The City of God by Augustine - 22 - On Heaven and Eternal Happiness
Book Twenty-Two
Quote
📝 ... but in that city all the citizens shall be immortal, men now for the first time enjoying what the holy angels have never lost.
Notes
🔥 God allowed his angels to rebel, "deeming it more befitting His power and goodness to bring good out of evil then to prevent the evil from coming into existence." So great is God's will, that even things that seem adverse to it still lead towards just and good ends.
🔥 The Romans believed that Romulus was a god, but Jesus is God for real and is founding the city of God. And there will be a physical resurrection from the dead for those who are saved by him.
🔥 The Romans only believed Romulus was a god because they were forced to out of fear. Christians, by contrast, choose death for their belief. Many Christians died for Jesus — they "preferred to win eternal salvation by abstaining from war."
🔥 Some say, how come there were so many miracles back then, and none now. Augustine says there are still miracles happening today. But they might not spread the same way Jesus's miracles did. Augustine shares some stories of miraculous cures that happened in his time, as well as exorcisms of demons.
🔥 Some argue that our bodies can't survive in heaven. He spends some time refuting this. God can make it happen, he says. We have bodies that survive in different environments now. Fish live in the ocean. Birds live in the air. So our bodies can be made to live in heaven.
🔥 There are other strange and mocking questions about the resurrection by its objectors. Like what happens to the body of a man that was eaten by someone else? What happens to aborted babies? Will they resurrect? Some say that women will resurrect not as women, but as men?... Augustine disagrees.
🔥 What about our hair and nails, or our wounds? Do they stay on our bodies after the resurrection? Augustine gives his attempt at an explanation. He believes the resurrection will restore us to our youthful bodies because they were most beautiful in their youth, and the resurrection will restore beauty in everything.
🔥 All of life and its many sufferings is its own kind of hell, and it's proof of the weight of the original sin. Jesus is the only way out of it.
🔥 Still we do have some blessings in life. The fact that we can have children and grow and multiply. The gift of reason and our capacity for learning and acquiring knowledge. Not to mention the blessings of invention and creativity. We have eyes to see and ears to hear all this beauty of music and nature. If these are the blessings that are given to both the good and evil people in the world, then how much greater must our blessings be in heaven.
🔥 But so much of all this is too far beyond our minds to really begin to grasp. "Neither we nor the angels can understand, as God understands, the peace which God himself enjoys."
🔥 But we will come to understand. He quotes from the Bible: "When I was a child, I understood as a child, I spake as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things. Now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face; now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known."
🔥 We shall see God. But how that will work — whether with our physical eyes or with our spiritual eyes, the eyes of our heart — it's hard to know.
🔥 There will be perfect harmony between our bodies and our spirits. And we will still have free will. But we will not have any desire to sin. This seems a bit like a contradiction, though. Shouldn't we still have the freedom to sin? Or else do we really have freedom? But, answers Augustine, do we say that God is not free because he cannot sin? No, we don't.
🔥 "In that city, then, there shall be free will, one in all the citizens, and indivisible in each, delivered from all ill, filled with all good, enjoying indefeasibly the delights of eternal joys, oblivious of sins, oblivious of sufferings, and yet not so oblivious of its deliverance as to be ungrateful to its Deliverer."
🔥 We will still have an intellectual memory of the past life, but in terms of experience, it will be totally forgotten.
Reflection
💬 I wasn't fully expecting Augustine to still be dealing with strange logical issues in his philosophy in this final book (like what happens if a man eats another man when it comes to the resurrection), but it has been a big part of so much of this book. Trying to counter all the various accusations against Christianity that are out there, and trying to present it all in a way that still makes rational sense ... or tries to.
Still he does show some humility in how much we can know. And some appreciation for the beauty that does exist in this world, too. We may be pilgrims in this world, says Augustine, but it doesn't mean there aren't things to enjoy here.