The City of God, Volume I

The immediate effect of the first sin was God’s abandonment of the human soul. Adam and Eve became aware of their nakedness and experienced shame where none had existed before. A new motion arose in their flesh—disobedient desire that they could not control. This was fitting retribution: the soul that had refused to serve God lost its own authority over the body. Having deserted its superior Lord, it could no longer command its inferior servant. The flesh began to lust against the spirit, and this internal warfare has characterized human existence ever since. We are born inheriting this seed of death, carrying in our members the conflict that originated in the first transgression.

God created humanity upright, but through the abuse of free will, humanity corrupted itself and passed that corruption to all descendants. The whole human race existed in Adam seminally; when he fell, we fell. His voluntary departure from God preceded God’s abandonment of him—spiritual death came before the sentence of bodily death. When God asked “Where art thou?” He was not seeking information but calling Adam to recognize his condition: God was no longer with him. The sentence “Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return” pronounced the bodily death that would follow from spiritual death. Christians agree that bodily death is not natural but penal—the righteous judgment of God on sin.

Augustine now confronts the philosophers, particularly the Platonists, who ridicule the Christian teaching that death is punishment. These thinkers hold that the soul’s blessedness is complete only when it escapes the body entirely. Augustine responds that the burden is not the body itself but the body’s corruptibility. Scripture states that “the corruptible body presses down the soul”—the adjective is essential. The soul is weighed down not by embodiment as such but by the corrupted body that sin has produced.

More devastatingly, Augustine cites Plato himself against the Platonists. In the Timaeus, Plato represents the supreme Deity promising the lesser gods that they will never be separated from their bodies but will abide in them eternally. If embodiment were inherently miserable, why would the supreme God promise eternal union with the body as a gift? The philosophers contradict themselves: they maintain that souls must escape all bodies to be blessed, yet they affirm that the gods—whom they consider most blessed—are eternally united to their bodies. They cannot have it both ways.

The philosophers further object that earthly bodies cannot become incorruptible or inhabit heaven. Augustine replies that their own system undermines this objection. They consider the earth eternal, though it is the central member of their divine world-animal. If the earth can be eternal, why cannot earthly bodies be made eternal by God’s power? Plato himself acknowledges that God can prevent created things from dying and composite things from dissolving. What prevents God from conferring the same immortality on human bodies that Plato’s supreme Deity confers on the gods?

The objection from weight—that earthly bodies must fall to earth—proves equally weak. Human artistry can make vessels float from metals that sink. Cannot God, by means unknown to us, enable glorified bodies to transcend their natural weight? The soul already moves the body more easily when it is healthy than when it is sick; how much more perfectly will a glorified soul move a spiritual body? If angels can transport earthly creatures wherever they wish, surely the saints in their resurrection bodies will move with perfect freedom.

The Christian hope surpasses anything the philosophers imagined. Plato’s best souls must undergo endless cycles of embodiment and disembodiment, forgetting and returning. Porphyry, ashamed of this doctrine in the Christian era, taught that purified souls escape all bodies forever—but he still required them to worship gods who remain embodied. The Christian promise is superior: the saints will rise in their own bodies, transformed so that neither corruption nor unwieldiness afflicts the flesh, neither grief nor trouble clouds their joy.

The resurrection body will surpass even Adam’s pre-fall body. Adam possessed an animal body—animated by a living soul but not yet quickened by the Spirit. He required food and the tree of life to sustain his existence and ward off death. The resurrection body will be spiritual—not converted into spirit, but perfectly subject to the spirit, free from all corruption and reluctance. It will not need food for sustenance, though it will retain the power to eat. Christ Himself ate after His resurrection, demonstrating that the spiritual body can still participate in such acts without needing them.

Augustine acknowledges that Paradise admits of allegorical interpretation. Some understand it as representing the life of the blessed, its rivers as the four virtues, its trees as useful knowledge, the tree of life as wisdom, and the tree of knowledge as the experience of transgression. These spiritual meanings may also point to the Church: Paradise as the Church, its rivers as the four Gospels, its fruit trees as the saints, the tree of life as Christ. Such allegories are profitable so long as they do not displace the historical truth that a real Paradise existed and real events occurred there.

The distinction between the animal body and the spiritual body rests on apostolic teaching. Paul states that the first Adam became a living soul, while the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. The animal body is animated by the soul; the spiritual body is quickened by the Spirit. Adam’s body, though not subject to death before sin, was still animal—it required sustenance and was preserved from decay only by access to the tree of life. The resurrection body will be inherently immortal, unable to die at all, transformed by the Spirit’s quickening power.

This leads to the final clarification regarding the creation of the soul. Some have argued that when God breathed into Adam the breath of life, He was not creating the soul but imparting the Holy Spirit to an already-existing soul. They point to Christ breathing on His disciples and saying “Receive the Holy Spirit.” But Augustine demonstrates that the scriptural language distinguishes these events. The Greek word used for Adam’s breath is pnoē, a term frequently used of creatures; the word for the Holy Spirit is pneuma. The breath given to Adam created the rational soul, making the dust into a living being. This was not the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the Trinitarian sense but the initial creation of the human soul.

Scripture speaks of “living souls” and “the breath of life” even in reference to animals. What distinguishes the human soul is not the general term but its rational nature, created directly by God rather than produced from the waters and earth like the souls of beasts. The human soul, though immortal by creation, can die in the sense of being forsaken by God. The rebellious angels similarly died when they abandoned God, yet they continue to exist and feel, for they are immortal by nature. In the second death, both fallen angels and condemned humans will suffer eternally—alive to feel pain, dead to blessedness.

The book concludes by acknowledging a remaining question: how would Adam and Eve have procreated had they remained in their sinless state? The motion of disobedient desire in their members arose only after their transgression and God’s abandonment. How then would generation have occurred in a state of innocence? This question, too large for the present treatment, must be reserved for the following book.