Annotation XX

”Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the sons of God.” — Matthew 5:9

Whether man can attain to an impeccable perfection.

Augustine, in the first book On the Lord’s Sermon on the Mount, chapter 9, so expounded this passage that he afterward retracted it, in the first book of the Retractations, chapter 19, in these words: “In the first volume, on account of that which is written, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers,’ etc., I said: Wisdom befits the peacemakers, in whom all things are now set in order, and no motion is in rebellion against reason, but all things obey the man’s spirit, since he himself obeys God. This rightly raises the question of how I could have said [it]; for it cannot befall anyone in this life that the law [of the members], warring against the law of the mind, should be wholly absent from the members — since, even if the man’s spirit should so resist it that it slipped into no consent, it would nonetheless not fail to war [against him]. Therefore, this that was said — that there is no motion rebellious against reason — can rightly be taken now of the peaceable [nations], [as a thing reached] by taming the concupiscences of the flesh, so that one may at length come to that fullest peace. And so, whereas in another place, repeating the same evangelical saying, when I had said ‘Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the sons of God,’ I added, saying, ‘And these things indeed can be fulfilled in this life, as we believe them to have been fulfilled in the Apostles’ — this is to be understood thus: not that we should think that in the Apostles, living here, no motion of the flesh warred against the spirit, but that these things can be fulfilled here [only] to the extent that we believe them to have been fulfilled in the Apostles — that is, by that measure of human perfection, as great as perfection can be in this life. For it was not said, ‘These things can be fulfilled in this life,’ for we believe them to have been fulfilled in the Apostles; but it was said thus, ‘as we believe them to have been fulfilled in the Apostles,’ so that they may be fulfilled just as they were fulfilled in them — that is, by a certain perfection of which this life is capable — not [in the way] that those things are to be fulfilled which we hope for in fullest peace, when it shall be said, ‘O death, where is thy strife?’”