Whence too they covered their shameful parts with fig-leaves, which perhaps were the first things found by them in their disturbance; these were the same members as before, but before they were not shameful. They therefore felt a new movement of their disobedient flesh, as a kind of reciprocal punishment for their own disobedience. For now the soul, delighting in its own liberty turned to perversity and disdaining to serve God, was deprived of its former servitude of the body; and because by its own choice it had forsaken its higher Lord, it did not hold its lower servant to its own choice, nor did it have the flesh in every way subject, as it could always have had it, if it had itself remained subject to God.
Then, therefore, the flesh began to lust against the spirit, with which conflict we are born, drawing the origin of death, and bearing in our members and our vitiated nature the strife — or the victory — of that first transgression. [XIV] For God created man upright, being the author of natures, not indeed of vices; but man, depraved by his own will and justly condemned, begot offspring depraved and condemned. For we all were in that one man, when we all were that one man, who fell into sin through the woman who was made from him before the sin. There was not yet individually created and distributed to us the form in which we severally should live; but there already was the seminal nature from which we should be propagated;
and when this had been vitiated because of sin, bound by the chain of death, and justly condemned, man could not be born of man of any other condition. And thus, from the evil use of free will, the whole train of this calamity has arisen, which, through nature depraved at its origin, as though the root were corrupted, leads the human race by an unbroken chain of miseries down to the destruction of the second death, which has no end — except those alone who are set free by the grace of God. [XV] Wherefore, even if in what was said, 'By death you shall die,' since it was not said 'By deaths,' we understand only that death which comes about when the soul is forsaken by its own life, which is God (for it was not forsaken so that it should forsake, but it forsook so that it should be forsaken; for toward its evil, its own will is prior;
but toward its good, the will of its Creator is prior — whether to make it, when it was nothing, or to remake it, because it had fallen and perished) — even if, then, we understand that God announced this death when He said, 'On the day you eat of it, by death you shall die,' as though He said, 'On the day you forsake me through disobedience, I will forsake you through justice': assuredly in that death the others too were announced, which without doubt were to follow. For in this — that a disobedient movement arose in the flesh of the disobedient soul, on account of which they covered their shameful parts — was felt the one death, in which God forsook the soul. This was signified by His words, when to the man hiding himself in demented fear He said: 'Adam, where art thou?'
not indeed asking in ignorance, but admonishing by rebuke, that he might attend to where he was — namely, in a state in which God was not. But when the soul itself forsook the body, corrupted by age and worn out by old age, there came into experience the other death, concerning which God, still punishing sin, had said to man: 'Earth thou art, and unto earth thou shalt go'; so that from these two, that first death, which is of the whole man, might be completed, which the second follows at the last, unless the man be set free by grace. For neither would the body, which is of the earth, return to the earth except by its own death, which befalls it when it is forsaken by its own life, that is, the soul.
Whence it is established among Christians who truly hold the catholic faith that even this death of the body itself was inflicted upon us not by the law of nature, by which God made no death for man, but by the merit of sin, since God, avenging sin, said to man, in whom then we all were: 'Earth thou art, and unto earth thou shalt go.' [XVI] But the philosophers, against whose calumnies we defend the City of God, that is, His Church, think themselves to jeer wisely at us because we say that the separation of the soul from the body is to be reckoned among its penalties — because, forsooth, they suppose its perfect blessedness comes to it only when, wholly stripped of all body, it returns to God simple and alone and in a manner naked.
But if I found nothing in their writings by which this opinion might be refuted, I should have to argue more laboriously to demonstrate that it is not the body which is a burden to the soul, but the corruptible body. Whence comes that which we recalled from our own Scriptures in the earlier book: 'For the corruptible body weighs down the soul.' By adding the word 'corruptible,' he showed that the soul is weighed down not by any kind of body, but by such a body as was made corruptible by the punishment following upon sin. And even if he had not added it, we ought to understand nothing else.
But since Plato most openly proclaims that the gods made by the supreme God have immortal bodies, and represents that very God by whom they were made promising them, as a great benefit, that they shall remain forever with their bodies and be loosed from them by no death: what is it that these men, to harass the Christian faith, pretend not to know what they do know, or even, contradicting themselves and being at war with their own selves, prefer to say, while they cease not to contradict us? Surely these are the words of Plato, as Cicero rendered them into Latin, in which he represents the supreme God addressing the gods whom He made and saying: 'You who are sprung from the seed of gods, attend:
of these works I am the parent and the maker, and they are indissoluble against my will, although everything bound together can be dissolved; but it is by no means good to wish to dissolve by reason what has been bound together. But since you have come into being, immortal indeed you cannot be, nor indissoluble; yet you shall by no means be dissolved, nor shall any fates of death destroy you, nor shall they be more powerful than my counsel, which is a greater bond to your perpetuity than those with which you were bound together at the time when you were being begotten.' Behold, Plato says that the gods are both mortal by the joining of body and soul, and yet immortal by the will and counsel of the god by whom they were made.
If, then, it is a penalty for the soul to be bound in a body of any kind, why is it that the god, addressing them as though anxious lest perchance they die — that is, be dissolved from the body — makes them secure concerning their immortality; not on account of their nature, which is compounded, not simple, but on account of his own most invincible will, by which he is able to bring it about that things which have arisen do not perish, and things joined together are not dissolved, but persevere incorruptibly? And whether indeed Plato says this truly of the heavenly bodies is another question.
For it is not straightway to be conceded to him that those globes of light, or little orbs shining with corporeal light above the earth by day or by night, live by certain souls of their own, and by souls intellectual and blessed at that — which he insistently affirms even of the whole universe itself, as of one greatest living creature, in which all the other living creatures are contained. But this, as I said, is another question, which we have not now undertaken to discuss. This much only I thought worth recalling against those who boast that they are called, or are, Platonists — whose pride in that name makes them blush to be Christians, lest the appellation common to them with the vulgar should cheapen the wearers of the pallium, a company all the more puffed up as it is the more scanty in number.
And seeking what they may reprehend in Christian doctrine, they harass the eternity of bodies, as though these things were mutually contradictory — that we should both seek the blessedness of the soul and yet wish it always to be in a body, as though bound in a wretched chain; whereas their own founder and master, Plato, says that a gift was granted by the supreme god to the gods made by him, that they should never die, that is, be separated from the bodies to which he joined them. [XVII] These men further contend that earthly bodies cannot be everlasting, although they do not doubt that the whole earth itself is a member of their god — not the supreme, yet a great one, that is, of this whole world — set in the midst and everlasting.
Since therefore that supreme god made for them another which they think a god, that is, this world, to be preferred to the other gods who are beneath him, and they suppose this same to be a living creature — with a soul, namely, as they assert, rational or intellectual, enclosed in so great a mass of its body — and constituted the four elements as it were the members of that very body, set and arranged each in its own place, the joining of which they wish to be indissoluble and everlasting, lest their god so great should ever die: what reason is there that in the body of the greater living creature the earth should be an eternal member, as it were the middle one, and the bodies of other earthly living creatures, if God should so will, as He wills that, could not be eternal?
But the earth, they say, must be given back to the earth, whence the earthly bodies of animals were taken; from which it follows, they say, that it is necessary for these to be dissolved and to die, and in this way to be restored to the stable and everlasting earth whence they had been taken. If anyone should now similarly affirm this also of fire, and say that the bodies which were taken thence to become heavenly living creatures must be given back to the universal fire: will not the immortality which Plato, as though the supreme god were speaking, promised to such gods, fall away as it were by the violence of this argument? Or does it not so happen there, because God wills it not — whose will, as Plato says, no force overcomes?
What, then, prevents God from being able to bring this about also concerning earthly bodies, seeing that Plato confesses that God can bring it about that things which have arisen do not perish, that things which are bound are not dissolved, that things which are taken from the elements are not given back, and that souls established in bodies neither ever forsake them and yet enjoy immortality and everlasting blessedness together with them? Why, then, could He not bring it about that earthly things too should not die? Or is God not powerful as far as Christians believe, but only as far as the Platonists wish? Doubtless, indeed, the philosophers could know the counsel and power of God, and the prophets could not;
whereas, on the contrary, His own Spirit rather taught the prophets of God to announce His will, so far as He deigned, but deceived the philosophers in coming to know it by human conjecture. Yet they ought not to have been so far deceived — not only by ignorance, but also by obstinacy — as both most openly to contradict themselves, asserting with great forces of argument that, in order for the soul to be able to be blessed, not only the earthly but every body must be fled from, and again saying that the gods have most blessed souls and yet are bound to eternal bodies — the heavenly gods to fiery bodies, but the soul of Jupiter himself, whom they hold to be this world, enclosed in absolutely all the corporeal elements by which this whole mass rises from earth to heaven.
For Plato opines that this soul is diffused and extended from the inmost middle of the earth, which geometers call the centre, through all its parts up to the highest and outermost bounds of heaven, by musical numbers, so that this world is a living creature, greatest, most blessed, everlasting — whose soul both holds the perfect felicity of wisdom and does not leave its own body, and whose body both lives forever from that soul, and, although not simple but compacted of so many and so great bodies, could not dull or slow it down.
Since therefore they allow these things by their own surmises, why are they unwilling to believe that by the divine will and power earthly bodies too can be made immortal, in which souls, separated from them by no death and weighed down by no burdens of them, may live everlastingly and happily — which they assert their own gods can do in fiery bodies, and Jupiter himself, their king, in all the corporeal elements? For if, in order that it may be blessed, every body must be fled from by the soul, let their gods flee from the globes of the stars, let Jupiter flee from heaven and earth; or if they cannot, let them be judged wretched.
But these men will have neither: they dare neither grant to their gods separation from their bodies, lest they seem to worship mortals, nor privation of blessedness, lest they confess them to be unhappy. Not all bodies, therefore, are to be fled from for the attaining of blessedness; but the corruptible, troublesome, heavy, dying ones — not such as the goodness of God made for the first men, but such as the punishment of sin compelled them to be. [XVIII] But it is necessary, they say, that natural weight should either hold earthly bodies on the earth or force them toward the earth, and therefore they cannot be in heaven. Those first men, indeed, were in a land wooded and fruitful, which obtained the name of paradise;
but since this too must be answered, both on account of the body of Christ with which He ascended into heaven, and on account of the bodies of the saints, such as they will be in the resurrection, let them consider a little more attentively the earthly weights themselves. For if human art brings it about that, from metals which, placed in water, are straightway submerged, vessels fashioned in certain ways can even float:
how much more credibly and effectively can some hidden mode of the working of God — by whose most omnipotent will, as Plato says, neither do things which have arisen perish nor can things bound together be dissolved, since it is far more marvellous that incorporeal things should be joined to corporeal than that any bodies whatever should be joined to any bodies whatever — grant to earthly masses that they be depressed by no weight into the depths, and to the souls themselves most perfectly blessed, that they may place their bodies, though earthly yet now incorruptible, wherever they will, and move them whither they will, with the easiest position and motion! Or is it indeed to be believed that, if angels do this and snatch up whatever earthly animals from wherever they please and set them wherever they please, either they cannot, or they feel the burdens?
Why, then, should we not believe that the perfected and blessed spirits of the saints will, by divine gift, be able without any difficulty to bear their bodies whithersoever they will and to set them wherever they will? For while, as we are accustomed to feel the burden of earthly bodies in carrying, the greater the quantity, the greater also is the weight, so that more pounds press more than fewer: nevertheless the soul bears the members of its own flesh more lightly when they are robust in health than when they are wasted in weakness. And while to others carrying him a man sound and strong is more burdensome than one thin and sickly, yet he himself is more agile in moving and carrying his own body when in good health he has more bulk, than when in plague or famine he has the least of strength.
So much does it avail, even in the having of earthly bodies — though still corruptible and mortal — not the weight of quantity, but the measure of temperament. And who can unfold in words how great a distance lies between the present state which we call health, and the immortality to come? Not, therefore, do the philosophers refute our faith concerning the weights of bodies. For I do not wish to ask why they do not believe that an earthly body can be in heaven, when the whole earth is poised upon nothing. For perchance, concerning that very middle place of the world, because all heavier things come together into it, an argument even more like the truth might be held. This I say:
If the lesser gods, to whom Plato committed the making of the other earthly animals, and of man too among them, were able, as he says, to remove from fire the quality of burning, and to leave the quality of shining which should flash forth through the eyes: shall we then doubt to concede to the supreme God — to whose will and power that other conceded that things which have arisen do not die, and that things so diverse, so dissimilar, that is, corporeal and incorporeal, joined to one another can be sundered by no dissolution — that from the flesh of man, to which He grants immortality, He should take away corruption, leave the nature, retain the harmony of the figure and of the members, and withdraw the sluggishness of weight?
But concerning the faith of the resurrection of the dead, and concerning their immortal bodies, we must, if God will, treat more diligently at the end of this work. [XIX] Now let us explain what we have undertaken concerning the bodies of the first men; since not even this death — which is reputed good to the good, and is known not only to a few who understand or believe, but to all, by which the separation of the soul from the body comes about, by which certainly the body of a living creature, which was evidently living, evidently dies — could have befallen them, had not the desert of sin followed.
For although it is not lawful to doubt that the souls of the just and pious departed live in rest, yet it would be so much the better for them to live with their bodies in good health, that even those who suppose it to be most blessed to be in every way without a body refute this opinion of theirs by their own judgement which contradicts it. For none of them will dare to prefer wise men — whether about to die or already dead, that is, either lacking bodies or about to leave their bodies — to the immortal gods, to whom the supreme God, in Plato, promises a mighty gift, namely, indissoluble life, that is, an eternal fellowship with their own bodies.
And that same Plato judges it to fare best with men, if only they have passed through this life piously and justly, that, separated from their bodies, they be received into the bosom of the very gods who never forsake their bodies — 'Forgetful, forsooth, that they may revisit the vaults above, and begin again to wish to return into bodies'; which Virgil is praised for having said out of Platonic doctrine (for thus he supposes that the souls of mortals can neither always be in their bodies, but are dissolved by the necessity of death, nor endure forever without bodies, but thinks that, by alternating turns, the living are made from the dead and the dead from the living without ceasing);
so that wise men are seen to differ from other men in this — that after death they are borne to the stars, so that each may rest somewhat longer in the star congenial to him, and thence again, forgetful of his former misery and overcome by the desire of having a body, returns to the labours and hardships of mortals; but those who have led a foolish life are rolled back close by into bodies owed to their merits, whether of men or of beasts. In this most harsh condition, therefore, he places even the good and wise souls, to which such bodies have not been distributed as those with which they might live always and immortally, so that they can neither remain in bodies nor endure in eternal purity without them.
Concerning this Platonic doctrine we have already said in the earlier books that Porphyry, in the Christian era, blushed at it, and not only removed the bodies of beasts from human souls, but also wished the souls of the wise to be so freed from corporeal bonds that, fleeing every body, they should be held blessed with the Father without end. And so, lest he should seem to be conquered by Christ, who promises perpetual life to the saints, he too established purged souls in eternal felicity without any return to their former miseries; and, that he might oppose Christ, denying the resurrection of incorruptible bodies, he asserted that they should live forever not only without earthly bodies, but without any bodies whatsoever.
Yet not even with this opinion of whatever sort did he teach that they should at least not be subjected in the obsequiousness of religion to embodied gods. Why so, unless because he did not believe them, though joined to no body, to be better than those gods? Wherefore, if these men will not dare — as I think they will not dare — to prefer human souls to the most blessed gods who are nonetheless established in eternal bodies: why does it seem to them absurd, what the Christian faith proclaims, that the first men were so created that, if they had not sinned, they would have been loosed from their bodies by no death, but, endowed with immortality for the merits of the obedience they had kept, would have lived with them forever;
and that the saints in the resurrection shall have those very bodies in which here they laboured, so that neither can anything of corruption or difficulty befall their flesh, nor anything of grief and unhappiness befall their blessedness? [XX] Accordingly, the souls of the departed saints now do not have as grievous the death by which they were separated from their bodies, because their flesh rests in hope, however much it may be seen to have received insults now without any feeling at all.
For they do not, as it seemed to Plato, desire their bodies through forgetfulness, but rather, because they remember what has been promised them by Him who deceives no one, who gave them assurance even concerning the integrity of their very hairs, they longingly and patiently await the resurrection of the bodies in which they suffered many hard things, being about to feel nothing further of the kind in them. For if they did not hate their flesh, when by spiritual right they were curbing it as it resisted their mind by its weakness, how much more do they love it, seeing it too is to be spiritual!
For just as the spirit serving the flesh is not incongruously called carnal, so the flesh serving the spirit will rightly be called spiritual — not because it will be turned into spirit, as some suppose from what is written: 'It is sown a natural body, it shall rise a spiritual body,' but because it will be subject to the spirit with a supreme and wonderful ease of obedience, unto the fulfilling of the most assured will of an indissoluble immortality, every sense of trouble, all corruptibility and sluggishness being withdrawn.
For it will not only not be such as it now is in the best possible state of health, but not even such as it was in the first human beings before sin; who, although they would not have died had they not sinned, nevertheless used food as men do, bearing bodies not yet spiritual but still animal and earthly.
Although these bodies would not have grown decrepit with age, so as to be brought of necessity to death (a condition granted them by the wondrous grace of God through the tree of life, which stood in the midst of paradise together with the forbidden tree), yet they also took other foods besides the one tree that had been forbidden — forbidden not because it was itself an evil, but for the sake of commending the good of pure and simple obedience, which is a great virtue in a rational creature set under its Creator and Lord. For where no evil thing was being touched, surely, if what was forbidden were touched, the sin would be one of disobedience alone. Their eating of the other things, then, was done so that their animal bodies might not feel any distress through hunger and thirst;
but of the tree of life they partook for this reason: that death might not steal upon them from any quarter, nor that, worn out by old age, they should perish once the spans of their times had run their course — as though the other trees were for nourishment, but that one for a sacrament; so that the tree of life in the corporeal paradise is to be understood in the same way as, in the spiritual — that is, the intelligible — paradise, the Wisdom of God, of which it is written: She is a tree of life to those who lay hold of her. [XXI] Hence some refer that whole paradise, in which sacred Scripture in its truth relates that the first human beings, parents of the human race, dwelt, to intelligible realities, and turn those trees and fruit-bearing woods into the virtues and manners of life;
as though those things were not visible and corporeal, but were spoken of or written in such a manner for the sake of signifying intelligible realities. As if paradise could not for that reason have been corporeal, because it can also be understood spiritually; just as if, for that reason, there had not been two women, Hagar and Sarah, and from them two sons of Abraham, one of the bondwoman, the other of the free, because the Apostle says that the two testaments are figured in them; or as though for that reason water had not flowed from any rock when Moses struck it, because there too, by a figurative signification, Christ can be understood, the same Apostle saying: And that rock was Christ.
No one, therefore, forbids us to understand paradise as the life of the blessed; its four rivers as the four virtues — prudence, fortitude, temperance, and justice; its trees as all the useful branches of learning; the fruits of the trees as the manners of the pious; the tree of life as wisdom itself, the mother of all good things; and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil as the experience of a transgressed commandment. For God appointed a punishment for sinners, indeed a good one, since it is just, yet man does not experience it as good for himself. These things can also be understood as referring to the Church, so that we may take them rather as prophetic indications foreshadowing things to come: namely paradise as the Church herself, as is read concerning her in the Song of Songs;
the four rivers of paradise as the four Gospels; the fruit-bearing trees as the saints; their fruits as their works; the tree of life as the Holy of Holies, namely Christ; the tree of the knowledge of good and evil as the will's own power of choice. For man, having despised the divine will, can make no use of himself except a ruinous one, and thus learns what difference there is between cleaving to the good that is common to all and taking delight in what is his own. For in loving himself he is given over to himself, so that, being thereby filled with fears and sorrows, he sings in the psalm — if indeed he perceives his own evils: My soul is troubled within me; and, being now corrected, he says: My strength I will keep unto thee.
Let these things, and any others that may be more fittingly said concerning a spiritual understanding of paradise, be said with no one forbidding it, provided nevertheless that the truth of that history, commended by its most faithful narration of things done, be also believed. [XXII] The bodies of the just, therefore, which are to be in the resurrection, will need neither any tree by which it may come about that they die of no disease or worn-out old age, nor any other bodily nourishments by which any distress of hunger and thirst might be avoided; since they will be clothed with the sure and in every way inviolable gift of immortality, so that they may eat, if they will, by possibility and not by necessity.
This the angels also did, when they appeared visibly and tangibly — not because they had need, but because they willed and were able, that by a certain humanity of their ministry they might accord with men (for it is not to be believed that the angels ate in a mere phantom, when men received them into hospitality); although, to those who did not know whether they were angels, they seemed to eat with a need like our own. Whence it is that the angel says in the Book of Tobit: You saw me eat, but you saw with your sight — that is, you supposed that I took food, as you do, out of the necessity of refreshing the body.