The Divine Institutes

The Fire and the Thousand Years

So, to begin with, we say this: God’s power is so great that he takes hold even of things that have no body, and handles them as he wills. Even the angels are afraid of God, because he can punish them in some way past telling; and the demons dread him, because he torments and punishes them. Is it any wonder, then, that souls, immortal though they are, can still be made to suffer at God’s hand? They have nothing solid or touchable in them, so nothing solid and bodily can do them violence; but because they live only as spirits, God alone can lay hands on them, whose own energy and substance is spirit.

Still, the sacred writings tell us in what way the wicked are to undergo their punishment. Because they committed their sins in bodies, they will be clothed with flesh again, so that they may pay for those sins in their bodies. It will not be the flesh God clothed man with, like this earthly body of ours, but flesh that cannot be destroyed and lasts forever, so that it can hold out under torture and under everlasting fire. That fire is not the same in kind as this fire of ours, the fire we use for the necessities of life, which goes out unless it is kept up with fuel of some sort. The divine fire always lives by itself and thrives without anything to feed it. There is no smoke mixed into it; it is pure and clear and flowing, after the manner of water. Nothing forces it upward, as our fire is forced — for the taint of the earthly body that holds our fire, and the smoke mixed into it, make it leap out and fly up toward the nature of heaven with a trembling, restless motion.

So the same divine fire, by one and the same force and power, will both burn the wicked and form them again; it will replace as much of their bodies as it burns away, and in that way keep supplying itself with food that never runs out. This is what the poets moved over to the vulture of Tityos. So the bodies are never worn away, since they get their substance back, and the fire only burns them and works on them with the feeling of pain.

But when he has judged the righteous, he will also test them with fire. Then those whose sins come out too heavy or too many will be seared by the fire and scorched; but those whom full justice and a ripened virtue have soaked through will not feel that fire at all. They have something of God in them that pushes the violence of the flame away and refuses it. Such is the force of innocence that the flame shrinks back from it and does no harm — the flame having received this power from God, to burn the wicked and to be at the command of the righteous.

Let no one imagine, though, that souls are judged the moment they die. They are all kept in one common place of confinement until the time arrives when the great Judge examines what each of them has earned. Then those whose devotion has been approved will receive the reward of immortality; but those whose sins and crimes have been brought to light will not rise again. They will be hidden away in the same darkness as the wicked, marked out for certain punishment.

What the Poets Half-Heard

Some people take all this for the poets’ inventions, not knowing where the poets got it, and they say these things are impossible. It is no wonder it looks that way to them. The poets tell the matter in a way that is not the truth. They are far older than the historians and the orators and every other kind of writer; but they did not know the hidden secret of God, and word of a coming resurrection had reached them only as an obscure rumor. They passed it on as they had heard it — carelessly, lightly, in the manner of a made-up story. And they themselves admitted that they were not following any sure authority, only common opinion. Virgil says:

Let it be lawful for me to speak what I have heard.

So although they have partly spoiled the secrets of the truth, the matter itself turns out to be all the more true, because it partly agrees with the prophets — and that is proof enough for us. Even so, there is some reasoning inside their mistake. The prophets kept announcing that the Son of God was going to judge the dead, and that announcement did not escape the poets’ notice. But since they supposed there was no ruler of heaven but Jupiter, they reported that a son of Jupiter was king in the world below — not Apollo or Liber or Mercury, who are counted gods of heaven, but one who was both mortal and just: Minos, or Aeacus, or Rhadamanthus. So with a poet’s freedom they spoiled what they had received; or else the report, scattered through different mouths and different tellings, changed the truth as it went. They also foretold that when a thousand years had been spent in the world below, the dead would be restored to life. Virgil says:

All these, when they have rolled the wheel through a thousand years,

a god calls in a great column to the river Lethe,

so that, with memory gone, they may look again on the vault above

and begin once more to want to go back into bodies.

This is the point that escaped them: the dead will not rise a thousand years after their death. They will be restored to life so that they may reign with God for a thousand years. For God will come, and when he has cleansed the world of every defilement he will give the souls of the righteous back to their renewed bodies and raise them to blessedness that never ends. So everything else in the poets’ account is true, except the water of forgetting. They invented that so no one could raise the objection: why, then, do the souls not remember that they were once alive, or who they were, or what they did? Even so, it is not thought credible, and the whole matter is thrown out as loosely and fancifully made up.

But when we state that the dead will rise, and teach that souls will come back to another life not having forgotten themselves but keeping the same awareness and the same shape, we are met with this objection: so many ages have gone by — what one person ever rose from the dead, so that we might believe from his example that it can be done? But the resurrection cannot take place while wrongdoing is still in power. In this world men are killed by violence, by the sword, by ambush, by poison; they are visited with injuries, with want, with prison, with torture, with proscription. Add to this that righteousness is hated, and that everyone who wants to follow God is not only held in hatred but harassed with every kind of abuse, tormented with punishments of many kinds, and driven to the ungodly worship of gods made by hand — not by argument or by truth, but by the horrible tearing of their bodies.

Ought people, then, to rise again to these same things? To come back to a life in which it is impossible for them to be safe? Since the righteous count for so little and are so easily taken away, what do we suppose would have happened if someone returning from the dead had recovered his life along with his former standing? He would certainly have been taken out of people’s sight, for fear that if he were seen or heard everyone with one accord would leave the gods and go over to the worship and religion of the one God. So the resurrection has to take place once and once only, when evil has been taken away, since it is fitting that those who have risen should not die any more, and not be injured in any way, so that they can live a happy life with their death cancelled.

But the poets, knowing that this life overflows with every evil, brought in the river of forgetting, so that the souls would not remember their hardships and their troubles and refuse to go back up to the world above. That is why Virgil says:

Father, are we to think that any souls go up from here to the sky

and come back a second time to sluggish bodies?

Where does it come from, this terrible longing for the light in these poor wretches?

They did not know how or when it must happen, and so they supposed that souls were born over again — that they went back into the womb and returned to infancy. That is why Plato too, discussing the nature of the soul, says you can tell from this that souls are immortal and divine: in boys the mind is pliant and quick to take things in, and they grasp what they are taught so fast that they seem not to be learning for the first time but calling it back to mind and remembering it. On that point the wise man could hardly have believed the poets more foolishly.

So they will not be born over again — that is impossible — but they will rise again. God will clothe them with bodies, and they will remember their former life and everything they did in it. Set in possession of the goods of heaven and enjoying the pleasure of resources beyond counting, they will give thanks to God in his own presence, because he has destroyed every evil and because he has raised them to his kingdom and to unending life.

About this resurrection the philosophers also tried to speak, and spoiled it as badly as the poets did. Pythagoras claimed that souls pass into new bodies — but foolishly, that they pass from men into cattle and from cattle into men, and that he himself had been brought back from Euphorbus. Chrysippus speaks better — the man Cicero describes as holding up the porch of the Stoics. In the books he wrote on providence, where he was speaking of the renewing of the world, he put in these words: But since this is so, it is plain that nothing is impossible, and that we, after our death, when certain stretches of time have come round again, are restored to the state we are now in.

But let us come back from human things to divine. The Sibyl speaks this way:

The whole race of mortals is hard to convince;

but when the judgment of the world and of mortals comes,

the judgment God himself will set up,

judging the ungodly and the holy at one and the same time,

then at last he will send the wicked away into darkness, into fire.

But as many as are holy will live again on the earth,

and God will give them at the same time spirit and honor and life.

But if not only the prophets, but the seers and the poets and the philosophers agree that there will be a resurrection of the dead, let no one ask us how it is possible. No account can be given of the works of God. If God formed man at the beginning in some way past telling, then we can believe that the one who made him when he was new can put him back together when he is worn out.

The Thousand Years

Now let me add the rest. The Son of the Most High and Mighty God will come to judge the living and the dead, as the Sibyl bears witness when she says:

For then there will be confusion of mortals over the whole earth,

when the Almighty himself comes upon his judgment seat

to judge the souls of the living and the dead,

and all the world.

But when he has destroyed unrighteousness, carried out his great judgment, and called back to life the righteous who have lived from the beginning, he will be at work among men for a thousand years and will rule them with the most just command of all. The Sibyl proclaims this in another place, as she utters what has been breathed into her:

Hear me, you mortals: an everlasting King reigns.

Then those who are alive in their bodies will not die; through those thousand years they will produce a multitude beyond counting, and their offspring will be holy and loved by God. But those who are raised from the dead will preside over the living as judges. The nations will not be wiped out entirely; some will be left as a victory for God, to be the occasion of triumph for the righteous, and to be put under slavery that never ends.

About the same time the prince of the demons, who is the contriver of every evil, will be bound with chains and shut up for the thousand years of the heavenly rule, in which righteousness will reign in the world, so that he can contrive no evil against the people of God. After his coming the righteous will be gathered from the whole earth, and when the judgment is finished the holy city will be planted in the middle of the earth, and God himself, its builder, will live in it together with the righteous, holding rule there. The Sibyl marks out this city when she says:

And the city which God made — this he made more brilliant

than the stars and the sun and the moon.

Then that darkness will be taken away from the world, the darkness that spreads over the sky and blackens it. The moon will take on the brightness of the sun and will never wane again, and the sun will become seven times brighter than it is now. The earth will open its fruitfulness and bring forth the most abundant crops of its own accord. The rocky mountains will drip with honey, streams of wine will run down, and rivers will flow with milk. In short, the world itself will be glad and all nature will be in high spirits, rescued and set free from the rule of evil and ungodliness and guilt and error.

All through that time beasts will not be fed on blood, nor birds on prey; everything will be peaceful and quiet. Lions and calves will stand together at the manger, the wolf will not carry off the sheep, the hound will not hunt for prey, hawks and eagles will do no harm, and the infant will play with snakes. In short, the things will then come about that the poets spoke of as being done in the reign of Saturn.

Their mistake came from this: the prophets bring forward many things still to come and speak of them as already accomplished. Visions were set before their eyes by the divine Spirit, and they saw these things as though they were being done and finished in their own sight. Then, as report gradually spread their predictions about, people who had never been let into the secrets of religion did not know why the words had been spoken, and thought that all those things had already been fulfilled in the old days — things that plainly could not have been brought about or fulfilled under the reign of any man. But when ungodly religions have been destroyed and guilt has been put down, and the earth is made subject to God, then:

The seafarer himself will give up the sea, and the ship’s pine

will trade goods no longer; every land will bear everything.

The ground will not put up with the hoe, nor the vine with the pruning knife;

the sturdy plowman too will loose the bulls from the yoke.

Little by little the plain will turn golden with soft ears of grain,

the reddening grape will hang on untended brambles,

and hard oaks will sweat out dewy honey.

Wool will not learn to counterfeit one color after another;

but in the meadows the ram himself will change his fleece,

now to a sweetly blushing purple, now to a saffron dye,

and scarlet of its own accord will clothe the lambs at pasture.

The she-goats will bring home of themselves their udders stretched with milk,

and the herds will not be afraid of great lions.

These things the poet foretold from the verses of the Sibyl of Cumae. But the Erythraean Sibyl speaks this way:

But wolves will not contend with lambs on the mountains,

and lynxes will eat grass with kids;

boars will feed with calves and with all the flocks,

and the meat-eating lion will eat chaff at the manger,

and snakes will sleep with infants who have lost their mothers.

And in another place, speaking of how fruitful everything will be:

And then God will give great joy to men;

for the earth and the trees and the countless flocks of the earth

will give men the true fruit of the vine, and sweet honey,

and white milk, and grain, which is the best of all things for mortals.

And another in the same manner:

The holy land of the devout alone will produce all these things:

the stream of honey from the rock and from the spring,

and the milk of ambrosia will flow for all the just.

So people will live the most peaceful of lives, with resources in plenty, and will reign together with God. And the kings of the nations will come from the ends of the earth with gifts and offerings, to bow before the great King and honor him, whose name will be renowned and revered by all the nations that are under heaven and by the kings who rule on earth.