The City of God by Augustine - 10 - Worshiping the Invisible God
Book Ten
Quote
📝 For as the sound which communicates the thought conceived in the silence of the mind is not the thought itself, so the visible form by which God, invisible in his own nature, became visible, was not God himself.
Notes
🔥 Happiness comes from worshiping and serving the one, true God. Some philosophers talk about worshiping the "good demons", or angels, too. But if angels care about our happiness, they would want us to worship God only, not themselves.
🔥 The Platonists understand that the light (of rationality and goodness) within us receives its illumination from God.
🔥 We worship God not for his benefit, but for our own. In the same way that a "fountain does not benefit by our drinking."
🔥 God does not require animal sacrifices. Those were ever only symbols of the true sacrifice, which is a "contrite heart". The sacrifice is to give your life in service to God: "To do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with our God." Augustine says that "our heart, when it rises to Him, is His altar."
🔥 It also involves sacrificing our bodily desires to instead do what God desires for us. Augustine quotes the Bible which says, "Be not conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind."
🔥 Augustine goes back to discussing demons and those who worship them. He reviews some arguments by the Platonist, Porphyry, who points out the oddness of being able to manipulate demons through sacrifice or other means. Or how gods are associated with the sun or moon, when gods are supposed to be incorporeal. At the same time, Porphyry was confused and somehow agreed with the worship of demons, despite these questions he raised about them.
🔥 God can do miracles, but the biggest miracle was the creation of the world. Augustine says "the manner of creation" is incomprehensible to man.
🔥 All goodness and beauty comes from God. Like the idea of the Platonic forms. But even earthly beauty pales in comparison to the eternal, and earthly beauty must ultimately be discarded in order to seek the eternal.
🔥 He gives a hint of an idea that history is a story of humanity progressively growing closer to God: "The education of the human race, represented by the people of God, has advanced, like that of an individual, through certain epochs, or, as it were, ages, so that it might gradually rise from earthly to heavenly things, and from the visible to the invisible."
🔥 Augustine returns to the topic of sacrifice and how any visible sacrifices we make to God are signs of the invisible sacrifice of giving our heart to God. And Jesus, our true mediator, chose to be, rather than to receive, a sacrifice.
🔥 Any power given to demons is there only so that it may be overcome by God, and by the people of God through him.
🔥 Jesus showed us that only sin is evil, not flesh. God created the world and said it was good.
🔥 He quotes from the Bible about human wisdom: "Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For after that, in the wisdom of God, the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe.... Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God is stronger than men."
Key Takeaways
💬 I'm still trying to work out how and why this book is included in Susan Wise Bauer's history book list. There is a lot of theology in this history, and as far as I understand, the beginning of history was a move away from explanations involving the gods. But maybe there is something in The City of God that's bigger and different than those older myths. There is a hint in this section of weaving together a story that encompasses not just our history, but the whole cosmic history. And it's a history of progress, of humanity moving closer to the eternal. This is a much bigger scope than the other history books so far.