City of God (Penguin Classics), page 92
23. The promise that Abraham’s posterity would equal the number of the stars; Abraham’s faith, and his consequent justification, before circumcision
It was at this time that the word of the Lord came to Abraham in a vision. The Lord promised him protection and an exceedingly great reward; and then Abraham, concerned about his posterity, said that a man called Eliezer, a servant born in his household, was likely to be his heir. Straightway an heir was promised him, not that house-slave, but one who was to come from Abraham himself; and once again he was promised an innumerable seed, not like the sands of the earth, but like the stars of heaven.104 And here it seems that the promise is of a posterity exalted in heavenly felicity; for in respect of mere number, the stars will not bear comparison with the sands of the earth. Although it might be maintained that this comparison is similar to the other, in that the stars also cannot be numbered, because we have to believe that not all of them can be seen by us. For the keener the observer’s sight, the more stars he sees; and so we are justified in supposing that some stars are invisible even to the keenest eyes, quite apart from those stars which, we are assured, rise and set in another part of the world far removed from us. While as for all those who boast that they have made a comprehensive list of the whole number of the stars, Aratus,105 for example, and Eudoxus,106 and any others, the authority of this book treats them with contempt.
This, it should be noticed, is the context of the statement which the Apostle recalls for the purpose of emphasizing the grace of God: ‘Abraham believed in God, and this was accounted to him for righteousness.’107 Paul’s intention was to prevent the circumcised from boasting, and from refusing to admit the uncircumcised peoples to faith in Christ. For at the time when this happened, when Abraham’s faith was accounted to him for righteousness, Abraham had not yet been circumcised.
24. The meaning of Abraham’s sacrifice
In the same vision, when God was speaking to Abraham, he said this also to him: ‘I am your God, who brought you from the land of the Chaldeans, to give you this land so that you may inherit it.’108 Then Abraham asked God by what token he should know that he would inherit it; and God replied, ‘“Take a heifer of three years old, and a she-goat and a ram of three years old, and a dove and a pigeon.” Then he took all these and divided them in half, and put the halves facing each other: but he did not divide the birds. ‘And’, as the Scripture says,
birds came down on the carcasses which had been divided; and Abraham sat there by them. Now about sunset a horror assailed Abraham, and, behold, a dark and mighty dread fell upon him. And he was told: ‘You will know for a certainty that your seed will be strangers in a land not their own, and men will reduce them to slavery and afflict them for four hundred years. But I shall judge the nation to which they are enslaved; and after that they will depart with many possessions. You, for your part, will go to your fathers, nourished in peace in a great old age. But in the fourth generation they will return to this place. For the sins of the Amorites are not yet completed, up to the present time.’ Now when the sun was about to set, a flame appeared, and behold, a smoking furnace and burning torches, which passed along between the divided carcasses. On that day the Lord God arranged a covenant with Abram, saying: ‘To your seed I shall give this land, from the river of Egypt, as far as the great river, the river Euphrates, the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaims, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites and the Jebu-sites.’109
All these things were done and said in a vision sent by God. Now it would be tedious to discuss every detail and explain every meaning, and it would go beyond the purpose of this work. Therefore we need to understand only what suffices for our inquiry. After the statement that Abraham believed in God and it was accounted to him for righteousness, we observe that he did not fail in his faith in saying, ‘Lord God, by what token shall I know that I shall inherit it?’ – referring, of course, to the promised inheritance of the land. For he did not say, ‘How am I to know?’, implying that he did not yet believe. He said, ‘By what token shall I know?’ in the hope that he might be given some representation of what he already believed, by which he could realize in what way it was to be effected. In the same way there is no suggestion of lack of faith in the Virgin Mary when she says, ‘How will this happen, since I do not know a man?’110 She was convinced that it would happen, but she asked in what way it was to be effected; and when she asked this, she was told. Thus on this occasion also a symbolic representation was presented in the form of the animals, the heifer, the she-goat, the ram, and the two birds, the dove and the pigeon, so that he might know that the event about whose future happening he had no doubt, would come about in a way suggested by those symbols.
Thus the heifer may have symbolized the people placed under the yoke of the Law, and the she-goat the same people in their future state of sin, the ram the same people as destined to reign. Those animals are specified as three years old because the important eras are from Adam to Noah, from Noah to Abraham, from Abraham to David, who, after Saul’s rejection, was the first man established on the throne of Israel by the will of the Lord.111 Hence it was in this third period, extending from Abraham to David, that the people attained adult status, in what may be called the third stage of its life. Or there may be some other more suitable application of the symbolism of these animals. However that may be, I have no shadow of doubt that Abraham’s spiritual offspring are foreshadowed by the addition of the dove and the pigeon.
The reason for the statement that ‘he did not divide the birds’ is that carnal beings are divided among themselves, whereas spiritual beings are not divided in any way, whether, like the turtle-dove, they keep away from the busy world of human affairs, or, like the pigeon, pass their time in the midst of those activities. Both those birds, however, are without guile and harmless, thus signifying that in the people of Israel, to which that land was to be given, there would be individual sons of the promise and heirs of the kingdom, destined to continue in eternal felicity. As for the birds descending on the divided carcasses, they do not stand for anything good; they represent the spirits of this lower air, looking for their own special food, as it were, in this division of carnal creatures. Further, the fact that Abraham sat by them symbolizes that even amidst those divisions of carnal creatures the truly faithful will persevere to the end. And the horror that assailed Abraham at sunset and the dark and mighty dread signify that about the end of this era there will be great distress and tribulation coming on the faithful. In the Gospel the Lord says about this, ‘For there will be great tribulation at that time, such tribulation as there has not been since the beginning.’112
Then there are the words spoken to Abraham: ‘You will know for a certainty that your seed will be strangers in a land not their own, and men will reduce them to slavery, and afflict them for four hundred years.’113 This was a clear prophecy about the people of Israel who were to be slaves in Egypt; not that they were to spend 400 years in the same state of servitude under the Egyptians, enduring affliction at their hands. The prophecy was rather that this would happen in the course of 400 years. For the Scripture says of Terah, Abraham’s father, ‘The days of Terah in Haran were 205 years’, not because all those years were spent in Haran, but because they were completed there; and in the same way in this passage the introduction of the statement, ‘and they will reduce them to slavery, and will afflict them for 400 years’, means that this period of years was completed in that affliction, not that the whole of it was passed in that situation. 400 years, in fact, is given as a round figure, whereas the actual period was somewhat longer, whether it is reckoned from the time of those promises to Abraham, or from the birth of Isaac, because he was the ‘seed of Abraham’, about which these predictions are made. For, as I said above, 430 years are reckoned from Abraham’s seventy-fifth year, when the first promise was given, down to the departure of Israel from Egypt. And in recalling those events the Aposde says, ‘Now this is what I am saying; that the law, made 430 years later, does not invalidate the covenant confirmed by God, so as to make the promise void.’114 This shows that those 430 years could at that time be called 400, because they were not much more than that. How much more naturally could they be so called when a considerable number of them had already gone by at the time when this demonstration and these words were given to Abraham in a vision, or when Isaac was born to his father, now a hundred years old, twenty-five years after the first promise, when of those 430 years only 405 were left, which God chose to call 400. As for the rest of the substance of God’s prediction, no one can doubt that it all refers to the Israelite people.
But then follows this description: ‘Now when the sun was about to set, a flame appeared, and behold, a smoking furnace and burning torches, which passed along between the divided carcasses.’ For the affliction of the City of God, such an affliction as has never happened before, which is to be expected in the future under the power of Antichrist, is symbolized by Abraham’s ‘dark and mighty dread’ just before sunset, that is when the end of the world is approaching. In the same way at sunset, that is, at the very end, this fire symbolizes the day of judgement as it separates the carnal men who are to be saved by fire from those who are to be condemned to punishment in the fire.115
There follows the covenant made with Abraham: and this clearly specifies the land of Canaan, naming eleven rivers there, from the river of Egypt to the great river Euphrates. We can see that this does not mean from the great river of Egypt, the Nile, but from the small river which divides Egypt from Palestine, where there is a town called Rhi-nocorura.116
25. Hagar, Sarah’s maidservant, chosen by Sarah as Abraham’s concubine
Then follows the period of Abraham’s sons, one by Hagar the maidservant, and the other by Sarah the free woman. I have already spoken about these in the last book.117 Now in view of the facts of the case Abraham is in no way to be branded with guilt in the matter of this concubine.118 For he made use of her for the procreation of offspring, not for the satisfaction of lust: not to insult his wife, but rather to obey her; for she believed it would be a consolation for her own barrenness if she made her maidservant’s fertilewomb her own, by her own choice, since she could not do so by nature. Thus as a wife she availed herself of that right referred to by the Apostle when he says, In the same way also the man has no authority over his body, but the woman has’,119 in order to produce a child from another when shecould not do so from herself. There is here no lascivious desire, nothing degraded or shameful. The maidservant is handed over to the husband by the wife for the sake of offspring, and she is received by the husband for the sake of offspring. The aim of both of them is not guilty self-indulgence but the natural fruit of the union. Finally, when the pregnant servant flouted her barren mistress, and Sarah, in feminine jealousy, chose to blame her husband, even in that situation Abraham showed that he had been not a slavish lover but a free parent, and that in respect of Hagar he had safeguarded the reputation of his wife Sarah, having acted not to gratify his own sensuality but to carry out his wife’s decision. He had not sought Hagar but had taken her; he had come to her, but he had not become attached to her; he had given her his seed, but not his love. For he said, ‘Look, your maid is at your disposal; employ her as you wish.’120 What a true man he was, treating women like a true man; treating his wife temperately, her maid obethently, treating no woman intemperately.
26. The promise of a son to Sarah, to be father of nations, the promise sealed by circumcision
After this, Ishmael was born of Hagar; and Abraham might have supposed that in him there was the fulfilment of the promise given when he had decided to adopt his house-born slave, and God said, ‘This man will not be your heir; but he who will issue from you, he will be your heir.’121 Therefore, to prevent the supposition that this promise had been fulfilled in the maid-servant’s son, when he was
already ninety-nine years old, the Lord appeared to him and said to him: ‘I am God; be pleasing in my sight, and be without blame, and I shall establish my covenant between me and you, and I shall increase you exceedingly.’ And Abram fell on his face. Then God spoke to him and said: ‘As for me, here is my covenant with you, and you will be the father of a multitude of nations. And your name will no longer be Abram, but Abraham,122 because I have appointed you as the father of many nations. And I shall increase you most exceedingly, and make you into nations, and kings will issue from you. And I shall establish my covenant between me and you and your seed after you, for their generations, to be an eternal covenant, so that I shall be your God, and the God of your descendants after you. And to you and to your descendants after you I shall give the land in which you are dwelling, all the land of Canaan for an eternal possession; and I shall be their God.’ Then God said to Abraham: ‘As for you, you will keep my covenant, you and your seed after you in their descendants. Now this is the covenant which you will keep between me and you and your descendants after you in their generations: Every male of yours shall be circumcised; and you shall be circumcised in the flesh of your foreskin, and this will be a token of the covenant between me and you. The boy of eight days shall be circumcised, every male in your generations. The slave born in your house and the slave bought from anyone of another nation, who is not of your seed, shall be circumcised, the house-slave and the bought slave; and my covenant will be in your flesh, to be an eternal covenant. And the male child who is not circumcised, who is not circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin on the eighth day, his soul will perish from his people, because he has broken my covenant.’
And God said to Abraham: ‘As for Sarai your wife, her name will not be called Sarai, but Sarah will be her name.123 Moreover, I shall bless her and give you a son by her, and I shall bless him, and he shall become nations, and kings of nations will issue from him.’ Then Abraham bowed down to the ground; and he laughed and said in his heart: ‘Will a child be born to me, at the age of a hundred years? And will Sarah bear a child, at the age of ninety?’ Then Abraham said to God: ‘Let Ishmael here live in your sightl’ But God said: ‘It is true. Sarah your wife will bear you a son, and you will call his name Isaac. And I shall establish my covenant for him as an eternal covenant, to be his God and the God of his descendants after him. While as for Ishmael, see, I have listened to you; see, I have blessed him, and I shall increase him and multiply him greatly. He will be the father of twelve nations, and I shall make him into a great nation. But I shall establish my covenant with Isaac, the son that Sarah will bear to you at this time next year.124
Here are more explicit promises about the calling of the Gentiles in Isaac, that is, in the son of the promise, in whom grace, rather than nature, is symbolized, because he is promised as the son of an old man and a barren old woman. For though God is also at work in the natural process of procreation, nevertheless, where God’s operation is manifest, in a case where nature is decayed and failing, there his grace is more clearly recognizable. And since this was going to happen not by way of generation but by regeneration, that is why circumcision was commanded at this time, when a son was promised from Sarah. As for the fact that God orders the circumcision not only of all the sons, but of the house-born slaves and the purchased slaves as well, this is evidence that this grace pertains to all men. For what does circumcision symbolize but the renewal of nature by the sloughing off of old age? And what does the eighth day symbolize but Christ, who rose again after the completion of seven days, that is, after the Sabbath? The names of the parents are also changed. ‘Newness’ is the note struck in every detail; and the new covenant is presented, in a veiled manner, in the old. For what is the ‘Old Testament’ but a concealed form of the new? And what is the ‘New Testament’ but the revelation of the old? Abraham’s laughter is the exultation of the thankfulness, not the derision of incredulity. As for the words which he said in his heart, ‘Is a son to be born to me, at the age of a hundred years? And is Sarah to bear a child, at the age of ninety?’, these are not expressions of doubt, but of wonder.
If anyone is worried by the statement, ‘And to you and your seed after you I shall give the land in which you are dwelling, all the land of Canaan for an eternal possession’, and is puzzled about how this may be taken as being fulfilled, or whether its fulfilment is still to be awaited, since no earthly possession whatsoever can be eternal for any nation whatsoever; he should know that ‘eternal’ is used by our translators to represent the Greek aiônios, which comes from the Greek word for ‘age’, aiōn being the Greek equivalent of the Latin saeculum. But the Latin translators have not ventured to render it by ‘secular’, for fear of conveying a very different meaning. Many things, in fact, are called ‘secular’ which take place in this age (saeculum) in such a manner that they pass away even in a brief time. Whereas when a thing is called aiônios it means either that it has no end or that it lasts to the end of this age.
27. The perishing of the male child, if not circumcised on the eighth day
Another question may cause perplexity. How are we to interpret the statement in this passage that ‘the male child who is not circumcised in the flesh of the foreskin on the eighth day, his soul will perish from his people, because he has broken my covenant’?125 Now this is in no way the fault of the infant whose soul is said to be doomed to perish; and it is not the infant himself who has broken the covenant of God; it is his elders, who have not taken care to circumcise him. That is, unless it is because even infants have broken the covenant, not in consequence of any particular act in their own life but in consequence of the origin which is common to all mankind, since all have broken God’s covenant in that one man in whom all sinned.126 Now it is true that many covenants are called God’s covenants, apart from the two principal ones, the Old and New, which anyone may get to know by reading, them. But the first covenant, made with the first man, is certainly this: ‘On the day you eat, you will surely die.’127 Hence the statement in the book called Ecclesiasticus. ‘All flesh grows old like a garment. For the covenant from the beginning is, “You will surely the.”’128 Now, seeing that a more explicit law was given later, and the Apostle says, ‘Where there is no law, there is no law-breaking’,129 how can the psalm be true, where we read, ‘I have counted all sinners on earth as law-breakers’?130 It can only be true on the assumption that those who are held bound by any sin are guilty of a breach of some law.
