The City of God, Volume I

In contrast to the evil will, Augustine considers the good will of the holy angels. He argues that if there were no efficient cause of the good will, one might erroneously suppose the good will to be co-eternal with God. But since the angels are created, their good will must also be created. They could not have existed for a time without a good will, for then they would have been evil or at least not good. Nor could they have produced a good will in themselves without God’s help, for that would imply they made themselves better than God made them. Therefore, the holy angels never existed without a good will or the love of God. They were created with a holy love that enabled them to cleave to Him. The love of God is shed abroad in their hearts by the Holy Spirit. Those who have this good in common form one City of God, a holy fellowship with Him and with one another.

Augustine then turns to the creation of man, refuting pagan theories that the human race is eternal or that the world has existed for countless ages. He dismisses the chronologies of Apuleius and others who claim vast cycles of destruction and renewal, noting that these contradict the authority of Scripture, which records less than six thousand years of history. He cites the discrepancies between Egyptian and Greek chronologies to show the unreliability of such claims. Augustine also addresses the opinion that there are numberless worlds or that the same world perpetually dies and is renewed in cycles. He argues that these theories are attempts to solve the problem of why man was created so recently, but they fail.

To those who ask why man was not created sooner, Augustine replies that any finite time, no matter how long, is infinitesimal compared to eternity. Even if man had been created millions of years earlier, the question could still be asked why he was not created before that. Compared to the boundless eternity during which God abstained from creating, any span of time is as nothing. The first man himself could have asked this question on the day of his creation. Therefore, the controversy regarding the recent origin of man is based on a misunderstanding of the relationship between time and eternity.

Augustine refutes the specific theory of cyclical history, where the same events and individuals repeat endlessly. He argues that this contradicts the promise of eternal life and the unique sacrifice of Christ, who died once and rose again, dying no more. The saints shall be ever with the Lord. He interprets the words of Solomon, “There is no new thing under the sun,” as referring to the cycles of generations or the predestination of God, not to the recurrence of identical historical events. The path of the wicked is circular, but this refers to the error of their doctrine, not to a metaphysical cycle of time.

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.