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What pious ears could bear to hear that after a life spent in so many
and severe distresses (if, indeed, that should be called a life at
all which is rather a death, so utter that the love of this present
death makes us fear that death which delivers us from it,) that after
evils so disastrous, and miseries of all kinds have at length been
expiated and finished by the help of true religion and wisdom, and when
we have thus attained to the vision of God, and have entered into
bliss by the contemplation of spiritual light and participation in His
unchangeable immortality, which we burn to attain, that we must at
some time lose all this, and that they who do lose it are cast down
from that eternity, truth, and felicity to infernal mortality and
shameful foolishness, and are involved in accursed woes, in which God
is lost, truth held in detestation, and happiness sought in iniquitous
impurities? and that this will happen endlessly again and again,
recurring at fixed intervals, and in regularly returning periods? and
that this everlasting and ceaseless revolution of definite cycles,
which remove and restore true misery and deceitful bliss in turn, is
contrived in order that God may be able to know His own works, since
on the one hand He cannot rest from creating and on the other, cannot
know the infinite number of His creatures, if He always makes
creatures? Who, I say, can listen to such things? Who can accept
or suffer them to be spoken? Were they true, it were not only more
prudent to keep silence regarding them, but even (to express myself as
best I can) it were the part of wisdom not to know them. For if in
the future world we shall not remember these things, and by this
oblivion be blessed, why should we now increase our misery, already
burdensome enough, by the knowledge of them? If, on the other hand,
the knowledge of them will be forced Upon us hereafter, now at least
let us remain in ignorance, that in the present expectation we may
enjoy a blessedness which the future reality is not to bestow; since in
this life we are expecting to obtain life everlasting, but in the world
to come are to discover it to be blessed, but not everlasting.
And if they maintain that no one can attain to the blessedness of the
world to come, unless in this life he has been indoctrinated in those
cycles in which bliss and misery relieve one another, how do they avow
that the more a man loves God, the more readily he attains to
blessedness, they who teach what paralyzes love itself? For who would
not be more remiss and lukewarm in his love for a person whom he thinks
he shall be forced to abandon, and whose truth and wisdom he shall come
to hate; and this, too, after he has quite attained to the utmost and
most blissful knowledge of Him that he is capable of? Can any one be
faithful in his love, even to a human friend, if he knows that he is
destined to become his enemy? God forbid that there be any truth in an
opinion which threatens us with a real misery that is never to end, but
is often and endlessly to be interrupted by intervals of fallacious
happiness. For what happiness can be more fallacious and false than
that in whose blaze of truth we yet remain ignorant that we shall be
miserable, or in whose most secure citadel we yet fear that we shall be
so? For if, on the one hand, we are to be ignorant of coming
calamity, then our present misery is not so short-sighted for it is
assured of coming bliss. If, on the other hand, the disaster that
threatens is not concealed from us in the world to come, then the time
of misery which is to be at last exchanged for a state of blessedness,
is spent by the soul more happily than its time of happiness, which is
to end in a return to misery. And thus our expectation of unhappiness
is happy, but of happiness unhappy. And therefore, as we here suffer
present ills, and hereafter fear ills that are imminent, it were truer
to say that we shall always be miserable than that we can some time be
happy.
But these things are declared to be false by the loud testimony of
religion and truth; for religion truthfully promises a true
blessedness, of which we shall be eternally assured, and which cannot
be interrupted by any disaster. Let us therefore keep to the straight
path, which is Christ, and, with Him as our Guide and Saviour,
let us turn away in heart and mind from the unreal and futile cycles of
the godless. Porphyry, Platonist though he was, abjured the opinion
of his school, that in these cycles souls are ceaselessly passing away
and returning, either being struck with the extravagance of the idea,
or sobered by his knowledge of Christianity. As I mentioned in the
tenth book, he preferred saying that the soul, as it had been sent
into the world that it might know evil, and be purged and delivered
from it, was never again exposed to such an experience after it had
once returned to the Father. And if he abjured the tenets of his
school, how much more ought we Christians to abominate and avoid an
opinion so unfounded and hostile to our faith? But having disposed of
these cycles and escaped out of them, no necessity compels us to
suppose that the human race had no beginning in time, on the ground
that there is nothing new in nature which, by I know not what cycles,
has not at some previous period existed, and is not hereafter to exist
again. For if the soul, once delivered, as it never was before, is
never to return to misery. then there happens in its experience
something which never happened before; and this, indeed, something of
the greatest consequence, to wit, the secure entrance into eternal
felicity. And if in an immortal nature there can occur a novelty,
which never has been, nor ever shall be, reproduced by any cycle, why
is it disputed that the same may occur in mortal natures? If they
maintain that blessedness is no new experience to the soul, but only a
return to that state in which it has been eternally, then at least its
deliverance from misery is something new, since, by their own
showing, the misery from which it is delivered is itself, too, a new
experience. And if this new experience fell out by accident, and was
not embraced in the order of things appointed by Divine Providence,
then where are those determinate and measured cycles in which no new
thing happens, but all things are reproduced as they were before?
If, however, this new experience was embraced in that providential
order of nature (whether the soul was exposed to the evil of this world
for the sake of discipline, or fell into it by sin), then it is
possible for new things to happen which never happened before, and
which yet are not extraneous to the order of nature. And if the soul
is able by its own imprudence to create for itself a new misery, which
was not unforeseen by the Divine Providence, but was provided for in
the order of nature along with the deliverance from it, how can we,
even with all the rashness of human vanity, presume to deny that God
can create new things, new to the world, but not to Him, which He
never before created, but yet foresaw from all eternity? If they say
that it is indeed true that ransomed souls return no more to misery,
but that even so no new thing happens, since there always have been,
now are, and ever shall be a succession of ransomed souls, they must
at least grant that in this case there are new souls to whom the misery
and the deliverance from it are new. For if they maintain that those
souls out of which new men are daily being made (from whose bodies, if
they have lived wisely, they are so delivered that they never return to
misery) are not new, but have existed from eternity, they must
logically admit that they are infinite. For however great a finite
number of souls there were, that would not have sufficed to make
perpetually new men from eternity, men whose souls were to be eternally
freed from this mortal state, and never afterwards to return to it.
And our philosophers will find it hard to explain how there is an
infinite number of souls in an order of nature which they require shall
be finite, that it may be known by God.
And now that we have exploded these cycles which were supposed to bring
back the soul at fixed periods to the same miseries, what can seem more
in accordance with godly reason than to believe that it is possible for
God both to create new things never before created, and in doing so,
to preserve His will unaltered? But whether the number of eternally
redeemed souls can be continually increased or not, let the
philosophers themselves decide, who are so subtle in determining where
infinity cannot be admitted. For our own part, our reasoning holds in
either case. For if the number of souls can be indefinitely
increased, what reason is there to deny that what had never before been
created, could be created? since the number of ransomed souls never
existed before, and has yet not only been once made, but will never
cease to be anew coming into being. If, on the other hand, it be
more suitable that the number of eternally ransomed souls be definite,
and that this number will never be increased, yet this number,
whatever it be, did assuredly never exist before, and it cannot
increase, and reach the amount it signifies, without having some
beginning; and this beginning never before existed. That this
beginning, therefore, might be, the first man was created.
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