Proconsul Marcellinus, a year or so after the sack of Rome by the Visigoths under Alaric in
440 The Literal Meaning ofGenesis who stray from it, the other greedy for praise by whatever means, one friendly, the otherjealous, one of them wanting for its neighbor what it wants for itself, the other wanting to subject its neighbor to itself; one of them exercising authority over its neighbor for its neighbor's good, the other for its own—these two loves were first manifested in the angels, one in the good, the other in the bad, and then distinguished the two cities, one of the just, the other of the wicked, founded in the human race under the wonderful and inexpressible providence of God as he administers and directs everything he has created. These two cities are mixed up together in the world while time runs its course, until they are sorted out by the last judgment, and one of them, joined to the good angels, attains eternal life in its king, while the other, joined to the bad angels, is dispatched with its king into the eternal fire. About these two cities we shall perhaps have more to say, ranging more widely over the subject, ifthe Lord so wishes, in another place.17
Back to the devil and his sin
16, 21. So then scripture does not say when it was that pride cast the devil down so that he distorted the goodness of his natural being by a twisted will; reason nonetheless declares unambiguously that this happened first and that as a result of this pride he became jealous of the man. It is easy, l mean, for all to see who look into these things that pride is not born ofjealousy, but rather jealousy of pride. Nor can it be said that it is idle to think that the devil fell by pride from the beginning of time, and that there was no time before that in which he lived at peace and in bliss with the holy angels. On the contrary, from the very starting point of creation he apostatized from his creator;18 so turning to what the Lord said: He was a murdererfrom the beginning, and has not stood in the truth (Jn 8:44), we should understand both parts to be "from the beginning"; not only that he was a murderer, but also that he has not stood in the truth. A murderer indeed from the beginning of the time when the man could be murdered, and of course he could not be murdered before he existed to be murdered. So then, the devil is a murderer from the beginning, because he murdered the first man, before whom there was no human being. But his not standing in the truth dates from the begin ning of the time when he was himself created, able to stand in it, if to stand in it had been his wish.
17. This he does, of course, in The City of God. This was begun, at the request of his friend the Proconsul Marcellinus, a year or so after the sack of Rome by the Visigoths under Alaric in 410. 1 think we may infer accordingly that this pan of The Literal Meaning of Genesis was written about the time he promised Marcellinus to set out the workings of divine providence which he has referred to here, and so to answer the attacks of the pagans who blamed the fall of the city on the supercession of its ancestral tutelary deities by the upstart Christian religion.
1 8. Here he is alluding to the first part of that text of Ecclesiasticus, quoted above in 15,19. "The beginning of all sin is pride," where it says in the previous verse, The beginning ofpride is to apostatizefrom God (Sir 10:12).