The second age of the world began from Noah after the Flood, which was universal throughout the whole world. It occurred in the 600th year of Noah’s life and, from the beginning of the world, in the 1,656th year according to the Hebrews, but according to the Septuagint translators, whom Bede and Isidore approve, in the 2,242nd year. It lasts until Abraham for 292 years according to the Hebrews, but for 842 years according to the Septuagint translators.
One hundred years before the Flood the Lord appeared to Noah—that is, in the 500th year of Noah’s life—and when he had already begotten his sons Shem, Ham, and Japheth, He commanded him to build an ark. In it Noah was to be saved from the waters of the Flood with his aforesaid sons and their wives, together with some of every kind of living creature of the earth and of the birds, male and female.
Thus one hundred years were granted to human beings as a period for returning to pardon, during which Noah, obedient to God, built the ark, preaching penance to human beings by deed and word so that they might escape God’s sentence.
Indeed, when God said, “Their days shall be 120 years,” Jerome, in On Penance, distinction 1, expounds it by saying that this time was first given to the human race for returning to penance. But because human beings did not reform themselves by these things but became worse, God took twenty years away from the promised time and sent the Flood at the end of one hundred years.
For all flesh had corrupted its way. The sons of Cain, as Vincent says in the Historical Mirror, abused the wives of their brothers in excessive fornications, and women, turned to madness, shamefully went beyond the men. Finally, burning for one another, men coupled with one another. And the sons of Seth—that is, those descended from him, who had once been religious and good—contrary to the prohibition of their father Adam, were overcome by concupiscence and joined themselves to the daughters of Cain. Hence they begot giants: human beings immense in body, proud in strength, and uncultivated in morals.
By God’s command the ark was made three hundred cubits long, fifty wide, and thirty high, from smoothed timbers coated with pitch. “You shall make a window in the ark,” and its summit was completed within a cubit. There was also a window in its side and, below near the earth, a door through which the animals had entered.
Where our text says, “You shall make inner chambers in it,” another text has more clearly, “Thus you shall make it with double chambers and triple chambers.” It therefore had certain divisions or chambers which Augustine says were there in addition to the bilge. For he says that above the bilge deck it was double-chambered, and there were lateral chambers: one for dung and another a storeroom, where food was placed for all the animals to eat.
Above this dwelling was another, likewise triple-chambered. In one of these chambers lived fierce animals, in another tame ones, and in the middle human beings. Others arrange all these vertically—that is, by stories—as Josephus does, who says there were four stories, not including the bilge. This is in Genesis, chapter 6.
When Noah had entered the ark according to the Lord’s command, with his wife, his three sons, and every kind of animal—two and two of the unclean, male and female, but seven of the clean—the Flood poured forth for forty days and forty nights, with an immense rain falling continuously.
The water rose fifteen cubits higher than every mountain in order to wash away the filth of the air, just as it is also said that the fire of the final judgment will ascend to so great a height. All the animals of the earth and the birds perished in the Flood except those in the ark, which by themselves, through God’s operation, came to the ark and entered before the Flood and were fed from the foods stored there.
The waters held the earth for 150 days; afterward they began to diminish. The ark rested upon the mountains of Armenia in the seventh month, on the twenty-sixth day of that month. Noah sent a raven from the ark to see whether the waters had yet ceased, but it did not return to the ark.
He then sent out a dove. Finding nowhere for its foot to rest, namely no clean place, it returned to the ark and was brought inside. After waiting seven days, he sent it out again, and it brought back to the ark a small branch of green olive in its mouth, as a sign of God’s mercy.
Thus, when a year had revolved, Noah left the ark on the same calendar day on which he had entered it, at the command of the Lord, with his sons and their wives and all the living creatures preserved there. Having built an altar, he offered sacrifice to God, as though for peace and thanksgiving, and God accepted the sacrifice, as is stated in Genesis 8, and blessed them.
This blessing consisted in three things: the multiplication of offspring, the subjection of the other living creatures, and the granting of foods. These were enlarged both because of human weakness and because of the earth’s lack of fertility. Hence the use of meat was granted, which did not exist in the first age, as Jerome says in distinction 35, “From the beginning.” Flesh was nevertheless permitted without blood, under which homicide is prohibited.
Because the Flood was still feared, the Lord made with them a covenant of security and placed the rainbow in the clouds. Although it is said to have six or four colors, it nevertheless has two principal ones, as a sign of the two judgments: the exterior color, namely blue, which is also watery, as a sign that the past judgment by water is no longer to be feared; and the interior color, red, as a sign that the future judgment by fire is to be expected.
Thus in the Flood the first age ended and, like infancy, was handed over to oblivion; and the second age began.
In what the Lord said to Noah in Genesis 6, “My spirit shall not remain in man forever, because he is flesh,” the spirit of God may here be understood as the Holy Spirit dwelling in man through grace, or as the will of God, with which one who lives rightly agrees and which he follows. “Flesh,” however, means a human being who lives according to the flesh.
When this is the case, it is at present impossible for him to live according to the spirit, that is, according to the will of God. Thus the spirit of grace, or the fulfilled will of God, is not in him. Hence the apostle also says to the Galatians, “If you live according to the flesh, you shall die,” namely spiritually and eternally. “But if by the spirit”—that is, according to the reason of God, or by the spirit, that is, by a will regulated by Him—“you mortify the deeds of the flesh, you shall live,” namely in grace and afterward in glory.
Augustine, at the beginning of Book XIV of The City of God, gives this as the difference between the city or society of the elect and that of the reprobate: the wicked live according to the flesh, while the good live according to the spirit.
Explaining each at length, he says that to live according to the flesh is not only to live according to carnal pleasures in sexual acts, food, drink, and the like, in which the Epicureans placed the highest good. He proves this because, when the apostle had said to the Galatians, “The works of the flesh are manifest,” in explaining them he names not only adulteries, fornications, uncleannesses, revelries, and drunkenness, but also numbers among them idolatry, enmities, envies, wrath, heresies, and the like. These vices are certainly not accomplished through the flesh and are found in the devil, who is incorporeal, as are envy, enmity, and the like.
Nor is living according to the spirit the same as living according to acquired human virtue, in which the Stoics placed the highest good. Rather, this too is living according to the flesh: to live according to man, that is, according to oneself, or, to speak more plainly, according to one’s own will when it is not subject to God’s will but rebellious against it. To live according to the spirit is to live according to God, or, more plainly, according to the will of God.
And because sin is nothing other than a word, deed, or desire contrary to the law and will of God, every sin can therefore not unfittingly be called a lie. For, as Augustine says, sin is committed only with the will by which we wish things to go well for us or do not wish them to go badly. It is therefore a lie that, when sin is committed so that things may go well for us, things instead turn out badly for us; or when it is committed so that things may go better for us, they instead become worse.
Whence does this come, except that a person can fare well from God—namely by living according to His will, whom he abandons by sinning—but not from himself, that is, from his own will, according to which he lives when he sins? Hence, when the devil willed to live according to himself by taking complacency in his own pride, Christ said of him, “He did not stand in the truth.” And concerning man, because every human being is a sinner, the Psalm says, “Every man is a liar.”
It therefore matters what kind of will a person has. If it is perverse—which is to live according to man or according to one’s own will—he will have perverse movements of the passions: desire, joy, sorrow, fear, and the others reducible to them. But if the will is upright, these movements of the passions will be not only blameless but even praiseworthy. An upright will is to live according to God’s will in all the passions.
For what are desire and gladness but the will consenting to the things we will? And what is sorrow but the will dissenting from the things we do not will? According to the variety of things sought or avoided, therefore, as a person’s will is attracted or offended, so it changes and turns into these or those affections.
These passions are found in the good and the wicked, including sorrow or grief, which the Stoics asserted was not found in the mind of a wise person. “Among us,” Augustine says in chapter 9 of the aforesaid book, “according to the holy Scriptures, the citizens of the holy city of God who live according to God during the pilgrimage of this life fear, desire, grieve, and rejoice. And because their love, which is the principle of the passions, is upright, they have all these affections uprightly.”
They fear eternal punishment and desire eternal life. They grieve in reality because they still groan within themselves, awaiting adoption, the redemption of their bodies. They rejoice in hope because the saying that is written will come to pass: “Death has been swallowed up in victory.” Likewise, they fear to sin, desire to persevere, grieve over sins, and rejoice in good works. Augustine adds there the authorities of Scripture by which the saints are moved to these things. He also gives the apostle Paul as an example, affirming of himself that he rightly used these passions.
Indeed, even Christ, as is evident in the Gospel, began to fear and to be sorrowful; with desire He desired to eat the Passover with His disciples; and He rejoiced when He heard of Lazarus’s death. But we experience these things according to passion, whereas Christ experienced them according to propassion, in such a way that the act or light of reason was obscured in no respect, which does not occur in us.
The end of the carnal is destruction in the flood of desires which war against the soul, or of carnal concupiscence which lusts against the spirit. The end of the spiritual, or of those living according to the spirit, is salvation, figured in the few saved in the ark.
Here one must also attend to and guard against familiarity with the wicked. For the spiritual—namely, the descendants of Seth, Adam’s son—after they mingled with the carnal, namely the women descended from Cain, themselves became people living according to the flesh. The descendants of Seth are called sons of God, and, according to another text, angels of God, because of adoption and their former purity. The descendants of Cain are called sons of men, that is, persons living according to man or the flesh.
It must not be believed, as some have said, that the angels of God were incubus demons who, mixing themselves with women, generated giants. Augustine rejects this in Book XV of The City of God.
§ I: On the Ark
Concerning the ark made by Noah—its material and form and the things contained in it—Augustine says at the end of Book XV of The City of God: “It must be believed and wisely kept in memory that these things were both committed to writing and done literally, and that they signify something, and that this something pertains to prefiguring the Church.”
First, as Gregory says in the Moralia, just as all who were found outside the ark perished, so all who are outside the Church perish eternally in the flood of vices.
The material of the ark is squared timbers, smoothed and coated with pitch, signifying the faithful of the Church, steadfast in good, the roughness and inequality of vices removed from them, united by conformity of morals.
As to its dimensions, its length was three hundred cubits. This number is formed from three and one hundred, while one hundred results from ten multiplied ten times. The continuance or duration of the Church is from the beginning of the world to its end, possessing in all the elect the three virtues of faith, hope, and charity, together with the perfect and complete observance of the Ten Commandments.
The breadth signifies the Church’s breadth and her extension everywhere upon the earth. In her alone is found the full remission of sins, from the breadth of charity which covers all offenses, as is said in Proverbs 10. The breadth of the ark was fifty cubits, which is the number of the jubilee in which there was full remission.
Its height was thirty cubits. The Church’s height is the sublime knowledge of truth, reaching even to the mystery of the Trinity of divine persons, the perfect knowledge of which is the term and end of all our desires. The number thirty consists of three and ten, while ten is the first boundary or limit of numbers.
These cubits, however, with respect to the material ark itself, are not to be understood as our cubits but as geometrical cubits, one of which contains six of ours, as Origen says, an opinion that pleases Augustine in The City of God.
Where our translation says, “You shall make upper rooms and three stories in it,” another says, “You shall make it double-chambered and triple-chambered.” The double chambering signifies the distinction of the faithful people into circumcision and foreskin, that is, Jews and gentiles. The triple chambering signifies the Church’s three states: virgins, the continent, and the married.
The quadrupeds existing there signify active persons who dwell upon earthly things. The birds moving through the airy heaven signify contemplative persons. Those who maintain a life mixed from both especially signify the prelates who govern the ark of the Church.
Clean and unclean animals were there because, as to number, the good are mingled with the wicked in the Church. The unclean were in the number two, which is the first number to depart from unity, because the wicked are separated from the unity of love. The clean were there in the number seven, because the elect are enriched by the sevenfold grace of the Holy Spirit.
Four men with their wives were preserved from the Flood because males and females who possess the four cardinal virtues are saved in the Church. And just as the waters multiplied from heaven lifted the ark on high, so multiplied tribulations—which indeed are sent from heaven—raise the mind or the Church to the height of contemplation and perfection.
Divine providence rather than human prudence governed the floating ark so that it did not anywhere undergo shipwreck, as Augustine says there; in the same way Christ governs the Church.
The ark itself also figures the mediator of God and human beings, the head of the Church, the Lord Jesus Christ, who through His Passion on the wood of the cross saves us from the flood of perdition. The measurements themselves of length, breadth, and height signify the human body, in the truth of which He was announced beforehand to human beings as coming, and came.
For the length of a human body from the crown of the head to the soles of the feet is only six times its breadth, which extends from one side to the other, and ten times its height, whose measure is from the back to the belly. Thus, if you measure a person lying supine or prone, he is six times as long from head to feet as he is broad from right to left or from left to right, and ten times as long as he is high from the ground.
Hence the ark was made in this figure, three hundred cubits in length, fifty in breadth, and thirty in height. And the door which the ark received in its side is certainly the wound made when the side of the Crucified was pierced by the lance. Those coming to Him enter through this, because from it flowed the sacraments—figuratively and virtually—by which believers are initiated.
§ II: On Monstrous Kinds of Human Beings Recounted in the Histories of the Nations
It is reported that certain persons have one eye in the middle of the forehead; that some have the soles of their feet turned backward behind their legs; that some naturally possess both sexes, with the right breast male and the left female, and, by alternately coupling with one another, both beget and give birth; that others have no mouths and take breath only through their nostrils; and that others are a cubit in stature, whom the Greeks call pygmies from the cubit.
It is reported elsewhere that women conceive before their fifth year and do not pass beyond the eighth year of life. Likewise, it is said that there are peoples whose members have only one leg, who do not bend the big toe and are of marvelous speed. Some are called Sciapods: during the heat they lie supine on the ground and protect themselves with the shadow of their feet. Some have no neck and have their eyes in their shoulders. What shall I say of the Cynocephali, whose dog-like heads and very barking confess them to be beasts rather than human beings?
But it is not necessary to believe in all the kinds of human beings said to exist. Nevertheless, let none of the faithful doubt that whoever is born anywhere and dies as a human being—that is, as a rational mortal animal—derives his origin from that one first-formed man and, through him, from Noah after the Flood, however unusual the shape, color, motion, sound, power, member, or natural quality of his body may appear to our senses.
The same account given for persons among us who are monstrous in some bodily parts can be given for certain monstrous nations. For God is the creator of all, and He Himself knows where and when each thing ought or ought to have been created, knowing the beauty of the universe, of whose parts He Himself wove both likeness and diversity. But one who cannot inspect the whole is offended, as though by the deformity of a part, because he does not know with what it agrees or to what it is referred.
Augustine gives examples of certain monstrous persons of his own time and country: one having crescent-shaped soles with only two toes on them and two fingers on his hands; and a man born double in his upper members but single in his lower ones, having two heads, two chests, four hands, one belly, and two feet.
What if God therefore willed to create some nations in this way, lest from those monsters which must be born among us from human beings we should think that His wisdom, by which human nature is fashioned, had erred like the art of some less perfect craftsman?
But there is no reason to believe that antipodes exist, as some tell in fables—that is, human beings on the opposite side of the earth, where the sun rises when it sets for us, who press their footprints against ours with feet pointing the other way. Thus Augustine in Book XVI of The City of God, chapter 8.
§ III
Noah, a husbandman, afterward became drunk from the fruit of a vine he had planted. While he lay with his private parts uncovered, Ham mocked him; but when Shem and Japheth heard, they covered him. Hence Ham was cursed in his son, and the other two were blessed by Noah.
Morally, this signifies subjects who mockingly and irreverently disclose the vices of their spiritual fathers and thereby incur the curse of damnation. Good subjects, however, reverence their fathers and cover the defects of prelates—not by assenting to or committing those defects with them, but by not divulging them where doing so is not useful. This is found in distinction 96, “In the Scriptures.”
Concerning Noah’s drunkenness literally, Ambrose says: “In the beginning of the human race wine was unknown. Noah was the first to plant a vineyard; he knew its nature but did not know its power. Thus wine did not spare even its own author. But his drunkenness commends sobriety.” And below: “The envy of fraternal betrayal had already crept in, but reverence for paternal piety still remained. Piety is injured when drunkenness is mocked. Liberty remained unshaken for all: no one knew how to exact the service of servitude from a brother. There would be no servitude today if there had been no drunkenness.” Thus Ambrose, distinction 35, “Sixth.”
For as punishment for the mockery, Noah assigned Canaan, the son of Ham, to the servitude of his brothers.
Ham himself was not cursed, but his son, to intimate, according to the Master of the Sentences in Book II, that no one is reprobated because of the first movements of sins, but because of those movements proper to him which are mortal sins.
Nevertheless, Noah did not sin mortally in this drunkenness, because he did not know the power of wine. It is also intimated that excessive drinking leads to the uncovering of members in lust, because a belly heated with wine easily foams forth into lust. Jerome, distinction 42.
Noah, the governor of the ark, who transplanted a wild vine and made it cultivated, became drunk from its wine and therefore lay naked, and so forth. He signifies Christ, governor of the Church, who so cultivated the vine of human nature or of the synagogue, created by God but producing wild fruits of fear, by His evangelical teaching confirmed with miracles and examples, that it produced the sweet wine of love.
As though drunk from the sweetness of that love, Christ drank the inebriating cup of the Passion and, put to sleep by death upon the cross, remained naked. Seeing this, the Jewish people, figured in Ham—or also, according to Augustine, the company of heretics or wicked Christians—reports the Passion aloud by announcing it to others, but dishonors it by mocking or acting wickedly. Therefore it is cursed not in itself but in its son, that is, in its work. Hence Canaan is interpreted as “their movement,” by which their work is signified.
Shem and Japheth, however, are as circumcision and foreskin—that is, the Jews and gentiles who were called and justified through faith. Having learned of the nakedness of their father, that is, the Passion of the Savior, they cover his nakedness by venerating the Passion, with the garment placed upon their backs—that is, with the sacrament of the Passion in memory of past things—and with their faces turned away, that is, by turning from or detesting the crime of the Jews.
The reprobate announce Christ’s Passion outside, that is, only in the sound of the voice; the upright possess and honor so great a mystery within the house, that is, within the inner person, inwardly in the heart.
After Noah’s two sons had thus been blessed and the third cursed, there is thereafter, until Abraham, silence for more than a thousand years concerning any of the just who believed in and worshiped God. I would not believe there were none, but if all were commemorated it would become excessively long and would be historical diligence rather than prophetic providence.
The writer of these sacred letters—or rather, the Spirit of God through him—pursues those matters by which not only past events are narrated but future events are also announced, provided that they pertain to the city of God. Whatever is said here even of persons who are not its citizens is said so that by comparison with its contrary that city may either advance or stand out.
Certainly not everything narrated as done is to be thought also to signify something; rather, other events are woven in because of those which signify something. The earth is cleft by the plowshare alone, but in order that this may be done, the other members of the plow are also necessary. Thus Augustine in Book XVI of The City of God.