disaster is not hidden from us in the world to come, then the soul actually spends its time of misery more peacefully than its time of happiness, since the misery ends in blessedness while the happiness ends in a return to ruin. Our expectation of unhappiness becomes, in a strange way, the happier state, and our expectation of happiness the more wretched one. And so, since we suffer real evils in the present and dread imminent evils in the future, it would be more honest to say that we will always be miserable than to claim we can ever truly be happy.

Religion and truth together give loud and clear testimony against these ideas. True religion promises a genuine blessedness, one we will possess forever without fear of losing it to any disaster. Let us therefore stay on the straight path, which is Christ, and with Him as our Guide and Savior, let us turn our hearts and minds away from the empty, futile cycles invented by the godless. Even Porphyry, committed Platonist that he was, rejected his own school's teaching that souls pass endlessly through these cycles, either repelled by the sheer extravagance of the idea or sobered by his exposure to Christianity. As I noted in Book Ten, he preferred to say that the soul was sent into the world to encounter evil, be purged of it, and be set free, and that once it returned to the Father, it would never face such an ordeal again. If even Porphyry could abandon the teachings of his own school, how much more should we Christians reject and despise an opinion so baseless and so hostile to our faith? But having broken free from these cycles, we are not therefore forced to conclude that the human race had no beginning in time, simply because nothing in nature is truly new and everything has, through some cycle or other, existed before and will exist again. Consider: if the soul, once delivered in a way it never was before, never returns to misery, then something has happened in its experience that has never happened before. And this is no small thing; it is the soul's secure arrival in eternal happiness. If something genuinely new can occur in an immortal nature, something that no cycle has ever produced or ever will produce, why should anyone dispute that the same can happen in mortal natures? If our opponents insist that blessedness is not a new experience for the soul but simply a return to a state it has always known, then at least its deliverance from misery is something new, since by their own account the misery it is delivered from was itself new. And if that new misery came about by accident, outside the order appointed by divine Providence, then what becomes of those fixed and measured cycles in which nothing new ever happens and everything repeats exactly as before? If, on the other hand, this new experience was included in that providential order of nature (whether the soul was exposed to the world's evil for the sake of discipline, or fell into it through sin), then it is entirely possible for new things to happen that have never happened before, without those things being foreign to the natural order. And if the soul can, through its own foolishness, bring upon itself a new misery that divine Providence foresaw and built into the order of nature along with the means of deliverance from it, then how can we, even with all the reckless arrogance of human vanity, presume to deny that God can create things new to the world but not to Him, things He never created before yet foreknew from all eternity? If our opponents argue that ransomed souls truly do not return to misery, but that even so nothing new occurs because there always have been, are now, and always will be a succession of ransomed souls, they must at least concede that in this case there are new souls for whom both the misery and the deliverance from it are genuinely new experiences. For if they insist that the souls from which new human beings are made each day (souls that, if they have lived wisely, are delivered never to return to misery) are not new but have existed from eternity, then they must logically accept that these souls are infinite in number. No finite number of souls, however large, could have supplied an endless stream of new human beings from eternity, each soul to be freed forever from this mortal condition and never to return to it. And our philosophers will find it very difficult to explain how an infinite number of souls can exist within a natural order they insist must be finite, so that it can be fully known by God.

Having dismissed those cycles that supposedly return souls to the same miseries at fixed intervals, what could be more consistent with sound theological reasoning than to believe that God is fully capable of creating things that have never existed before, while remaining entirely unchanged in His will? As for whether the number of eternally redeemed souls can increase without limit, let the philosophers settle that question, since they are so skilled at determining where infinity cannot apply. Our argument holds either way. If the number of souls can increase indefinitely, then there is no reason to deny that what had never before been created could be created, since the full company of redeemed souls never existed before, and yet not only has it come into being, but it will never stop growing. If, on the other hand, it is more fitting that the number of eternally redeemed souls be fixed, and that this number will never be added to, then that number, whatever it is, certainly never existed before. It cannot grow and reach its final count without having some starting point, and that starting point had never existed before either. So that this beginning might occur, the first man was created.

After working through that difficult question about how an eternal God can create new things without any change in His will, we can now see more clearly why it was better for God to produce the entire human race from a single individual rather than originating it from several people at once. Consider how He handled the other animals: some He created as solitary creatures that naturally seek out lonely places, such as eagles, kites, lions, and wolves; others He made gregarious, preferring to live in company, such as pigeons, starlings, stags, and fallow deer. But in neither case did He propagate them from a single individual; He called many of them into being at once. Humanity was different. Human nature was designed to occupy a middle position between the angelic and the bestial, and God created mankind accordingly. If a person remained in submission to his Creator as his rightful Lord and kept His commandments faithfully, he would pass into the company of the angels and obtain a blessed, endless immortality without ever tasting death. But if he offended the Lord his God through a proud and disobedient use of his free will, he would become subject to death, live as the animals do as a slave to appetite, and face eternal punishment after death. This is why God created only one man at the beginning, not to leave him isolated and without society, but so that the unity of human community and the bond of mutual affection might be more powerfully impressed upon him. People would be bound together not only by a shared nature, but by family ties. God even went so far as to create the woman who would become the man's wife not independently, as He had created the man, but out of the man himself, so that the entire human race would descend from a single person.

God was not ignorant of the fact that man would sin, and that, having become subject to death himself, he would father children equally destined to die, and that these mortal descendants would plunge into such depths of wickedness that even the beasts, creatures without rational will, created in great numbers from the waters and the earth, would live more safely and peacefully among their own kind than men, who had been descended from a single individual for the very purpose of fostering harmony. Not even lions or dragons have ever waged against their own kind the wars that men have waged against one another. Yet God also foresaw that through His grace a people would be called to adoption, and that these people, justified by the forgiveness of their sins, would be united by the Holy Spirit to the holy angels in eternal peace, once death, the last enemy, had been destroyed. He knew that this people would draw real benefit from understanding that God had caused all of humanity to descend from one man, in order to show how deeply He values unity within a multitude.

God made man in His own image. He gave man a soul endowed with reason and intelligence, so that man would surpass every creature of earth, air, and sea, none of which had been given such gifts. He formed the man from the dust of the earth and willed that his soul should be as I have described. Whether He had already created the soul and then breathed it into man, or whether He created it in the very act of breathing (since what else does "to breathe" mean but to make breath?), the soul came from that divine breath. He also made a wife for the man, to help him in the work of producing offspring, forming her from a bone taken out of the man's side, working in a manner entirely His own. We should not picture this work in crude, physical terms, as though God labored the way craftsmen do, using their hands and raw materials to shape something according to their skill. God's hand is God's power, and He works invisibly to produce visible results. Yet this seems more like legend than truth to those who judge God's power and wisdom by the ordinary, everyday works they are used to seeing. God understands and produces even seeds themselves without needing seeds to do it, and because people cannot comprehend the things created at the very beginning, they doubt them. This is ironic, since the things they do know about human reproduction, conception, and birth would seem just as incredible to anyone who had never experienced them. And yet even those familiar processes are attributed by many people to physical and natural causes rather than to the work of the divine mind.

But in this book, we have no quarrel with those who don't believe that a divine mind created or cares about this world. Consider, however, those who follow Plato in believing that all mortal creatures (among whom humanity holds the highest place, closest to the gods themselves) were created not by the supreme God who made the world, but by lesser gods whom the Supreme had created and to whom He had delegated power. If only such people could be freed from the superstition that drives them to seek justification for worshipping these lesser gods as their creators, they would easily escape this error as well. For it is blasphemy, even before one fully understands why, to believe or claim that anything other than God is the creator of any nature, however small or fleeting. As for the angels, whom the Platonists prefer to call gods: yes, they do assist in bringing about the things around us, to the extent that they are permitted and commissioned to do so. But that doesn't make them creators, any more than we would call gardeners the creators of the fruits and trees they tend.

There are two kinds of form. The first is imposed on physical matter from outside, the kind that potters, smiths, painters, and sculptors produce when they shape material into something resembling a living body. The second is internal, not constructed at all, but rather the efficient cause behind both natural physical forms and the very life of living creatures. It arises from the hidden, purposeful activity of an intelligent and living nature. The first kind of form can be credited to any skilled craftsman. The second belongs to God alone, the Creator and Originator who made the world itself and the angels without the assistance of either. The same divine, creative energy that cannot itself be made but only makes, the energy that gave their roundness to the earth and sky, also gave their roundness to the eye and to the apple. Every other natural object we observe anywhere received its form not from outside, but from the deep and hidden power of the Creator, who said, "Do not I fill heaven and earth?" and whose wisdom "reaches from one end to another mightily, and sweetly orders all things."

I will admit that I don't fully understand what role the angels, themselves the first created beings, played in assisting the Creator when He made everything else. I won't claim they can do what may be beyond them, but I also won't deny them whatever capacity they genuinely possess. Still, with their own agreement, I attribute the creative and originating work that brought all natures into being to God alone, to whom the angels themselves gratefully credit their own existence. We don't call gardeners the creators of their fruit, because we read, "Neither is he that plants anything, nor he that waters, but God that gives the increase." We don't even call the earth a creator, though she appears to be the fertile mother of everything that germinates and pushes up through her soil, and everything she holds rooted in her depths. We read, after all, that "God gives it a body, as it has pleased Him, and to every seed its own body." We shouldn't even call a woman the creator of her own child, because the true Creator is the One who said to His servant, "Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you" (Jer 1:5). And while a pregnant woman's mental and emotional states can indeed shape qualities in the child she carries (just as Jacob used peeled rods to produce spotted sheep), the mother no more creates her offspring than she created herself.

Whatever physical or biological causes are involved in bringing things into existence, whether through the cooperation of angels, human beings, or animals, whether through sexual reproduction, and whatever influence a mother's desires and emotions have in shaping the features and coloring of the tender, developing child in her womb, the natures themselves that are shaped by all these influences are the work of none other than the most high God. His hidden power pervades all things, present everywhere without being contaminated by anything. He gives being to everything that exists, and He defines and limits what each thing is, so that without Him nothing would be what it is, nor would it exist at all. Consider how we speak about cities: even though masons and architects did the physical work, we don't say that Rome and Alexandria were built by them. We say they were built by the kings whose will, vision, and resources made them possible, so that Romulus is the founder of one and Alexander the founder of the other. How much more reason do we have, then, to say that God alone is the Author of all natures? He uses no material that He did not make, no workers who were not themselves made by Him, and if He were to withdraw His creative power from created things, they would instantly collapse back into the nothingness they occupied before they were created. I mean "before" in terms of eternity, not time, because who else could be the creator of time but the One who created the things whose movements constitute time?

It's clear that when Plato attributed the creation of other living creatures to those lesser gods made by the Supreme God, he intended us to understand that the immortal part of humanity came from God Himself, while these minor creators contributed the mortal part. In other words, he meant them to be seen as the creators of our bodies, but not of our souls. Yet Porphyry insists that if the soul is to be purified, it must escape all entanglement with the body. At the same time, he agrees with Plato and the Platonists that souls who have not lived temperately and honorably are sent back into mortal bodies as punishment: into the bodies of animals, according to Plato, or into human bodies, according to Porphyry. It follows, then, that the beings they want us to worship as our parents and makers, conveniently calling them gods, are in reality nothing more than the forgers of our chains. They are not our creators but our jailers, locking us away in the most bitter and wretched house of correction. The Platonists should either stop threatening us with embodiment as the soul's punishment, or stop urging us to worship as gods those whose very handiwork they tell us to flee from by every means possible. In truth, both positions are false. It is false that souls return to this life as punishment, and it is equally false that any creator of anything in heaven or earth exists apart from the One who made heaven and earth. If we inhabit a body only to atone for our sins, how do we explain Plato's claim elsewhere that the world could not have been supremely beautiful and good unless it were filled with every kind of creature, mortal and immortal alike? But if our creation as mortal beings is itself a divine gift, how can being restored to a body, that is, to a divine gift, constitute punishment? And if God, as Plato consistently argues, held within His eternal mind the perfect ideas of the universe and of all living creatures, how could He have left the actual making of them to anyone else? Could He really have been unwilling to construct with His own hand the very works whose design called upon His unspeakable and endlessly praiseworthy intelligence?

True religion is right, therefore, to recognize and declare that the same God who created the entire cosmos also created all living creatures, both their souls and their bodies. Among all earthly animals, He made humanity in His own image, and for the reason I have already given, He created only one individual at first, though He did not leave that individual alone. For there is no creature more naturally social, nor more thoroughly antisocial in its corruption, than the human race. And nothing serves humanity better, whether to prevent conflict or to heal it once it has broken out, than the memory of that first parent from whom we all descend. God chose to create him alone so that all human beings would come from a single source, and so that this shared origin would remind us to preserve unity across the whole of our vast multitude. And because the woman was formed from his side, the clear intention was that we should understand how precious the bond between husband and wife truly is. These acts of God may seem extraordinary, but only because they were the first of their kind. Those who refuse to believe them should not believe in any miracles at all, since miracles are only called miracles because they fall outside the ordinary course of nature. Yet can anything happen without purpose, however hidden its cause may be, within so magnificent a system of divine providence? One of the sacred psalmists writes, "Come, behold the works of the Lord, what prodigies He has wrought in the earth." Why God made woman from man's side, and what this first miracle foreshadowed, I will explain in another place, with God's help. For now, since this book must be brought to a close, let me simply say this: in that first man, created at the beginning of all things, the foundation was laid, not visibly but in God's foreknowledge, for these two cities or societies, as far as the human race is concerned. From that one man all people were to descend, some of them destined to share in the reward of the good angels, others to share in the punishment of the wicked, all of it ordered by God's secret yet perfectly just judgment. For since it is written, "All the paths of the Lord are mercy and truth" (Ps 25:10), His grace cannot be unjust, nor can His justice be cruel.