City of God (Penguin Classics) (118 page)
Read City of God (Penguin Classics) Online
Authors: Saint Augustine
Then after these words the Lord uses the singular in his reply, although he was in the two angels, when he said, ‘Behold, I have marvelled at your face…’
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Hence it is much more likely that Abraham recognized the Lord in the persons of the three men, as also did Lot in the two, and that they spoke to him in the singular, even
though they thought their visitors to be merely men. And their only reason for taking them in was to minister to their wants on the assumption that they were mortals in need of refreshment. But there was, we may be sure, something extraordinary about them, so that although they appeared as men, those who offered them hospitality could not doubt that the Lord was in them, as he is wont to be in the prophets. And this explains why their hosts sometimes addressed them in the plural and sometimes in the singular, to address the Lord in their persons. That they were angels is the testimony of Scripture not only in this book of Genesis where these events are described, but also in the Epistle to the Hebrews, which says, when praising hospitality: ‘By this some men have entertained angels unawares.’
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Thus the promise of a son, Isaac, to be born of Sarah, was again conveyed to Abraham by these three men; and the divine assurance was also given him in these words: ‘Abraham will become a great and populous nation, and all the nations of the earth will be blessed in him.’
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Here were the two promises in the briefest and yet the amplest terms: the promise of Israel according to the flesh, and the promise of all nations according to faith.
30.
Lot’s escape from Sodom: Abimelech and the chastity of Sarah
After the giving of this promise, when Lot had escaped from Sodom, a fiery storm came down from heaven and the whole territory of that ungodly city was reduced to ashes. It was a place where sexual promiscuity among males had grown into a custom so prevalent that it received the kind of sanction generally afforded by law to other activities. But the punishment of the men of Sodom was a foretaste of the divine judgement to come. And there is a special significance in the fact that those who were being rescued by the angels were forbidden to look back. Does it not tell us that we must not return in thought to the old life, which is sloughed off when a man is reborn by grace, if we look to escape the final judgement? Furthermore, Lot’s wife was rooted to the spot where she looked back; and by being turned into salt she supplied a kind of seasoning for the faithful – a seasoning of wisdom to make them beware of following her example.
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After this Abraham again used the device in respect of his wife that he had employed in Egypt; this time it was at Gerar, in relation to Abimelech, the king of that city; and once more Sarah was restored to
him inviolate. And here indeed when the king reproached him, and asked why he had concealed the fact that she was his wife, and had called her his sister, Abraham revealed the nature of his fears, and added, ‘She is in fact my sister through her father, though not through her mother’,
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because she was Abraham’s sister by his father, through whom she was in this close relation. We observe that her beauty was such that even at that age she was found attractive.
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The birth of Isaac, and the meaning of his name
After this a son was born to Abraham from Sarah, in fulfilment of the promise; and he gave him the name Isaac, which means ‘laughter’.
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This was because when this son was promised to him, his father had laughed in wonderment and joy;
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and when the promise was repeated by the three men, his mother too had laughed in joy that was mixed with incredulity. However, when the angel reproached her because her laughter, though it showed joy, did not show complete faith, she was afterwards strengthened in faith by the same angel. This is how the boy received his name. And indeed, when Isaac was born and was given that name, Sarah showed that her laughter had no suggestion of scorn or derision but was rather a joyful expression of gladness, for she said, ‘The Lord has provided laughter for me; for anyone who hears of it will rejoice with me.’
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But after a very short time the maidservant was expelled from the house with her son, and according to the Apostle the two covenants, the old and the new, are symbolized here, where Sarah figures as the heavenly Jerusalem, that is, the City of God.
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32.
Abraham’s obedience and faith tested. The death of Sarah
It would be too tedious to give a detailed narrative of all these events; but in the course of them Abraham was tempted in the matter of the sacrifice of his beloved son Isaac, so that his dutiful obedience might be put to the proof, and be brought to the knowledge, not of God, but of future ages. It is to be observed that temptation does not always imply anything blameworthy, since the testing that brings approval is a matter for rejoicing. And as a general rule, there is no other way in which the human spirit can acquire self-knowledge except by trying its own strength in answering, not in word but in deed, what may be
called the interrogation of temptation. And then, if God acknowledges the task performed, there is an example of a spirit truly devoted to God, with the solidity given by the strength of grace, instead of the inflation of the empty boast.
Abraham, we can be sure, could never have believed that God delights in human victims; and yet the thunder of a divine command must be obeyed without argument. However, Abraham is to be praised in that he believed, without hesitation, that his son would rise again when he had been sacrificed. For when he had refused to accede to his wife’s wish that the maidservant and her son should be turned out of the house, God had said to him, ‘Through Isaac your descendants will carry on your name.’ Now it is true that this is followed by the statement, ‘And I will make of the son of the maidservant a mighty nation, because he is your son.’ What then is the meaning of the words, ‘Through Isaac your descendants will carry on your name’, seeing that God also called Ishmael Abraham’s seed? The Apostle explains the force of ‘Through Isaac your descendants will carry on your name’ in this way: ‘It does not mean that the sons of the flesh are the sons of God: it is the sons of the promise who are counted as his descendants.’
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Consequently, the sons of the promise are called in Isaac to be the descendants of Abraham, that is they are called by grace and gathered together in Christ. The devout father therefore clung to this promise faithfully, and since it had to be fulfilled through the son whom God ordered to be slain, he did not doubt that a son who could be granted to him when he had ceased to hope could also be restored to him after he had been sacrificed.
This is the interpretation we find in the Epistle to the Hebrews, and it is explained as follows: ‘By faith Abraham, when tested, went before Isaac and offered his only son, who received the promises, to whom it was said: “In Isaac your seed will be called”, considering that God is able to raise men from the dead.’ Then he went on, ‘Hence he brought him also to serve as a type.’
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A type of whom? It can only be of him of whom the Apostle says, ‘He did not spare his own son, but handed him over for us all.’
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This is why, as the Lord carried his cross, so Isaac himself carried to the place of sacrifice the wood on which he too was to be placed. Moreover, after the father had been prevented from striking his son, since it was not right that Isaac should be slain, who was the ram whose immolation completed the sacrifice by blood of symbolic significance? Bear in mind that when
Abraham saw the ram it was caught by the horns in a thicket. Who, then, was symbolized by that ram but Jesus, crowned with Jewish thorns
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before he was offered in sacrifice?
But now let us turn our attention to the divine words spoken by the angel. For the Scripture says,
And Abraham stretched out his hand to take the knife to slay his son. Then the angel of the Lord called to him from heaven and said: ‘Abraham.’ And he said: ‘Here I am.’ And the angel said: ‘Do not lay your hand on the boy, nor do anything to him; for now I have the assurance that you fear your God, and you have not spared your beloved son, for my sake.’
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‘Now I have the assurance’ means ‘Now I have made it known’, for God was not in ignorance before this happened. After that, when the ram had been sacrificed instead of his son Isaac, ‘Abraham’, we are told, ‘called the name of the place “The Lord saw”, so that people say today: “The Lord appeared on the mountain.” ’
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Just as ‘Now I have the assurance’ stood for ‘Now I have made it known’, here ‘The Lord saw’ stands for ‘The Lord appeared’, that is, he made himself visible.
Then the angel of the Lord called to Abraham from heaven a second time, saying: ‘I have sworn by myself’ says the Lord ‘because you have carried out this bidding and have not spared your beloved son for my sake, that I shall certainly bless you, and I shall assuredly multiply your posterity like the stars of the sky, and like the sand that stretches by the lip of the sea. And your posterity will possess by inheritance the cities of your enemies, and all the nations of the earth will be blessed in your descendants, because you have obeyed my voice.’
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In this way the promise of the calling of the nations in Abraham’s descendants, after the whole burnt-offering, by which Christ is symbolized, was confirmed also by an oath given by God. For he had often given promises, but never before had he taken an oath. Now what is the oath of the true and truthful God but the confirmation of his promise, and a kind of rebuke to the unbelieving?
After this, Sarah died, in the 127th year of her life, and the 137th year of the life of her husband. For he was ten years her senior in age, as he himself declared when he was promised a son by her, when he said, ‘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?’
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Then Abraham bought a piece of land, in which he buried his wife. It was then, according to
Stephen’s narrative,
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that Abraham was settled in that land, since he now began to be a landowner there – that is, after the death of his father, who is reckoned to have passed away two years previously.
33.
Isaac marries Rebecca
After that, when Isaac was forty years old, he married Rebecca, the granddaughter of his uncle Nahor; this, as we see, was when his father was 140, and when his mother had been dead for three years. Now when the servant was sent by Isaac’s father into Mesopotamia to fetch Rebecca, Abraham said to him, ‘Put your hand under my thigh, and I shall put you on oath, by the Lord God of heaven and the Lord of the earth, not to take a wife for my son Isaac from the daughters of the Canaanites.’
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This was nothing but a sign that the Lord God of heaven and the Lord of the earth was destined to come in the flesh which was derived from that thigh. These are no trivial proofs of the foretelling of the reality which we now see fulfilled in Christ.
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The meaning of Abraham’s marriage to Keturah
But what is the meaning of Abraham’s taking Keturah as a wife after the death of Sarah? We must never imagine that this was a case of incontinence, especially at his age, and considering the holiness of his faith. Are we to suppose that he was still looking to procreate children, even though God’s promise assured him, by a pledge of utter reliability, that Isaac’s children would be multiplied to the number of the stars of the sky and the sands of the earth? But if Hagar and Ishmael, as the Apostle teaches,
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symbolized the carnal people of the old covenant, there is obviously no reason why Keturah and her sons should not stand for the carnal people who suppose themselves to belong to the new covenant. For both Hagar and Keturah are called concubines of Abraham as well as wives, whereas Sarah is never spoken of as a concubine. For when Hagar was given to Abraham, the Scripture says, ‘Then Sarah, Abram’s wife, took Hagar, her Egyptian maidservant, after Abraham had been living in the land of Canaan for ten years, and gave her as a wife to Abram her husband.’
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While the passage about Keturah, whom Abraham received after Sarah’s death, runs thus: ‘Furthermore, Abraham took another wife, whose name was Keturah.’ Here we see both of them called wives; but they
are both also found to have been concubines, for the Scripture goes on to say, ‘Now Abraham gave all his property to his son Isaac; and to the sons of his concubines Abraham gave presents, and sent them away from his son Isaac, in his own lifetime, to the east, to the eastern lands.’
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Thus the sons of the concubines have some gifts, but they do not come to the promised kingdom – neither the heretics nor the Jews by physical descent – because there is no heir except Isaac, and ‘it is not those who are sons of the flesh that are the sons of God, but the sons of the promise are reckoned as his descendants’, about whom the Scripture says, ‘It is through Isaac that your descendants will carry on your name.’ For I can see no reason why Keturah, who was married to Abraham after his wife’s death, should be called a concubine, unless it was for the sake of this hidden meaning. But anyone who refuses to take the passage in this sense must not make false accusations against Abraham. For it may be that this episode was designed to provide a refutation of the heretics who were to condemn second marriages;
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that a second marriage after the death of a wife is not a sin is shown by the example of the father of many nations.
Then Abraham died, at the age of 175. Thus he left behind him his son Isaac, now seventy-five, who was born to him when he was a hundred years old.
