City of God (Penguin Classics), page 89
But what could the empty presumption of man have achieved, no matter how vast the structure it contrived, whatever the height to which that building towered into the sky in its challenge to God? What though it should overtop the mountains and escape beyond the region of this cloudy atmosphere? When all is said, what harm could be done to God by any spiritual self-exaltation or material elevation however high it soared? The safe and genuine highway to heaven is constructed by humility, which lifts up its heart to the Lord, not against the Lord, as did that giant who is called ‘a hunter against the Lord’. Some interpreters have misunderstood this phrase, being deceived by an ambiguity in the Greek, and consequently translating it as ‘before the Lord’, instead of ‘against the Lord’.31 It is true that the Greek enantion means ‘before’ as well as ‘against’. For example, we find the word in one of the psalms: ‘Let us lament before (ante) the Lord who made us’;32 and also in the Book of Job, where it says, ‘You have burst into fury against (ante) the Lord.’33 It is in the latter sense that we must take it in the description of Nimrod; that giant was ‘a hunter against the Lord’. For the word ‘hunter’ can only suggest a deceiver, oppressor and destroyer of earth-born creatures. Thus he, with his subject peoples, began to erect a tower against the Lord, which symbolizes his impious pride. Now it is right that an evilly affected plan should be punished, even when it is not successfully effected. And what kind of punishment was in fact imposed? Since a ruler’s power of domination is wielded by his tongue, it was in that organ that his pride was condemned to punishment. And the consequence was that he who refused to understand God’s bidding so as to obey it, was himself not understood when he gave orders to men. Thus that conspiracy of his was broken up, since each man separated from anyone whom he did not understand, and only associated with those to whom he could talk. And so the nations were divided by languages, and were scattered over the earth. Such was God’s design; and he achieved it by ways that are to us inscrutable and incomprehensible.
5. The Lord’s descent to confuse the language of those who were building the tower34
Let us consider the statement, ‘And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower built by the sons of men’ – not, be it noted, by the sons of God, but by that society which lives by man’s standards, the society we call ‘the earthly city’. Now God is present everywhere in his entirety, and so does not move from one place to another; but he is said to ‘come down’ when he performs an action which is miraculous in being contrary to the ordinary course of nature, and thus in some way points to his presence. Again, he can never be unaware of anything; and so he does not learn the facts by seeing them at a particular time. But he is said to ‘see’ and to discover’ at a particular time anything which he causes to be seen and discovered. Thus the city had not so far been seen in the way in which God caused it to be seen when he made it clear how much it displeased him. On the other hand, God can be understood as coming down to the city in the sense that his angels, in whom he dwells, did so descend. And so the next passage, where it says, ‘And the Lord God said: “Behold the people are one race, and they all have the same language” ’, and so on; and the following words, ‘Come, let us go down and bring confusion in their speech’, are a recapitulation35 which shows how the action described by ‘the Lord came down’ was effected. If, in fact, he had already come down, what is the point of the words, ‘Come, let us go down and bring confusion’ (which is taken as said to the angels) except that he was present in the angels when they descended and thus came down himself through his agents? And it is appropriate that he does not say, ‘Come, go down and bring confusion’ but, ‘Come, let us bring confusion on their speech’; for in this way he shows that he works through his servants, so that they themselves are also God’s fellow-workers; as the Apostle says, ‘we are fellow-workers with God.’36
6. The mode of God’s speech with the angels
There is another passage which might have been interpreted with reference to the angels; it is the place where, at the creation of man, God said, ‘Let us make man’,37 instead of ‘Let me make man.’ However, since this is followed by ‘in our image’, and since it is unthinkable that we should believe man to have been made in the image of the angels, or that the angels and God have the same image, the plural here is correctly understood to refer to the Trinity. Nevertheless, the Trinity is one God, and therefore even after the words ‘Let us make’ the narrative proceeds: ‘And God made man in the image of God.’ It does not say, ‘The gods made’ or, ‘in the image of the gods’.
Now the passage we are discussing might also be understood as referring to the Trinity, as if the Father said to the Son and the Holy Spirit, ‘Come, let us go down and bring confusion on their speech’, if there had been anything to prevent our understanding this in reference to the angels. But it is more appropriate that the angels should ‘come’ to God with holy movements, that is to say, with reverent thoughts; for it is with reverent thoughts that they consult the changeless Truth, as the law which is established eternally in that heavenly court of theirs. For they themselves are not the truth for themselves; they are partakers of the creative Truth, and move towards it, as to the fountain of life,38 to receive from it what they do not possess of themselves. And this movement of theirs is a stable movement, by which they approach without withdrawing.
And God does not speak to the angels in the same way as we speak to one another, or to God, or to the angels, or as the angels speak to us. He speaks in his own fashion, which is beyond our describing. But his speech is explained to us in our fashion. God’s speech, to be sure, is on a higher plane; it precedes his action as the changeless reason of the action itself; and his speaking has no sound, no transitory noise; it has a power that persists for eternity and operates in time. It is with this speech that he addresses the holy angels, whereas he speaks to us, who are situated far off, in a different way. And yet, when we also grasp something of this kind of speech with our inward ears, we come close to the angels. Therefore I do not have to be continually explaining about God’s acts of speaking in this present work. For unchanging Truth either speaks by itself, in a way we cannot explain, to the minds of rational creatures, or it speaks through a mutable creature, either to our spirit by spiritual images, or to our physical sense by physical voices.
Certainly the words, ‘And from now on they will not fail to achieve anything they try to do’,39 were not put as an assertion but as a question. This is frequently the way men express a threat, as when a speaker says,
Shall they not take up arms and then pursue
From the whole city?40
Accordingly, the passage quoted must be interpreted as if God said, Will not they fail to achieve everything they try to do?’ The quotation as given would not in itself suggest a threat. But I have added the particle –ne, for the benefit of the slow-witted, to read nonne, since a tone of voice cannot be indicated in writing.
We now see that from those three men, Noah’s sons, seventy-three nations – or rather seventy-two, as a calculation will show – and as many languages came into being on the earth, and by their increase they filled even the islands. However, the number of nations increased at a greater rate than the languages. For even in Africa we know of many barbarous nations using only one language.
7. Whether the remotest island received all kinds of animals from those preserved in the ark
There can be no doubt that men could have crossed over by boat to inhabit the islands, after the human race had multiplied. But there is a problem about beasts of all kinds which are not looked after by human beings, and are not, like frogs, brought into life from the earth,41 but only as a result of the intercourse of male and female, such as wolves and the other animals of that kind. How could they have existed on the islands, as well as on the mainland, after the Flood in which all creatures were wiped out, except for those in the ark? For we have to assume that they could be restored only from those whose species was preserved, in both sexes, in the ark. It is credible, to be sure, that they crossed to the islands by swimming, but that could only be true of the nearest islands; and there are some islands situated so far from the mainlands that it is clearly impossible for any beasts to have swum to them. But if we assume that men captured beasts and took them with them, and in this way established the species where they lived, because they were interested in hunting, this could give a credible explanation of the facts. On the other hand, it would be wrong to rule out the possibility that they were transported by activity of angels, either at God’s command or with his permission. If, however, they sprang from the earth, as at their first origin, when God said, ‘Let the earth produce the living soul’,42 then it becomes much more apparent that all species were in the ark not so much for the purpose of restoring the animal population as with a view to typifying the various nations, thus presenting a symbol of the Church. This must be the explanation, if the earth produced many animals on islands to which they could not cross.
8. The origin of recorded monstrosities
There are accounts in pagan history43 of certain monstrous races of men. If these are to be believed, the question arises whether we are to suppose that they descended from the sons of Noah, or rather from that one man from whom they themselves derived. Some of those monsters are said to have only one eye, in the middle of their forehead;44 others have the soles of their feet turned backwards behind their legs;45 others have the characteristics of both sexes,46 the right breast being male and the left female, and in their intercourse they alternate between begetting and conceiving. Then there are men without mouths,47 who live only by inhaling through their nostrils; there are others whose height is only a cubit – the Greeks call them ‘Pygmies’,48 from their word for a cubit. We are told in another place that there are females who conceive at the age of five and do not live beyond their eighth year.49 There is also a story of a race who have a single leg attached to their feet;50 they cannot bend their knee, and yet have a remarkable turn of speed. They are called Sciopods (‘shadow-feet’) because in hot weather they lie on their backs on the ground and take shelter in the shade of their feet. There are some men without necks, and with their eyes in their shoulders; and other kinds of men or quasi-men portrayed in mosaic on the marine parade at Carthage, taken from books of ‘curiosities’, as we may call them.
What am I to say of the Cynocephali, 51 whose dog’s head and actual barking prove them to be animals rather than men? Now we are not bound to believe in the existence of all the types of men which are described. But no faithful Christian should doubt that anyone who is born anywhere as a man – that is, a rational and mortal being –derives from that one first-created human being. And this is true, however extraordinary such a creature may appear to our senses in bodily shape, in colour, or motion, or utterance, or in any natural endowment, or part, or quality. However, it is clear what constitutes the persistent norm of nature in the majority and what, by its very rarity, constitutes a marvel.
Moreover, the explanation given for monstrous human births among us can also be applied to some of those monstrous races. For God is the creator of all, and he himself knows where and when any creature should be created or should have been created. He has the wisdom to weave the beauty of the whole design out of the constituent parts, in their likeness and diversity. The observer who cannot view the whole is offended by what seems the deformity of a part, since he does not know how it fits in, or how it is related to the rest. We know of cases of human beings born with more than five fingers or five toes. This is a comparatively trivial abnormality; and yet it would be utterly wrong for anyone to be fool enough to imagine that the Creator made a mistake in the number of human fingers, although he may not know why the Creator so acted. So, even if a greater divergence from the norm should appear, he whose operations no one has the right to criticize knows what he is about.
At Hippo Zaritus52 there is a man with feet shaped like a crescent, with only two toes on each, and his hands are similarly shaped. If there were any race with those characteristics it would be listed among the marvels of nature. But are we therefore going to deny that this man is descended from that one man who was first created?
As for Androgynes, also called Hermaphrodites, they are certainly very rare, and yet it is difficult to find periods when there are no examples of human beings possessing the characteristics of both sexes, in such a way that it is a matter of doubt how they should be classified. However, the prevalent usage has called them masculine, assigning them to the superior sex; for no one has ever used the feminine names, androgynaecae or hermaphroditae.
Some years ago, but certainly in my time, a man was born in the East with a double set of upper parts, but a single set of the lower limbs. That is, he had two heads, two chests, and four arms, but only one belly and two feet, as if he were one man. And he lived long enough for the news of his case to attract many sightseers.
In fact, it would be impossible to list all the human infants very unlike those who, without any doubt, were their parents. Now it cannot be denied that these derive ultimately from that one man; and therefore the same is true of all those races which are reported to have deviated as it were, by their divergence in bodily structure, from the normal course of nature followed by the majority, or practically the whole of mankind. If these races are included in the definition of ‘human’, that is, if they are rational and mortal animals, it must be admitted that they trace their lineage from that same one man, the first father of all mankind. This assumes, of course, the truth of the stories about the divergent features of those races, and their great difference from one another and from us. The definition is important; for if we did not know that monkeys, long-tailed apes and chimpanzees are not men but animals, those natural historians who plume themselves on their collection of curiosities might pass them off on us as races of men, and get away with such nonsense. But if we assume that the subjects of those remarkable accounts are in fact men, it may be suggested that God decided to create some races in this way, so that we should not suppose that the wisdom with which he fashions the physical being of men has gone astray in the case of the monsters which are bound to be born among us of human parents; for that would be to regard the works of God’s wisdom as the products of an imperfectly skilled craftsman. If so, it ought not to seem incongruous that, just as there are some monstrosities within the various races of mankind, so within the whole human race there should be certain monstrous peoples.
I must therefore finish the discussion of this question with my tentative and cautious answer. The accounts of some of these races may be completely worthless; but if such peoples exist, then either they are not human; or, if human, they are descended from Adam.
9. The story of the ‘antipodes’
As for the fabled ‘antipodes’, men, that is, who live on the other side of the earth, where the sun rises when it sets for us, men who plant their footsteps opposite ours, there is no rational ground for such a belief.53 The upholders of this notion do not assert that they have discovered it from scientific evidence; they base their conjecture on a kind of a priori reasoning. They argue that the earth is suspended within the sphere of the heavens, so that the lowest point and the middle point of the world are identical; and this leads them to suppose that the other half of the world which lies below this part cannot be devoid of human inhabitants. They ignore the fact that even if the world is supposed to be a spherical mass, or if some rational proof should be offered for the supposition, it does not follow that the land on that side is not covered by ‘the gathering together of the waters’.54 Again, even if the land were uncovered, it does not immediately follow that it has human beings on it. For there is no untruth of any kind in the Scripture, whose reliability in the account of past events is attested by the fulfilment of its prophecies for the future; and it would be too ridiculous to suggest that some men might have sailed from our side of the earth to the other, arriving there after crossing the vast expanse of ocean, so that the human race should be established there also by the descendants of the one first man.
Let us therefore search among those early peoples of mankind who were, we gather, divided into seventy-two nations and as many languages, to see if we can find among them the City of God on pilgrimage here on earth. We have brought its story down to the Flood and the ark, and have shown its continuance in the sons of Noah through his blessings on those sons, especially in the eldest of them, who was called Shem; for Japheth was blessed only in respect of his dwelling in the habitations of his brother Shem.
10. The progress of the City of God towards Abraham, by way of Shem’s descendants
