While almost all of the works in this vault use Victorian translations, due to the English translations of this letter being in copyright, it was machine-translated (by Claude, 2026) from the public-domain Latin. It has not been checked by a human translator.
To Dardanus: On the Presence of God (A.D. 417)
Augustine to Dardanus.
Chapter 1
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I confess, my dearly beloved brother Dardanus, more illustrious to me in the love of Christ than in the dignity of this world, that I have answered your letter later than I ought. I would rather you did not ask the reasons for this, lest you find it more tiresome to bear with me at length excusing myself than you found it to bear with my answering late; for I would rather that you readily forgave my fault than that you sat in judgment on my defence. Whatever those reasons may have been, believe me that there could have been no contempt of you on my part. On the contrary, if I had held you in contempt I should have answered very quickly. Nor, now that at long last I have written, have I at least at long last produced something worthy of such a reader as you, and fit to be inscribed with your name; I have simply preferred to answer in whatever way I could, rather than let this summer too go by with me still in your debt for this service. It was not your rank that daunted me and made me hesitate, for your kindness is more winning than your rank is intimidating. But the more I love you, the harder I find it to discover how I may satisfy so great an eagerness as that of your devout love.
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To this was added the following. Besides the flame of mutual charity, by which it comes about that we love even those whom we have never seen, since we believe that they possess what we love — and in this you were beforehand with me, and have made me fear that your opinion and expectation of me may be disappointed — besides this, then, you have put to me in your letter questions of such a kind that, had they been put by anyone at all, they would have been no small task even for my leisure, of which I have none. But when they are put by you, who in searching the depths are by no means content with the surface of their solution, and put to one who is exceedingly occupied and hemmed in and bound on every side by the weight of other people’s cares, it is for your prudence and your goodwill to consider how gentle I must hope to find you, whether because I have been so long in answering, or if even now I do not answer as the greatness of your purpose deserves.
Chapter 2
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You ask, then, “how the man Christ Jesus, the Mediator between God and men, is now believed to be in heaven, when, hanging on the tree and already about to die, He said to the thief who believed, ‘Today you shall be with me in paradise.’” And from this you say that perhaps paradise is to be understood as situated in some part of heaven; or else that, because God is everywhere, that Man also who is in God is diffused everywhere — meaning of course that from this it may be understood that He who is everywhere could also be in paradise.
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Here I ask, or rather I recognise, in what sense you take “the man Christ.” Certainly not as certain heretics take Him, as the Word of God and flesh, that is, without a human soul, so that the Word was to the flesh in place of a soul; nor as the Word of God with a soul and flesh, but without a human mind, so that the Word of God was to the soul in place of a human mind. You do not take the man Christ in this way, but as you said above, where you said that you accept Christ as almighty God on such a principle of belief that you would not believe Him to be God unless you had also believed Him to be perfect man. Assuredly, when you say “perfect man,” you wish the whole of human nature to be understood as there; and a man is not perfect if either the soul is lacking to the flesh or the human mind to the soul itself.
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If, then, we suppose that the words, “Today you shall be with me in paradise,” were spoken with respect to the Man whom God the Word took up, we are not to infer from these words that paradise is in heaven; for on that same day the man Christ Jesus was not going to be in heaven, but in hell as to His soul, and in the tomb as to His flesh. As to the flesh, that it was laid in the tomb on that day, the Gospel is perfectly plain; but that His soul descended into hell is proclaimed by the teaching of the apostles, since blessed Peter brings to bear on this point a testimony from the Psalms, where he shows that it was foretold: “Because You will not leave my soul in hell, neither will You give Your Holy One to see corruption.” The first was said of the soul, because it was not left there, from which it returned so soon; the second of the body, which, by reason of its swift resurrection, could not suffer corruption in the tomb. But no one understands paradise to be in the tomb. And if anyone were so foolish as to try to hold this, because that tomb was in a garden, he would certainly be recalled from such an opinion by this, that he to whom it was said, “Today you shall be with me in paradise,” was not with Christ in that tomb on that day; nor would the burial of the flesh — which feels no joy or pain in death — have been held out to his faith as a great reward, when what he was thinking of was a rest in which there is feeling.
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It remains, therefore, that if the words, “Today you shall be with me in paradise,” were spoken with respect to His manhood, paradise must be understood to be in hell, where on that day Christ was to be as to His human soul. Whether, however, that bosom of Abraham, where the ungodly rich man, when he was in the torments of hell, saw the poor man at rest, is to be reckoned under the name of paradise, or is to be thought to belong to hell, I could not easily say. For of that rich man we read that it was said, “The rich man also died, and was buried in hell”; and, “when he was in torments in hell.” But in the case of the poor man’s death and rest, hell is not named; but “It came to pass,” it says, “that the beggar died, and was carried by the angels into Abraham’s bosom.” Then Abraham says to the rich man in the flames, “Between us and you there is a great gulf fixed,” as though between hell and the abodes of the blessed. For it is not easy to find anywhere in the Scriptures the name of hell used in a good sense. Hence the question is commonly raised, if nothing but places of punishment are rightly understood by hell, how we may devoutly believe that the soul of Christ the Lord was in hell. But it is well answered that He descended there in order to bring help to those whom it was fitting that He should help; wherefore blessed Peter says that He loosed the pains of hell, “because it was not possible that He should be held by them.” Further, if both regions, that of those in pain and that of those at rest — that is, both where that rich man was tormented and where that poor man rejoiced — are to be believed to be in hell, who would dare to say that the Lord Jesus came only to the penal regions of hell, and was not also among those who rest in Abraham’s bosom? And if He was there, that is to be understood as the paradise which He deigned to promise to the soul of the thief on that day. If these things are so, “paradise” is a general name for a place where life is lived in blessedness. For because the place where Adam was before his sin was called paradise, Scripture is not thereby forbidden to call the Church also a paradise, with its fruit of the orchard.