The justification for this centering of human interests and energies lay in the nature of the _summum bonum_ for man. According to the principles of the _City of God_, eternal life is the supreme good and eternal death the supreme evil. Evidently no temporal satisfaction or happiness compares with the eternal. This is good logic; but it is enforced with arguments drawn from the Christian temper, which viewed earth as a vale of tears. The deep Catholic pessimism toward mortal life is Augustine’s in full measure: “Quis enim sufficit quantovis eloquentiae flumine, vitae hujus miserias explicare?” Virtue itself, the best of mortal goods, does nothing here on earth but wage perpetual war with vices. Though man’s life is and must be social, how filled is it with distress! The saints are blessed with hope. And mortal good which has not that hope is a false joy and a great misery. For it lacks the real blessedness of the soul, which is the true wisdom that directs itself to the end where God shall be all in all in eternal certitude and perfect peace. Here our peace is with God through faith; and yet is rather a _solatium miseriae_ than a _gaudium beatitudinis_, as it will be hereafter. But the end of those who do not belong to the City of God will be _miseria sempiterna_, which is also called the second death, since the soul alienated from God cannot be said to live, nor that body be said to live which is enduring eternal pains.[56] Augustine devotes a whole book, the twenty-first, to an exposition of the sempiternal, non-purgatorial, punishment of the damned, whom the compassionate intercession of the saints will not save, nor many other considerations which have been deemed eventually saving by the fondly lenient opinions of men. His views were as dark as those of Gregory the Great. Only imaginative elaboration was needed to expand them to the full compass of mediaeval fear.