The Essential Augustine (continued)
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY
minds such worthless and deceptive diversions. Let us use the steps which Divine Providence has deigned to fashion for us. For if we should take too great delight in empty imaginings, we would then be lost in our thoughts and would turn our whole life into empty dreams. In the case of a rational creature keeping its laws revealed by words and letters, fire, smoke, by a cloud, and by a column, all visible words, as it were, the ineffable mercy of God did not disdain, so to say, to sport with our childish mentality by speaking in parables and similes and to cure with clay of this kind the interior eyes of our souls.
Let us distinguish, therefore, what credence we 99. should put in history, what in understanding, and what in memory, not knowing what the truth is but believing. Let us find where that truth is which neither comes nor goes but always remains the same. What is the manner of interpreting allegory, which, spoken in wisdom, is believed in the Holy Spirit? Is it sufficient to follow it from the visible things of old to more recent manifestations; or should it be followed to the affections and nature of the soul; or to immutable eternity? Or do some allegories signify deeds which were done and seen; others, the workings of minds; others, the eternal law? Can some be found in which traces of all the above may be discovered? Further, what is that firm faith, be it based on history and material things, or on things spiritual and eternal, toward which every interpretation carrying authority must be directed? What help does faith in temporal things lend to the understanding and grasping of eternal things, the end of all good actions? What is the difference between historical allegory, allegory of the thing done, allegory of word, and allegory of the sacrament? Further, how should the wording itself of Divine Scripture be rendered according to the idiom of each language? For each tongue has its own peculiar way of expression, which seems absurd when translated into another language. Of what profit is such lowliness of speech in which the Sacred Books tell not only of the wrath of God, of sorrow, of arousing from sleep, of memory, of forgetfulness, and of not a few other incidents which can befall all men, but also they speak of penance, of zeal, of the names of surfeits, and of other things of a like nature? Again, are the eyes of God, His hands and feet, and other like members which are named in Scripture, to be considered as standing for powers both intellectual and spiritual, as does a helmet, shield, sword, a belt, and other such things? Lastly, the most pressing question concerns what profit the human race has gained by having Divine Providence speak to us through a rational, begetting, corporeal creature serving it. The: solution of this question given, all childish petulance is excluded from the mind and sacred religion makes its entrance.
SIX AGES IN. BIBLICAL HISTORY*
As therefore God made man in His own image on the sixth day: thus we find that our Lord Jesus Christ came into the sixth age, that man might be formed anew after the image of God. For the first period, as the first day, was from Adam until Noah; the second, as the second day, from Noah unto Abraham; the third, as the third day, from Abraham unto David; the fourth, as the fourth day, from David unto the removal to Babylon; the fifth period, as the fifth day, from the removal to Babylon unto the preaching of John. The sixth day beginneth from the preaching of John, and lasteth unto the end; and after the end of the sixth day, we reach our rest. The sixth day, therefore, is even now passing.
THE SYMBOLIC MEANING OF JEWISH HISTORYt
e--It came to pass, when the seventy years had JI. been completed the temple was restored which had been thrown down: and there returned from captivity a great part of that people. But whereas the apostle saith, "These things in figure happened unto them, but they have been written for our sakes, upon whom the end of the world hath come"; we also ought to know first our captivity, then our deliverance: we ought to know the Babylon wherein we are captives, and the Jerusalem for a return to which we are sighing. For these two cities, according to the letter, in reality are two cities. And the former Jerusalem indeed by the Jews is not now inhabited. For after the crucifixion of the Lord vengeance was taken upon them with a great scourge, * On Psalm 92, 1; trans. Nicene. { On Psalm 64, 1; trans. Nicene. and being rooted up from that place where, with impious licentiousness being infuriated, they had madly raged against their Physician, they have been dispersed throughout all nations, and that land hath been given to Christians; and there is fulfilled what the Lord had said to them, "Therefore the kingdom shall be taken away from you, and it shall be given to a nation doing justice." But when they saw great multitudes then following the Lord, preaching the kingdom of Heaven, and doing wonderful things, the rulers of that city said, "If we shall have let Him go, all men will go after Him, and there shall come the Romans, and shall take from us both place and nation." That they might not lose their place, they killed the Lord; and they lost it, even because they killed. Therefore that city, being one earthly, did bear the figure of a certain city everlasting in the Heavens; but when that which was signified began more evidently to be preached, the shadow whereby it was being signified was thrown down; for this reason in that place now the temple is no more, which had been constructed for the image of the future Body of the Lord. We have the light, the shadow hath passed away; nevertheless, still in a kind of captivity we are: "So long as we are," he saith, "in the body, we are sojourning afar from the Lord."
CHRIST IN HISTORY*
Who would not be moved to faith by so remarkable 4.15. an order of events from the beginning and by this concatenation of the ages, which makes the past credible by means of the present and in which the earlier things are confirmed by the later, the recent by the ancient? A man was chosen from the nation of the Chaldaeans, one endowed with great piety and faith, that to him might be given divine promises to be fulfilled after long centuries in the last days, and it is foretold to him that in his seed all nations shall be blessed [Gen. 12:2]. This man, worshipping the one true
God, the Creator of the universe, begets in his old age a son of a wife who, through sterility and old age, had wholly given up hope of bringing forth a child. From him there proceeded a very numerous people which multiplied in Egypt whither it had been led from out of the East by divine dis-
* Letter to Marcellinus, 137, 4.15-16; trans. Nicene.