Read City of God (Penguin Classics) Online
Authors: Saint Augustine
City of God (Penguin Classics) (168 page)
27.
Refutation of the argument that works of mercy will atone for persistent wickedness
It remains for us to reply to the contention that the only people to burn in eternal fire are those who have omitted to perform works of mercy to counterbalance their sins. This contention is based on the saying of the apostle James, ‘Judgement will be merciless on those who have shown no mercy.’
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It follows, they say, that anyone who does
show mercy, even though he has not amended his dissolute behaviour, but has lived a life of depravity and corruption along with his works of mercy, will meet with mercy at the judgement, so that either he will escape damnation altogether or else he will be set free after some time from the punishment to which he is condemned at the last judgement. And that, they suppose, is the reason why Christ will separate those on the right from those on the left by this sole criterion, their performance or their neglect of works of mercy; and the former he will bring into his kingdom, the latter he will consign to eternal punishment. They hold that their daily sins, which they never cease to commit, can be forgiven on account of their acts of mercy, whatever the nature and the magnitude of these sins; and in support of that belief they try to call in as their witness the prayer which the Lord himself taught us. There is never a day, they say, on which the Christian does not repeat this prayer; by the same token, there is no daily sin, whatever its nature, which is not forgiven through that prayer, when we say, ‘Forgive us our debts’, provided that we are careful to fulfil the following clause: ‘as we forgive our debtors’. For the Lord, they urge, does not say, ‘If you forgive other men their sins, your Father will forgive your trivial daily offences’; he says, ‘He will forgive you your sins.’
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Therefore whatever the nature of those sins, whatever their magnitude, even though they are committed every day, and though a man does not amend his life and abandon those sins, nevertheless those sins, they claim, can be forgiven through the mercy shown in not refusing forgiveness to others.
Those people are indeed right in warning us that acts of mercy should be performed
in adequate proportion
to our sins; for if they had said that any kind of acts of mercy could obtain mercy for daily sins and even for great sins, sins of any magnitude, and for a life of habitual crime, they would see that they were saying something absurd and ridiculous. For on this principle they would be forced to admit the possibility that a man of great wealth could atone for homicide, adultery and every crime in the calendar by laying out a shilling a day in works of charity. Now such an assertion would be utterly absurd and insane; but, that being granted, if we inquire what are the acts of mercy in adequate proportion to sins that Christ’s forerunner spoke of when he said: ‘Produce fruits
appropriate
to repentance’,
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we shall find, without a shadow of doubt, that they are not produced by those who disfigure their lives, to the day of their death, by the perpetration of daily offences. In the first place, such people when they rob others
of their property take far more in plunder than they give in charity; and yet by bestowing a minute proportion of this plunder on the poor they suppose that they are feeding Christ. So much so that in their belief they have bought, or rather are buying each day, a licence from him for their misdeeds, they proceed in their fancied impunity to commit all the grave offences that ensure their damnation. And yet if they had distributed all their goods to the needy members of Christ in atonement for just one sin, this could not have been of any service to them, if they had not abandoned such practices by the acquisition of the ‘love which does no evil’.
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Therefore, anyone who would perform acts of mercy in adequate proportion to his sins should begin with himself in their performance. For it is wrong not to do to oneself what one does to one’s neighbour, since we have heard God saying, ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself’; and we have been told to ‘have compassion on your own soul by pleasing God’.
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If anyone does not show this mercy to his own soul, that is, by pleasing God, how can he be said to perform acts of mercy in adequate proportion to his sins? There is another text in Scripture to the same effect: ‘If a man is mean to himself, to whom will he be generous?’
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Now works of mercy assist our prayers; and we must certainly take careful note when we read these words, ‘My son you have sinned: do not go on to sin again; and pray for mercy for your past sins, that they may be forgiven.’
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Works of mercy, then, are to be performed for this end, that when we entreat forgiveness for past offences, our prayers may be heard, and not that we should continue in our evil courses in the confidence of having acquired, by our acts of charity, a licence to sin.
Moreover, when the Lord foretold that he would put the performance of acts of charity to the account of those on the right, and their omission to the account of those on the left, his intention was to show what power such acts have to cancel former offences, but not to give perpetual impunity for sins. For if men refuse to abandon the practice of crimes and to amend their lives, they cannot be said to perform acts of mercy. In fact, when Christ says, ‘When you failed to do this to one of the least of these, you failed to do it to me’,
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he makes it clear that they do not do it even when they suppose that they are doing it. For if they gave food to a hungry Christian, as being a Christian, they certainly would not deprive themselves of the food of righteousness, which is Christ himself, since God is not concerned
about the recipient of a gift, but about its motive. Anyone who loves Christ in a Christian gives help to that Christian with the intention of coming closer to Christ, not of escaping from Christ unpunished. For the more one loves what Christ disapproves the more one abandons Christ. For what does the fact of baptism profit anyone if he is not made righteous? Christ said, it is true, that ‘unless a man is reborn by means of water and the Spirit, he will not enter the Kingdom of God’; but did he not also say, ‘Unless your righteousness far exceeds that of the Scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter the Kingdom of Heaven’?
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Why is it that many people rush to be baptized through fear inspired by the first saying, but not so many are concerned to be made righteous? People are not scared, it seems, by the second warning.
Thus in the same way that a man does not say to his brother. ‘You fool!’ when he says it in hostility to his brother’s sins, not to his brother as brother (for in the latter case he would be liable to the fire of hell);
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so, on the other side, when a man gives charitable aid to a Christian it is not to a Christian that he gives it if he does not love Christ in that Christian. But no one can love Christ if he shrinks from being made righteous in Christ. Now if anyone is caught in the offence of saying ‘You fool!’ to his brother, saying it, that is, in wrongful abuse, not with the intention of restraining his brother from sin, it is utterly inadequate for him to attempt atonement by acts of charity, unless he combines this with the healing process of reconciliation. This is prescribed in the passage which follows in the same place: ‘If you are bringing an offering to the altar and there recall that your brother has a cause for grievance against you; leave your offering there before the altar; go and be reconciled to your brother first, and then come and offer your gift.’ In the same way it is futile to perform acts of charity, whatever their scale, while continuing in criminal habits.
Our daily prayer, which Jesus himself taught us (hence it is called the Lord’s Prayer) does indeed cancel our daily sins, when we say, each day, ‘Forgive us our debts’ and when the following clause, ‘as we forgive our debtors’, is not only said but also put into practice. But this clause is said because sins are committed, not in order that we should commit sins because it is said. For by this clause in the prayer our Saviour wished to make it known that however righteous our life in the darkness and weakness of our present condition, we are never without sins and we are bound to pray for their forgiveness and
to pardon those who do us wrong, so that we ourselves may receive pardon. And so, when the Lord said, If you forgive your fellow men their sins, your Father will also forgive yours’, his intention was not that this prayer should give us confidence to commit daily crimes with supposed impunity, either because our power frees us from the fear of the laws of man or because our craftiness enables us to deceive our fellows. His purpose was that we should learn by this prayer not to imagine ourselves to be sinless, even if we are not liable to any criminal charges. God gave the same warning to the priests of the old law in the instructions about sacrifice, when he ordered them to offer sacrifice first for their own sins, and then for the sins of the people.
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We should notice carefully the precise words of our great Master and Lord. For he does not say, ‘If you forgive your fellow-men their sins, your Father will forgive your sins
of any kind whatever
.’ What he says is, ‘
Your
sins’. Now remember, he was teaching a prayer to be said daily; and he was speaking, of course, to disciples, who were justified. ‘Your sins’ therefore, can only mean ‘the sins from which even you cannot be free, though you have been justified and sanctified’. Now those people who try to find in this prayer an excuse for committing crimes every day, assert that the Lord did not say ‘trivial sins’ but ‘your sins’, and that this proves that he meant to include great sins. We, on the other hand, take into account here the kind of people he was addressing, and when we hear the words, ‘your sins’, we are bound to assume it means only minor sins, because people of that kind did not commit major offences.
Furthermore, those more grievous sins, which have to be abandoned with a thorough amendment of life, are not forgiven to those who use this prayer unless the condition is fulfilled that they ‘forgive their debtors’. For the smallest sins, which occur even in the lives of the righteous, are not forgiven except under this condition; then how much more certain it is that those involved in a multitude of major crimes can never obtain pardon, even though they have already ceased to commit them, if they inexorably refuse to forgive others the various wrongs they have done them. For the Lord says, ‘If you do not forgive your fellow-men, your Father will not forgive you.’ And the words of the apostle James are to the same effect, when he says that ‘judgement will be merciless to those who have shown no mercy.’
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And here, surely, that servant is bound to come to mind, whose master forgave him a debt of ten thousand talents, but afterwards demanded their repayment because the servant on his part had not
shown compassion to his fellow-servants who owed him a hundred denarii.
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And so it is in those who are ‘sons of the promise’ and ‘vessels of mercy’ that the saying holds good which comes immediately after in the letter of the same apostle. He says, ‘Mercy exults over judgement.’
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For those righteous ones have lived such holy lives that they receive ‘into everlasting dwellings’ other people as well, who have ‘made them their friends by means of the worldly wealth of unrighteousness’;
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and they have attained this righteousness because they have been delivered by the compassion of him who justifies the wicked by reckoning the reward on the basis not of debt but of grace.
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The Apostle himself is, as we know, among that number; for he says, ‘I have been granted mercy, so that I might be faithful.’
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On the other hand, those who are ‘received’ by those justified souls ‘into everlasting dwellings’ are not, it must be admitted, endowed with the moral character that would make it possible for their manner of life to be enough to fit them for deliverance without the intercession of the saints; and therefore even more in them does ‘mercy exult over justice’. For all that, it must not be thought that any thorough criminal, if he has made no change in his life to make it good, or even more tolerable, can be received into ‘eternal dwellings’, although he has been of service to the saints ‘by means of the worldly wealth of unrighteousness’ that is, with his money or other resources, which were ill-gained. And even if they are honestly come by, they are not the true riches, but only what unrighteousness counts as riches; for such a man does not know what the true riches are, those riches which are enjoyed in abundance by those who receive others ‘into eternal dwellings’.
There must therefore be a kind of life which is not so evil that generosity in charity cannot help those who live in that way towards the attainment of the Kingdom of Heaven, and yet not so good that it is in itself sufficient for the achievement of that supreme felicity, if such people do not meet with compassion through the merits of those whose friendship they have won. (I always find it surprising that we can discover in Virgil an expression of the same thought as is uttered in those words of our Lord, ‘Win friends for yourselves by means of the worldly wealth of unrighteousness, so that they on their part may receive you into the eternal dwellings’; and in the very similar saying, ‘Anyone who welcomes a prophet because he is a prophet will have a
prophet’s reward: and anyone who welcomes a righteous man because he is a righteous man will receive a righteous man’s reward’.
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Now when Virgil describes the Elysian fields, where, as the pagans think, the souls of the blessed dwell, he places there not only those who have been able to reach that abode by reasons of their own merits; he adds that there are found there
