Cyprian & Lactantius · a new plain-English translation from the original language
Now let me add what still remains. The Son of the highest and greatest God will come to sit in judgment over the living and the dead, just as the Sibyl declares and testifies: for confusion will then overtake the whole earth of mortal men, when the Almighty himself comes from his throne to judge the souls of the living and the dead, and the entire world besides. And once he has blotted out injustice and pronounced the greatest of all judgments, he will call back to life those righteous ones who lived since the world began. For a thousand years he will dwell among men, ruling them under a most equitable government, as a different Sibyl proclaims in her frenzied utterance: Hear me, you mortal ones — an eternal king now reigns. Those who are then still living in the flesh will not perish, but across that same millennium will beget children beyond counting, offspring holy and beloved of God. Meanwhile those who have been raised from among the dead will stand over the living as their judges. As for the nations, they will not be wiped out entirely; a remnant will be spared as a witness to God's triumph, so that the righteous may parade them in victory and hold them in lasting servitude. During this same span the ruler of the demons, contriver of every wickedness, will be shackled in chains and held under watch through the thousand years of the heavenly reign, a time when justice will govern the earth so that he can devise no harm whatsoever toward God's people. Once he has come, the righteous will be brought together out of every land, and after judgment is complete, a holy city will rise at the center of the world, where God the Maker himself will live alongside the righteous who share his rule. It is this city the Sibyl indicates when she declares: the city God yearned for — this he fashioned brighter than the stars, than the sun, and than the moon. At that time the darkness now shrouding and blinding the heavens will be lifted away from the world; the moon will take on the sun's radiance and wane no more, while the sun itself will shine seven times more brilliant than it does today. The earth will unlock her own abundance and yield her richest harvests unbidden; honey will ooze from the rocky heights, wine will run down in streams, and the rivers will brim over with milk. In sum, the world itself will exult and every part of nature will rejoice, rescued and set free from the reign of evil, of impiety, of crime, and of deceit. In that age no beast will live on blood, no bird on prey — everything will be tranquil and at peace. Lion and calf will share a stall together; the wolf will leave the sheep unharmed, the dog will give up the hunt, hawk and eagle will do no injury, and a child will play among serpents. In a word, what the poets claimed had already come to pass in a golden age under Saturn's rule will then actually occur. Their mistake had this origin: the prophets, describing much that lay still ahead, often speak of it and lay it out as though it were already finished. This is because visions were placed before their eyes by the divine spirit, so that they beheld those very events unfolding and reaching completion as if in that moment. As their prophecies gradually spread by hearsay, outsiders unacquainted with the faith failed to grasp the sense intended, and so imagined that everything had already been accomplished in ages long past — outcomes that plainly neither were nor could have been realized while a mere mortal held power. Yet once impious cults have been swept away and wickedness restrained, and the earth made subject to God, the sailor will step back from his trade and no vessel of pine will carry goods to exchange; every land will produce every kind of crop. The ground will no longer bear the hoe, nor the vine the pruning knife; even the sturdy plowman will loose his oxen from the yoke for good. Then fields will gradually turn gold with tender grain, red grapes will hang from briars no one tended, and even hard oak will drip honeyed dew. Wool will have no need to feign varied dyes, for the ram itself, out in the meadow, will change its own fleece — now to a soft blushing crimson, now to saffron — and a scarlet tint will clothe the grazing lambs unasked. Nanny goats will come home with udders heavy with milk, and herds will no longer dread the great lions. Such was the poet's word, following the songs of the Cumaean Sibyl. The Erythraean Sibyl, however, speaks in this way: wolf and lamb will graze side by side in the mountains, leopard and kid will feed together, bear will live among calves, and the flesh-devouring lion, alongside every mortal creature, will eat straw at the stall, while serpents will lie down beside infants in their cradles. And elsewhere, on the plenty of all things, she says: then God will give great joy to mankind, for the earth, the trees, and the countless herds of the world will yield to men their genuine fruit — wine, sweet honey, white milk, and grain, finest of all things for mortal beings. And again, in the same vein: for the righteous alone will the sacred earth bear all of this — a stream honey-dripping from the rock and from the spring, and a flow of ambrosial milk given to every just soul. Thus mankind will live out a life of the utmost peace and plenty, reigning together with God; the kings of the nations will travel from earth's farthest reaches bearing gifts and tribute, to adore and exalt the great King, whose name will stand glorious and honored among every nation beneath heaven and among every king who governs upon the earth.
These are the things the prophets declare are yet to come. I have not judged it necessary to lay out their testimonies word for word, since that would prove endless, nor could a single volume hold so vast a body of material, given how many voices, speaking with one spirit, say the same thing; besides, I had no wish to tire my readers by piling up everything I have gathered and rendered from every quarter. Beyond this, my aim was to establish what I have argued chiefly on the strength not of our own writings but of those belonging to others, showing that this truth stands on record not merely among us but even among the very people who assail us — a truth they refuse to admit. Should anyone wish to examine the matter in greater depth, let him draw from the source directly, where he will discover marvels far beyond what we have brought together in these pages. Perhaps someone will now ask when these things we have set out will actually happen. I already showed earlier that this transformation is bound to occur once six thousand years have run their course, and that the last day of the final reckoning already draws near. We may recognize it from the signs the prophets foretold, for they announced the signs by which we are meant to watch for and dread, day after day, the close of the age. As for when this total will be reached, those who have studied chronology inform us, drawing their figures both from the holy scriptures and from assorted historical records, of how many years have elapsed since the world's beginning. Although their reckonings differ somewhat and their sums do not perfectly match, the whole remaining stretch anticipated appears to run no longer than two hundred years. The present state of the world itself makes plain that its downfall and collapse are near at hand, except that so long as the city of Rome remains unharmed, there seems nothing yet to fear on this score. But once that head of the world has fallen and become, as the Sibyls say it will, a mere back-alley, who could doubt that the end has already arrived for human affairs and for the whole earth? That city alone still holds everything together, and we owe it to the God of heaven to pray and to worship, that his decrees and designs — if such a thing is possible — might be postponed, lest that detestable tyrant arrive sooner than we suppose: the one destined to commit so monstrous a crime and snuff out that very light, at whose ruin the world itself is fated to collapse. Let us now turn back to relate what comes next in order.
A little earlier we noted that at the outset of the holy kingdom, God will have the prince of the demons bound. Yet once the thousand years of that reign — the seventh millennium, that is — begin nearing their close, he will be set loose once more and, freed from confinement, will go out to rouse every nation then living under the authority of the righteous, driving them to wage war against the holy city. An innumerable host of peoples will be assembled from every corner of the earth to lay siege to and encircle that city. Then God's final wrath will fall upon the nations, and he will crush them down to the very last one. First he will shake the earth with tremendous force, and by that upheaval the mountains of Syria will split apart, valleys will drop away into a chasm, and the walls of every city will collapse. God will command the sun to stay above the horizon for three full days and set it ablaze, and a scorching, excessive heat will pour down upon the defiant and impious peoples, together with showers of sulfur, hailstones of stone, and drops of fire; their very breath will dissolve in that heat, their bodies will be crushed beneath the hail, and they will cut one another down by the sword. Corpses will fill the mountains and bones will cover the plains. Yet God's own people will remain concealed in caverns of the earth throughout those three days, until his wrath against the nations and the final judgment have run their course. Then the righteous will emerge from their hiding places and discover the whole land blanketed in corpses and bones. The entire race of the impious will be destroyed down to its root, and no nation will remain any longer in this world besides the single people of God. For seven full years afterward the forests will stand untouched, with no timber cut from the mountains, for the weapons of the nations will instead be burned; war will cease and everlasting peace and rest will follow. And once the thousand years have run out, the world will be made new by God: heaven will be rolled up and the earth transformed. God will change men into a form like that of angels, white as snow, and they will stand forever in the sight of the Almighty, offering sacrifice and unending service to their Lord. At that same moment will come the second, universal resurrection of all, in which the unrighteous will rise again for eternal torment. These are the ones who worshiped objects shaped by their own hands, who either never knew the Lord and Father of the world or denied him outright. Their own lord, too, will be seized along with his servants and condemned to punishment, and with him the whole mass of the impious will burn forever in unending fire, in full view of the angels and the righteous, for the sake of their own misdeeds. Such is the teaching handed down by the holy prophets, one that we who bear the name of Christ hold to; such is our wisdom — mocked as folly and emptiness by those who either worship perishable things or cling to a hollow philosophy, since it is not our habit to argue for it or proclaim it openly. God commands us instead to keep his mystery hidden, in quiet and in silence, deep within our own conscience, and not to wrangle with stubborn argument against those genuine unbelievers who attack God and his religion out of a wish not to learn but merely to refute and deride. A mystery, after all, deserves to be concealed and guarded as faithfully as we can manage — above all by those of us who carry the name of the faithful. Yet others charge this silence of ours as proof of a guilty conscience, and from that suspicion they go on to invent shameful tales about people who are in truth chaste and innocent, believing only too readily what they themselves have fabricated.
Now that we have made our way through the seven sections of the work I set out to compose and reached the finish line, it remains for me to urge everyone to embrace wisdom together with true religion, whose whole force and function comes down to this: that once we have despised earthly things and cast aside the errors that once held us bound — slaves to fragile things, craving fragile things — we may set our course toward the everlasting rewards stored up in heaven. And to make ourselves capable of grasping them, we must, as soon as possible, set aside the tempting pleasures of this present life, pleasures that ruin the souls of men with a sweetness that destroys. What happiness it must be counted, to be lifted free of this earth's filth and go forward to meet that most just Judge, that most generous Father, who grants rest instead of toil, life instead of death, brightness instead of darkness, and eternal heavenly goods instead of earthly ones that soon pass away! No bitterness or misery we suffer in this world while pursuing righteous deeds can be weighed against or made equal to that reward. Therefore, if we mean to be wise, if we mean to be blessed, we must hold before our minds — and set squarely before ourselves — not merely that line from Terence, that one must grind at the mill, take a beating, wear the fetters, but hardships far worse than these: prison, chains, and torment must be borne, suffering must be endured, and death itself faced and undergone, since our own conscience makes it plain that neither will that fragile pleasure escape its punishment nor will virtue go without its reward from God. Everyone, then, ought to take pains either to steer himself onto the right path as quickly as he can, or, having taken up and practiced the virtues and patiently worked through this life's hardships, so that God himself will console them in the end. It was he — the one we call Father and Master, the maker who gave the sky its firmness, who set the sun in place among the other stars, who girded the earth (balanced there by its own weight) with mountains, threw the sea around it, and drew its lines with rivers, shaping the whole fabric of this world out of nothing and bringing it to completion — it was he who looked down on humanity's errors and dispatched a guide to open the road of righteousness before us. Let all of us follow him, listen to him, obey him with the utmost devotion, since he alone, as Lucretius says, cleansed the hearts of men with truthful words, fixed a boundary on both desire and fear, made plain what the highest good actually is, toward which every one of us strives, and pointed out the way — a narrow track by which we might press straight onward toward it. Nor did he stop at pointing it out — he went ahead and walked it himself, precisely so that its difficulty would give no one an excuse to flinch from choosing virtue. Let the road of ruin and deception be forsaken, if that can at all be managed — the road along which death lies concealed, masked by pleasure's enticements. And the nearer each of us, as the years tip toward old age, feels himself approaching that day when he must leave this life behind, the more he ought to weigh how purely he may depart, how blamelessly he may stand before the Judge — not following the example of those who, propped up on blind minds, when the body's strength is already giving way and the coming of the final necessity has already been signaled to them, only push themselves to drink more eagerly and more feverishly from their own lusts. Let each person free himself from that pit while he still has the chance, while opportunity remains, and turn to God with his whole mind, so that he may face without fear the day on which God, ruler and lord of the world, will judge every person by deeds and by thoughts alike. Whatever is sought after here, let him not simply set it aside but run from it, and count his own soul worth more than these deceitful goods, whose holding is uncertain and short-lived: for they slip away every day and vanish far quicker than they arrived, and even if we could enjoy them right to the very end, they would still have to be handed on to others. We can bring nothing with us except a life led well and without reproach. That man will arrive before God rich, that man wealthy, who comes attended by self-control, compassion, endurance, love, and faith. This is the inheritance that belongs to us, one that cannot be torn from anyone or handed off to someone else. Who would not wish to obtain and secure such goods for himself? Let the hungry come, so that, filled with heavenly food, they may bring their unending hunger to an end; let the thirsty come, so that with mouths open wide they may draw saving water from the everlasting spring. Through this food and drink from God, the blind will see and the deaf will hear, the mute will speak and the lame will walk, fools will grow wise and the sick will grow well, and the dead will return to life. For whoever tramples the corruption of the earth under the power of virtue, that supreme and truthful Judge will raise up to life and unending light. Let no one place trust in wealth, in high office, or even in royal authority — none of these grants immortality. For whoever casts off the reasoning proper to man and, chasing after present things, throws himself prostrate on the earth, earns the penalty owed to one who deserts his own Lord, Commander, and Father. Let us then fix our minds on righteousness, which alone, as an inseparable companion, will lead us to God, and while the spirit still governs these limbs of ours, let us serve God as tireless soldiers, keep our posts and our watches, and face the enemy we know how to recognize with courage, so that, victorious and triumphant over our vanquished foe, we may win from the Lord the prize of virtue that he himself has promised.