Augustine of Hippo

Both in the prophet Ezekiel and in the Apocalypse of the same John whose Gospel this is, there is mentioned a quadruple beast, having four characteristic faces: a man's, a calf's, a lion's, an eagle's. Very many who have commented on the mysteries of the holy Scriptures before us have understood the four Evangelists in this animal, or rather in these animals. The lion, [they say], has been put for king, because the lion seems to be, in a way, the king of beasts because of his power and terrifying bravery. This character has been attributed to Matthew because he described in proper order the royal line in the generations of the Lord, how the Lord was through royal descent from the seed of King David. But Luke, because he began from the priesthood of the priest Zechariah, making mention of the father of John the Baptist, is accounted the calf because the calf was the important victim in the sacrifice of the priests. Christ as a man has rightly been assigned to Mark, because neither did he say anything about his royal power nor did he begin from the priestly, but he simply started with Christ the man. All of these have practically not departed from the earthly things, that is, from those deeds that the Lord Jesus Christ performed on earth. They said very few things about his divinity, as if they were walking with him on earth. There remains the eagle: it is John, he who preaches the sublime and who gazes with unflinching eyes upon the internal and eternal light.

So the true victory of our Lord Jesus Christ was achieved when he rose again and ascended into heaven. Then was fulfilled what you heard when the Apocalypse was read, “The lion from the tribe of Judah has conquered.” It is he that is called a lion, he that is called a lamb. He is called a lion for courage, a lamb for innocence. A lion because unconquered, a lamb because gentle. And when this lamb was slain, he conquered by his death the lion “who prowls around seeking whom he may devour.” The devil, you see, is called a lion for his ferocity, not for any virtue. Thus the apostle Peter says we must be on the watch against temptations, “because your adversary the devil is prowling around seeking whom he may devour”; but he did say how he prowls around: “Like a roaring lion he is prowling around, seeking whom he may devour.” Who could avoid encountering the teeth of this lion, if the lion from the tribe of Judah had not conquered? Against the lion fights a lion, against the world a lamb. The devil was exultant when Christ died, and by that very death of Christ was the devil conquered. It’s as though he took the bait in a mousetrap. He was delighted at the death, as being the commander of death. What he delighted in, that’s where the trap was set for him. The mousetrap for the devil was the cross of the Lord. The bait he would be caught by, the death of the Lord. And our Lord Jesus Christ rose again.

“Like a sheep he was led to be slaughtered, and like a lamb in the presence of his shearer he was without voice, thus he did not open his mouth Who is this?.” Obviously the one about whom he goes on to say, “In humility his judgment was taken away. His generation, who shall relate?” I can see this model of such humility in a king of such power and authority. Because this one, who is like a lamb not opening its mouth in the presence of the shearer, is himself “the lion from the tribe of Judah.” Who is this, both lamb and lion? He endured death as a lamb; he devoured it as a lion. Who is this, both lamb and lion? Gentle and strong, lovable and terrifying, innocent and mighty, silent when he was being judged, roaring when he comes to judge. Or perhaps both in his passion lamb and lion, and also in his resurrection lamb and lion. Let us see him as a lamb in his passion. It was stated a moment ago: “Like a lamb in the presence of his shearer he was without voice, thus he did not open his mouth.” Let us see him as a lion in his passion; Jacob said, “You have gone up, lying down you have slept like a lion.” Let us see him as a lamb in his resurrection. The book of Revelation, when it was talking about the eternal glory of virgins, “They follow the lamb, it is said, wherever he goes.” The same book of Revelation says, what I mentioned just now, “The lion from the tribe of Judah has conquered, to open the book.” Why a lamb in his passion? Because he underwent death without being guilty of any iniquity. Why a lion in his passion? Because in being slain he slew death. Why a lamb in his resurrection? Because his innocence is everlasting. Why a lion in his resurrection? Because everlasting also is his might.

“Our belly stuck to the ground.” They mean that “our belly” consented to the impious persuasion of that dust [i.e., godless persecutors]; for that is what the expression “stuck to” implies.… To cling to God is to do his will. It makes sense, then, to say of the belly that it clung to the earth, when we mean those people who could not hold out under persecution but yielded to the will of the wicked; for this is how they “stuck to the earth.” But why are they called “the belly”? Because they are carnal. It suggests that the church’s mouth is to be found in the saints, in spiritual people, and the church’s belly in the carnal. This is why the church’s mouth is plainly visible, but its belly is covered up, as befits something weaker and more vulnerable. Scripture supports this interpretation in the passage where someone says he was given a book to eat, “and the book was sweet in my mouth but bitter in my stomach.” What can that mean? Surely that the highest precepts, which spiritual persons accept, are unacceptable to the carnal, and that commands that delight the spiritual only give the carnal indigestion. What is in that book, brothers and sisters? “Go and sell all you possess, and give the money to the poor.” How sweet is that command in the church’s mouth! All the spiritual have obeyed it. But if you tell any sensual person to do that, he or she is more likely to walk sadly away, as the rich man in the Gospel walked away from the Lord, than to fulfill the injunction. Why does a carnal person walk away? Because that book, so sweet to the mouth, is bitter in the belly.

Now, brothers, you see the saints armed. Observe the slaughter, observe their glorious battles.… What have these done who had in their hands swords sharpened on both sides? "To do vengeance on the nations." See whether vengeance has not been done on the nations. Daily is it done; we do it ourselves by speaking. Observe how the nations of Babylon are slain. She is repaid twofold.… How is she repaid double? The saints wage war, they draw their "swords twice sharpened." From there come defeats, slaughters, severances. How is she repaid double? When she had the power to persecute the Christians, she slew the flesh indeed, but she crushed not God. Now she is repaid double, for the pagans are extinguished and the idols are broken.… And lest you should think that people are really smitten with the sword, blood really shed, wounds made in the flesh, he goes on and explains "chastisements on the peoples." What is "chastisements"? Reproof. Let the two-edged sword go forth from you. Do not delay. Say to your friend, if you have yet a friend [among the pagans] left to whom to say it, "What kind of man are you, who have abandoned him by whom you were made, and worship what he made? Better is the workman than that which he makes." When he begins to blush, when he begins to feel compunction, you have made a wound with your sword, it has reached his heart, he is about to die that he may live.

The lowest person must worship the same God as is worshiped by the highest angel. In fact it is by refusing to worship him that human nature has been brought low. The source of wisdom and of truth is the same for angel and humankind, namely, the one unchangeable Wisdom and Truth. The very Virtue and changeless Wisdom of God who is consubstantial and coeternal with the Father, for our salvation deigned, in the temporal dispensation, to take upon himself our nature in order to teach us that humanity must worship what every rational intellectual creature must also worship. Let us believe that the highest angels and most excellent ministers of God want us to join them in the worship of the one God, in contemplation of whom they find their happiness. Even we are not made happy by seeing an angel but by seeing the Truth, by which we love the angels too and rejoice with them. We do not grudge that they should have readier access to the Truth and enjoy him without obstacle. Rather, we love them because we are bidden by our common Lord to hope for the same condition hereafter. So we honor them with love but not with divine worship. We do not build temples for them. They do not wish to be honored by us in that way, because they know that when we are good people we are ourselves the temples of the most high God.

and bound him. The Lord Jesus Christ Himself says, No man can enter into a strong man's house, and spoil his goods, except he first bind the strong man (Matt. 12:29) — meaning by the strong man the devil, because he had power to take captive the human race; and meaning by his goods which he was to take, those who had been held by the devil in various sins and iniquities, but were to become believers in Himself. It was then for the binding of this strong one that the apostle saw here. bound him: But the binding of the devil is his being prevented from the exercise of his whole power to seduce men, either by violently forcing or fraudulently deceiving them into taking part with him. If he were during so long a period permitted to assail the weakness of men, very many persons, such as God would not wish to expose to such temptation, would have their faith overthrown, or would be prevented from believing; and that this might not happen, he is bound. For the Almighty does not absolutely seclude the saints from his temptation, but shelters only their inner man, where faith resides, that by outward temptation they may grow in grace. And He binds him that he may not, in the free and eager exercise of his malice, hinder or destroy the faith of those countless weak persons, already believing or yet to believe, from whom the Church must be increased and completed;
Now the devil was thus bound not only when the Church began to be more and more widely extended among the nations beyond Judea, but is now and shall be bound till the end of the world, when he is to be loosed. Because even now men are, and doubtless to the end of the world shall be, converted to the faith from the unbelief in which he held them. (City of God 20.7)

Our Lord Jesus Christ himself said, “No one can enter the strong man’s house and plunder his goods, unless he first binds the strong man.” By “strong man” he means the devil, who was able to hold the human race in bondage. By his “goods” that Christ was to “plunder,” he means God’s future faithful ones whom the devil was keeping for himself because of their ungodliness and various sins. It was for the purpose of binding this strong man that John, in the Apocalypse, saw “an angel coming down from heaven … who bound [the ancient serpent] for a thousand years.” The angel, that is, checked and repressed his power to seduce and possess those destined to be set free.Now, the “thousand years” can, so far as I can see, be interpreted in one of two ways. One interpretation is that this event is to take place in the sixth and last millennium (the sixth “day”), the latter span of which is now passing, and that when John spoke of the last part of this millennium as a “thousand years” he was using, figuratively, the whole to indicate a part. (After this “sixth day” will come the “sabbath” that has no evening, namely, the endless repose of the blessed.)
The other interpretation makes the “thousand years” stand for all the years of the Christian era, a perfect number being used to indicate the “fullness of time.” For the number one thousand is the cube of ten. Ten times ten equals one hundred, which is already a square, but still a plane figure. To give it depth and make it a cube, one hundred is further multiplied by ten to make a thousand. Now it is true that the number one hundred is sometimes made to stand for “all.” Thus, the Lord promised to anyone leaving all things to follow him, “he shall receive a hundredfold.” … How much more properly, then, does the number one thousand stand for the whole, since it is the cube, whereas one hundred is only the square of ten? In the same way there is no better interpretation of the text, “he has remembered his covenant forever: the word that he commanded to a thousand generations,” than to take “a thousand” as meaning “all” generations.

When he is let loose at last, there will be little time left, since, as we read, he and his [followers] will rage with the fullness of strength only for three years and six months. Moreover, the people upon whom he will make war are to be such people as will be beyond overpowering by his open attacks or hidden ambush. If he were never set free, the full measure of his malevolent power would never be known, nor would the full measure of the holy city’s staunchness under fire be put to the test. Likewise, we would not have a full view of the good use to which almighty God puts the devil’s great wickedness. For example, [we would not see] how God allows him, even though driven from the saints’ inmost hearts which cling to God in faith, to tempt the saints somewhat so that they may profit by these external assaults. We would not see how God, further, has bound him in those who belong to his camp, to make it impossible for him to spill out and set to work such quantities of his evil power as would topple down countless weak souls destined to increase and fill the church. These include already believing people whose constancy the devil would smash, and people destined to believe whom he would frighten from the faith. At last, God will loose him to the end that all people may see how mighty a foe God’s city had overcome—all to the immense glory of its Liberator, Helper, Redeemer.… However, it may be asked whether, during the last three years and a half in which the unleashed devil will stage his all-out offensive, any one of these haters [of Christians] is to turn at last to the faith he formerly spurned? Think of the text: “How can anyone enter the strong man’s house and plunder his goods, unless he first binds the strong man?” How can these words remain true if the devil can be dispossessed just as well when he is loosed? The text seems to compel us to believe that the brief interval in question will witness no new conversions to Christianity, but that the devil will do battle only with those who are already Christians at the time of his unleashing—and, of course, any whom he may win over to his side will not have been numbered among the predestined sons of God.

The devil was cast into the “abyss,” taken in the sense of the countless number of godless people whose bitter hatred of God’s church comes from the abysmal depths of their hearts. The devil was cast into those hearts, not in the sense that he was not there before, but because in proportion as he has been more and more shut out from believing hearts, he has taken still deeper hold upon unbelievers. It is bad enough to be a stranger to God, but gratuitously to hate God’s servants is to have the devil’s hold take even deeper root.… The words “closed it over him” mean that the angel rendered him powerless to escape, that is, forbade him to go beyond bounds. The further verb, “sealed,” means, I think, that the angel wants no one to know the secret of who is on the devil’s side and who is not. For to be sure, this secret division is absolutely unknowable in this world of time, inasmuch as we have no certainty whether the one who is now upright is going to fall, and the one who is now lying flat is going to rise to righteousness. The nations or people freed from the devil’s seductions, in virtue of this restraining and disabling chaining and imprisonment, are those whom he used to lead astray and hold captive but who now belong to Christ. For God chose, before the world was made, to rescue these from the power of darkness and to transfer them into the kingdom of his beloved Son, as Paul says. With respect to others not predestined to eternal life, the devil continues to this very day to lead these people astray and to drag them down into eternal damnation, as every believer knows. And these assertions are not shaken by the fact that the devil often seduces those people, too, who have been reborn in Christ and walk in the ways of God. For “the Lord knows who are his.” Of these chosen ones the devil seduces no one to the point of eternal damnation. For the Lord’s knowledge of his elect is a divine knowledge and perfect knowledge, wholly unlike the knowledge a person has of his fellow man. Even at the moment of looking, a man can hardly see another man, since he does not see his heart, and he has no foresight at all of how anyone, including himself, is going to turn out in the future.

This verse should be applied to both the living and the dead.… As to the identity of the beast in question, there is need of very careful study. Nevertheless, consistently with sound faith, one may take it to be the godless city as opposed to the city of God, men and women without faith as opposed to those who believe. The beast’s “image,” I think, is his deception as found, for example, in such people as profess the faith yet live like pagans. For they pretend to be what, in fact, they are not, and are called Christians, not because of full faith but of false face. The beast possesses, in addition to the openly avowed enemies of Christ’s name and of his glorious city, the “weeds” that are marked for uprooting from his kingdom, the church, at the end of the world. Those who do not follow the beast or his image are surely those who follow Paul’s admonition: “Do not bear the yoke with unbelievers.” Their not worshiping means their not agreeing with, their not becoming subjects to, unbelievers. Their not accepting his “mark” upon their “foreheads” and “hands” means that they refuse the stigma of false faith and bad morals. Such people, alive or dead, keep themselves aloof from such evils and so reign with Christ, even now, in a fashion befitting the passage of time, throughout this whole era indicated by the “thousand years.”

We are to understand as implied by the words that come further on that these souls of the martyrs “reigned with Christ a thousand years”—of course, not yet reunited with their bodies. For the souls of the faithful departed are not divorced from Christ’s kingdom, which is the temporal church. If they were, we should not be mindful of them at God’s altar in the communion of the body of Christ; nor would there be any point in hastening one’s baptism in time of danger, lest one die unbaptized; nor in seeking reconciliation, when one has been cut off from Christ’s body by a sinful conscience or by the church’s penitential discipline. Why do we go to all this trouble if the faithful departed are not still Christ’s members? We may be sure, then, that their souls reign with him, just as their bodies will in time to come, even while the thousand years are rolling on.… We conclude, therefore, that even now, in time, the church reigns with Christ both in its living and departed members. “For to this end Christ died,” says Paul, “and rose again, that he might be Lord both of the dead and of the living.” If John mentions only the souls of the martyrs, that is because they who have battled for the truth unto death reign in death with a special splendor. But as the part is here used for the whole, we know that the words apply to the remaining faithful who belong to the same church, which is Christ’s kingdom.

During the “thousand years” when the devil is bound, the saints also reign for a “thousand years” and, doubtless, the two periods are identical and mean the span between Christ’s first and second coming. For not only in that future kingdom to which Christ referred in the words, “Come, blessed of my Father, take possession of the kingdom prepared for you,” but even now those saints reign with him in some authentic though vastly inferior fashion. To them he said, “Behold, I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world.” … This, to be sure, is the period in which the scribe instructed in the kingdom of heaven brings forth from his storeroom things new and old, as I mentioned above. So, too, the reapers are to gather up out of the church the weeds, which he allows to grow intermixed with the wheat up to the time of harvest.… This certainly cannot be the kingdom that is to be utterly without scandals. The kingdom from which scandals are gathered out, then, must be the church on earth.… The mixed kingdom must be the church, such as she exists in her temporal stage, while the unmixed kingdom is the church such as she will be when she is to contain no evildoer. Consequently the church, even in this world, here and now, is the kingdom of Christ and the kingdom of heaven. Here and now Christ’s saints reign with him, although not in the way they are destined to reign hereafter; but the “weeds” do not reign with him, even now, though they grow along with the “wheat” in the church.… Those alone reign with Christ whose presence in his kingdom is such that they themselves are his kingdom.… Now it is of this militant stage of the kingdom, during which there is still war with our enemy, alternating victory over, and defeat before, our evil inclinations, that the Apocalypse speaks. The “thousand years” are to last until we come to that kingdom, free of the foe, where the saints reign in fullest peace.… After mentioning the devil’s chaining for a thousand years and his brief interval of freedom to follow, John sums up the activity of and in the church during the “thousand years”: “And I saw thrones, and men sat upon them and judgment was given to them.” Now there is no question of the last judgment in this verse. The thrones and the enthroned people are the prelates who govern the church here and now. And the judgment is best interpreted as the one contained in the words, “Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound also in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed also in heaven.”