The City of God: Book 22

The saints do will many things that are inspired by His holy will, yet are not brought about by Him directly. When they pray for someone, for instance, He is not the cause of that prayer itself, even though He produces the desire to pray in them through His Holy Spirit. So when the saints will and pray in accordance with God's purposes, we can rightly say that God wills it and yet does not directly work it, in the same way that we say He wills something when He causes others to will it. But according to His eternal will, joined with His foreknowledge, He created all that He pleased in heaven and on earth, and has already accomplished all things, whether future, past, or present. When the time for something God foreknows has not yet arrived, we say, "It will happen when God wills it." If both the timing and the outcome are uncertain, we say, "It will happen if God wills it." This does not mean God will have a different will at that point than He had before; it simply means that what His eternal, unchanging will ordained from all eternity will at that moment be brought to pass.

To skip over much that could be said: just as we see God's promise to Abraham fulfilled in Christ, "In thy seed shall all nations be blessed," so too will that other promise to the same seed be fulfilled through the prophet: "The dead shall live, even with their bodies shall they rise." And where He says, "I will create new heavens and a new earth, and the former shall not be remembered, nor come into mind, but be ye glad, and rejoice in the things I shall create; for behold I will create Jerusalem as a rejoicing, and her people as a joy," and so on. And through another prophet: "At that time shall thy people be delivered, everyone that shall be found written in the book of life, and many that sleep in the dust of the earth, shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and perpetual contempt." And again: "They shall take the kingdom of the saints of the Most High, and possess it for ever, even for ever and ever." And a little after: "His kingdom is an everlasting kingdom," and so on. Together with all such passages as I either included in Book 20 or left aside, all these things will come to pass, just as those things have already come to pass that unbelievers would never have believed. For the same God promised them both, the very God before whom the pagan gods tremble, as Porphyry, a distinguished philosopher among them, himself confesses.

But the learned of the world think they have a powerful objection against this all-converting power, specifically regarding the resurrection. They cite a passage from Cicero's third book *On the Republic*, in which he affirms that Romulus and Hercules were both deified, yet insists that their bodies were not translated into heaven, since nature, he says, will allow an earthly body no place except on the earth. This is the wise man's argument, and God knows how empty it is. Consider: if we were all pure spirits, without bodies, dwelling in heaven and entirely ignorant of earthly creatures, and someone told us that one day we would be bound within physical bodies, could we not have raised exactly this objection with even greater force, and refused to believe that nature would ever allow an incorporeal substance to be confined or circumscribed by a physical one? Yet the earth is full of vegetable souls, strangely combined with earthly bodies. Why, then, cannot God, who made this creature, transport an earthly body into heaven, just as He can bring a soul (a purer essence than any celestial body) down from heaven and enclose it within a form of earth? Can this small piece of earth contain so excellent a nature, live by it, and yet heaven cannot receive it or sustain it, given that it lives by an essence more excellent than heaven itself? This has not yet come to pass, because it is not His pleasure who made what we see every day and take for granted, in a manner far more admirable than that which these wise men refuse to believe. For why is it not stranger that a most pure and incorporeal soul should be chained to an earthly body, than that an earthly body should be lifted up to heaven, which is itself only a body? Simply because we see the first daily in ourselves, and the second we have never yet seen. But reason tells us plainly that it is a more divine work to join bodies and souls than to join bodies to bodies, however different their natures may be, whether the one be heavenly and the other of the earth.

This was once unbelievable. But now we see the whole world believes that Christ's body was taken up to heaven. The resurrection of the body and the ascension into glory are now believed across the entire earth; the learned and the unlearned alike embrace it, with only a handful rejecting it. If it is credible, what fools are those who refuse to believe it? If it is not credible, how astonishing that it should be so universally believed! These two incredible things, namely the resurrection and the world's belief in it, our Lord Jesus Christ promised would come to pass before He had brought either of them about. Now one of them (the world's belief in the resurrection) we can already see has come to pass. Why, then, should we despair of the other? Why should we doubt that this incredible thing, which the world already believes, will also come to pass? Especially since both are promised in those same Scriptures through which the world came to believe. The manner of that belief is more astonishing still: that men ignorant of every art, without rhetoric, logic, or grammar, plain fishermen, should be sent by Christ into the sea of this world armed with nothing but the nets of faith, and draw in such an innumerable multitude of every kind, all the more remarkable because they caught many distinguished philosophers among them. This may rightly be counted a third incredible thing, and yet all three have come to pass. It is incredible that Christ should rise again in the flesh and carry that flesh up to heaven with Him. It is incredible that the world should believe this. And it is incredible that this belief should be brought about by a small company of poor, simple, unlearned men. The first of these our adversaries refuse to believe; the second they witness with their own eyes and cannot explain, unless it was accomplished by the third. Christ's resurrection and ascension are proclaimed and believed throughout the entire world. If it is incredible, why does the whole world believe it? If many noble, learned, and powerful men had claimed to have witnessed it and spread the news abroad, it would have been no surprise if the world had believed them, and those who refused would have seemed unreasonable. But since the world believes it on the testimony of a few obscure, lowly, and unlearned men, why do our stubborn adversaries not believe the whole world, which believed those simple and unlearned witnesses? The reason is that the Deity itself, working through these humble instruments, acted all the more powerfully and far more wonderfully; for their proofs and persuasions lay not in words but in wonders. Those who had not seen Christ rise and ascend believed their testimony because it was confirmed by miracles. Men who had previously spoken only one language, or at most two, suddenly spoke every tongue of every nation. They healed a man who had been lame for forty years, lame from birth, by the name of Jesus Christ alone. Their handkerchiefs cured diseases; the sick had themselves laid in the streets where the apostles would pass, hoping to be helped even by their shadows. And among all these miracles performed in the name of Christ, they raised some from the dead. If these things are true, as they are written, then all of these may be added to the three earlier incredibles. We thus bring forward a multitude of extraordinary events to persuade our adversaries of just one thing: the resurrection. And yet their stubborn resistance will not let them see the light. If they refuse to believe that the apostles performed any such works to confirm the resurrection of Christ, it is enough to point out that the whole world believed them without miracles, which is itself as great a miracle as any of the rest.

Let us hear what Cicero says about the mythical deification of Romulus: "What is most remarkable about Romulus," he says, "is that other men who were deified lived in ages of ignorance, when there was far more room for fiction and the common people were far more credulous. But Romulus, as we know, lived within the last six hundred years, by which time learning had become widespread and the ignorance of earlier ages had been thoroughly swept away." So says Cicero, and a little further on: "This makes it clear that Homer lived long before Romulus, so that in later times, as men grew more educated, fiction was almost entirely driven out, whereas antiquity gave credence to some very unlikely fables. Our more polished modern age, by contrast, ridicules and rejects everything that seems impossible." So this most learned and eloquent man is saying that the deification of Romulus is all the more remarkable precisely because his era was an enlightened one that left little room for mythmaking. But who actually believed in this deification? Only Rome, which was at the time, God knows, a small and young city. Later generations were bound to preserve the traditions of their ancestors, each one drinking in superstition from the nurse, while the city grew into such power that, standing in sovereignty over the nations beneath her, she spread belief in this deification of her founder throughout her conquered provinces. Subject peoples were expected to affirm that Romulus was a god, whatever they privately thought, lest they give offense to the founder of their mistress and ruler by saying anything different from what an error born of love (not a love of error) had led her to believe. Now Christ likewise founded the Heavenly City, yet she does not regard Him as God because He founded her; rather, she was founded precisely because she regards Him as God. Rome, already built and established, honored her founder in a temple; but the heavenly Jerusalem places Christ her Founder in the very foundation of her faith, so that she may be built and perfected through it. Love led Rome to believe that Romulus was a god; and the belief that Christ is God led His City to love Him. So just as Rome had an object for her love that she was ready to honor with a false belief, the City of God has an object for her faith that she is always ready to honor with a true and rightly grounded love. For regarding Christ, beyond His many miracles, the holy prophets also declared Him to be God long before His coming; what the fathers believed would come to pass, we now see has indeed come to pass. But regarding Romulus, we read that he built Rome and reigned over it, not that any of this was foretold beforehand; and as for his deification, the records say it was believed, but they do not explain how it was established, since there were no miracles to prove it. The she-wolf that nursed the two brothers, which is treated as so miraculous: what does this prove about his divinity? Even if this she-wolf was a real beast and not a courtesan, since the event concerned both brothers equally, why was Remus not deified alongside him? And who is there that, if threatened with death for saying that Hercules, Romulus, or others like them are not gods, would rather die than profess belief in their divinity? What nation would worship Romulus as a god, were it not for fear of Rome? On the other side, who could count those who willingly endured death in every form of cruelty rather than deny the divinity of Christ? A modest fear of Roman power compelled various subject cities to honor Romulus as a god; but neither power, nor torture, nor death could prevent an immense multitude of martyrs, spread across the entire world, from both believing and openly confessing that Christ was God. Nor did His City, though she was at that time a pilgrim on earth with vast numbers within her, ever attempt to defend her earthly position against her persecutors by force; she set that aside to secure her place in eternity. Her people were bound, imprisoned, beaten, racked, burned, torn, and butchered, and yet they multiplied. Their way of fighting for life was to hold their own lives in contempt for the sake of their Savior. Cicero, in the third book of his *De Republica* (unless I am mistaken), argues that a just city should never take up arms except for its safety or its pledged word. What he means by safety he explains elsewhere: "From those sufferings which even the most foolish can feel," he says, "such as poverty, exile, flogging, imprisonment, and the like, a private person may escape by the ready release of death. But this death, which seems to free private individuals from suffering, is itself a kind of suffering for a city, since a city's goal should be to endure forever. Death, therefore, is not as natural to a commonwealth as it is to a private person; a person may often be driven to welcome it, but when a city is destroyed, the whole world seems in some sense to perish with it." So says Cicero, holding with the Platonists to the eternity of the world. He would therefore have a city take arms for her safety, meaning for her perpetual continuance here on earth, even as her individual members perish and are renewed in succession, like the leaves of the olive and laurel trees; for death, he says, may free private persons from misery, but it is itself misery for a commonwealth. It is therefore an open question whether the people of Saguntum did rightly in choosing the destruction of their city rather than break faith with Rome, an act the whole world nonetheless commends.

But I cannot see how they could possibly follow this rule, that a city should not take up arms except for the sake of its faith or its safety. When both are threatened together, so that one cannot be saved without losing the other, there is no clear way to choose between them. If the Saguntines had chosen to preserve their safety, they would have broken their faith; if they had chosen their faith, they would lose their safety, as indeed they did. But the safety of the City of God is different: it is preserved, or rather purchased, by faith, and once faith is lost, safety must inevitably perish along with it. This conviction, held with firm and patient resolve, crowned so many martyrs for Christ, while Romulus never had so much as a single man willing to die in defense of his supposed divinity.

It is absurd, of course, to compare the false divinity of Romulus with Christ at all. But consider: if the people of Romulus's age, nearly six hundred years before Scipio, were so sharp-minded that they would not accept anything they found impossible to believe, how much more discerning were those who lived six hundred years later, in the time of Cicero, in the time of Tiberius, in the very days of Christ's coming? By that point, His resurrection and ascension would have been dismissed as fiction and fantasy, had not the power of God and the weight of miracles persuaded people otherwise. Those miracles demonstrated what had already been shown in Christ and what would one day be shown in all people, and this truth was proclaimed boldly against savage persecution across the entire world, until the blood of the martyrs caused it to spread and flourish. People read the prophets, noticed how the prophecies aligned with events, and saw how all those miracles converged. The truth confirmed what was new, and what was new proved consistent with reason, so that in the end the world embraced and openly professed the very faith it had once hated and persecuted.

But why, they ask, do you have no such miracles today as you claim were performed in former times? I could answer that those miracles were necessary before the world believed, in order to bring it to belief; and anyone who now demands wonders before he will believe is himself the greatest wonder of all, refusing to accept what the entire world already accepts. But this objection implies that they don't believe any miracles happened at all. If that's so, then why is Christ's bodily ascension so universally acknowledged? How does the world, in such a learned and skeptical age, believe such extraordinary things without seeing them confirmed by miracles? Were these things credible enough to be believed on their own? Then why don't these skeptics believe them? The conclusion is simple: either this incredible event that no one witnessed was confirmed by other incredible events that people did witness, or else it is so credible on its own terms that it needs no miracle to prove it, which only exposes the stubborn unbelief of those who still reject it. I say this to silence foolish objections, because we cannot deny that Christ's miraculous bodily ascension was attested to us by the power of many other miracles. The Scriptures both record those miracles and explain what they were meant to accomplish. They were written to produce faith in people, and the faith they produced has made them far more widely known. They are read to lead people to believe, yet they would not be read at all unless people already believed them. As for miracles, some are still being performed today, partly through the sacraments and partly through the commemorations and prayers of the saints, but they are not as widely known or as celebrated as the earlier ones. The Scriptures, which were meant to be spread everywhere, gave the first miracles their fame among all nations, while the later ones are known only in the cities where they occur, or in the surrounding areas. Even there, few people typically know about them while many do not, especially in a large city; and when those who witnessed them tell others, they are not believed as readily or as completely as the earlier miracles, even when one Christian is telling another. The miracle that happened in Milan while I was there could easily become famous, both because the city was so large and because of the great crowds that came to the shrine of Protasius and Gervase, where a blind man received his sight. The bodies of these two martyrs had lain unknown for a long time until Bishop Ambrose was told of them through a dream. But the miracle at Carthage, by which a man named Innocentius, a former advocate for a neighboring province, was healed, was unknown to most people, even though I was present and saw it with my own eyes. He was the man who had given lodging to me and my brother Alypius, who were not yet priests but only lay Christians, and we were living in his house at the time. He was suffering from multiple fistulas in the rectum; the surgeons had lanced them and put him through extreme and bitter pain, yet they had left one part untouched that they would inevitably have to cut before they could complete the cure. They had healed everything else, but this one omission troubled them greatly and made all their treatments useless. Innocentius, watching their delays and dreading another incision (which a physician living in his house had told him they would be forced to make, though they had refused to let this physician observe the procedure, which so angered Innocentius that he had thrown the man out and could barely be persuaded to receive him again), finally burst out: "Will you cut me again? Will it come to what that man said, the one you wouldn't let watch your work?" But they dismissed the other physician's opinion and told Innocentius to take heart, assuring him there was no such thing to worry about. Time passed, but no improvement in the condition could be seen; the surgeons kept promising they would heal him with ointment rather than the knife. They had now brought in an experienced and skilled surgeon named Ammonius to join them, and after examining the wound he confirmed what they had said, which so reassured Innocentius that he himself began to mock the other physician who had predicted another incision. To cut the story short: after several more weeks had passed, they all abandoned him, admitting to their shame that he could not possibly be cured without surgery. This news, combined with his overwhelming fear of the knife, immediately shattered him; but collecting himself, he dismissed them all and told them never to return, and was now forced by necessity to send for a skilled surgeon from Alexandria, a man renowned as a master of the craft, to do what his anger had prevented the others from doing. When this man arrived and examined the wound, he studied the work of the previous surgeons like a craftsman reading the marks left by others, and then, as an honest man, advised Innocentius to let those who had already invested such extraordinary effort complete the cure, for he had observed with admiration how much they had done. He acknowledged that surgery was indeed the only way to heal him, but said he had no intention of robbing those men of the credit for their great labor. So the original surgeons were summoned to perform the operation, while the Alexandrian would stand by and watch them open the part that had otherwise been considered incurable. The procedure was postponed until the following day. When the surgeons had all gone, the house was so filled with grief over their master's suffering that it looked more like a household preparing for a funeral than anything else, and this grief could barely be contained. He was visited daily by several holy men, including Saturninus of blessed memory, the Bishop of Uzali, and Gelosus, a priest and deacon of the Church of Carthage, as well as Bishop Aurelius, who alone of these three is still living: a man of great worth, with whom I have occasionally spoken about the wonderful works of God, and I have often had occasion to mention this story and found that he remembered it very well. These men visited him toward evening, and he begged them all to come back the next day, not to witness his suffering but his death, for his previous ordeal had so terrified him that he had no doubt he would die under the surgeon's hands. They urged him to take comfort, trust in God, and bear His will with patience. Then we went to prayer, and as we knelt down, he threw himself face-first to the floor as though someone had pushed him, and began to pray with such intensity of soul, such floods of tears, such groans and sobs that his breath was nearly cut off, and the whole scene was utterly beyond words to describe. Whether the others were praying or watching him, I cannot say; as for myself, I could not pray at all, but only said in my heart, "Lord, whose prayers will You hear, if You will not hear his?" For it seemed to me that such a prayer could not fail to obtain what he asked. We rose, received the bishop's blessing, and left the room, while he begged them to come to him in the morning and they strengthened his spirit with every consolation they could offer. The dreaded morning came; the holy men arrived as promised, and so did the surgeons. The fearful instruments were prepared, and everything was made ready for the procedure, while the whole company sat in silent dread. The senior men, those with the most authority, comforted him as best they could; his body was positioned for the surgeon's hand, his clothing loosened, the place exposed. The surgeon examined it with his knife in hand, ready to cut, probing with his fingers for where the diseased matter lay. After making a thorough examination of the entire area that had previously been affected, he found the opening firmly closed and every part of it as sound and solid as if it had been created that way. Then joy and praise to God, with tears of relief, broke out on every side in a way that my pen has no power to describe. In that same city, a devout woman named Innocentia, one of the leading women of Carthage, had a cancer on her breast, a condition the surgeons told her was completely incurable; they therefore typically either removed the affected part entirely or, following Hippocrates' advice (as they said), abandoned all treatment in order to prolong life. A skilled physician who was her close friend told her this, so she now sought help from no one but the Lord, who told her in a dream that at the coming Easter, which was then drawing near, she should watch on the women's side by the baptismal font for the first woman to approach her after being baptized, and ask her to make the sign of the cross over the wound. She did so, and was healed. The physician who had advised her to give up all hope of treatment, seeing her afterward completely well when he knew for certain she had previously had that incurable ulcer, was so eager to learn how she had been cured that he pressed her urgently for the answer, longing to discover the remedy that had overturned Hippocrates' rule.

She told him, and he replied immediately, with a tone so dismissive that she feared he was about to say something blasphemous: "Why, I thought you were going to tell me something remarkable." She stood there, completely stunned. "Is it really so strange," he said, "for Christ to heal a cancer, when He could raise someone from the dead after four days?" When I first heard this story, it troubled me that such a great miracle, performed for such a notable person, had been so thoroughly suppressed. I decided to confront her about it directly, and when I met her and raised the matter, she insisted she had not kept it secret. So I went and asked her close companions, who told me they had never heard a word of it. "You see," I said to her, in front of them all, "you have kept it secret, since even your closest friends know nothing about it." At that, she began to recount the whole story from beginning to end, to their great astonishment and to the glory of God. There was also a physician in the same town who suffered badly from gout. He had registered to be baptized, and the night before he was to receive the sacrament, he was visited in his sleep by a group of curly-headed black boys whom he recognized as devils. They tried to forbid him from going through with it, but when he refused to obey them, they stamped on his feet and put him in excruciating pain. Even so, he held firm in his resolve, and when he was baptized the next day, he was freed from both the pain and its underlying cause, and he never suffered from gout again for the rest of his life. But who knew about this man? We did, and a handful of our neighboring brothers in the faith. Otherwise, it would have remained entirely unknown.

A man from Curubis was freed by baptism from both palsy and a severe hernia, leaving the font as healthy as any man born. Where was this known except in Curubis, and to a handful of people beyond it? When I heard of it, I had Bishop Aurelius send him to Carthage, even though the story had first reached me from men of solid credibility. Hesperius, a former captain who still lives near us, has a small farm called Zubedi in the district of Fussali. Noticing from the harm done to his servants and cattle that the place was troubled by evil spirits, he asked one of our priests (during my absence) to go there and drive them out by prayer. The priest went, prayed, and administered communion, and by God's mercy the evil presence left the place for good. Hesperius also had a small amount of earth from the site of Christ's tomb, given to him by a friend, which he had hung in his bedroom to protect himself personally from those wicked disturbances.

Once the spirits were expelled, he was unsure what to do with the earth. Out of reverence for it, he was unwilling to keep it in his lodging any longer. So when my colleague Maximus, Bishop of Synica, and I happened to be in the neighboring town, he asked us to come to his house. We did; he told us the whole story and asked that the earth be buried somewhere suitable, with a place of prayer established there where Christians could gather for worship. And so it was done.

Now there was a country youth afflicted with palsy who, hearing of this, asked his parents to bring him there. They did so, he prayed, and was immediately cured. Victoriana is a town some thirty miles from Hipporegium. There is a memorial to the two martyrs of Milan, Gervase and Protasius, and to this place they brought a young man who, while bathing in summer at midday, had been possessed by a devil. When he arrived, he lay as though dead, or very nearly so. Meanwhile, the lady of the village (as was the custom) entered the place for evening prayers with her maids and certain devoted women, and began to sing psalms. The sound made the man start up as if in a fright, and in a terrible raving fit he seized the altar and clung to it, unable to move away, holding it as though he had been bound to it. Then the devil within him began to cry out mournfully for mercy, describing how and when he had entered the man, and finally declaring that he would leave him. He named the parts of the man he would damage on his way out, and having said this, departed. But one of the man's eyes fell down onto his cheek and hung there by only a thin thread of tissue, the entire pupil (naturally black) having turned white. The people who had come running at his cries saw this and fell to helping him with their prayers. Though they rejoiced at the recovery of his senses, they grieved over the loss of his eye and urged him to find a surgeon. But his sister's husband, who had brought him there, replied: "The God who delivered him from the devil has the power to restore his eye." With that, he pressed the eye back into its socket as best he could and bound it up with a cloth, telling the man not to remove it for several days. When those days had passed, the man found his eye as sound as it had ever been. Many others were helped at this place as well, though it would take too long to recount each case individually.

I knew a virgin in Hippo who was freed from a demon simply by being anointed with oil mixed with the tears of the priest who prayed over her. I know a bishop who, through prayer alone, drove out a demon from a young man he had never even met. There was also a man named Florentius, a poor and devout elderly resident of Hippo who earned his living by mending shoes. He lost his outer garment and, unable to afford another, came to the shrine of the Twenty Martyrs and prayed aloud, asking them to help him obtain clothing. A group of mocking young men overheard him, and when he left they followed him, jeering and asking whether he had begged fifty halfpence from the martyrs to buy himself a coat. He walked on quietly, ignoring them, until he spotted a large fish that had just been cast up by the sea and was still gasping on the shore. With the permission of those nearby, he picked it up and carried it to a cook named Carchosus, a devout Christian, and sold it to him for three hundred halfpence. He planned to use the money to buy wool for his wife to spin into a garment for him. When the cook cut open the fish, he found a gold ring inside its stomach. Astonished, and moved by his conscience, he sent for the poor man and gave him the ring, saying: "Behold how the Twenty Martyrs have clothed you."

When Bishop Projectus brought the relics of St. Stephen to the town of Aquae Tibilitanae, a great crowd gathered to honor them. Among them was a blind woman who asked to be led to the bishop carrying the holy relics. The bishop gave her some flowers he was holding in his hand. She took them, pressed them to her eyes, and immediately had her sight restored, so completely that she walked swiftly ahead of all the others, no longer needing anyone to guide her. Similarly, Bishop Lucillus, while carrying the relics of the same martyr to their new home in the castle of Synice near Hippo, was completely cured of a fistula that had tormented him for a long time and had reached the point where he was expecting the surgeon to lance it any day. He was never troubled by it again after that day. Eucherius, a Spanish priest living at Calame, was cured of kidney stones by the same relics, which Bishop Posidius had brought there. Later, when he was laid out for dead from a separate illness, he was brought to the martyr's shrine and restored to full life and health.

There was a man named Martialis, well respected and advanced in years, but a fierce opponent of Christianity, who lived in that place. His daughter was a Christian, and she had married a Christian man. When the father fell gravely ill, both of them pleaded with him through prayers and tears to become a Christian, but he refused outright and with considerable anger. So the husband decided to go to St. Stephen's shrine and pray that God would change his father-in-law's heart and bring him to embrace Christ Jesus without further delay. He prayed with great intensity and devotion, weeping freely and sighing with deep religious feeling. When he left, he took some flowers from the altar and, that night, placed them at his father's head while the old man slept. The father slept soundly that night, and in the morning called urgently for the bishop, who was at Hippo with me at the time. When they told him this, he immediately sent for the priests, and when they arrived he told them at once that he believed. He was baptized on the spot, to everyone's astonishment. For the rest of his life, this man kept one saying constantly on his lips: "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit." These were also his final words, though he did not know they were St. Stephen's, for he did not live long after. At this same place, two people were also healed of gout: one a local citizen, the other a stranger passing through. The citizen knew from others' experience what to do to be rid of his pain, but the stranger received the knowledge through a revelation.

There is a place called Andurus where part of St. Stephen's body is also kept. One day, a child was playing in the street when a team of oxen pulling a cart broke free and ran over the child with the wheel, leaving it crushed and with no hope of survival. The mother snatched the child up and ran to the shrine, where she laid it down, and it immediately recovered both life and full strength, completely healed of every injury. Near this place, at Caspalia, there lived a consecrated woman who fell gravely ill beyond all hope of recovery. She sent her garment to the shrine, but before it could be returned she died, and her parents covered her body with it. She revived at once and was as healthy as before. Something similar happened to a Syrian named Bassus who lived at Hippo. While he was at St. Stephen's shrine praying for his sick daughter and holding her garment, a boy arrived with news that she had died. His friends, however, intercepted the boy before he could reach Bassus and told him to say nothing there, not wanting Bassus to walk home in public grief. So Bassus returned home, found everyone in tears, and laid the garment over his daughter. She revived immediately. In the same way, the son of Irenaeus, a tax collector, had died and was being prepared for burial when someone suggested anointing him with oil from St. Stephen's shrine. They did so, and he came back to life. Similarly, a captain named Elusinus, upon finding his son dead, carried him to the shrine on his farm just outside the city, prayed for a time, and found the boy alive again. What am I to do? I promised to be brief, yet surely many who read all of this will be disappointed that I have left out so many other accounts that both they and I know well.

But I ask their pardon, and urge them to consider how tedious a task this would be, since my commitment to brevity will not permit it. If I were to recount all the miracles performed through the memorials of St. Stephen at Calama and Hippo alone, it would fill many volumes and still be incomplete. I could not relate them all, only those that have been recorded for the knowledge of the people, since when we see our own times produce wonders like those of old, we want them not to be lost entirely to forgetfulness and oblivion.

It has not yet been two years since the shrine was built at Hippo, and although we ourselves know of many miracles performed there that have been recorded, there are already nearly seventy written accounts from that period alone. At Calama the shrine is older, the miracles more frequent, and the records far more numerous. At Uzali also, near Utica, many miracles have been worked through the power of this same martyr, where Bishop Evodius erected a memorial long before ours. There, however, they did not use to record them, though it may be that they have recently begun to do so. When we were there, we urged Petronia, a noble woman who had been cured of a longstanding illness that all the physicians had given up on, to have the account of her miraculous cure written down (as the bishop of that place approved) and read aloud to the people. She did so, and the account contained one remarkable detail that I cannot pass over, even though my time barely allows me to include it.

A certain Jewish man had advised her to take a ring set with a stone found in the kidneys of an ox, and sew it into a hair girdle that she was to wear against her skin, beneath all her other clothing. She was wearing this girdle when she set out for the martyr's shrine, but she had left Carthage some time before and was staying at her own house by the river Bagrada. As she rose to continue her journey, she noticed the ring lying at her feet. Puzzled, she felt for her girdle and, finding it still tied just as she had fastened it, assumed the ring must have broken loose and worn through. But when she found it intact, she took this as a good omen for her recovery, and loosening the girdle, she threw both it and the ring into the river. Now, those who refuse to believe that Jesus Christ was born without any disruption to the virgin's body, or that He passed through closed doors to reach His apostles, will not believe this story either. But when they investigate it and find it to be true, let them then believe the other. The woman is of noble birth, nobly married, and lives in Carthage: a city so great, and she so prominent within it, that no one who cares to inquire will find her unknown. The martyr through whose prayer she was healed believed in Him who was born of an eternal virgin, who entered to His disciples through closed doors, and finally (to which all of this ultimately points) who ascended into heaven in the very flesh in which He rose from death. It was for this faith that the martyr gave his life.

So we can see that God still works miracles today, using whatever means He chooses, just as He did in ancient times. But these miracles are not widely known, nor are they fixed in memory through repeated reading, and so they tend to be forgotten. We have recently adopted the good practice of reading accounts of miracles to the congregation, but these accounts are often read only once. Those who are present hear them, but no one else does. And even those who do hear them rarely hold the memory for long, nor will most of them bother to pass the story on to those who weren't there. But there was one miracle that happened among us, so remarkable and so well-attested, that I believe there is not a single person in Hippo who either witnessed it or heard of it, and not one among those who know of it who could ever forget it.

There were seven siblings, three sisters and four brothers, all born to the same parents in Caesarea, a city in Cappadocia. The family was of noble standing. After their father died, they gave their mother cause for anger, and she laid a heavy curse on all of them. God's judgment fell in support of that curse, and every one of them was seized by a terrible trembling throughout their entire bodies. Horrified that their own countrymen would see them in this condition, they scattered as wanderers across much of the Roman Empire. Two of them, Paul and Palladia, came to us after their suffering had become known in many other places. They arrived about fifteen days before Easter, and every day they visited the shrine of St. Stephen, humbly begging God to finally have mercy on them and restore their health. Wherever they went, they drew every eye in the room, and those who knew how they had come to be afflicted told the story to others, so that everyone might understand what they were seeing. Then Easter Sunday arrived. Many people had come to the church that morning, among them Paul, who had made his way to the railing that enclosed St. Stephen's relics and stood there praying, gripping the bars. Suddenly he fell flat on the ground and lay there as if asleep, but without the trembling that had always seized him before, even during sleep.

The people were all amazed: some were afraid, some felt pity, some moved to help him, while others said, "Wait, let's see what happens." Then suddenly he sprang up, as sound and whole as the day he was born. At that, the whole church erupted in loud praise and thanksgiving to God. They came crowding toward me as I was about to go out to them, each one eager to tell me about this strange and miraculous event. I rejoiced and gave thanks to God in my heart. Then the young man himself came in and fell at my knees. I lifted him up and kissed him, and together we went out to the people, who packed the church and could do nothing but cry, "God be thanked, God be praised!" Every voice spoke these words; I greeted them, and the cry only grew louder.

At last, silence fell. The Scriptures were read, and when the time came for the sermon, I offered only a brief word of encouragement, suited to the moment and the joy that filled the room. In the face of so great a work of God, I thought it better to leave the people to their own reflections than to crowd out their wonder with words. The young man dined with us afterward and told us the full story of his mother's and siblings' suffering. The next day, after my sermon, I told the congregation that the following morning they would hear the entire account of this miracle read aloud. When that moment came, I had the young man and his sister stand together on the steps leading up to the chancel (where I have a raised platform from which I address the people), so that the whole congregation could see them both. And so they looked: the brother standing firm and whole, the sister trembling in every limb. Those who had not witnessed his healing could see God's mercy toward him reflected in her condition, and could understand at once what to give thanks for in his case and what to pray for in hers. When the account had been read, I asked them to step back out of the people's sight and began to address the cause of what had happened, when suddenly a fresh cry went up from around the shrine. Those who had been listening to me abandoned me and rushed toward it, for when the young woman had stepped down from the stairs, she had gone there to pray, and the moment she touched the gate she was seized just as her brother had been and restored to the full and perfect use of all her limbs. So while I was still asking what the commotion was about, the people brought her into the choir to me, now as completely sound as her brother. What followed was a surge of rejoicing so intense that it seemed as though it would never end. The young woman was brought back to the very spot where she had stood before. The people who had grieved that she was unlike her brother now exulted that she was like him, marveling that God's will had anticipated the very prayers they had been intending to offer on her behalf. Their joy was so loud and so sustained that it could have stunned the sharpest ear into silence. And what was in the hearts of all those who rejoiced, if not faith in Christ, for whom St. Stephen had shed his blood?

What does this great multitude of miracles accomplish, if not to confirm the faith that holds that Christ rose again in the flesh and ascended into heaven? The martyrs were martyrs in the truest sense: witnesses to this truth. For this they endured the cruelty of a hostile world, which they never fought back against but overcame through patient suffering. For this faith they died, and from Him for whom they died they received the power to work these wonders. Their patience opened the way for these remarkable miracles to follow. For if the resurrection had not already occurred in Christ, or had not been promised for the future (as Christ Himself promised, along with the prophets who foretold Him), how could the martyrs who died for this belief have the power to work such wonders? Whether God Himself (who, being eternal, can bring about temporal events by extraordinary means) worked these things directly, or through His ministers, or through the souls of the martyrs as though working through living men, or through His angels over whom He holds an invisible, unchangeable, and purely spiritual command (so that what the martyrs are said to do is accomplished through their prayers rather than their own power): whatever the means, every miracle points in the same direction, confirming the faith that proclaims the resurrection of the flesh into eternal life.

But perhaps they will say that their gods have also worked wonders. Very well, then let them come and compare their deities with our dead men. Will they claim, do you think, that they have gods who were once human, such as Romulus, Hercules, and the like? We, however, make no gods of our martyrs. The martyrs and we share one God, and only one. Moreover, the miracles the pagans attribute to their idols are in no way comparable to the wonders worked by our martyrs. Just as Moses overthrew the enchanters of Pharaoh, so our martyrs overthrow the devils who worked those wonders out of their own pride, seeking only to gain the reputation of gods. Our martyrs, however (or rather God Himself working through their prayers), worked to an entirely different end: to confirm the faith that rejects a multitude of gods and believes in only one. The pagans built temples to those devils, ordaining priests and sacrifices for them as though they were gods. We, by contrast, build no temples to our martyrs; we erect only monuments in their memory, as for men who have departed and whose spirits rest in God. We raise no altars to sacrifice to them. We offer sacrifice only to Him who is both their God and ours, and at that offering each of those conquerors of the world, as servants of God, receives his own particular commemoration, but no invocation whatsoever. The sacrifice is offered to God, though it is made in their memory; and the one who offers it is a priest of the Lord, not of theirs. The offering is "the body of the Lord," which is not offered to them, because they are themselves that body. Whose miracles, then, should we believe? Those of beings who wanted to be counted as gods by the very people to whom they displayed their wonders? Or those whose miracles all point toward confirming our faith in the one God, who is Christ? Those who wanted their most shameful acts held sacred? Or those who refused to have even their genuine virtues honored for their own glory, insisting instead that all glory be referred to Him who granted them such goodness in the first place? Let us believe those who both work miracles and teach the truth, for it was the truth that gave them the power to perform the miracles. A central point of that truth is this: Christ rose again in the flesh, and in His own body demonstrated the immortality of the resurrection, which He has promised to us at the end of this age and the beginning of the next.

Many people, "whose thoughts God knows to be vain," oppose this promise by appealing to the nature of the elements. Their teacher Plato taught them that the two most contrary bodies in the world are joined by two intermediate ones: air and water. Therefore, they argue, since earth is lowest, water next, then air, and then heaven, earth cannot possibly be contained in heaven, because every element has its own natural weight and tends toward its proper place. Consider how vain, weak, and weightless are the arguments that human frailty uses to oppose God's omnipotence. Why, then, are there so many earthly bodies in the air, given that air is the third element from earth? If God could give birds (which are earthly bodies) feathers powerful enough to sustain them in the air, can He not give glorified and immortal bodies the power to inhabit heaven? Furthermore, if their reasoning were correct, all creatures that cannot fly would live beneath the earth, just as fish live in the water. Why, then, don't earthly creatures live in water, which is the element immediately above earth, but instead in air, which is the third? And since they belong to the earth, why does the next element above it immediately suffocate and drown them, while the third one feeds and sustains them? Are the elements out of order here, or are their arguments simply out of reason? I won't rehearse here what I said in the thirteenth book about many heavy earthly substances, such as lead and iron, which can nonetheless be shaped so that they float and support themselves on water. Can God Almighty not likewise give the human body a form that allows it to ascend and sustain itself in heaven? Even if we grant their method of elements, which is the whole foundation of their case, they still have no answer to my earlier point. Earth is the lowest element, then water and air in succession, and heaven is the fourth and highest; but the soul is a fifth essence above them all. Aristotle calls it a fifth body, and Plato says it is entirely incorporeal. If it were fifth in order, it would already be above the rest; but being incorporeal, it is far above all corporeal substances. What, then, is it doing in a lump of earth, being the most subtle of essences while earth is the most gross, being the most active while earth is the most unwieldy? Can its excellence not have the power to lift earth up? If the nature of the body has the power to drag a soul down from heaven, shall the soul not have the power to carry the body back to where the soul itself came from? And if we were to examine the miracles they compare with those of our martyrs, we would find evidence against their own position drawn from their own accounts.

One of their greatest examples is the one Varro reports about a vestal virgin who was suspected of fornication. She filled a sieve with water from the Tiber and carried it to her judges without spilling a single drop. Who kept that water in the sieve, so that not one drop passed through those thousand holes? Some god or some devil, they must say. Well, if it was a god, is he greater than the One who made the world? If an inferior god, angel, or devil had the power to hold a heavy element in place so completely that its very nature seemed altered, can the Almighty Maker of the whole world not remove the weight from earth, and give a body that has been made alive the ability to dwell wherever the spirit that quickens it chooses? And as for their claim that air sits between the fire above and the water below: how is it that we so often find air between water and water, or between water and earth? What do they make of those watery clouds, between which and the sea the air passes freely? What law of the elements requires that the floods of rain falling on the earth below the air should first hang suspended in clouds above the air? And why does air sit in the middle between heaven and earth, if its supposed role is to occupy the space between the heavens and the waters, as water sits between air and earth? Finally, if the elements are arranged so that the two middle ones, air and water, connect the two extremes, fire and earth, with heaven in the highest place and earth in the lowest as the world's foundation, and therefore (they say) impossible to be in heaven: what do we make of fire here on earth? If their ordering is to be kept intact, then just as earth cannot occupy any place in fire, fire should have no place in earth; just as what is lowest cannot remain aloft, what is aloft should not remain below. But we see this order overturned everywhere: fire exists both on the earth and within it. Mountain tops pour it out in abundance, and beyond that, we see fire produced directly from the earth, namely from wood and stones. And what are these but earthly bodies? They will say, of course, that elemental fire is pure, harmless, still, and eternal, while our fire is turbulent, smoky, corrupting, and corruptible. Yet our fire does not corrupt or harm the hills where it burns perpetually, nor the underground hollows where it works most powerfully. It is not like elemental fire, certainly, but it is suited to the practical needs of humanity. Why, then, should we not believe that a corruptible body can be made incorruptible and fit for heaven, just as we see elemental fire made corruptible and fit for us? Arguments drawn from the visible qualities of the elements cannot in any way diminish the power that Almighty God has to make the human body capable of inhabiting the heavens.

In their careful scrutiny of this subject, they come at us with taunts like these: Will miscarried children have any part in the resurrection? And since the Lord says, "There shall not one hair of your head perish," will all men be the same height and size? If they will, how will miscarried children (if they rise again) have at the resurrection what they never had in life? Or if they don't rise again because they were never truly born but cast out, we might raise the same question about infants: where will they get the bodily size they lacked when they died? After all, infants are capable of regeneration and must therefore have their share in the resurrection. These pagans then ask us: what height and size will human bodies be? If everyone is as tall as the tallest person who ever lived, then both short people and many tall ones will end up with something they never had on earth, so where does it come from? But if what Paul says is true, "that we shall come to the measure of the age of the fulness of Christ," and again if the passage "He predestinated them to be made like to the image of His Son" means that all members of Christ's kingdom will resemble Him in form and stature, then many people (they say) will have to give up part of the height they had on earth. And what becomes of that great promise about every hair, if such a reduction in height and body is to be made? Beyond that, they raise the question of whether a man will rise with all the hair the barber ever cut from his head. If he does, who wouldn't be repulsed by such a sight? For by the same logic he would also have to have every nail clipping restored. Where, then, is the beauty that ought in that immortal state to far surpass anything in this world of corruption? But if he doesn't rise with all his hair, then it is lost, and what becomes of your Scriptures? From there they move on to the question of fat and thin. If everyone is the same (they say), then one person will be fat and another lean, meaning some must lose flesh and some must gain it; some will receive what they lacked and some will have to give up what they had. Then there is the matter of bodily decay and dissolution: part of a body turns to dust, part to air, part to fire, part is consumed in the stomachs of beasts and birds, and part is drowned and dissolved in water. These complications trouble them greatly and lead them to think such bodies could never be reassembled into flesh. From there they turn to deformities: monstrous births, malformed limbs, scars, and the like, asking with mockery what form these will take in the resurrection. If we say all such things will be removed, they turn our own teaching against us, pointing out that Christ rose with His wounds still on Him. But their hardest question of all is this: in the resurrection, whose flesh will belong to the man who was eaten by another man driven by starvation? For that flesh was absorbed into the body of the one who ate it, filling the hollows that hunger had carved out.

Whether the original owner will reclaim it, or the one who ate it and thereby came to possess it, is the question. These are the doubts that mockers of our faith in the resurrection put to us. They themselves either consign human souls to a state that is never certain, swinging between misery and blessedness (as Plato does), or else, with Porphyry, they claim that these cycles toss the soul about for a long time but ultimately come to an end, leaving the spirit at rest yet permanently separated from the body.

With God's help, I intend to answer all of these objections. First, regarding abortions: children who die after quickening in the womb. I will neither affirm nor deny that such will rise again. Yet if they are counted among the dead, I see no reason to exclude them from the resurrection. Either not all the dead will rise again, meaning souls that had no body except in the womb will remain bodiless forever, or all souls will receive their bodies again, including those whose bodies perished before reaching full development. Whichever of these two positions is accepted as true, what we are about to affirm concerning infants should be understood to apply to abortions as well, if they have any share in the resurrection.

Now, regarding infants, I believe they will not rise again in the small bodies they had when they died. The sudden and extraordinary power of God will give them the full stature of maturity. When our Savior said, "There shall not one hair of your heads perish," He was promising that nothing they had before will be lost, not ruling out the addition of what they did not yet have. The infant lacked the full development of a mature body (as every infant does by nature): it had not yet reached the height and size that all people are born to attain, and which they carry at birth as a potential rather than an actual reality, just as all the members of a human being are potentially present in the generative seed, even if the child lacks some of them at birth (the teeth, for instance). Within this latent capacity of substance, what is not yet visible lies, so to speak, already coiled within the original substance from the very beginning. In this sense, in terms of potential, an infant can already be said to be tall or short, because that is what he will eventually become. This should reassure us that no part of the body will be lost in the resurrection. Even if everyone were raised to the same height, however tall, those who had been reduced from a greater stature to that height would still lose no part of their body, for Christ said they would not lose so much as a hair. And as for the means of addition: how could the One who crafted this entire world lack the right material to add wherever He sees fit?

But Christ Himself rose in the same body He died in. We cannot say that at the resurrection He will take on any different height or size than what He showed His disciples after rising, or that He will become as tall as the tallest man who ever lived. If we say that everyone will be made equal to His stature, then many who were taller would have to lose part of their bodies, which contradicts Christ's own words. Everyone, therefore, will rise in the stature they had at full maturity, or would have had, if they had not died before reaching it. As for Paul's words about "the measure of the fullness of Christ," they either mean that all His members, being joined to Him as their head, will together complete the fullness of time, or if they point to the resurrection, the meaning is that everyone will rise neither younger nor older, but at exactly the age at which Christ Himself suffered and rose again. The learned scholars of this world say that around thirty years of age a man reaches his full development, and from that point he declines into a season of greater gravity and decay. This is why the apostle does not say "unto the measure of the body" or "unto the measure of the stature," but rather "unto the measure of the age of the fullness of Christ."

And when Paul says the predestinate will be conformed to the image of the Son of God (Rom 8:29), this can be understood as referring to the inner person; for he says elsewhere, "Fashion not yourselves like unto this world, but be ye changed by the renewing of your mind" (Rom 12:2). So when we are transformed away from the likeness of this world, we are made like the image of the Son of God. We may also take it this way: just as He was made like us in mortality, so we will be made like Him in immortality, which connects this passage to the resurrection. But if it concerns the form of our risen bodies, then it speaks (as the other passage does) only of the age of our bodies, not their size. Therefore, all people will rise in the stature they either had, or would have reached, at the fullness of human maturity. Though in truth, it matters little whether their bodies are those of old men or infants, since both soul and body will be complete and free from all infirmity. So if someone argues that every person will rise in the same stature they had at death, that is not a position worth much opposition.

There are some who, drawing on Paul's words "Till we all meet together in the unity of faith and knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man and unto the measure of the age of the fulness of Jesus Christ," argue that no woman will retain her sex in the resurrection, but that all will become men. Their reasoning is that God made man from earth and woman from man. I find myself more persuaded, however, by those who hold that both sexes will rise, for there will be none of that lust which caused humanity's ruin. Just as our first parents before the fall were both naked and felt no shame, so at the last day sin will be taken away while nature is preserved. A woman's sex is not a corruption; it is natural, and in the resurrection it will be free from childbirth, nor will the female body any longer have the power to stir up desire in those who behold it, for all lust will then be extinguished. Instead, praise and glory will be given to God for creating what did not exist, and for freeing from corruption what He had created. When a rib was taken from the sleeping Adam to make Eve, this was a clear prophecy of Christ and the Church. Adam's sleep signified Christ's death, and from His side, pierced by a spear as He hung on the cross, came blood and water: the two sacraments by which the Church is built up. The word in the text is not *formavit* (formed) nor *finxit* (fashioned), but *Aedificavit eam in mulierem*, meaning he built her up into a woman. The Apostle likewise calls the Church "the edification of the body of Christ." Woman, then, was God's creature just as man was, though made from man for the sake of unity, and in that manner she was a clear figure of Christ and His Church. He who made both sexes will therefore raise both to life. When Jesus was questioned by the Sadducees, who deny the resurrection, about which of seven brothers should have as his wife at the resurrection a woman each of them had married in turn, He answered: "Ye are deceived, not knowing the Scriptures nor the power of God." Had it been true that women would become men at the resurrection, He could easily have said so; but He said no such thing. He said only this: "In the resurrection they neither marry wives, nor wives are bestowed in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven." That is, they resemble the angels in felicity, not in flesh, nor in resurrection, which the angels have no need of because they cannot die. Christ does not deny that women will exist at the resurrection; He denies only that marriage will. Had there been no female sex at the resurrection, He could have answered the Sadducees far more simply by saying so. Instead, He affirmed that both sexes would be present in these words: "They neither marry wives," meaning men do not marry, "nor wives are bestowed in marriage," meaning women are not married, so that both those who ordinarily marry and those who are ordinarily married in this world will be present there.

Regarding Paul's words, "Till we all meet together, etc., unto a perfect man," we should consider the full context of the passage, which reads: "He that descended, is even the same that ascended far above all heavens that He might fill all things. He therefore gave some to be apostles, and some prophets, and some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers, for the gathering together of the saints, and for the work of their ministry and for the edification of the body of Christ, till we all meet together in the unity of faith and knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man and unto the measure of the age of the fulness of Christ that we may henceforth be no more children, wavering and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the deceit of men, and with craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to deceive, but let us follow the truth in love, and in all things grow up into Him, which is the Head, that is, Christ, by whom all the body being coupled and knit together by every joint, for the furniture thereof, according to the effectual power which is in the measure of every part, receiveth increase of the body unto the edifying of itself in love." Here we see the perfect man: head and body together, consisting of all members, which will be complete in due time. But the body is still growing daily in members as the Church expands, and it is to this Church that Scripture says, "Ye are the body of Christ, and members one of another" (1 Cor 12:27); and again, "for His body's sake, which is the Church" (Col 1:24); and elsewhere, "For we being many, are one bread, and one body" (1 Cor 10:17). Of the building up of this body, you hear what Paul says here: "For the gathering together of the saints, and for the work of the ministry, and for the edification of the body of Christ." He then adds the goal toward which all of this is directed: "Till we all meet together, etc., unto the measure of the age of the fulness of Christ." To which body this measure belongs, he makes clear by saying, "Let us in all things grow up into Him which is the Head, that is Christ, by whom all the body, etc."

So both the measure of the whole body and of each part within it constitute this measure of fullness about which the apostle speaks here, and also elsewhere, saying of Christ: "He hath given Him to be the Head over all the Church, which is His body, the fulness of Him, who filleth all in all." But if this applies to the form of the resurrection, why can't we imagine woman to be included under man, as in that passage, "Blessed is the man that feareth the Lord," which extends the same blessing to women who fear Him as well?

Now what should I say about hair and nails? Simply understand that no part of the body will perish, yet no deformity will remain either, and this means that any parts which would cause deformity will exist only within the whole mass of the body, not on any surface where they might offend the eye. Consider this example: take a lump of clay, shape it into a pot, break it down, and shape it again. It isn't necessary that the clay which formed the handle before should form the handle again, nor that the same clay should return to the base or any other part. It is enough that it is the same clay it was before.

Clipped hair and nails will not return to disfigure their former places, yet if they do return, they will not be lost but will find their proper place within the same flesh from which they came. Though our Savior's words may be better understood as referring to the number of our hairs rather than their length, as He says elsewhere, "All the hairs of your head are numbered." I say this not to suggest that any essential part of the body will perish, but rather that whatever arises from deformity and reflects the miserable condition of mortal life will return in such a way that the substance remains while the deformity is gone. Consider an image-maker who, having fashioned a misshapen statue for some purpose, can remold or recast it into something beautiful using the very same material, without any of the original ugliness, neither cutting away the protruding parts that marred the whole nor using any method other than simply recasting the metal or remolding the clay. What, then, should we think of the Almighty Maker of the entire world? Can He not remove the bodily deformities of men, whether common or extraordinary (being nothing more than marks of our present misery, entirely excluded from our future glory), just as any ordinary sculptor can reshape a misshapen statue of stone, wood, clay, or metal? The overweight and the underweight, therefore, need never fear that they will remain so in the life to come, in a condition they would not choose for themselves even now.

All bodily beauty consists in the harmonious arrangement of a body's parts, combined with a pleasing complexion. Where this harmony is absent, there is always something disagreeable, whether from excess or deficiency. At the resurrection, then, there will be no cause for displeasure through any incongruence of parts: deformities will be corrected, deficiencies supplied, and excesses brought into proper proportion. As for complexion, how glorious it will be! "The just shall shine as the sun in the kingdom of their Father" (Matt 13:43), and this radiance was hidden from the apostles' eyes at Christ's resurrection rather than absent from His body. Human eyes in their weakness could not have endured it, and Christ's purpose was to make Himself known to them rather than to display His glory, as He showed by allowing them to touch His wounds and by eating and drinking with them. He did this not out of any need for food or sustenance, but because He had the power to do it. When something is present but unseen, alongside other things that are present and seen (as this glory was, invisible, while His person was visible), the Greeks call this *ἀορασία*. The Latin translators render it in Genesis as *caecitas*, meaning blindness. The Sodomites were struck with it when they searched for Lot's door and could not find it; but if they had been truly blind, they would have sought guides to lead them home rather than continuing to search for a door they could not find.

Our love for the martyrs is such that we long to see the scars of their wounds, borne for the name of Christ, even in their glorified state, and perhaps we will. Those scars will not disfigure them but adorn them, radiating the brightness of their virtue, a quality not of the body itself, yet present within it. And if any of them lost a limb for their Savior's sake, they will certainly not lack it at the resurrection, for it was to such as these that the promise was given: "not an hair of your heads shall perish" (Luke 21:18).

But if Christ chooses to make their scars visible in the world to come, then the members that were cut off will also bear visible marks where they were severed and reattached. Not all their wounds will be on display, but some will be, and these will no longer be called wounds at all, but honors. And let us never think that God's power is insufficient to gather and reunite every atom of the body, whether it was burned, torn apart by beasts, reduced to dust, dissolved into moisture, or dispersed into the air. God forbid that any corner of nature, however hidden it may be from us, should lie beyond the sight and power of the Almighty. Cicero, that great authority of theirs, attempting to define God as best he could, described Him as "*Mens soluta et libera, secreta ab omni concretione mortali, omnia sentiens et movens ipsaque motu predita sempiterno*" (a free and unbounded intellect, separate from all mortal composition, knowing and moving all things, and moving eternally within Himself). This he drew from the great philosophers. If we take them at their word, then what can be hidden from One who knows all things? What can escape the power of One who moves all things? And now we can address the doubt that seems most difficult: at the resurrection, whose flesh will belong to the man whose body another man has eaten? Ancient accounts and more recent experience have grimly shown us that this has indeed happened, that one man has eaten another. In such a case, no one would claim that all the flesh passed straight through the body without any of it being converted into nourishment, since the fact that the emaciated body grew fuller and more fleshed out on this food alone proves the opposite. My earlier premises, then, will serve to resolve this difficulty.

The flesh of a starving man, consumed by hunger, is released into the air, and from there (as we said before) the Creator can retrieve it. That flesh, therefore, which belonged to the man who was eaten, will return to its original owner, from whom the starving man merely borrowed it, and so must give it back. And what famine dissolved into air from his own body will be gathered again and restored to its proper place. Even if it were so completely consumed that nothing of it remained anywhere in nature, God could recover it in an instant, whenever He chose. But since even the very hairs of our head are secured to us, it would be absurd to imagine that famine could permanently deprive us of any portion of our flesh.

With all of this in mind, the sum of the matter is this: in the resurrection, every person will rise with the same body they had, or would have had, at their fullest growth, in complete beauty and without any deformity in even the smallest member. To preserve that beauty, if something must be taken from a misshapen part and distributed fittingly among the rest (so that nothing is lost, and proper proportion is maintained), we may reasonably believe that some addition to the body's stature is possible, with whatever was visibly disproportionate in one part being invisibly distributed throughout the rest and so, in effect, absorbed. If someone insists that every person will rise in exactly the stature they had at the moment of death, we will not argue the point, provided they grant us the complete removal of all deformity, dullness, and corruptibility from that form and stature, as things that have no place in that kingdom where the sons of promise will be equal to the angels of God, if not in their bodies or ages, then in absolute perfection and blessedness.

Every part of the body, whether it perishes in death or afterward, in the grave or anywhere else, will be restored and renewed. What was once a natural, corruptible body will become immortal, spiritual, and incorruptible. Let it be ground to powder and dust by accident or by cruelty, or dissolved into air or water so that no part remains undispersed: it will not, and cannot, be hidden from the omnipotence of the Creator, who will not allow even a single hair of the head to perish. In this way, the spiritual flesh will become subject to the spirit, yet will still be flesh, just as the carnal spirit was once subject to the flesh and yet remained a spirit.

We find proof of this in the deformity of our condition under punishment. Those to whom Paul said, "I could not speak unto you as unto spiritual men, but as unto carnal" (1 Cor 3:1), were carnal in respect of the spirit, not merely of the flesh. In the same way, a person in this life may be called "spiritual" even while still being "carnal," with a law in his members that rebels against the law of his mind. But he will be spiritual in body when he rises again, for as the same Apostle says, "it is sown a natural body, but raised a spiritual body" (1 Cor 15:44). As for the measure of this spiritual grace, what it will be and how great it will be in the body, I am reluctant to say: it would be rash to attempt it.

But since we must not conceal the joy of our hope for the glorifying of God, and since it was said from the very depths of divine rapture, "Lord, I have loved the habitation of Thine house!" we can, by God's help, make some conjecture from the good things given to us in this transitory life about how great the glories will be that we receive in the life to come, which we have not yet experienced and cannot truly describe. I will pass over the state of humanity before the fall, and the happiness of our first parents in the fertile Paradise, which lasted so briefly that their offspring never tasted it. Who can express the boundless mercies of God shown to mankind, even in this life that we all experience, in which we suffer temptations, or rather one continuous temptation (however vigilant we may be) throughout all the time we enjoy it?

Concerning the origin of humanity, our present life (if such a miserable condition can even be called a life) proves clearly enough that all of Adam's children were condemned along with him. What else does that dreadful abyss of ignorance confirm, from which all error is born, and in which every son of Adam is so deeply submerged that no one can escape without toil, fear, and sorrow? What else does our love of empty things declare, from which arises such a storm of cares, sorrows, complaints, fears, mad exultations, discord, quarrels, wars, treasons, rages, hatreds, deceits, flatteries, thefts, plunder, perjuries, pride, ambition, envy, murder, parricide, cruelty, villainy, excess, shamelessness, unchastity, fornications, adulteries, incests, various sins against nature (too vile even to name), sacrilege, heresy, blasphemy, oppression, slander, manipulation, fraud, false testimony, unjust judgments, violence, robbery, and countless other evils I cannot fully recall, yet none of which are absent from human life? All these evils belong to humanity and spring from the root of that error and disordered desire that every son of Adam brings into the world with him. For who does not know in what a fog of ignorance (as we see in infants) and with what a crowd of foolish desires (as we see in children) all of humanity enters this world? So much so that if left entirely to his own choices, a person would fall into most of the evils listed above.

But the hand of God, bearing a rein on our condemned souls and pouring out His mercies upon us rather than shutting them up in displeasure, revealed law and instruction to human understanding, to wake us from the deep sleep of ignorance and to resist those ancient corruptions. Yet this is not accomplished without great toil and trouble. What do the fears by which we keep small children in line actually mean? What do teachers, rods, the strap, and similar instruments confirm, if not this very truth? And what of that discipline the Scriptures prescribe, that our sons must be beaten on the sides while they are young, lest they grow stubborn and become either entirely or nearly beyond correction? What is the purpose of all this, if not to abolish ignorance and to bridle the corruption we are wrapped in from birth? Consider our labor to remember things, our labor to learn, and the ignorance that overtakes us without that labor; the agility we gain through effort, and the dullness that sets in when we neglect it. Does all of this not declare how readily our nature, left to itself, inclines toward every kind of vice, and how much care must be taken to reclaim it? Sloth, dullness, and negligence are all vices that shrink from labor, and yet labor itself is nothing more than a productive form of pain.

But to set aside the pains that force children to learn the barely useful books their parents choose for them: how vast a host of sufferings attends the more settled years of adulthood, not inflicted specifically on the wicked, but hanging over all of us alike by virtue of our shared condition of misery? Who can count them, who can even imagine them? What fears, what disasters does the loss of children, of property, or of reputation bring? What about the betrayal of others, false suspicion, open violence, and every other harm that people inflict on one another? These sorrows typically come packaged with poverty, imprisonment, chains, exile, torture, the loss of limbs or senses, violation by brutal lust, and countless other horrors. Then there are the blows that strike us from outside (*ab externo*): cold, heat, storms, rain, floods, lightning, thunder, earthquakes, collapsing buildings, savage animals, poisoned air, water, plants, and creatures of a thousand kinds, the sting of serpents, the bite of a rabid dog. That last is a strange affliction indeed, in which an animal that is among the most sociable and familiar to humanity can suddenly become more terrifying than a lion or a dragon, infecting its victim with such a raging madness that his own family must fear him more than any wild beast. What misery do sailors sometimes endure? Or travelers on land? What person can walk anywhere free from sudden accident? One man left the courthouse in perfectly good health, fell down, broke his leg, and died from it. Who could have foreseen that, having seen him sitting there moments before? Eli the priest fell from the chair where he sat and broke his neck. What fears do farmers, and indeed all people, live under, dreading that their crops will be ruined by bad weather, or blight, or caterpillars, or locusts, or some other destructive force? And even when the harvest is gathered and stored away, they feel safe at last; yet I have known granaries full of grain to be swept entirely away by a flood.

Who can protect himself through his own innocence against the countless assaults of demons, when we see them sometimes afflicting baptized infants, who are as innocent as any creature can be, and, by God's permission, even using those harmless little bodies to display the miseries of this life and urge us all to press on toward the blessedness of the next? Beyond this, consider how vulnerable the human body is to diseases that medicine can neither fully cure nor fully understand. In most cases, the very remedies that heal are deeply unpleasant, and even ordinary food becomes offensive during the height of an illness. Has not extreme thirst driven men to drink their own urine, and the urine of others? Has not famine forced men to eat human flesh, to kill one another for food, and even driven mothers to slaughter and devour their own children? And is not sleep itself, which we call rest, sometimes so filled with torment that it disturbs the soul and all her faculties at once, through the appearance of such horrifying visions to the imagination, and with such vividness, that she cannot tell them from real terrors? This is common in certain illnesses. Beyond that, deceitful demons will sometimes so overwhelm the senses of a healthy person with such apparitions that, even if they leave no lasting impression, they convince the senses that what appears is real, for the devil's constant desire is to deceive. From all these wretched entanglements, which amount to a kind of living hell, we are freed only by the grace of Jesus Christ. For this is His name: Jesus means Savior, and it is He who will save us from a worse life, or rather from a perpetual death, after this one. Although we receive many great comforts through the saints in this life, those benefits are not granted at everyone's request, lest we fix our faith on passing concerns, when it ought rather to be directed toward securing a life completely free from all suffering. And the more faithful a person is in this life, the greater the confirmation he receives from grace to endure those miseries without giving way, the very miseries to which pagan authors point as the proper subject of true philosophy, which their gods, as Cicero says, revealed to a select few. "There never was," he says, "nor could there be, a greater gift given to man than this." So even our opponents are compelled to admit that true philosophy is a divine gift. Since it is, as they themselves confess, the only remedy against human misery, and since it comes from above, it follows that all of humanity was condemned to suffer misery. But just as they acknowledge that this gift was the greatest God ever gave, so we affirm and believe that it was given by no other God than the One to whom even the worshippers of many gods concede supremacy.

Beyond the calamities that fall on everyone alike, the righteous face a particular struggle: resisting vice and remaining in constant combat with dangerous temptations. The flesh is sometimes furious, sometimes sluggish, but always in rebellion against the spirit, and the spirit wages the same kinds of conflict against the flesh. We cannot simply do as we wish or rid ourselves entirely of sinful desire; instead, we strive (with God's help) to suppress it by refusing to consent to it, and to keep it in check as best we can through unrelenting vigilance. We must guard against being deceived by plausible appearances or subtle arguments; against falling into error; against mistaking good for evil or evil for good; against letting fear hold us back from what we should do, or letting desire draw us toward what we should not; against letting the sun go down on our anger; against letting enmity move us to repay harm with harm; against letting ingratitude cause us to forget those who have done us good; against letting slander disturb a clear conscience; against letting rash suspicion of others mislead us, or others' false suspicion of us crush our spirit; against letting sin gain mastery over our bodies; against letting our limbs become instruments of wrongdoing; against letting our eyes follow our appetites; against letting the desire for revenge lead us into harm; against letting our gaze or our thoughts linger too long on a sinful pleasure; against lending a willing ear to corrupt and indecent speech; against letting our desires become our law. And above all, we must guard against two final dangers in this perilous conflict: trusting in our own strength to win the victory, or, having won it, taking the credit for ourselves rather than giving it to the grace of Him of whom Paul says, "Thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ" (1 Cor 15:57), and elsewhere, "In all these things we are more than conquerors through Him that loved us" (Rom 8:37).

But we should know this: no matter how firmly we stand against sin, or how thoroughly we subdue it, as long as we are mortal we have reason every day to say, "Forgive us our trespasses." When we ascend into that kingdom where immortality dwells, we will have neither wars to fight nor trespasses to pray over. Nor would we have had any here below, if our nature had kept the gifts of its first creation. These conflicts, then, in which we are endangered and from which we long for freedom through a final victory, are part of those miseries that continually trouble human life.

Now let us consider what good things the great Creator has given us in His mercy, even in this life made miserable by His justice. The first was that blessing spoken before our parents' fall: "Increase and multiply, fill the earth," and so on. This He did not revoke when they sinned, but left the gift of fruitfulness to their condemned offspring. Their crime could not abolish that power of seed producing seed, woven as it were into the very bodies of man and woman. To this gift, however, death was attached, so that in one and the same stream of human life ran both the evil our parents earned and the good the Creator bestowed. In that original evil lies sin and punishment; in that original good lies the capacity for reproduction and the forming of new life. Of those evils, the first (sin) arose from our own recklessness, and the second (punishment) from the judgment of God. We have already said enough about both.

This section concerns the good things God has given, and continues to give, to humanity in its condemned state. In that condemnation, God did not strip away everything He had given, for if He had, humanity would have ceased to exist altogether. Nor did He surrender His authority over humanity when He handed it over to the devil, for the devil himself is God's servant. God is the source of all existence; He alone is absolutely and essentially self-sufficient, and He gives being to everything beneath Him, including the devil himself.

Of these two good things, then, which we said that God's almighty goodness had granted to our nature (however corrupted and cursed), He gave the first (propagation) as a blessing at the very beginning of His works, before He rested on the seventh day. The second (conformation) He continues to give in every act of creation He still performs. For if He were to withdraw His sustaining power from earthly creatures, they could neither grow toward any further perfection nor remain in whatever state He left them. So when God created humanity, He gave human beings the capacity to reproduce and to pass that capacity on to their offspring, though not as an inescapable necessity, since God can withhold it from whomever He chooses. It was His gift to the first parents of the human race, and having once given it, He has not taken it away from humanity as a whole.

But although sin did not abolish this capacity for reproduction, it diminished it far below what it would have been had sin never entered the picture. "For man being in honor, understood not, and so was compared unto beasts, begetting such like as himself" (Ps 49:20), yet a small spark of reason remains in him, that faint reflection of the image of God. Now if this reproduction lacked divine formation, nature could maintain no consistent form or likeness in her various productions. For if man and woman had never come together, and God had nonetheless chosen to fill the earth with people, He could have made all of them just as He made Adam: without the generation of man or woman. But when man and woman do come together, they cannot beget life unless He creates it. For as Paul says in a spiritual sense, speaking of a person's formation in righteousness: "Neither is he that planteth anything, nor he that watereth, but God that giveth the increase" (1 Cor 3:7). So we may say the same here: neither does the one who sows accomplish anything, nor does the one who conceives, apart from God who gives the form.

It is His daily work that a seed unfolds from what seems like a hidden thread, drawing out its latent forms into visible beauty. It is He who creates that remarkable union of an incorporeal nature (the ruler) and a corporeal nature (the subject), by which the whole becomes a living creature. This work is so extraordinary that it can stop the mind in its tracks and draw praise to the Creator from anyone who observes it, not only in human beings, whose reason sets them above all other creatures, but even in the smallest fly: one can behold this wondrous and astonishing combination. It is He who has given the human spirit a capacity for understanding (which, along with reason, seems to lie dormant in an infant until the years bring it to life) by which a person can acquire knowledge, discipline, and every habit of truth and virtue. Through this capacity, one can grasp the meaning of all the virtues: prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance, and be better armed against vice, and stirred to overcome it by contemplating that supreme and unchangeable goodness. Even if the mind never fully reaches that height, who can adequately describe how great a good this is, and how wonderful a work of the Most High it represents, considered on its own terms? For beyond the disciplines of right conduct and the paths to eternal happiness (which we call the virtues), and beyond the grace of God in Jesus Christ given only to the children of promise, human ingenuity has produced so many remarkable sciences and arts, some necessary and some purely voluntary, that the excellence of our capacity makes the extraordinary goodness of our creation plain, even when we turn that capacity toward things that are superfluous or harmful. It reveals from what a magnificent gift our inventions and practices spring. What variety has humanity discovered in architecture, clothing, agriculture, navigation, sculpture, and painting! What skill has been displayed in theatrical performances, in taming, hunting, and capturing wild animals! What countless inventions have been devised against others and for ourselves: poisons, weapons, engines of war, stratagems, and the like! What thousands of remedies for health, delicacies for the palate, methods and figures of persuasion, eloquent phrases crafted to delight, verses composed for pleasure, musical inventions and instruments! How remarkable are geography, arithmetic, astronomy, and the rest! How vast is human capacity, if one were to go through it all in detail! And finally, how cleverly and with what sharp ingenuity have philosophers and heretics defended even their errors: it is astonishing to consider, for here we are speaking of human nature in general, of humanity as mortal, without any reference to the path of truth by which one comes to eternal life.

Now, since the true and only God, who rules all things in His almighty power and justice, was Himself the Creator of this excellent nature, man would never have fallen into such misery (from which many will never be freed, though some will) if the sin of those who first incurred it had not been so profoundly malicious. Consider the body: though it is mortal like the bodies of animals, and weaker than many of them, see what great goodness and providence God Almighty has shown in its design. Are not all the sinews and members arranged in such fitting places, and the whole body so composed, that one might say, "This is exactly the kind of dwelling a rational spirit deserves"? Other creatures have a crouching posture and look toward the earth, while man's upright form continually directs his gaze toward the heavens. The nimbleness of his tongue and hands in speaking, writing, and working at trades: what does this declare but for whose service they were so made? And yet, setting aside their practical function, the very harmony and balance of the body's parts work together so well that one cannot easily say whether the human body was made more for use or for beauty. There is no functional part of man that lacks its own proper grace, as we would better appreciate if we understood the precise proportions in which each part relates to the others, something we may perhaps learn by studying those proportions that are visible to us. As for those that are hidden, such as the courses of the veins, sinews, and arteries, and the inner workings of the vital organs, we cannot arrive at their full measure. Some rough-handed surgeons (called anatomists) have often cut open dead bodies, and sometimes living ones, to study the arrangement of man's inner parts and to learn how to make incisions and effect cures. Yet the deeper harmony and proportion that gives the whole body its coherence is something no one has ever managed to uncover or dared to fully investigate. If it could be known, we would find far more reason for wonder and delight in the structure of the interior parts than we can observe or gather from those that lie open to the eye. Some parts of the body serve beauty alone and have no practical function: the nipples on a man's chest, for instance, and the beard, which adds no strength but only ornament to the face, as the smooth chins of women (who, being physically weaker, might otherwise have needed that reinforcement) make plain. Now if there is no exterior part of man that is useful which is not also beautiful, and if there are also parts of man that are beautiful without being useful, then God, in forming the human body, had a greater regard for dignity than for necessity. For necessity will one day cease: the time will come when we do nothing but enjoy one another's beauty without lust, and for this we must especially glorify Him, of whom the psalm says, "You have put on praise and comeliness." And as for the beauty and usefulness of the rest of creation, which God has set before the eyes of man (though man is still wretched and surrounded by wretchedness), who is able to recount it all? The universal grace of the heavens, the earth, and the sea; the brilliance of the light in the sun, moon, and stars; the shade of the forests; the colors and fragrances of flowers; the multitudes of birds with their varied plumage and song; the countless forms of beasts and fish, of which the smallest are often the most remarkable (for the construction of a bee or an ant is more astonishing than that of a whale); and the strange shifts in the color of the sea, as though it were changing garments: now one shade of green, then another; now blue, then purple. How pleasing it sometimes is to see it churning and rough, and how much more pleasing when it lies calm! And what a hand it is that provides so many foods to satisfy hunger, so many flavors in those foods without any cook's assistance, and so many medicinal properties within those flavors! How delightful is the alternation of day and night, the mildness of the air, and the intricate work of nature in the bark of trees and the skins of animals! Who could enumerate all the particulars? How long would I take if I lingered over each of these things I have here, as it were, heaped together in a single breath? And yet all of these are merely consolations for man's misery, with no bearing at all on his glory.

What blessings, then, will God's grace give to those He has predestined for life, when even those predestined for death receive such extraordinary gifts? What will He give in His kingdom to those for whom He sent His only Son to endure every injury, even death itself, on earth? As Paul writes to them: "He who spared not His own Son, but gave Him for us all unto death" (Rom 8:32), how will He not also give us all things with Him? When that promise is finally fulfilled, what will we become? How glorious will the human soul be then, free from every stain and sin, with nothing left to subdue, oppose, or struggle against: perfect in every virtue, and established in the fullness of peace!

How great, how delightful, how true will our knowledge of all things be in that place, free from every error and every effort, where we will drink directly from the fountain of God's wisdom, without difficulty and in complete joy? How perfect will our bodies be, wholly subject to their spirits, fully sustained and nourished by that alone, needing no other food, for they will no longer be natural bodies but spiritual ones, possessing the substance of flesh yet entirely free from all fleshly corruption!

But when it comes to the good things of the mind that the blessed will enjoy after this life, the philosophers and we are in agreement. Our difference lies in the resurrection, which they deny with every argument at their disposal. Yet the growth of believers has left us only a handful of opponents, as Christ, who disproved the stubborn even in His own body, has drawn all people to His faith: the learned and the unlearned, the wise and the simple. The world believed God's promise in this matter, and He had also promised that the world would believe it. It was not Peter's magic that accomplished it, but rather that God before whom (as I have said many times, and as Porphyry himself confesses from their own oracles) all their gods stand in awe and dread. Porphyry calls Him "God the Father, and King of Gods." But God forbid that we should treat His promises the way those do who refuse to believe what He had promised: namely, that the world would come to believe.

For why should we not simply believe what the world believes, and what was prophesied it would believe, and leave those who refuse to believe it to their idle speculation? If they say we must interpret it differently, because they won't do God the injury of calling His Scriptures meaningless, they still injure Him just as much, or more, by insisting that Scripture must be understood differently from how the world understands it, which is precisely the way God both promised and fulfilled it. Why can't God raise the flesh to eternal life? Is such a work unworthy of Him? I have already said enough about His omnipotence, by which He works so many wonders. If they want to show me something He cannot do, I will tell them: He cannot lie. Let us therefore believe only what He can do, and refuse to believe what He cannot. If they don't believe He can lie, then let them believe He will do what He promises. And let them believe as the world believes, which He promised would believe, and whose faith He both produced and praised. How do they prove that the resurrection of the body is in any way unworthy of God? There will be no corruption in it, and that is the only evil that can befall the body. I have already addressed the nature of the elements, as well as the possibility of swift motion in an incorruptible body. As for human bodily health in this world and its weakness compared to immortality, I believe our thirteenth book covers that sufficiently. Those who haven't read it, or don't remember what they read, should look back at the relevant passages already recorded in this volume.

Porphyry objects that a blessed soul must be free of the body, and that bodily incorruptibility is therefore worthless if the soul can only be blessed without one. We have argued this point thoroughly in Book 13, but let me recall just one consideration. If Porphyry were right, then Plato himself, their great master, would need to revise his own books and declare that the gods must abandon their bodies (for he says they all have celestial bodies), meaning they must die before they can be blessed. Yet Plato promises them immortality and an eternal dwelling in those very bodies, as the guarantee of their happiness, and he grounds this promise not in their nature but in the power of the Creator's will. In that same passage, Plato also dismantles the argument of those who deny the resurrection on the grounds that it is impossible, for Plato's uncreated Maker of the other gods, in promising them eternity, plainly declares that He will accomplish something impossible. This is what Plato has Him say to them: "Because you are created, you cannot help but be mortal and dissoluble; yet you will never die or be dissolved. Fate will not overrule my will, which is a stronger bond for your perpetuity than all the bonds by which you are composed." No one who hears this, however slow-witted, provided he is not deaf, will doubt that Plato's Creator is promising the gods He has made something that is, by nature, impossible. When He says, "You cannot be eternal, yet by my will you shall be eternal," what is that but saying: my will shall make possible what is impossible? The One who, as Plato says, promised to accomplish this impossibility will also raise the flesh in an incorruptible, spiritual, and immortal state. Why, then, do they cry out that what God has promised is impossible, what the world has believed, and what it was promised it would believe, when Plato himself agrees with us and affirms that God can accomplish impossibilities? It is not the absence of a body, then, but the possession of one that is utterly incorruptible, in which the soul will be blessed. And what body could be more fitting for that joy than the one in which, while it was still corruptible, they endured such suffering? They will not be tormented by that longing which Virgil describes, drawing on Plato, when he says:

"Rursus et incipiunt in corpora velle reverti."

'Now they began to wish to live on earth again.'

I mean, when they have the bodies they desired, they will no longer desire any bodies at all: they will possess those bodies forever, never separated from them for even a single moment.

Plato and Porphyry held sharply different opinions, and if they could have reconciled them, they might perhaps have become Christians. Plato said that the soul could not exist forever without a body, and that even the wisest souls would eventually return to bodies. Porphyry said that once a purified soul ascends to the Father, it never returns to the corruption of this world. Now, if Plato had conceded to Porphyry that the soul's return would be only into a human body, and Porphyry had conceded to Plato that the soul would never return to the miseries of a corruptible body, and if both had held these two positions together, I think it would have followed that souls must return to bodies, but to bodies suited for eternal happiness. For Plato says that holy souls will return to human bodies, and Porphyry says that holy souls will not return to the evils of this world. Let Porphyry therefore agree with Plato that they will return to bodies, and let Plato agree with Porphyry that they will not return to evils, and then both will be saying the same thing: that souls will return to bodies that bring them no evil whatsoever, namely those in which God has promised the blessed will dwell forever. I think both philosophers would grant us this much: that if the souls of the righteous do return to immortal bodies, those bodies would be the very ones in which they endured the miseries of this world and served God so faithfully that they obtained everlasting deliverance from all future suffering.

Some among us who admire Plato for his eloquence and brilliance, and who recognize that his opinions were correct on certain points, claim that he held views resembling our own on the resurrection of the dead. Cicero touches on this in his *De Republica*, though he suggests that Plato spoke in jest rather than with any serious intent to present it as truth. Cicero describes a man who returned to life and reported things consistent with Plato's arguments. Labeo, too, records that two men died on the same day, met each other at a crossroads, were then ordered to return to their bodies, and afterward resolved to live in lasting friendship with one another, which they did until they eventually died again. These authors, then, describe a resurrection of the body of the same kind we have genuinely witnessed: people restored to life, brought back to this present existence. But they do not describe it in a way that rules out a second death. Marcus Varro, however, records something far more remarkable in his books on the history of the Roman people. I think it worth quoting his own words: "Certain astrologers," he says, "have written that there is a rebirth in human beings, which the Greeks call regeneration. They hold that this comes about over a span of four hundred and forty years, so that the same body and soul that were once joined together will return to the same union they shared before." Now, whether this was Varro's own view or that of these astrologers (whose names he withholds, so I cannot say who they were), they have said something that, though false in one respect (since the souls returning to their former bodies will, on our account, never again leave them), nonetheless serves to silence those who scoff at the very idea.

and to dismantle the stronghold of arguments claiming this is impossible. Those who have thought carefully about these things do not consider it impossible that dead bodies dissolved into air, dust, ashes, fluids, or consumed by beasts or other human beings should return to what they once were. Therefore, let Plato and Porphyry, or rather those living today who admire them, if they agree with us that holy souls will return to their bodies (as Plato says), but will not return to any evils (as Porphyry says), so that the conclusion our Christian faith declares may follow, namely, that they will receive such bodies as will allow them to live happily in them forever without any evil: let them, I say, also accept from Varro that souls return to the same bodies they previously inhabited, and then there will be a beautiful harmony between them on the question of the eternal resurrection of the flesh.

Now let us consider what the saints will do in their immortal and spiritual bodies, their flesh no longer living according to the flesh but according to the Spirit, insofar as the Lord enables us to understand. And truly, what kind of activity this will be, or rather what kind of rest and stillness, I honestly do not know. I have never perceived it through the senses of the body, and if I claim to have grasped it through the mind or understanding, then how great, really, is our understanding compared to that surpassing excellence? For there is "the peace of God which passeth all understanding," as the apostle says. But what understanding does it surpass? Ours, certainly, and perhaps that of all the holy angels as well, for it does not surpass the understanding of God Himself. If, then, the saints are to live in the peace of God, they will without question live in that peace "which passeth all understanding." There is no doubt that it surpasses our understanding. But if it also surpasses the understanding of angels (for Paul seems not to exclude them when he says "all understanding"), then we must conclude that neither we nor any angel can know the peace in which God Himself rests, in the way that God knows it. Yet we, being made partakers of His peace according to the measure of our capacity, will attain a most excellent peace within ourselves, among one another, and with Him, in proportion to the greatness we have received. In this way the holy angels already know that peace according to their own measure, while human beings now know it at a far lower degree, even among those who are sharpest in understanding.

We should consider what a great man once said: "We know in part, and we prophesy in part, until that which is perfect has come. And we see now in a glass darkly: but then we shall see Him face to face" (1 Cor 13:9, 12). This is how the holy angels now see, those who are called our angels as well, because we, having been delivered from the power of darkness and translated into the kingdom of God, having received the pledge of the Spirit, have already begun to belong to them. With them we will enjoy that most holy and glorious City of God, about which we have already written so many books. The angels, then, are ours, just as they are the angels of God, even as the Christ of God is our Christ. They are the angels of God because they have not forsaken God; they are ours because they have begun to count us among their citizens. For the Lord Jesus said, "Take heed ye do not despise one of these little ones: For I say unto you, that their angels do always behold the face of My Father, which is in heaven" (Matt 18:10). As they see now, so also we will see, but not yet. This is why the apostle says what I quoted a moment ago: "We see now in a glass darkly: but then we shall see Him face to face" (1 Cor 13:12). That vision is kept for us as the reward of faith, and the apostle John speaks of it as well: "When He shall appear, we shall be like unto Him, for we shall see Him as He is" (1 John 3:2).

By "the face of God," however, we should understand His self-revelation, not any physical feature resembling the kind of face we have in the body. So when people ask what the saints will do in that spiritual body, I will not claim to see it clearly now; I will say only that I believe it, in keeping with what I read in the Psalms: "I believed, and therefore I spake" (Ps 116:10). I say, then, that they will see God in the body, but whether in the same way that we now see the sun, moon, stars, sea, and earth through our bodies is no small question.

It is a difficult thing to say that the saints will have bodies incapable of opening and closing their eyes at will. But it is far more difficult to say that whoever shuts their eyes in that life will be unable to see God. Consider the prophet Elisha: though absent in body, he saw his servant Gehazi accepting the gifts that Naaman had given him, the very man Elisha had cleansed from leprosy, and whom the wicked servant thought he had deceived without his master's knowledge. If Elisha could do this, how much more will the saints in their spiritual bodies see all things, not only with their eyes closed, but even from places where they are physically absent? For then will be fulfilled what the apostle describes when he says, "We know in part, and prophesy in part: but when that shall come which is perfect, that which is in part shall be done away."

Then, to illustrate by analogy how much this present life differs from the life to come, and not merely for ordinary people but even for those here endowed with exceptional holiness, he says, "When I was a child, I understood as a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things. We see now in a glass darkly, but then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part, but then shall I know even as I am known." If, then, in this life, where even the prophetic gifts of remarkable men compare to that future life as a child compares to a grown man, Elisha could nonetheless see his servant accepting gifts from a distance where he himself was not present, will the saints really need physical eyes to see what must be seen? Elisha, absent in body, had no need of them. And when that which is perfect has come, the corruptible body will no longer weigh the soul down, and nothing incorruptible will hinder it.

"Did not my heart go with thee," the prophet says to Gehazi in the Septuagint, "and I knew that the man turned back from his chariot to meet thee, and thou hast received money." Jerome's translation from the Hebrew renders it: "Was not my heart present when the man returned from his chariot to meet thee?" The prophet, then, claimed to have seen this event with his heart, wonderfully aided by divine power, as no one doubts. How much more will everyone abound in that gift when God is all things in all?

Yet the bodily eyes will also have their function and their place, and the spirit will use them through the spiritual body. The prophet did use his eyes to see what was before him, though he had no need of them to see his absent servant. He could have seen present things by the spirit even with his eyes shut, just as he saw things that were distant and beyond his physical reach. We should not conclude, then, that the saints in that life will see God only with their eyes closed, seeing Him always by the spirit. Whether they will also see Him with their bodily eyes when those eyes are open is a genuine question.

If the spiritual body's eyes can do no more than our present eyes can, they will certainly not be able to see God. They must therefore be of an entirely different power, if an incorporeal nature, contained in no place yet wholly present everywhere, is to be seen by them. We do not say, when we say that God is both in heaven and on earth (for He says through the prophet, "I fill heaven and earth"), that He has one part in heaven and another on earth. He is wholly in heaven and wholly on earth, not at different times but simultaneously, which no bodily nature can be. The eyes of the resurrection must therefore possess a more excellent and powerful capacity, not merely sharper sight in the way that serpents and eagles are said to see keenly, for those creatures, however sharp their vision, can see nothing but physical bodies. These eyes must be able to see incorporeal things as well.

It may be that a great power of sight was granted for a time to the eyes of holy Job, even in that mortal body, when he says to God: "By the hearing of the ear I did hear Thee before, but now my eye doth see Thee, therefore I despised myself, consumed, and esteemed myself to be earth and ashes" (Job 42:5-6). Though there is nothing to prevent us from understanding this as the eye of the heart, concerning which the apostle says: "the eyes of your heart enlightened" (Eph 1:18). No Christian doubts that God will be seen with those inner eyes, given that God Himself, the Master, says: "Blessed are the pure in heart, because they shall see God" (Matt 5:8). The question now is whether He may also be seen there with bodily eyes.

As for what is written, "And all flesh shall see the salvation of God" (Luke 3:6), this can be understood without difficulty as meaning "every person will see the Christ of God," who, as He was seen in a body, will likewise be seen in a body when He judges the living and the dead. That He is the salvation of God is confirmed by many other passages of Scripture as well.

But the words of that worthy and venerable old man Simeon make this even clearer. After he had received the infant Christ into his arms, he said: "Now, Lord, you are letting your servant depart in peace, according to your word, because my eyes have seen your salvation." Consider also what Job says, as it is found in many manuscripts taken from the Hebrew: "And I shall see God in my flesh." He was undoubtedly prophesying the resurrection of the flesh, yet he did not say "by my flesh." Had he said so, we might have understood him to mean God in Christ, who will be seen in the flesh by the flesh. As it stands, the passage may also be read as "In my flesh I shall see God," as if he had said, "I shall still be in my flesh when I see God." And when the apostle says "face to face," this does not force us to conclude that we will see God through our physical face, where our physical eyes are located, since we will see Him through the spirit without interruption. For if the inward man had no face of his own, the same apostle would not have written: "But we, beholding the glory of the Lord with unveiled face, are transformed into the same image from glory to glory, as by the Spirit of the Lord." Nor do we understand differently what is sung in the Psalm: "Come to Him and be enlightened, and your faces shall not be ashamed." We come to God by faith, which, as is evident, belongs to the heart and not to the body in any general sense. But because we do not yet know how close the spiritual body will draw to God (for we are speaking of something beyond our experience, where certain things cannot be understood in any other way), the authority of the divine scriptures does not resist us here but supports us. What is written in the book of Wisdom must necessarily prove true in us: "The thoughts of men are fearful, and our struggles are uncertain." For if the philosophers' method of reasoning, by which they argue that intelligible things are seen by the understanding and sensible (that is, physical) things are seen by the senses of the body, such that the understanding cannot perceive physical things through the body, nor physical things perceive intelligible things through themselves, were entirely certain for us, then it would likewise be certain that God could not be seen by the eyes of a spiritual body. But both sound reason and prophetic authority expose the weakness of that kind of argument. For who is so stubborn an enemy of truth as to dare claim that God does not know physical things? Does He therefore have a body, with eyes through which He learns them? Furthermore, does not what we mentioned a little earlier about the prophet Elisha demonstrate sufficiently that physical things can be seen by the spirit rather than by the body? When his servant accepted the gifts, though the act was entirely physical, the prophet saw it not through his body but through his spirit. Since it is clear, then, that physical things can be seen by the spirit, what if the spiritual body should possess such great power that the spirit may also be seen by the body? For God is a Spirit. Moreover, every person knows his own life, the life by which he now lives in the body, which causes these earthly members to grow and thrive and makes them living, through inward sense rather than through the eyes of the body. Yet he sees the lives of other people through the body, even though those lives are in themselves invisible. How else do we distinguish living bodies from lifeless ones, if not by seeing both the body and the life together? We do not see with physical eyes the lives that exist apart from bodies.

It may well be, and it is entirely credible, that we will then see the physical bodies of the new heaven and new earth in the same way we see God present everywhere and governing all material things through the bodies we will carry. Wherever we turn our eyes, we will perceive this with complete clarity, all clouds of obscurity having been removed. This will not be like the way we now see the invisible things of God, understood through what has been made, as through a glass darkly and only in part, where faith carries more weight in us than the things we see with physical eyes. Rather, it will be like this: when we look at the people among whom we live, seeing them alive and moving with the vitality of life, we do not merely believe they are alive; we see that they are alive. We cannot see their life apart from their bodies, yet through those bodies we perceive it with complete clarity, all ambiguity removed. In the same way, wherever we turn these spiritual eyes of our bodies, we will likewise see the incorporeal God governing all things through our bodies.

Either God will be seen by those eyes because they possess some quality resembling the understanding by which incorporeal things are perceived (which is difficult, if not impossible, to explain through examples or the testimony of scripture), or, more plausibly, God will be known and visible to us in this way: He will be seen by the spirit of each person in every other person, seen by each person in himself, seen in the new heaven and the new earth, and in every creature that will exist at that time. He will also be seen through bodies, in every body, wherever the eyes of the spiritual body happen to look. Our thoughts, too, will be open and transparent to one another, for then will be fulfilled what the apostle hints at when he says, "Judge not anything before the time, until the Lord come, who will lighten things that are hid in darkness, and make the counsels of the heart manifest, and then shall every man have praise of God."

How great will that happiness be, where there is no evil, where no good thing lies hidden, and where we will have all the time we need to praise God, who will be everything in everything! What else will we be doing there? We will not rest in laziness, nor labor under any need. I am reminded of this by the holy song where I read, or hear, "Blessed are they, O Lord, which dwell in Thy house, they shall praise Thee for ever and ever." All the limbs and organs of the incorruptible body, which we now see assigned to various necessary functions, will no longer serve those necessities. Instead, in that state of full, certain, secure, and everlasting happiness, they will be caught up in the praise of God. All the harmonious proportions of the body (which I have already discussed) that are now hidden will then be hidden no longer. Arranged inwardly and outwardly through every part of the body, and joined with other things that will be seen there, great and wonderful, they will kindle rational souls with delight in such a rational beauty, moving them to sing the praises of so great and excellent a Maker. What the movements of those bodies will be like, I dare not rashly define, since I cannot fathom the depths of that mystery. Yet both movement and stillness, and the very form of those bodies, will be graceful and fitting, whatever they may be, for there will be nothing there that is not graceful. Truly, wherever the spirit wills to go, the body will instantly be there; and the spirit will will nothing that is unbecoming either to the body or to the spirit. There will be true glory, where no one is praised for error or flattery. True honor, which will be denied to none who is worthy and given to none who is unworthy, will reign completely, for no unworthy person will even desire it, since no one unworthy will be permitted to exist there. There is true peace, where no one suffers anything that troubles him, whether from within himself or from anyone else. God Himself will be the reward of virtue, He who gave virtue and has promised Himself to those who love Him, than whom nothing can be better or greater. What else does He mean when He says through the Prophet, "I will be their God, and they shall be My people," but this: I will be that by which they are satisfied; I will be whatever people rightly desire, whether life, health, food, abundance, glory, honor, peace, or any good thing? This is also the right way to understand what the apostle says: "That God may be all in all." He will be the end of our desires, seen without end, loved without any weariness, and praised without any tedium. This activity, this devotion, this action will belong to all, just as eternal life will be shared by all. But who is capable of imagining, let alone expressing, what degrees of reward for merit, of honor and glory, there will also be? We must not doubt, however, that such degrees will exist. That blessed city will also see within itself that no one of lower standing will envy one of higher standing, just as the other angels do not envy the archangels now. No one will wish to be what he has not received, even while he is bound in the most peaceful harmony with those who have received more, just as the finger in the body does not wish to be the eye, even though the peaceful union and joining of the whole flesh holds both members together. So one will have a lesser gift than another, yet will also have this gift: the contentment to want no more. Nor will they lack free will simply because sin will hold no appeal for them. In fact, free will is more truly free when it is freed from the pull of sin and fixed in an unwavering delight in not sinning. The first free will, given to man when he was created righteous, had the power not to sin, but also the power to sin. This final free will will be more powerful than that, because it will not be able to sin at all. But this too comes by the gift of God, not by any capacity of human nature on its own. It is one thing to be God; it is another to share in God. God cannot sin by nature, but the one who shares in God receives from Him the inability to sin. There were degrees to be observed in this divine gift: the first free will was given so that man might be able not to sin; the final free will is given so that he cannot sin. The first belonged to the obtaining of merit; the latter to the receiving of a reward. But because human nature sinned when it had the power to sin, it is freed by a more generous grace, so that it may be brought to that liberty in which it cannot sin. Just as the first immortality, which Adam lost by sinning, was the ability not to die, so too the will toward godliness and righteousness will be free from loss, just as the will toward happiness is free from loss. For just as by sinning we lost both godliness and happiness, we did not, even so, lose the will toward happiness, even when happiness itself was lost.

Should we therefore deny that God Himself has free will, simply because He cannot sin? The free will of that city will be one and the same in all its citizens, and inseparable in each one of them: freed from all evil, filled with all good, enjoying an everlasting delight in eternal joys, no longer remembering past sins, no longer remembering past punishments, yet not so forgetful of its deliverance as to be ungrateful to its deliverer. As far as rational knowledge is concerned, that city will still remember the evils it once endured; but as far as any felt experience of them goes, it will have forgotten them entirely.

For even the most skilled physician knows almost all diseases of the body as they are understood through medical knowledge, yet he does not know by personal experience many of those he has never suffered himself. There are, then, two kinds of knowledge of evils: one by which they are grasped by the understanding, and another by which they are felt in the body of the one who endures them. All vices are known one way through the teaching of wisdom, and another way through the wretched life of a foolish man. In the same way, there are two kinds of forgetting evil. A learned and skilled man forgets evil in one way, while someone who has personally experienced and suffered it forgets it in another. The first forgets by neglecting his knowledge; the second forgets by being freed from misery. It is in this second sense that the saints will no longer remember the evils of the past, for they will be entirely without evil, so completely removed from their experience that it will have no hold on their senses whatsoever. Yet the great power of knowledge they will possess will allow them to know not only the evils they once endured, but also the eternal misery of the damned. For if they did not know that they had once been miserable, how, as the psalm says, "shall they sing the mercies of the Lord for ever?" (Ps 89:1). Truly, nothing will be more joyful to that city than this song, sung to the glory of the love of Christ, by whose blood we are delivered. There will be fulfilled the word: "Be still and know that I am God" (Ps 46:10). For there will be the great Sabbath without evening, which the Lord commended to us in the first works of the world, where we read, "And God rested the seventh day from all His works He made, and sanctified it, because in it He rested from all His works, which God began to make" (Gen 2:2-3). We ourselves will be that seventh day when we are filled and renewed by His blessing and sanctification. Freed there from all labor, we will see that He is God, which we ourselves sought to become when we fell from Him, having listened to the deceiver: "Ye shall be as gods" (Gen 3:5). We departed from the true God, through whom we might have become godlike by participating in Him rather than by abandoning Him. For what have we accomplished apart from Him, except to fall away from Him and turn back under His anger? Restored and perfected by a greater grace, we will rest forever, seeing that He is God, filled with Him when He shall be all in all. Even our good works, which are better understood as His than ours, are credited to us so that we may obtain this Sabbath, because if we attribute them to ourselves, they will be servile, as it is said of the Sabbath: "Ye shall not do any servile work in it." For this reason the prophet Ezekiel also says: "And I have given my Sabbaths unto them for a sign between Me, and them, that they might know, that I am the Lord, which sanctify them." Then we will know this perfectly, and we will perfectly rest and perfectly see, that He is God. If, therefore, that number of ages is counted as days, according to the distinctions of time that seem to be expressed in the sacred Scriptures, that Sabbath day will appear more clearly, because it is found to be the seventh. The first age, like the first day, runs from Adam to the flood; the second from there to Abraham, not by equality of time, but by number of generations, for they are found to number ten. From there, as Matthew the Evangelist concludes, three ages follow up to the coming of Christ, each expressed by fourteen generations. From Abraham to David is one; from there to the exile in Babylon is another; and the third runs from there to the incarnate birth of Christ. So all together they make five. Now this present age is the sixth, to be measured by no number, because of what is spoken: "It is not for you to know the seasons, which the Father has placed in His own power." After this age, God will rest as on the seventh day, when He makes that same seventh day to rest in Himself, which we shall be. It would take far too long to discuss each of those ages in detail here. But this seventh will be our Sabbath, whose end will not be the evening, but the Lord's day, as the eighth eternal day, sanctified and made holy by the resurrection of Christ, prefiguring not only the eternal rest of the spirit, but also of the body. There we will rest and see; we will see and love; we will love and praise. Behold what will be in the end without end! For what else is our end, but to come to that kingdom of which there is no end? I believe I have, with God's help, discharged the debt of this great work. Let those who think I have done too little, and those who think I have done too much, grant me a generous pardon. But let those who think I have done enough, accepting it with kind congratulation, give thanks not to me, but "unto the Lord with me." Amen.