city of god excerpt (loc.9385-9515)

the good angels hold cheap all that knowledge of material and transitory things which the demons are so proud of possessing not that they are ignorant of these things but because the love of god whereby they are sanctified is very dear to them and because in comparison of that not merely immaterial and ineffable beauty of the holy love in which they are inflamed they despise all things which are beneath it and which are not of god and that they may enjoy with it all that is good and all sources of this goodness and therefore they have a more certain knowledge even of those temporary and mutable things because they contemplate their principles and sources in a word of god by which the world was made those causes by which one thing is approved another rejected and all arranged but the demons do not behold the wisdom of god in these eternal and as it were cardinal causes of things temporal but only foresee a larger part of the future than men do by reason of their greater acquaintance with the signs that are hidden from us sometimes too it is their own intentions they predict as the demons are frequently yet the angels never deceived for it is by the aid of things temporal and changeable to conjecture the changes that may occur in time and to modify such things by one's own will and faculty and this is granted to the angels by a just discretion for without end they enjoy contemplation and participation in him ==================== nevertheless if men are called gods because they belong to god's people are not the immortals who already enjoy the felicity which men seek to attain by worshiping god much more worthy of the title and what shall by the reply to this if not that it is with reason that in holy scripture men are more expressly styled than those immortal and blessed spirits to whom we hope to be equal in the resurrection because there was a fear that the weakness of unbelief being overcome with the excellence of these beings might presume to constitute some of them a god in the case of man this was a result that need not be guarded against besides it was right that the men not belonging to god's people should be more expressly called gods to assure and certify them that he who is called being of beings is their god because although those immortal and blessed spirit who dwell in the heaven are called gods yet they are not called being of beings that is to say gods of the men who are god's people and to whom it is said i have said ye are gods and all of you the children of the most high hence the saying of the apostle though there be those tat are called gods whether in heave or on earth as there be gods many and lords many but to us there is but one god the father of whom are all things and we in him and one lord jesus christ by whom are all things and we in him ================== it is the decided opinion of all those who think that people desire to be happy first and foremost but who are happy and how they become so these are questions about which the weakness of human understanding stirs endless and angry controversies about which philosophers have wasted their strength and expended their leisure but regarding the future life of happiness whether we can reach it by paying honors to the one true god you must have the wit to perceive that the human soul immortal and rational or intellectual cannot be happy except by partaking of the light of that god by who both itself and the world were made and also the happy life which all men desire does not come about except thru an unchanging attention to a pure and holy devotion to that one supreme good the unchangeable god but even as these philosophers who "becoming vain in their imaginations" it remains to be determined whether the angels desire us to offer sacrifice and worship and to consecrate our possessions and ourselves top them or only to god ours and theirs ==================== the word religion might seem to express more definitively the worship due to god alone and not only the uneducated but also the best instructed use the word religion to express human ties relationships and affinities and it would introduce ambiguity to use this word to imply worship alone unable as we are to say that religion is nothing but the worship of god without contradicting the common usage of the world as applies to a whole variety of social relationships this worship which the greeks called laternia and in latin servitus but the service due to god only this worship which in greek is called threskia and in latin religio but the religion by which we are bound to god only this we say belongs only to the god who is the true god and who makes his worshipers gods and therefore whoever these blessed and immortal inhabitants of heaven be if they do not love us and wish us to be blessed then we ought not to worship them but if they do love us and desire our happiness they cannot wish us to be made happy by means other than those that they themselves have enjoyed for how could they wish our blessedness to flow from one sources and their from another ====================