The City of God, Volume I

Augustine explains how the creation of man in time was effected without any change in God. God, though eternal, caused time to have a beginning. He created man not by a new resolution, but by His eternal and unchangeable design. The Psalmist declares that God multiplied the children of men according to the depth of His wisdom, a depth that man cannot comprehend. Augustine grapples with the question of whether God always had creatures over whom to exercise dominion, given that He is always Lord. He suggests that while no creature is co-eternal with the Creator, there may have always been some creature, though not the same ones, succeeding one another. He explores the relationship between time and the angels, noting that if time began with the motion of creatures, and the angels were created before time or along with it, they have existed in all time and thus can be said to have “always” existed, yet they are not co-eternal with the changeless eternity of God. However, Augustine ultimately refrains from making positive assertions on these obscure points, urging humility and obedience rather than hazardous speculation.

He addresses the apostle Paul’s reference to “eternal times” in the past, understanding this to mean that in God’s eternity and co-eternal Word, what was to be manifested in time was already predestined. Augustine strongly defends God’s unchangeable counsel against the reasonings of the cyclical philosophers. These philosophers argue that God’s knowledge cannot comprehend the infinite, and therefore He must repeat the same finite cycles to know His works. Augustine shatters this argument by affirming that God’s knowledge is infinite and comprehends all numbers, which are infinite in their multitude. If God can comprehend infinite numbers, He does not need repetitive cycles to know His creatures. His knowledge is simple and eternal, foreknowing all things without succession of thought.

Finally, Augustine considers the phrase “ages of ages,” debating whether it implies a succession of worlds or the eternal causes of temporal ages. Regardless of the interpretation, he argues that it does not substantiate the cycles of misery and blessedness. He concludes with a powerful refutation of the impiety of suggesting that the blessed must return to misery in these cycles. He argues that such a view paralyzes love, for who would love God faithfully if they knew they must eventually abandon Him? True religion promises eternal, uninterrupted blessedness, and Augustine urges the reader to keep to the straight path of Christ, turning away from the futile circles of the godless. He notes that even Porphyry, a Platonist, eventually rejected the idea of cyclical return, likely sobered by the knowledge of Christianity.

Augustine opens by dismantling the Platonic teaching that souls revolve through endless cycles of misery and deliverance. If the soul, once liberated from suffering, is never again subjected to it, then something has occurred in its experience that possesses no precedent. This single, unrepeatable transition into lasting blessedness stands as a genuine novelty—one that no rotational model of history can accommodate. The objection that nothing genuinely new can arise in nature therefore collapses. Even granting that a soul’s fall into wretchedness came about through imprudence rather than divine appointment, the providential order already made room for both the lapse and its remedy, which shows that unprecedented events can unfold within, not outside, the fabric of nature as governed by God. Those who insist that souls have always existed, cycling through bodies from eternity, face a further dilemma: to supply an endless succession of embodied beings, the store of pre-existing souls would need to be limitless—yet a truly infinite multitude sits uneasily alongside the philosophers’ own conviction that the natural order is finite and fully comprehended by the divine mind.

With the machinery of cosmic repetition dismantled, Augustine turns positive. Nothing prohibits the eternal God from bringing into being what has never existed before, and doing so without the slightest shift in His purpose. Consider the company of the redeemed: whether their total number grows without bound or is fixed from the outset, in either case there was a moment when that number did not yet exist. A definite total, once reached, implies a point at which the count began; and for that beginning to occur, a single progenitor was required—the first human being.

Augustine then asks why that progenitor was one rather than many. Among the lesser creatures, God produced some species inclined toward solitude—eagles, lions, wolves—and others drawn to flock together—doves, deer—yet each kind was brought forth in groups. The human animal, poised between angelic and bestial life, was given a different origin: one individual alone, so that the entire species might recognize in its shared descent a powerful incentive toward social harmony and familial love. The woman was fashioned from the man’s own body to reinforce the same lesson, pressing home the truth that all humankind draws from a single wellspring.

God was not ignorant of what would follow. He knew that the creature endowed with free choice would rebel, becoming subject to death and transmitting mortality to his offspring. The result would be a race so fractured by conflict that even beasts—though made in numbers from earth and water—live more peaceably among their own kind than human beings do among theirs. Yet divine foreknowledge also encompassed the great multitude that grace would call to adoption, justifying them through the forgiveness of sins and uniting them with the holy angels in unending peace, once death itself had been destroyed. And that diverse company of the saved would derive lasting benefit from recalling their common ancestry, seeing in it how highly God esteems unity amid multiplicity.

Turning to the constitution of the human person, Augustine insists that the rational and intellectual soul marks humanity as the earthly creature most resembling its Maker, surpassing all other animals of land, air, and sea. How God imparted this soul—whether He first fashioned it and then breathed it into the body, or produced it through the very act of breathing—is less important than recognizing that the manner of divine working utterly transcends ordinary craftsmanship. The Almighty does not manipulate pre-existing materials with physical tools; His power is His hand, operating invisibly to accomplish visible results. Those who judge the original acts of creation incredible because they fall outside routine experience should reflect that ordinary human generation, conception and birth, would sound equally implausible to anyone who had never witnessed it.

Augustine next challenges those Platonists who attribute the making of mortal creatures to subordinate deities acting under the Supreme God’s commission. Whatever assistance celestial ministers may render in the unfolding of the world, they remain stewards rather than authors, much as those who tend orchards are not the originators of the fruit. The internal form and vitality of every living thing issue from God’s own decree, not from any external fashioner. Were His sustaining energy withdrawn, every creature would lapse immediately into the nothingness from which it was called. This holds whether the causes at work are bodily, seminal, emotional, or angelic: the underlying natures themselves owe their existence solely to the Most High.