The City of God: Book 15

The location and happiness of the earthly Paradise, along with the life and fall of humanity within it, have generated countless opinions, claims, and books, as different thinkers have reasoned, argued, and written according to their own lights. What we believe on this subject, or could draw from Holy Scripture in a way consistent with its truth and authority, we covered in some of the earlier books. If those matters were examined further, they would raise more questions and require longer discussions than we have space for here. Our time does not allow us to argue carefully over every question that busy minds might raise, especially minds more eager to inquire than equipped to understand. I think we have said enough about the doubts surrounding the origin of the world, the soul, and humanity itself. That last subject divides into two kinds of people: those who live according to human nature, and those who live according to God. We call these, in a figurative sense, "two cities" or societies: one destined to reign eternally with God, the other condemned to perpetual torment with the devil. That is their final end, which we will address later. Having said enough about their origins, both among the angels (whose number we do not know) and in the two first parents of humanity, I think it is time to move on to their course through history, from the first human offspring until the begetting of children ceases altogether. All the time contained between those two points, in which the living continually succeed the dying, is the career of these "two cities." Cain, then, was the firstborn of those two who were humanity's parents, and he belongs to the city of man. Abel came after, and he belongs to the city of God. As we observe in that one man, as the apostle says, the spiritual did not come first but the natural, and only afterward the spiritual (1 Cor 15:46), it follows that everything descending from Adam's corrupted nature must begin as evil and carnal, and only becomes good and spiritual afterward, if the person is regenerated through Christ. So it is in the first unfolding of humanity and the course of the "two cities."

In this dispute, the carnal citizen was born first, and the pilgrim on earth, or heavenly citizen, came afterward: predestinated by grace, elected by grace, a pilgrim on earth by grace, and a citizen of heaven by grace. As for his birth, it came from the same corrupted mass that was condemned from the beginning. But God, like a potter (the apostle himself uses this image), made from the same lump "one vessel to honor and another to reproach" (Rom 9:21). The vessel of reproach was made first, and the vessel of honor afterward. For in that one man, as I said, reprobation came first, which is where we must begin (though we need not remain there), and goodness came afterward, reached through growth and progress, and once reached, made our dwelling place. It follows, then, that no one can be good who has not first been evil, though not everyone who is evil becomes good. But the sooner a person improves, the more quickly their new name follows them, erasing the memory of the old one. This is why Scripture records that Cain built a city, while Abel was a pilgrim and built none. For the city of the saints is above, though it has citizens here on earth, where it lives as a pilgrim until the time of the kingdom comes. Then it gathers all its citizens together in the resurrection of the body and gives them a kingdom to reign in with their King, forever and ever.

The shadow and prophetical image of this city (not presenting it but signifying it) served here on earth at the time when it was to be revealed, and was called "the holy city" after its symbolic image rather than the express truth in which it would afterward be established. Concerning this image in its serving role, and the "free city" it prefigured, the apostle speaks to the Galatians as follows: "Tell me, you who desire to be under the law, do you not hear the law? For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by a bondwoman and the other by a free woman;" but the son of the bondwoman was born of the flesh, and the son of the free woman by promise. These things are an allegory: for these are the two Testaments, the one given from Mount Sinai, begetting people in servitude, which is Hagar. Sinai is a mountain in Arabia, joined to the earthly Jerusalem, for it serves with her children. But our mother, the celestial Jerusalem, is free, for it is written, "Rejoice, you barren woman who bears not; break forth into joy and cry out, you who do not travail with child, for the desolate has many more children than the married wife." But we, brothers, are the sons of promise according to Isaac. As then he who was born of the flesh persecuted him who was born of the Spirit, so it is now. Nevertheless, the Scripture says, "Cast out the bondwoman and her son, for the bondwoman's son shall not be heir with the free woman's son." Then, brothers, we are not children of the bondwoman but of the free. In this way the apostle authorizes us to understand the old and new covenants. A part of the earthly city was made an image of the heavenly, not signifying itself but another, and therefore serving: it was not ordained to signify itself but another, and was itself signified by an earlier signification, since Hagar, Sarah's servant, and her son were a type of it. And because when the light comes the shadows must flee away, Sarah the free woman, signifying the free city (which that shadow signified in a different manner), said, "Cast out the bondwoman and her son, for the bondwoman's son shall not be heir with my son Isaac," whom the apostle calls the free woman's son. So we find this earthly city in two forms: one presenting itself, and the other prefiguring the celestial city and serving it. Our nature, corrupted by sin, produces citizens of earth; and grace, freeing us from the sin of nature, makes us citizens of heaven. The first are called vessels of wrath, the last vessels of mercy. This was signified in the two sons of Abraham: one, born of the bondwoman, was called Ishmael, being the son of the flesh; the other, born of the free woman, was Isaac, the son of promise. Both were Abraham's sons, but natural custom produced the first while gracious promise brought forth the latter. In the first was a demonstration of what human nature does on its own; in the second was a commendation of God's goodness.

Sarah was barren and had given up hope of having a child. Longing for one, even if it meant using her slave as a surrogate, she gave her servant to Abraham so that he might have children through her, since she could give him none herself. In this way she secured what was her due from her husband, even if through another woman's womb. So Ishmael was born, conceived through the ordinary union of man and woman according to the natural order, and for this reason he is said to have been born "after the flesh." This is not to say that such births fall outside God's care or craftsmanship, for His working wisdom, as Scripture says, reaches from one end to the other, ordering all things with power and grace. The point is rather that, for the sake of signifying the free grace God intended to give humanity, a son needed to be born in a way that nature's ordinary laws did not allow. Nature denies children to unions like Abraham's and Sarah's, where both age and barrenness work against conception. Sarah had been unable to conceive even in her younger years, when age alone should not have been an obstacle, though fruitfulness was already absent in that season of life. The fact that her nature, so affected, could not produce a son on its own points to something deeper: that human nature, corrupted and condemned on account of sin, had no claim of its own to any share of blessedness. But Isaac, born through a promise, is a true image of the children of grace, those free citizens, those inhabitants of eternal peace, where no private or self-centered love will hold sway, but all will rejoice in the universal good, and many hearts will be joined as one, forming a perfect pattern of love and obedience.

The earthly city is temporal in every sense: when it is finally condemned to eternal punishment, it will cease to be a city at all. It finds all its good things here on earth and takes whatever joy those things can offer. But because these goods don't free their possessors from trouble, this city is perpetually divided against itself, torn by wars, quarrels, and the appetite for bloody, deadly victories. Any faction that wages war against another wants to conquer the world, while remaining, in truth, a slave to its own vices. If it does conquer, it becomes arrogant, and that arrogance becomes its ruin. And if we look honestly at the state of worldly affairs, grieving over humanity's vulnerability to adversity rather than celebrating the moments of prosperity, then even victory turns deadly: no power can hold forever what it won only once. Nor can we truly call the things this city craves "good," when human nature itself, at its best, far surpasses them. The earthly city desires an earthly peace, driven by the lowest ambitions, and pursues it through war. If it crushes all resistance, it achieves that peace, though the side that fought just as desperately for the same reasons is left without it. They seek this peace through exhausting war and believe they obtain it through glorious victory. And when those who had the just cause are the ones who conquer, who wouldn't celebrate their victory and rejoice in their peace? These things are genuinely good, and they are gifts from God. But if the goods belonging to that heavenly, eternal city, where victory will be everlasting, are neglected in favor of these earthly goods, and if these earthly goods are desired as the only goods, or loved as though they were greater than the others, then misery is the inevitable result, compounding the wretchedness that was already there.

So the earthly city was founded by a man who murdered his own brother out of envy, a brother who was himself a pilgrim of the heavenly city passing through this world. It should come as no surprise, then, that the founder of what would become the world's greatest city, the queen of nations, followed this original pattern in exactly the same way. One of their own poets records the fact in these words:

*Fraterno primi maduerunt sanguine muri.*

"The first walls stained with a brother's blood."

Such was Rome's founding, and such was Romulus' murder of his brother Remus, as their histories record. There is, however, one key difference: these brothers were both citizens of the earthly city and builders of Rome's glory, and it was for that glory that they competed. But both could not share it fully; had there been only one, he might have possessed it entirely. The man who glories in dominion will always find his glory diminished when he must share it with a partner. So the one killed the other to have it all, and through villainy rose to a corrupt greatness that honest obscurity would have spared him. But those other two brothers, Cain and Abel, were not equally attached to earthly things, nor did their conflict arise from the fear that sharing power would diminish one man's glory to the point where only killing the other could raise him higher. Abel sought no dominion in the city his brother built. It was the devil's own envy that did all the damage: the hatred the wicked bear toward the good, simply because the good are good. For goodness is not diminished by being shared; on the contrary, it grows when many possess it together in a bond of charity. Whoever refuses to share goodness will never truly have it, and whoever welcomes a partner in it will have it all the more abundantly. The strife between Romulus and Remus, then, reveals the division within the earthly city itself, while the strife between Cain and Abel reveals the opposition between the city of men and the city of God. The wicked oppose the good, but the good, when perfected, cannot contend among themselves. While they remain imperfect, however, they may contend with one another in the same way that each person contends within himself, for in every person the flesh wars against the spirit and the spirit against the flesh. The spiritual desire of one person may therefore fight against the carnal desire of another, or the reverse: the carnal against the spiritual, as the wicked do against the good; or the two carnal desires of two imperfect but well-meaning people may clash as the wicked clash with the wicked, until their diseases are cured and they are brought at last to the everlasting health of victory.

The weakness or disobedience discussed in the last book is the first punishment of disobedience, and therefore it is not a natural condition but a corruption. It is on account of this that the following words are addressed to those earthly pilgrims who are growing in grace: "Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ" (Gal 6:2); and again, "Admonish the unruly, comfort the feeble, be patient towards all, overcome evil with good, see that none render evil for evil" (1 Thess 5:14, 15); and again, "If a man be fallen by occasion into any sin, ye that are spiritual restore such an one in the spirit of meekness, considering thyself, lest thou also be tempted" (Gal 6:1); and besides, "Let not the sun go down upon your wrath" (Eph 4:26); and in the Gospel, "If thy brother trespass against thee, take him and tell him his fault between thee and him alone" (Matt 18:15).

And concerning those who cause scandal, the apostle says: "Them that sin, rebuke openly that the rest may fear" (1 Tim 5:20); and in this respect much is taught about pardoning. A great responsibility is laid on us to keep that peace, given the sobering warning of the servant who was commanded to repay the ten thousand talents he owed, because he had forcibly demanded his fellow servant's debt of a hundred pence. To this parable the Lord Jesus added: "So shall My heavenly Father do unto you, except ye forgive each one his brother's trespasses from your hearts" (Matt 18:35). This is how God's citizens on earth are healed of their diseases while they long for their heavenly home. But the Holy Spirit works within to make the outwardly applied remedy effective; otherwise, even if God were to speak to humanity through any creature, whether through the senses or in dreams, without also disposing our hearts through His inward grace, the preaching of truth would not advance anyone's conversion in the slightest. This is what God does in His secret and just providence, dividing the vessels of wrath and mercy. And it is His remarkable and hidden work that sin, being in us more as the punishment of sin (as the apostle says), and dwelling in our members, does not reign in our mortal body when we refuse to obey its desires; and when we do not offer our members as instruments of iniquity to serve it, sin is turned, by God's governance, into a mind that consents to no evil. The person who manages this imperfectly here will have it settled most completely hereafter, sinless and in eternal peace.

But God's speaking to Cain through some visible form of His creatures (as we have shown He did with the first humans) accomplished nothing. Cain still carried out his murderous plan against his brother, even after God had warned him. God had distinguished between their two sacrifices, rejecting one and accepting the other, almost certainly through some visible sign, and He did so because one brother practiced evil and the other good. Cain became furiously angry, and his face fell. God said to him: "Why is your face fallen? If you offer well but do not divide well, have you not sinned? Be quiet; his desire will be subject to you, and you will rule over him." In this warning from God to Cain, the opening words, "If you offer well and do not divide well, have you not sinned?" are ambiguous, and translators have rendered them in various ways, each trying to align the meaning with the rule of faith. A sacrifice offered to the true God, to whom alone such offerings are due, is well offered. But the division can be made badly through a flawed distinction of times, place, offering, offerers, or the one to whom it is offered, or those among whom the offering is distributed. By "division" here we mean the discernment between offering at the right times, in the right places, with the right offerings, the right distributions, and the opposites of all these: as when we offer where, when, or what we should not; or when we keep better things for ourselves than we offer to God; or when we distribute the offering to the unsanctified, thereby profaning the sacrifice. In which of these Cain offended God we cannot easily determine. But as the apostle John said of these two brothers: "Not as Cain, who was of that wicked one, and slew his brother; and why did he slay him? Because his own works were evil and his brother's good" (1 John 3:12). This shows that God did not regard his gifts, because he divided badly, giving God only some of his cattle while keeping himself for himself, as all do who abandon God's will to follow their own, and who, living in perverseness of heart, offer gifts to God as though to buy Him, not to cure their vicious desires but to satisfy them. This is the defining trait of the earthly city: to worship one god or many for the sake of victory and earthly peace, never for charitable instruction, but always in the service of the lust for power. The good use this world to enjoy God; the wicked do precisely the opposite and would use God to enjoy the world. I mean those who believe God exists and that He takes an interest in humanity, for there are those far worse who believe neither. So when Cain saw that God regarded his brother's sacrifice and not his own, he should have changed himself and turned to imitate his good brother, not swollen with envy against him. But because he was sad and his face downcast, this grief at another's good fortune, and especially his own brother's, God rebuked sharply, asking him: "Why are you sad, and why is your face cast down?" God saw his envy toward his brother and condemned it. A human being, who cannot see the heart, might reasonably have wondered whether Cain was sad over his own wickedness that had displeased God, or over his brother's goodness for which God had accepted his sacrifice. But God gave His reason for not accepting Cain's offering, so that Cain would have better cause to be displeased with himself than with his brother: he had not divided well, that is, he had not lived well, and was not worthy to have his sacrifice accepted. This shows that Cain was far more wicked still in hating his righteous brother without cause. Yet God did not send him away without a good and holy command: "Be quiet," He said, "for his desire will be subject to you, and you will rule over him." Rule over whom? His brother? Certainly not. Over sin. For God had already said, "Have you not sinned?" and now He adds, "Be quiet, for his desire will be subject to you." Some may read this to mean that sin will be turned back on the one who commits it, so that the sinner has no one to blame but himself. This is the wholesome medicine of repentance and the proper plea for pardon, provided we understand God's words here as a command rather than a prediction. For a person rules over sin when he does not defend it with excuses but subdues it through repentance. Otherwise, whoever becomes sin's protector will surely become its prisoner. But if we understand this sin to be the carnal desire of which the apostle says, "The flesh lusts against the spirit" (Gal 5:17), and among whose works envy is counted, the very envy that drove Cain to murder his brother, then we may well read these words as: "It will be turned to you, and you will rule over it." For the carnal part of us, which the apostle calls sin when he says, "It is not I who do this, but the sin that dwells in me" (Rom 7:17), and which the philosophers call the vicious part of the soul, a part that should not rule but serve the mind and be restrained by it from unreasonable acts: when this part moves us toward some mischief, if we follow the apostle's counsel and do not "yield our members as weapons of unrighteousness to sin" (Rom 6:13), then this part is conquered and brought under the governance of mind and reason. This is the rule God gave to a man who was nursing malice against his brother and longing to kill the very one he should have been following: be quiet, He said, meaning keep your hands from harm, do not let sin gain control over your body to accomplish what it desires, and do not yield your members as weapons of unrighteousness to it. For its desires will become subject to you if you restrain it by suppression rather than feeding it by giving it free rein. And you will rule over it: refuse to let it carry out any outward act, and your goodness of will shall shut it out from all inward motion as well. A similar word was spoken to the woman when God had examined and condemned our first parents after their sin, along with the devil in the serpent: "I will greatly increase your sorrows and your conceptions; in sorrow you will bring forth children," and then He adds, "Your desire will be subject to your husband, and he will rule over you" (Gen 3:16). What was said to Cain concerning sin or concupiscence was thus said here to the offending woman as well. Here we must learn that the man is to govern the woman as the soul should govern the body, which is why the apostle said, "He who loves his wife loves himself, for no man ever hated his own flesh" (Eph 5:28-29). These we must heal as our own, not cast away as strangers. But Cain received God's command as only a wicked reprobate would, and giving himself over to the full force of his envy, he lay in wait for his brother and killed him. This was the founder of the earthly city. As for how Cain was further a type of the Jews who killed Christ the true Shepherd, prefigured in the shepherd Abel, I will leave that aside, since it is a prophetical allegory, and I recall that I addressed it in my work against Faustus the Manichee.

Now I must defend the authority of the divine history, which says that this one man built a city when there were only three or four people on earth. After he had killed his brother, there were only Adam, the first father, Cain himself, and his son Enoch, whose name was given to the city. But those who stumble over this fail to notice that Scripture doesn't need to name every person alive at the time, only those relevant to its purpose. The purpose of the Holy Spirit working through Moses was to trace a lineage and genealogy from Adam, through certain men, to Abraham, and then through his descendants to the people of God. This people, set apart from all other nations, would carry all the types and foreshadowings of the eternal heavenly city, of Christ its King and Founder. All of this was spiritual and yet to come, though the men of the earthly city were also mentioned, to the extent necessary to identify the adversaries of that glorious city of God. So when Scripture records a man's lifespan and notes that he had sons and daughters without naming them, are we to suppose there couldn't have been, across the many years those early men lived, enough children born to populate several cities? It belonged to God, who inspired the Spirit by which Scripture was written, to distinguish these two lines through their separate genealogies: first, so that the lineages of the earthly citizens and of the spiritual ones could each be traced up to the flood, where both are recorded; their difference lying in the fact that one line descends from the murderer Cain and the other from the righteous Seth, whom Adam received in place of the son Cain had murdered; and their convergence, in that all people grew progressively worse until they deserved to be swept away by the flood, with the exception of one righteous man named Noah, his wife, his three sons, and their wives. Only these eight people did God see fit to preserve in the ark from the entire human race. As for the passage that reads, "And Cain knew his wife, who conceived and bore Enoch, and he built a city and called it by his son's name, Enoch," this does not prove that Enoch was his firstborn. We shouldn't assume that the phrase "he knew his wife" implies he had never known her before, since the same expression is used of Adam not only when Cain, his firstborn, was conceived, but also when his younger son Seth was born: "Adam knew his wife and she conceived and bore a son and called his name Seth." It is clear, then, that Scripture uses this phrase for all such unions, not only those that produce a firstborn child. Nor does it follow that Enoch was Cain's firstborn simply because the city bore his name; his father may have loved him above the others for some other reason entirely. After all, Judah, from whom the name Judah and the Jews derived, was not Israel's firstborn. But even granting that Enoch was this builder's firstborn, it still doesn't follow that his father named the city after him the moment he was born, since at that point he couldn't yet have founded a city, which is nothing other than a multitude of people bound together in one community. When his children and household had grown large enough, he could have organized them into a city and named it after his firstborn son. People in those days lived so long that the shortest-lived among those whose years are recorded still reached seven hundred and fifty-three years, and some exceeded nine hundred, though none quite reached a thousand. Who can doubt, then, that within a single man's lifetime the human race could grow to a number sufficient to fill many cities? A compelling illustration of this is that from Abraham's line alone, the Hebrew people grew in fewer than five hundred years to a number such that six hundred thousand fighting men marched out of Egypt, to say nothing of the descendants of Esau's Idumeans and the nations that came from Abraham's other son, not by Sarah, since these do not belong to Israel.

No wise person should doubt that Cain could build a city, and a large one at that, given how long people lived in those days. Some skeptics, however, may seize on the number of years our authors record for human lifespans and declare them impossible. By the same logic, they might also deny that people in those days were far larger in body than we are today, though their own famous poet Virgil offers testimony to this in his description of a boulder that a warrior snatched up in battle and hurled at his enemy:

"Vix illud lecti bis sex cervice tulissent,

Qualia nunc hominum producit corpora tellus."

'It passed the power of twelve strong men to raise

That stone from ground, as men go nowadays.'

This suggests that people in earlier times had much larger bodies, which would have been even more true before the famous flood, in the world's infancy. The difference in size is confirmed by ancient tombs that have been opened, whether by decay, by those who destroyed them, or simply by chance, and in which bones of incredible size have been found. On the shore of Utica, I myself, along with many others, saw a human molar so large that if it had been cut into pieces, it could have made a hundred of ours. I believe it belonged to a giant, for although the bodies of ancient people surpassed ours, giants surpassed all of them; and even in our own time, a very few individuals have grown far beyond the ordinary height. Pliny the Elder, that great scholar, affirms that the longer the world lasts, the smaller the bodies nature will produce, citing Homer's frequent complaints on this point. He does not dismiss it as fiction, but records it as a chronicler of nature's wonders. As I said, the bones of those buried in ancient times have left powerful evidence of this for later generations. As for the length of their lives, that cannot be proved by any such physical evidence; yet we must not undermine the credibility of the Holy Scriptures, nor be so arrogant in our disbelief of what they report, especially when we see that the things they foretell come to pass with such certainty. Pliny says there is still a country where men live to two hundred years. If we can believe that this length of life, unknown to us, still exists somewhere in the world, why can we not believe it was once universal in ancient times? If something absent here can exist elsewhere, why is it impossible that something absent now could have existed at another time?

Now, there does seem to be some difference between the Hebrew computation and ours, though I'm not sure of the cause. But this doesn't disprove that those men lived as long as we say they did. Adam, before he fathered Seth, is said by our books to have lived two hundred and thirty years, but by the Hebrew text only one hundred and thirty. After he fathered Seth, however, he lived seven hundred years according to our account, and eight hundred according to the Hebrews. Both agree on the total. The same pattern holds through the following generations: the Hebrews are consistently one hundred years behind us in the father's age at his son's birth, but they make up the difference in the years that follow, so that both accounts arrive at the same overall sum. In the sixth generation, however, the two texts don't differ at all. In the seventh generation, that of Enoch (not the one who died, but the one who pleased God and was taken up), there is again the same discrepancy of one hundred years before he fathered his son, yet both accounts still arrive at the same conclusion: both texts agree that he lived three hundred and sixty-five years before his translation.

The eighth generation shows some difference as well, though it is smaller and of a different kind. Methuselah, after fathering Enoch, is said by the Hebrews to have lived twenty years longer than our text records before the birth of his next named son. But in the years counted after that son's birth, we add the twenty back in, and both accounts arrive at the same total. Only in the ninth generation, that of Lamech, the son of Methuselah and the father of Noah, do the two texts differ in the overall sum. The difference is just twenty-four years, and the Hebrews have the larger number: their figure for Lamech's age before Noah's birth is six years less than ours, while their figure for his remaining years is thirty more than ours. Subtract six from thirty, and you get twenty-four, as I said.

Here is a notable question that arises from the difference between our texts and the Hebrew ones, where Methuselah is recorded as having lived fourteen years after the flood. Scripture accounts for only eight people saved from the flood out of all humanity, and Methuselah was not among them. In our books, Methuselah lived one hundred and sixty-seven years before fathering Lamech, and Lamech lived one hundred and eighty-eight years before fathering Noah. Added together, that gives three hundred and fifty-five years. Add Noah's five hundred years (since the flood began at that point), and the time between Methuselah's birth and the flood comes to nine hundred and fifty-five years. Now Methuselah's total lifespan is reckoned at nine hundred and sixty-nine years: having fathered Lamech at one hundred and sixty-seven, he lived eight hundred and two years afterward, making nine hundred and sixty-nine in all. Subtract nine hundred and fifty-five (the time from his birth to the flood) and fourteen years remain, which he is thought to have lived after the flood. Some therefore conclude that he spent those fourteen years not on earth (since no one survived there except those eight) but in the place to which his son Enoch had been translated, remaining there with him until the flood had come and gone. They reason this way because they are unwilling to question the authority of texts the Church has accepted, unwilling to believe the Jews preserve a more accurate text than we do, and unwilling to attribute the error to our side rather than to the Greek from which we received it. Their argument runs like this: it is hard to believe that the seventy translators, working together at one time and arriving at one consistent rendering, could have erred or would have falsified something that meant nothing to them either way. The Jews, on the other hand, envying our translations of their law and prophets, altered various passages in their own books to undermine the authority of ours. This suspicion is a matter of opinion, and everyone may take it as they see fit. What is certain, at least, is this: if the Hebrew reckoning is correct, Methuselah did not live after the flood at all but died in that very year. As for the Septuagint translation, I will give my full view on that later, when I come (God willing) to the chronology itself, as the structure of this work requires. For the present question, it is enough to have shown from both sets of texts that the ancient fathers lived so long that a single man could see enough of his own descendants to populate an entire city.

We should not listen to those who think that one of our ordinary years was equal to ten of the years used in those ancient times, the years being so short. On this view, nine hundred of their years amounts to only ninety of ours: their ten is our one, and their hundred is our ten. They conclude, then, that Adam was only twenty-three years old when he fathered Seth, and Seth only twenty and a half when he fathered Enos, which Scripture records as two hundred and five years. According to these interpreters, Scripture divided one year into ten parts, calling each part a year, and each part contains a sixfold square, because God made the world in six days and rested on the seventh (a point I have already discussed in Book 11). Now six times six (since six produces the sixfold square) is thirty-six, and ten times thirty-six is three hundred and sixty, which equals twelve lunar months. The five remaining days, plus the quarter-day that accumulates into a leap year every four years, were added later by the ancients to round out the calendar, and the Romans called these *dies intercalares* (intercalated days). On this reckoning, Enos was nineteen years old when he fathered Cainan, though Scripture says he was one hundred and ninety years old. And so it goes through all the generations down to the flood: not one person in all our books fathered a child at a hundred years, or a hundred and twenty, or anywhere near that age. The youngest father, they say, was a hundred and sixty years old, because (they argue) no one can father a child at ten years of age, which is what a hundred years amounts to on their scale. But at sixteen a man is capable of fathering children, and that corresponds, on their reading, to what Scripture calls a hundred and sixty years. To make this discrepancy seem plausible, they point to the Egyptian year of four months, the Acarnanian year of six months, and the Lavinian year of thirteen months. Pliny, having recorded that some people lived a hundred and fifty years, others ten more, others two hundred, some three hundred, some five hundred, some six hundred, and even some eight hundred, attributed all of this to errors in calculation. Some people (he says) counted summer and winter as two separate years; others counted the four seasons as four years, as the Arcadians did with their three-month year. And the Egyptians (he adds), beyond their short years of four months already mentioned, also counted each lunar month as a full year. The result, he says, is that some among them were recorded as having lived a thousand years. Some scholars have brought forward these parallels not to undermine the authority of Holy Scripture, but to make it credible that the patriarchs could have lived so long. They persuaded themselves, and thought it reasonable to persuade others, that years in those ancient days were so short that ten of them made only one of ours, and a hundred of theirs only ten of ours. But I will expose the clear falseness of this view shortly. Before I do, however, I must first address a more telling objection. We could actually overturn this whole argument using the Hebrew texts, which say that Adam was not two hundred and thirty but a hundred and thirty years old when he fathered his third son. If a hundred and thirty of their years equals only thirteen of ours, then he fathered his first son at eleven or twelve years of age. Who, in the ordinary course of nature, can father a child so young? We might make an exception for Adam himself: perhaps he could have fathered a child as soon as he was created, since we cannot suppose he was created as a small infant, the way our children are born. But his son Seth was not two hundred years old when he fathered Enos, as some read, but a hundred and fifty, according to the Hebrew text, which on their scale comes to only eleven years of age. And what shall we say of Cainan, who fathered Mahalaleel at seventy, not at a hundred and seventy years of age, as the Hebrews record? If seventy of those years amounts to only seven of ours, what man can father a child at seven?

But if I argue one way or the other, someone will likely tell me it is one of the Jews' lies, a charge I addressed earlier. For it seems incredible that translators as distinguished and honorable as those of the Septuagint would record a falsehood. Yet if I were to ask such a person which is more plausible: that a nation as large and widely scattered as the Jews all conspired together to forge this lie and, out of malice, corrupted the beliefs of other peoples while subverting their own truths; or that the Seventy, who were themselves Jews, all confined to one place (since Ptolemy had assembled them for that purpose), agreed among themselves to keep the Gentiles from the true scriptures by introducing these errors by common consent, who would not see which option is more probable? But God forbid that any wise person should think the Jews, however perverse, could have wielded such power over so many books scattered so widely, or that the Seventy shared any common intent to hide the truth of history from the Gentiles. One might more easily believe that the error crept in during the transcription of the copy from Ptolemy's library, and from there spread through all subsequent copies. This is a reasonable suspicion in the case of Methuselah's lifespan, and in that other instance where the total differs by twenty-four years. But in those cases where the discrepancy follows a consistent pattern, where one text always adds a hundred years before a generation and subtracts them after, while the other always subtracts before and adds after, yet both agree in the overall total, and this pattern holds through the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, and seventh generations, such consistency points not to careless oversight but to deliberate effort. The disparity between the Greek and Latin texts on one side and the Hebrew on the other, where years are first removed and then restored to preserve the agreement between the two, should therefore be attributed neither to Jewish malice nor to any scheming on the part of the Septuagint translators, but to the error of the scribe who first copied it from Ptolemy's library. Even today, numbers that are either difficult to follow or seem to record something of little practical importance are carelessly transcribed and even more carelessly corrected. Who, after all, feels compelled to learn exactly how many thousands there were in each tribe of Israel? Most people consider it useless knowledge, and very few can see what purpose such figures serve. But here, running through all these generations, a hundred years are missing in one place and a hundred years too many in another: missing where the text previously showed an excess before the birth of a given son, and in excess where it previously showed a deficit; he who did this wanted to persuade us that the patriarchs lived so long because their years were so short. To demonstrate this through their age at the time they were fit to father children, and thereby convince skeptics that a hundred of those years equaled only ten of ours, he added a hundred years wherever he found an age that his calculation would render too young for fathering children, and then subtracted that same amount from the total lifespan once the child had been born. In this way, he tried to show that these men were of suitable age for fathering children by his reckoning, without actually reducing the true count of their total years. The fact that he did not apply this method to the sixth generation is itself what persuades us that he only intervened where it was necessary, since where no adjustment was needed, he added or changed nothing. In the Hebrew text, he found that Jared lived a hundred and sixty-two years before fathering Enoch, which by his calculation comes to sixteen years, two months, and some additional days, an age already suitable for fathering children. He therefore saw no need to add a hundred years to bring the figure up to twenty-six of our years by his reckoning, nor did he subtract anything from Jared's remaining years after Enoch's birth. This is what kept the totals of both books in agreement. A second view concerns the eighth generation: before Methuselah fathered Lamech, the Hebrew text reads one hundred and eighty-two years, while our books have twenty years fewer, whereas we generally find a hundred more in such cases. After Lamech's birth, those years are added back in to preserve the total, which is the same in both books. For if he had wanted to treat a hundred and seventy years as seventeen on the grounds of fitness for fathering children, he should have neither added nor subtracted anything there, since he already found sufficient years in that case, whereas elsewhere he had to add a hundred precisely because there were not enough. We might well conclude that this discrepancy of twenty years arose from a copyist's error, except that ten years are then added back into the grand total to bring both books into agreement. Should we think this was deliberate on his part: concealing his additions and subtractions where they were necessary by also making smaller adjustments where they were not? Whether we accept that explanation or not, and whichever reading we judge to be correct, I have no doubt that the wisest course in all such disputes over calculations, where the two books differ (since both cannot be right), is to trust the original rather than the translation. For some Greek manuscripts, along with a Latin and a Syriac one, state that Methuselah died six years before the flood.

Now let us see how clearly we can show that ten of their years is not equal to one of ours, but that one of their years was just as long as one of ours: both measured by the course of the sun, and all their ancestors' long lives calculated on that basis. Scripture records that the flood came in the six hundredth year of Noah's life. But why does it say, "In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, and the twenty-seventh day of the month," if a year were only thirty-six days long? A year that short would either have no months at all, or only three days per month to arrive at twelve months in a year. How, then, can Scripture speak of "the six hundredth year, the second month, and the twenty-seventh day of the month," unless their months and years were the same as ours? And how else could it say that the flood came on the twenty-seventh of the month? Again, toward the end of the flood we read: "In the seventh month and the twenty-seventh day of the month, the ark rested upon Mount Ararat: and the waters decreased until the eleventh month: and in the eleventh month, on the first day, were the tops of the mountains seen." If they had months like these, then their years were like ours: a three-day month cannot contain twenty-seven days. And if someone tries to scale everything down proportionally, making one-thirteenth of three days stand for a single day, then the great flood that rose for forty days and forty nights lasted less than four of our days. Who could accept such an absurdity? Judge by this error those who try to win credibility for Scripture in one place by distorting it in many others. The day was unquestionably the same length then as it is now, beginning and ending within twenty-four hours; the month was the same, completed in one full cycle of the moon; and the year was the same, made up of twelve lunar revolutions, with five days and a quarter added to align it with the solar course. Noah had lived six hundred such years, two such months, and twenty-seven such days when the flood began, during which rain fell for forty days continuously, not days of two hours each, but full days of twenty-four hours including the night. Those patriarchs therefore lived some nine hundred such years, while Abraham lived only one hundred and eighty, his son Isaac nearly one hundred and fifty, Moses one hundred and twenty, and ordinary people today live seventy or eighty, or a few more, of which it is said, "their overplus is but labour and sorrow." The difference in reckoning between us and the Hebrews does not affect the actual length of the patriarchs' lives; and where there is a discrepancy between the two that cannot be resolved, we must trust the source from which our translation comes. Anyone has the ability to investigate this, yet it is not without reason that no one dares to correct what the Seventy have rendered differently from the Hebrew: for this difference is not an error, and no one should think so, least of all me. If it cannot be attributed to a copyist's mistake, we should conclude that the Holy Spirit intentionally altered certain things in the interest of deeper meaning, doing so through the translators not in the manner of ordinary interpreters, but with the freedom of prophets. This is why the apostles are found citing the Holy Scriptures in ways that follow not only the Hebrew but also the Septuagint. I will return to this subject later, God willing; for now, back to the matter at hand. We need not doubt, then, that Adam's firstborn son, living so long, could have fathered enough descendants to populate a city (an earthly one, I mean, not the City of God), which is the central subject this entire work addresses.

But some will ask: is it really credible that a man could live eighty, ninety, or even more than a hundred years without a woman, without any vow of celibacy, and then begin fathering children, as the Hebrew records claim? Or, if they had wanted to, couldn't they have had children earlier? There are two possible answers. Either they reached maturity later than we do, in proportion to their longer lifespans; or, more likely, their firstborn children are not the ones being recorded. Scripture names only those sons necessary for tracing the lineage from Adam to Noah, and from Noah onward to Abraham. This genealogical thread was preserved up to a certain point, as far as those family lines were suited to foreshadow the journey of God's glorious pilgrim city as it moves toward eternity.

No one can deny that Cain was the first child ever born of a man and woman. Adam would not have said, "I have gotten a man from the Lord," at his birth, unless Cain had been the first human being born before all others. Abel came next, and was killed by his elder brother. In this we see prefigured the persecutions that God's glorious city would endure at the hands of the wicked members of earthly society, those sons of earth, as we might call them. How old Adam was when these two were conceived is not stated. From there, Scripture moves on to trace the line of Cain, and then the line of Seth, whom God gave Adam as a replacement for the murdered Abel: "God hath appointed me another seed for Abel whom Cain slew" (Gen 4:25).

Since these two lines, Cain's and Seth's, perfectly represent the two cities, one heavenly yet laboring on earth, the other earthly and given over to earthly desires, not one of Cain's descendants from Adam through the eighth generation has his age recorded at the birth of his son, even though the whole line is listed. The Spirit of God chose not to record the ages of the wicked before the flood, only those of the righteous, as the only ones worthy of such attention. But when Seth was born, his father's age was not omitted, even though Adam had already fathered others before him, namely Cain and Abel, and who can say whether there were still more? It does not follow that Cain and Abel were Adam's only sons simply because they were the only ones named for the purpose of distinguishing the two lines. We read that Adam had sons and daughters, all of them unnamed; who would dare say how many there were without falling into recklessness? Adam may well have been moved by God's prompting to say at Seth's birth, "God hath raised me up another seed for Abel," because Seth was destined to carry on Abel's holiness, not merely because he happened to be born after him in time.

And when we read that Seth lived one hundred and five, or two hundred and five years, and then fathered Enosh, would anyone but the careless conclude from this that Enosh was Seth's firstborn son? That conclusion would give us reason to marvel that Seth could live so long without any vow of celibacy and without using the marriage bed for procreation. In fact, Scripture says of him: "He begat sons and daughters, and the days of Seth were nine hundred and twelve years, and he died" (Gen 5:7-8). The same is said of all the others named in that genealogy: each of them had sons and daughters. But none of this proves that the son named in connection with any of them was actually his firstborn. Nor is it credible that their fathers spent all those years either immature, unmarried, or childless, or that the son named was necessarily the eldest.

Scripture's intention was to trace a genealogical line from Adam to Noah and the flood, and so it recorded not the firstborn of each father, but only those who fell within the scope of these two family lines. Consider this example, which should settle any remaining doubt: Matthew the Evangelist, intending to record the genealogy of Christ the man, begins with Abraham and works down to David. "Abraham," he says, "begat Isaac" (Matt 1:2). Why not Ishmael? Ishmael was his firstborn. "Isaac begat Jacob" (Matt 1:2): why not Esau? Esau was his firstborn too. The reason is that neither Ishmael nor Esau lay on the path that led to David. Matthew continues: "Jacob begat Judah and his brethren" (Matt 1:2). Was Judah Jacob's firstborn? And then: "Judah begat Phares and Zara" (Matt 1:3). Neither of these was Judah's firstborn; he had three sons before either of them. The Evangelist simply followed the line that ran directly to David and served his purpose.

From all this we can see clearly that the firstborn children of the men before the flood were not the ones recorded in this account. Only those through whose line the descent passed from Adam to Noah the Patriarch were included. And so the otherwise fruitless and obscure question about their late maturity is answered as fully as necessary. We need not press the matter further.

When mankind first began to multiply, after the first man was formed from clay and the first woman from his side, brothers married sisters out of sheer necessity, since there was no other way to populate the earth. This was lawful then, compelled by circumstance, but it is rightly condemned now by religious prohibition. There was a wise concern for charity in this: those who needed to live together in harmony should be bound to one another through as many different ties of kinship and affinity as possible. Rather than one person holding many relationships in a single bond, each distinct relationship should be spread across many people, so that many individuals would be joined together through many different connections in honorable marriage. Consider that "father" and "father-in-law" are two separate relationships. When one man fills both roles, charity is extended further. Adam was forced to be both to his sons and daughters, who married one another as brothers and sisters. Eve was likewise both mother and stepmother to them all. But had there been two different women to fill those two roles, the reach of charity would have extended further still. The sister who became a wife combined two relationships in herself that, had they been divided between two different women, would have drawn more people into the bonds of love. As it was, there was no one on earth but brothers and sisters, all children of the first created pair.

It was necessarily right to end this practice as soon as possible, so that wives and sisters would no longer be the same person. There was no longer any need for it, and continuing it would have been a serious wrong. Consider the grandchildren of the first men: if they had married their sisters rather than their cousins, three relationships rather than two would have been collapsed into one. Those three relationships should, for the sake of extending love and charity, have been distributed among three separate people. A man would have been father, stepfather, and uncle to his own children, had a brother and sister married; his wife would have been mother, stepmother, and aunt to those same children; and the children themselves would have been not only brother and sister to each other, but also cousins. Now, those relationships that collapse three into one would, if properly distributed, bind nine people together in kinship and friendship: one person might have a sister, another a wife, another a cousin, another a father, another an uncle, another a stepfather, another a mother, another an aunt, and another a stepmother. In this way, the bonds of social affection are spread outward rather than folded back on themselves.

As the world's population grew, we can observe even among pagans and unbelievers that, although some of their more degraded laws permitted brothers to marry sisters, better custom recoiled from this license. Even where it had once been lawful, people came to avoid it as though it had never been permitted at all. Custom is a powerful force in shaping what we love or hate, and here custom, by suppressing the immoderate impulse of desire, has rightly branded such unions as irreligious and inhuman. If it is wrong to plow beyond your boundary out of greed for more land, how much worse is it to transgress every boundary, and indeed overturn every foundation of decent conduct, out of carnal lust?

We have also observed that marriage between first cousins, because it stands one step away from the relationship of brother and sister, has become very rare in our own times. This is the effect of good custom, even though the laws permit it, for neither God's law nor human law has forbidden it. Yet it is avoided because it stands so close to what is unlawful. A man who marries his cousin feels, in some sense, that he is almost doing what he would do with a sister, since cousins, by reason of their close blood ties, are commonly called brothers and sisters and are indeed very nearly that. The patriarchs showed a wise concern for keeping kinship within proper bounds, so that it would not dissolve into nothing. When it had spread a little, they drew it back and renewed its bonds. Once the earth was well populated, they no longer sought to marry brother to sister, yet each still desired a wife from within his own kindred.

There is no question that the prohibition of marriage between first cousins is entirely sound, for two reasons. First, for the reasons already given: two relationships are collapsed into one person, when they should rather be distributed between two people for the sake of extending affinity. Second, there is a natural and praiseworthy instinct of decency in a man, prompting him to refrain from directing carnal desire, even in its legitimate form, toward those whom closeness of kin has taught him to regard with chaste respect, since even blameless marriage is not without a certain shame in that very act.

As far as humanity is concerned, then, the union of man and woman is the seed from which a city grows. The earthly city requires nothing more than this. The heavenly city, however, requires something further: regeneration, to overcome the corruption inherited from the first birth. Whether there was any sign of regeneration before the flood, or at least any visible and bodily sign before circumcision was given to Abraham, Scripture does not make clear. That the first men offered sacrifices to God, Holy Scripture does declare, as in the case of the first two brothers, and of Noah, who is said to have offered to God after the flood when he came out of the ark. But we have already spoken of this, to show that the devils desire to be worshipped as gods and to receive sacrifice for one reason only: because they know that true sacrifice belongs to none but the true God.

Adam was therefore the father of both races belonging to the earthly and heavenly city. After Abel was slain, and a profound mystery commended to us in his death, Cain and Seth became the heads of the two parties. In the sons named after them, the two cities began to take shape on earth among humanity: for Cain fathered Enoch and built an earthly city in his name, not a city that would pass through this world as a pilgrim, but one that would settle into and enjoy the peace of this earth. Cain is interpreted as "Possession," which is why either his father or his mother said at his birth, "I have gotten a man by God." Enoch is interpreted as "Dedication," which suits the earthly city perfectly, because it is dedicated to this world, which is where it is built, where its goals lie, and where it finds its end. Now, Seth means "Resurrection," and his son Enos means "Man," though not in the same sense as Adam. Adam means "man," but in Hebrew that word applies equally to male and female, as it is written: "Male and female made He them, and called their name Adam" (Gen 5:2). Eve, then, was not her most essential name; Adam was a name that belonged to both of them. Enos, by contrast, means "man" in a way that excludes women entirely, as Hebrew scholars confirm, pointing to the son of the resurrection, where people will neither marry nor be given in marriage. Regeneration will replace generation there. I therefore consider it far from trivial that in the entire lineage descended from Seth, not a single woman is named as having been born into that line. We read: Methushael begat Lamech, and Lamech took two wives, Adah and Zillah. Adah bore Jabal, the father of those who lived in tents and kept cattle, and his brother's name was Jubal, the father of musicians. Zillah also bore Tubal, who worked in bronze and iron, and Tubal's sister was Naamah. This brings Cain's lineage to a close: eight generations from Adam, with Adam himself counting as the first and Lamech as the seventh, followed by Lamech's sons as the eighth, whose sisters are also mentioned. It is well worth noting that the earthly city will continue producing physical generations until its end, by which I mean generations that come from the union of male and female. This is why the wives of the last father in this line are named explicitly, while no other women before the flood are named except Eve. Just as Cain means "Possession," marking him as the founder of the earthly city, and his son Enoch means "Dedication," the name given to the city itself, together showing that this city has an earthly beginning and an earthly end with no hope beyond the things of this world, so too Seth means "Resurrection." As the father of the other line of descent, we must now consider what Scripture tells us about his son.

Scripture tells us that Seth had a son and named him Enos. This man hoped to call on the name of the Lord, for it is true, as the truth itself declares, that the son of the resurrection lives in hope: all the while he continues his pilgrimage here below, together with the City of God, which rises out of faith in Christ's resurrection. These two men, Abel (whose name means "Sorrow") and Seth (whose name means "Resurrection"), prefigure the death and rising again of Christ, the very faith from which the City of God takes its rise, in those who hoped to call upon the Lord.

For we are saved by hope, as the Apostle says: "But hope which is seen is no hope; for hopeth he for that he seeth? but if we hope for that which we see not, then do we with patience wait for it" (Rom 8:24-25). Who can say this doesn't touch the depths of this mystery? Did Abel not hope to call on the name of the Lord God when his sacrifice was so acceptable to Him? And did Seth not do the same, of whom it is said, "God hath appointed me another seed for Abel" (Gen 4:25)? Why, then, is this hope bound specifically to Seth's time, which we understand to represent the age of all the godly, if not because it was fitting that in the one first recorded as born should be prefigured the man who lifts his spirit from his earthly father to a better Father, the King of the heavenly country? That is, the society of people who live in hope of blessed eternity, not according to human ways but according to God. It is not said "he hoped in God," nor "he called on God," but "he hoped to call on God." Why hoped to call? Because it is a prophecy that from him would arise a people who, by the election of grace, would call on the name of the Lord God. This is what the Apostle takes from another source and shows to belong to the grace of God, saying, "Whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord, shall be saved" (Rom 10:13). This is what is meant when Scripture says, "He called his name Enos" (which means "man"), and then adds, "This man hoped to call upon the name of the Lord" (Gen 4:26): which plainly shows that man should not put his trust in himself. For "Cursed is the man that trusteth in man" (Jer 17:5), as we read elsewhere, and by extension, cursed is the man who trusts in himself. If he avoids this, he may become a citizen of that city founded above in the eternity of bliss, rather than of the city Cain built and named after his son, a city of this world, unstable and passing away.

Seth's line also has a dedication associated with one of its sons: Enoch, the seventh from Adam. He was translated, or taken up, because he pleased God, and he lived in that famous number on which the Sabbath was sanctified, namely the seventh generation from Adam, and the sixth from the first division of the generations into Cain's line and Seth's. Six is the number in which man was made and all God's works were completed. Enoch's translation prefigures our own dedication, which has already been accomplished in Christ, who rose from death never to die again and was likewise taken up. The other dedication, of the whole house, still remains: Christ is its foundation, but it is deferred until the end, until the final resurrection of all flesh to die no more. We may call it the house of God, the Church of God, or the City of God; any of these phrases will do. Virgil called Rome the house of Assaracus because the Romans descended from Troy and the Trojans from Assaracus, and he calls it the house of Aeneas because Aeneas led the Trojans into Italy and they built Rome. In this, the poet was imitating Scripture, which calls the populous Hebrew nation the house of Jacob.

Ay, but some ask: if Scripture meant only to trace the line from Adam to Noah at the flood, and from Noah to Abraham (where Matthew the Evangelist begins the genealogy of Christ, the King of the Heavenly City), why did it bother with Cain's line at all? My answer is that it traces Cain's descendants down to the flood, at which point the earthly city was utterly destroyed, though it was later rebuilt through Noah's sons. For the society of worldly people will never be absent until the end of time; of them Scripture says, "The children of this world marry and are given in marriage." But it is regeneration that lifts the City of God out of its pilgrimage through this world and places it in the next, where the sons neither marry nor are given in marriage. So generation is common to both cities here on earth, even though the City of God has many thousands who abstain from it, and the earthly city has some citizens who imitate them and yet go astray. For the founders of all heresies belong to the earthly city, living by the world's standards rather than God's. The Gymnosophists of India, who live naked in the deserts, belong to this society as well, and they too abstain from generation. But such abstinence is not good unless it is grounded in faith in God, that supreme good. Yet we find no one who practiced it before the flood: Enoch himself, the seventh from Adam, whom God took up without allowing him to die, had sons and daughters, among them Methuselah, through whom the line continued downward.

But then why are so few of Cain's descendants named, if they were meant to be counted down to the flood, and if their long lifespans did not delay their maturity, which continued a hundred or more years without children? If the author did not intend to trace this line down to a single man (as he does with Noah in Seth's line) and then proceed from there, why did he skip the firstborn and jump to Lamech, in whose time the two lines converged, in the eighth generation from Adam and the seventh from Cain? It is as if something more needed to be added for the descent, either down to the Israelites (whose earthly city, Jerusalem, was a type of the City of God) or down to the birth of Christ in the flesh (who is that eternal God, the blessed Founder and Ruler), while Cain's posterity was wiped out. From this we can see that firstborn children were counted in this recital of the line. Why, then, are there so few? There could not be so few unless the great age of their fathers delayed their maturity by at least a hundred years. If we assume they all began to have children at thirty years of age, then eight times thirty (for there are eight generations from Adam to Lamech's children, inclusive) gives us two hundred and forty years. Did they then have no children at all during the remaining time before the flood? Why does the author not mention the rest? Our books count two thousand two hundred and sixty-two years from Adam to the flood; the Hebrew reckoning gives one thousand six hundred and fifty-six. Taking the smaller number as the more accurate: subtract two hundred and forty from one thousand six hundred and fifty-six, and one thousand four hundred and sixteen years remain. Is it really likely that Cain's offspring had no children during all that time?

But let anyone troubled by this observe what I said earlier, when the question was raised of how it was credible that the first men could go so long without having children. Two answers were given: either because their maturity came late, proportioned to the length of their lives; or because those recorded in the genealogies were not necessarily the firstborn, but only those through whom Seth's line was carried down to Noah.

If no one in Cain's line stands out as worth mentioning specifically, we might attribute this to the unusually late age at which they reached maturity, which prevented them from fathering children until they were over a hundred years old. This would mean the genealogy continued through firstborn sons, descending across those long centuries until it finally met the flood. I cannot say for certain; there may be some deeper reason why the earthly city's lineage is passed over until Lamech and his sons, and why everything after that is simply suppressed by the author up to the deluge. To sidestep the problem of late maturity, another explanation for why the descent doesn't follow the firstborn is that Cain may have reigned for a long time in his city of Enoch, fathering many kings, each of whom left a son to reign in his place. Of these, Cain himself would be the first; Enoch his son the second (for whom the city was built so that he might reign there); Irad the son of Enoch the third; Mehujael the son of Irad the fourth; Methusael the son of Mehujael the fifth; Lamech the son of Methusael the sixth; and this man is the seventh from Adam through Cain. It doesn't follow that any of these was necessarily his father's firstborn: merit, virtue, political skill, chance, or simply a father's affection could easily have placed one son on the throne over another. The flood may then have struck during Lamech's reign, drowning him along with everyone else on earth outside the ark. The difference in generational lengths would make it entirely unsurprising that there are only seven generations from Adam through Cain to the flood, and ten through Seth: Lamech being the seventh from Adam, and Noah the tenth. This is also why Lamech is said to have had not one son but many, since it was uncertain who would have succeeded him had he died before the flood.

But however Cain's line is reckoned, whether by kings or by firstborn sons, I must not pass over the fact that Lamech, the seventh from Adam, had exactly as many children as make up eleven, the number of transgression. He had three sons and one daughter (his wives point to something else that need not be addressed here, since we are speaking of lineage, and their descent is not our present concern). The law is represented by the number ten, as the Ten Commandments confirm, and eleven, exceeding ten by one, signifies the breaking of the law, that is, sin. This is why eleven curtains of goat hair were made for the tabernacle, the portable sanctuary of God during Israel's wanderings. Goat hair carries the memory of sin, because of the goats who will be placed on the left hand; and in repentance we prostrate ourselves in sackcloth, saying as the Psalm puts it, "My sin is ever before Thee." So the line of Adam through wicked Cain ends at eleven, the number of sin, and the last figure to complete that number is a woman, in whom the sin began that made us all slaves to death, the sin by which disobedience to the spirit and the rule of fleshly desire entered into us. Naamah, Lamech's daughter, means "beautiful pleasure." But from Adam to Noah through Seth, the number ten, the number of the law, is completed; and to it Noah's three sons are added, two of whom their father blessed while the third fell away. With the reprobate excluded and the elect added to the whole, the number twelve is suggested, the number of the patriarchs and apostles, which is a glorious number because it arises from the multiplication of the factors of seven: four times three, or three times four, is twelve.

With all this established, it remains to examine how these two distinct lines, each pointing to one of the two cities (the city of the reprobate and the city of the redeemed), came to be so thoroughly mixed and tangled together that all of humanity, except for eight persons, deserved to perish in the flood.

First, we need to understand why Cain's line is traced all the way to the flood, beginning with his son Enoch, who is named before all his other descendants. Yet when Seth's son Enos is born, the author does not continue forward to the flood but instead circles back to Adam: "This is the book of the generation of Adam, in the day that God created Adam, in the likeness of God made He him, male and female created He them and blessed them, and called their name Adam that day that they were created." I take this return to Adam as a way of anchoring the chronology, something the author deliberately avoided when describing the earthly city, just as God set aside that accounting without concern for it. But why does the author return to this recapitulation after naming the righteous son of Seth, the one who hoped to call on the name of the Lord? Because he intends to present the two cities in a particular way: one traced through a murderer until it arrives at another murderer (for Lamech confesses to his two wives that he has killed a man), and the other traced through the one who hoped to call on the name of the Lord. The central task of God's city during its earthly pilgrimage is precisely what was embodied in that one man appointed as a seed in place of the one who was slain. In him alone, the unity of the heavenly city was not literally present but mystically represented. So what should the son of Cain, the son of "Possession," inherit but the name of an earthly city built in his honor? The Psalmist sings of this: "They have called their lands after their own names" (Ps 49:11), and elsewhere follows the word: "Thou, O Lord, in Thy city shalt bring their image to nothing." But let the son of "Resurrection," Seth's son, hope to call on the name of the Lord, for he is a figure of that community which says: "I am like a green olive tree in the house of God, for I trusted in His mercy" (Ps 52:8). And let him not seek empty pride on earth, for "Blessed is the man that maketh the Lord his trust: and regardeth not vanity, and false fondness" (Ps 40:4).

Thus the two cities are described in their respective positions: one rooted in worldly possession, the other sustained by heavenly hope, both passing through the common gate of mortality that was opened in Adam. From his condemned race, as from a corrupted mass, God chose some vessels of mercy and some of wrath, giving deserved punishment to the one and undeserved grace to the other. This arrangement teaches the citizens of God on earth, through those vessels of wrath, never to rely on their own election but to hope and call on the name of the Lord. For the natural will that God created (though the Unchangeable did not make it unchangeable) can turn away from Him who is good, and from all good, to do evil, and it can do so freely; yet it can also turn from evil to do good, but never without God's help.

This freedom of will, as it grew and intertwined with wickedness, produced a confused mingling of both cities. This trouble arose from women again, though not in the same way as before. This time, the women did not seduce men into sin; rather, the daughters who had always belonged to the earthly city, and who were of corrupt character, were loved by the citizens of God for their physical beauty. Beauty is indeed a gift from God, but He gives it to the wicked as well, so that the good will not mistake it for something of supreme worth. In this way, the greatest good was left to belong only to the good, while men turned toward the lesser good that the wicked also share. So the sons of God were captivated by love for the daughters of men and, for their sake, fell into fellowship with the earthly city, abandoning the piety that the holy community had practiced. In this way, physical beauty (a genuine gift from God, but a temporal, base, and fleeting one) was sinfully chosen and loved above God, who is the eternal, inward, and everlasting good. It is just as when a greedy man abandons justice and loves gold: the gold is not at fault, but the man is. The same is true of all other created things. They are all good, and they can be loved well or badly: well, when our love is measured; badly, when it is disordered. As one writer put it in praise of the Creator:

"Hæc tua sunt, bona sunt, quia tu bonus ista creasti,

Nil nostrum est in eis, nisi quod peccamus amantes,

Ordine neglecto pro te quod conditur abste."

These are your goods, for you (the Chief Good) made them,

Not ours, yet we seek them instead of you:

Perverse desire drives us to misuse them.

But we truly love the Creator only when we love Him for His own sake, not for anything outside His essence, since nothing about Him can be loved wrongly. Even that love by which we love what deserves to be loved must itself be held in proper measure within us, as a virtue that guides us toward honorable living. I think, therefore, that the best and most concise definition of virtue is this: it is an ordering of love. Christ's bride, the City of God, says as much in the Song of Songs: "He hath ordered his love in me." The sons of God broke this ordering of love when they neglected Him and ran after the daughters of men. In these two names, both cities are fully distinguished: those men were sons of men by nature, but grace had given them a new identity. For in the same passage of Scripture where it says that "the sons of God loved the daughters of men," they are also called the angels of God, which led some to conclude that those who acted this way were angels rather than men.

We touched on this question in our third book but left it unresolved: whether the angels, being spirits, could have carnal knowledge of women. It is written, "He maketh His angels spirits" (Ps 104:4), meaning that those who are spirits He makes His angels by sending them as messengers wherever He pleases, since the Greek word *ἄγγελος* (from which the Latin "Angelus" derives) means "messenger." Whether the following phrase, "and his ministers a flaming fire," refers to their bodies or suggests that God's ministers should burn with fiery zeal and charity is uncertain. Even so, Scripture plainly affirms that angels have appeared in visible and tangible form. Given how widespread the reports are, and how many people claim from their own experience or from the testimony of trustworthy witnesses that the sylvans and fawns (commonly called incubi) have often assaulted women, desiring and acting carnally with them, and that certain devils whom the Gauls call "Duses" continually practice this wickedness and tempt others to it, and given that these claims come from people of such evident credibility that denying them would be brazen, I still dare not venture a definitive judgment here. Whether devils embodied in air (which, when violently agitated, can be felt) are capable of experiencing this lust, or of producing it in the women with whom they mingle, I cannot say. What I do firmly believe is that God's angels could never have fallen in this way at that time, and that the Apostle Peter was not referring to them when he wrote, "If God spared not the angels that had sinned, but cast them down into hell, and delivered them into chains of darkness to be kept unto damnation" (2 Pet 2:4). He was referring instead to those who turned apostate with the devil, their prince, from the beginning: that is, the one who deceived humanity through the serpent.

Scripture also testifies that men were called angels of God, saying of John, "Behold, I send mine angel before Thy face which shall prepare the way before Thee" (Matt 11:10). And the prophet Malachi was called an angel by a particular grace given to him. Some people stumble over the fact that giants were born from the union of those called God's angels with the women of earth, as though extraordinary human size were unknown in our own times. Was there not a woman at Rome, with her father and mother, just before the city was sacked by the Goths, who was of giant-like height compared to everyone around her? The crowds who came to see her were remarkable, and she was all the more astonishing because her parents were of no more than ordinary stature. It is therefore entirely possible that giants existed before the sons of God (also called His angels) had any carnal relations with the daughters of men: that is, before the sons of Seth mingled with the daughters of Cain, those who lived according to the flesh. For Genesis says: "So when men were multiplied upon earth, and there were daughters borne unto them, the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair, and they took them wives of all that they liked. Therefore the Lord said, My spirit shall not alway strive with man: because he is but flesh, and his days shall be a hundred and twenty years. There were giants in the earth in those days, yea and after that the sons of God came unto the daughters of men, and they had borne them children, these were giants, and in old time were men of renown" (Gen 6:1-4).

These words of Holy Scripture show plainly that there were giants on earth when the sons of God took the fair daughters of men as wives, since Scripture customarily uses "fair" to mean "good." But giants also appeared afterward, for the text says "there were giants upon earth in those days," and then "after that the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men," meaning there were giants both before and after. The phrase "they begot unto themselves" shows that they had previously begotten children for God rather than for themselves: not out of lust, but out of their duty to propagate, not to build themselves a proud family line, but to increase the citizens of God. Like God's angels, they instructed their children to place their hope in Him, as Seth's son (the son of the Resurrection) did, who hoped to call upon the name of the Lord, and in that hope he and all his sons might be sons and heirs of everlasting life. But we must not take these angels to have been anything other than men: men they certainly were, and Scripture confirms this. Having first said, "The angels of God saw the daughters of men that they were good, and they took them wives of all whom they liked," it immediately adds, "And the Lord said, My Spirit shall not alway strive with man: because he is but flesh" (Gen 6:2-3). His Spirit had made them His angels and sons, but they declined toward the lower things, and so He called them men by nature rather than by grace, and flesh, as those who had abandoned and been abandoned by the Spirit.

The Septuagint calls them the angels and sons of God; some manuscripts call them only the sons of God, omitting "angels"; but Aquila, whom the Jews prefer above all other translators, calls them neither, but the sons of gods. Both readings are true: they were sons of God and, through His patronage, brothers of their fathers; and they were sons of the gods, born of the gods and their equals, in keeping with the Psalm: "I have said ye are gods, and ye are all the sons of the Most High" (Ps 82:6). We rightly believe that the Seventy had the spirit of prophecy and that whatever they altered was set down according to the truth of divine meaning rather than the preference of translators. Yet the Hebrew, it is said, is ambiguous and can be read as either "sons of God" or "sons of gods."

Let us therefore set aside the writings called Apocrypha, because the ancient fathers through whom we received the Scriptures did not know the authors of those works. Though some truths may be found in them, their abundance of falsehoods disqualifies them from canonical authority. Certain writings were undoubtedly composed by Enoch, the seventh from Adam, as the canonical Epistle of Jude records (Jude 14). But it is not without reason that they were excluded from the Hebrew canon kept by the priests in the temple. Their great antiquity raised doubts about whether they were genuinely divine, and uncertainty about whether Enoch was truly their author, since those who might have vouched for them to later generations never named them. For this reason, the books that circulate under his name and contain stories of giants whose fathers were not men are, by sound judgment, not considered his, but counterfeit, as the heretics have done with many texts, inventing them under the names of the apostles and prophets. All such texts were later examined and excluded from canonical authority. But according to the Hebrew canonical Scriptures, there is no doubt that giants existed on the earth before the flood, and that they were the sons of earthly men, citizens of the carnal city, to whom the sons of God (being of Seth's line in the flesh) joined themselves after forsaking righteousness. Nor is it surprising that these unions produced giants. Not all of them were giants, but there were far more before the flood than since. The Creator was pleased to make them so that we might learn a wise person should value neither physical size nor outward beauty, but find true happiness in the undying, spiritual, and eternal goods that belong to the righteous alone and are not shared with the wicked. Another writer commends this truth to us, saying: "There were the giants famous from the beginning that were of so great stature and so expert in war. These did not the Lord choose, neither gave He the way of knowledge unto them: but they were destroyed because they had no wisdom, and perished through their own foolishness."

When God said, "Their days shall be a hundred and twenty years," we should not read this as a warning that no one after that time would live beyond that age, since many people after the flood lived five hundred years or more. Rather, we should understand that God spoke these words near the end of Noah's five hundredth year, that is, when Noah was four hundred and eighty years old (which Scripture typically rounds to five hundred, taking the greater part to represent the whole). In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, the flood began, and so the hundred and twenty years had run their course, at the end of which humanity was to be destroyed by the deluge. Nor is it unreasonable to believe that the flood came at a time when no one remained on earth who was undeserving of such a death, though a good person who dies in such a way is none the worse for it once it has passed. Of all those in Seth's line whom Scripture names, not one died in the flood. Scripture traces the flood to this cause: "The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and all the imaginations of his heart were only and continually evil: and He revolved in His heart how He had made man in the earth, and said: I will destroy from the face of the earth the man whom I have made, from man to beast, and from the creeping things to the fowls of the air, for I am angry that I have made them."

God's anger is not a disturbance of mind within Him, but rather His judgment assigning sin its deserved punishment. His apparent change of thought is simply His unchanging ordering of changeable things, for God does not repent of anything He does the way a man does. His knowledge of a thing before it happens and His understanding of it after it has happened are both equally firm and fixed. But Scripture cannot instill the meaning of God's works into our understanding, nor terrify the proud, nor stir up the idle, nor challenge those who seek, nor delight those who find, without using these kinds of phrases. It cannot do so without stooping to our limited capacities. And when Scripture describes the coming destruction of beasts and birds, it conveys the sheer scale of that dissolution without threatening the irrational creation as though they had sinned.

Now, Noah was (as Scripture truly says) a just man in his time, perfect in his generation, though not in the way that citizens of God will be perfect in that immortality where they equal the angels, but perfect as a mortal pilgrim of God can be on earth. God commanded him to build an ark, in which he, his family, and the creatures God sent to him might be saved from the waters. This is truly a figure of God's City here on earth, that is, His Church, which is saved by wood: the wood on which Christ the Mediator between God and man was crucified. The dimensions of the ark's length, depth, and breadth signify the human body, in which the Savior was prophesied to come, and did come. The length of a human body from head to foot is six times its breadth from side to side, and ten times its thickness measured front to back. Lay a person flat and measure them, and you will find that their height from head to foot contains their breadth from side to side six times, and their height from the ground ten times. This is why the ark was made 300 cubits long, 50 cubits wide, and 30 cubits deep. The door in the side represents the wound that the soldier's spear made in our Savior's side, for through this all people enter into Him: from it came the sacraments of the faithful. The ark being built entirely of squared timber signifies the unshakeable constancy of the saints, for no matter how you set down a cube or square body, it will always stand firm. All the other details of the ark's construction were likewise types of things belonging to the Church. We have no time to go into them here, having already done so in our work against Faustus the Manichee, who denied that the Old Testament contained any prophecy concerning Christ. Different readers may interpret these details in different ways, provided that all interpretations are referred back to the Holy City of which we are speaking, which, as I have said repeatedly, labored through its earthly pilgrimage. Anyone who strays from that reference will stray far from the meaning of the text. For example, take the instruction to build the ark with lower, second, and third stories. In my work against Faustus, I interpret this to mean that because the Church is gathered from all nations, it had two stories for the two kinds of people, circumcised and uncircumcised, whom the apostle elsewhere calls Jews and Greeks; and it had three stories because all the world descended from Noah's three sons after the flood. If anyone prefers a different interpretation, they are free to follow it, provided they do not violate the true rule of faith. The ark had rooms below and rooms above, and was therefore called double-storied; and it had rooms above those upper rooms, making it triple-storied, three floors in all. These three levels may represent the three things the apostles so highly praise: faith, hope, and charity. Or, perhaps more fittingly, they may represent the three degrees of fruitfulness spoken of in the Gospels: thirty-fold, sixty-fold, and a hundred-fold, with chaste marriage dwelling in the first, chaste widowhood in the second, and chaste virginity in the highest of all. This or other interpretations may be accepted, provided they always maintain their reference to the Holy City. The same could be said of all the other details here awaiting interpretation: even where they admit more than one reading, every reading must conform to the single rule of agreement with the Catholic faith.

No one should think that these things were written merely to record historical fact without any deeper symbolic meaning. Nor, on the other hand, should anyone conclude that none of it actually happened and that the whole account is purely allegorical. And no one should dismiss it as useless or devoid of any prophetic significance for the Church. Who but an atheist would claim that books are worthless when they have been so carefully preserved and faithfully handed down across so many thousands of years? And who would call them merely historical when, to set aside everything else, the distinction between bringing unclean creatures in by pairs and clean ones by sevens clearly points to something beyond the literal? After all, the animals could have survived just as well in pairs. Could not God, who devised this means of restoration, simply recreate them as He had created them in the first place?

As for those who insist the whole account is purely allegorical, they begin by arguing that no flood could ever have risen fifteen cubits above the highest mountain, because Mount Olympus, they claim, reaches above the clouds and into the heavens themselves, so high that the denser air that produces wind and rain cannot even reach its summit. Yet they never stop to notice that the earth itself, the densest element of all, can lie at that very height. Or will they say the peak of that mountain is not earth? If not, then why do these poor reasoners allow earth to occupy such heights while denying that water could rise even higher, especially since water is by nature lighter and more capable of rising than earth? What reason can they give for earth holding such a position in the air for thousands upon thousands of years, while insisting that water cannot reach the same height for even a brief time?

They also argue that the ark was too small to hold so many creatures: seven of every clean kind and two of every unclean. It seems they are only counting three hundred cubits in length, fifty in breadth, and thirty in depth, without noticing that each deck of the ark was that size, making the whole vessel nine hundred cubits long, one hundred and fifty wide, and ninety deep. And if what Origen so elegantly demonstrates is correct, that Moses (who, as Scripture says, was educated in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, who were accomplished geometers) was using the geometrical cubit, one of which equals six of ours, then anyone can see what an enormous amount of space lies within those dimensions. When they say an ark of such size could never have been built, they are simply talking nonsense, since cities far larger than this ark have been constructed. They also ignore the fact that it was built over a hundred years. And unless they want to argue that stones can be bound together with mortar and walls extended for miles in every direction, yet timber cannot be fastened to timber with joints, bolts, nails, and pitch to form an ark, not with curved ribs but in a straight rectangular form, not launched into the sea by human effort but lifted from the ground by the natural rise of the waters themselves, with God's providence serving as both helmsman and pilot rather than any human skill, then their objection carries no weight.

As for their fussy question about vermin: whether there were more mice, lizards, locusts, hornets, flies, and fleas in the ark than God had commanded, those who are troubled by this should first consider that creatures capable of living in the water did not need to be brought into the ark at all. This applies both to fish swimming beneath the surface and to various birds swimming on top of it.

"They shall be male and female" refers to the preservation of each species, so creatures that don't reproduce but arise from mere putrefaction had no need to be there. If they were present, it was as they are now in our houses, in no fixed number. If the greatness of this holy mystery, contained within this true and literal event, required that the same numerical order be maintained even among those creatures that nature would not allow to survive in water, that was God's concern, not Noah's. Noah did not go out and gather the animals into the ark; God sent them all in, and Noah simply allowed them to enter. As the text says, "Two of every sort shall come unto thee" (Gen 6:20): not by Noah's collecting, but by God's directing. We may reasonably conclude that none of the creatures lacking sex were present, since the text states precisely, "They shall be male and female." Some creatures arise from decay and then go on to reproduce, like flies. Others have no sex at all, like bees. Still others have sex but do not reproduce, like mules of either kind. It seems likely these were not in the ark, and that their parents, the horse and the donkey, were brought instead to produce them afterward. The same logic applies to all other creatures born from the crossing of different kinds. But if the mystery required their presence, then they were there, for they were male and female.

Some also raise questions about the variety of food the animals had, and what those creatures could eat that could only eat flesh: whether there were more animals on the ark than the command specified, so that some could feed on others; or rather (which seems more likely) that there were other foods besides flesh that satisfied them. After all, we see many flesh-eating creatures that also eat fruits and nuts, especially figs and chestnuts. Why should it surprise us, then, if God had taught this righteous man to prepare food suited to every creature's diet, without relying on flesh? What will hunger not drive a creature to eat? And what can God not make wholesome and pleasant to the taste, when He could, if He chose, have sustained them with no food at all? But it was fitting to the perfection of this mystery that they should be fed. And so all people, except those who are stubbornly resistant, are bound to believe that each of these many details carried a symbolic meaning pointing to the Church: for the Gentiles have now so filled the Church with the clean and the unclean, and will continue to do so until the end, and all are now so enclosed within those ribs, that it is wrong to stop at those lesser (though more obscure) ceremonies. This being so, no one may think these things were written without purpose, nor as bare and meaningless accounts, nor as pure allegory with no historical reality, nor as stories unrelated to the Church. Rather, everyone should believe they were written in wisdom, and are at once true histories and mystical allegories, all pointing forward to the Church. With that, this book comes to its close, and from here we must follow the progress of both our cities: the one heavenly, which belongs to God, and the other earthly, which belongs to man. Concerning both, we must now consider what took place after the flood.