The City of God · Chapter
Of the Beauty of the Universe, Which Becomes, by God's Ordinance, More Brilliant by the Opposition of Contraries explained
Augustine explains that God, foreknowing the wickedness of angels and men, created them because He could turn their evil to good, embellishing the course of the ages like an exquisite poem set off with antitheses.
What happens
Augustine explains that God, foreknowing the wickedness of angels and men, created them because He could turn their evil to good, embellishing the course of the ages like an exquisite poem set off with antitheses. He draws an analogy between rhetorical antitheses—which lend beauty to speech—and the opposition of contraries in the world, which God arranges to produce a beautiful order. He cites the Apostle Paul's use of antithesis in 2 Corinthians and the Book of Ecclesiasticus to support this view.
Themes in this chapter
Divine Providence and History
Augustine argues that God ordains the opposition of good and evil to create beauty in the course of the ages, demonstrating providential control over history.
Sin, Grace, and Redemption
God foreknew wickedness but uses it for good, turning sin into an element of cosmic beauty and redemption.
Characters to notice
Key passages
“For God would never have created any, I do not say angel, but even man, whose future wickedness He foreknew, unless He had equally known to what uses in behalf of the good He could turn him, thus embellishing the course of the ages, as it were an exquisite poem set off with antitheses.”
God would not have created any being, angel or human, whose future sin He foresaw, unless He also knew how to use that sin for good, thereby adorning the flow of history like a beautiful poem enhanced by contrasts.
Augustine's core argument: God permits evil to enhance the beauty of the universe.
“As, then, these oppositions of contraries lend beauty to the language, so the beauty of the course of this world is achieved by the opposition of contraries, arranged, as it were, by an eloquence not of words, but of things.”
Just as contrasting words make speech beautiful, so the beauty of world history comes from the arrangement of opposites, crafted by a divine eloquence expressed in events rather than words.
Augustine extends the rhetorical concept of antithesis to God's ordering of history.