The City of God, Volume I

With the machinery of cosmic repetition dismantled, Augustine turns positive. Nothing prohibits the eternal God from bringing into being what has never existed before, and doing so without the slightest shift in His purpose. Consider the company of the redeemed: whether their total number grows without bound or is fixed from the outset, in either case there was a moment when that number did not yet exist. A definite total, once reached, implies a point at which the count began; and for that beginning to occur, a single progenitor was required—the first human being.

Augustine then asks why that progenitor was one rather than many. Among the lesser creatures, God produced some species inclined toward solitude—eagles, lions, wolves—and others drawn to flock together—doves, deer—yet each kind was brought forth in groups. The human animal, poised between angelic and bestial life, was given a different origin: one individual alone, so that the entire species might recognize in its shared descent a powerful incentive toward social harmony and familial love. The woman was fashioned from the man’s own body to reinforce the same lesson, pressing home the truth that all humankind draws from a single wellspring.

God was not ignorant of what would follow. He knew that the creature endowed with free choice would rebel, becoming subject to death and transmitting mortality to his offspring. The result would be a race so fractured by conflict that even beasts—though made in numbers from earth and water—live more peaceably among their own kind than human beings do among theirs. Yet divine foreknowledge also encompassed the great multitude that grace would call to adoption, justifying them through the forgiveness of sins and uniting them with the holy angels in unending peace, once death itself had been destroyed. And that diverse company of the saved would derive lasting benefit from recalling their common ancestry, seeing in it how highly God esteems unity amid multiplicity.

Turning to the constitution of the human person, Augustine insists that the rational and intellectual soul marks humanity as the earthly creature most resembling its Maker, surpassing all other animals of land, air, and sea. How God imparted this soul—whether He first fashioned it and then breathed it into the body, or produced it through the very act of breathing—is less important than recognizing that the manner of divine working utterly transcends ordinary craftsmanship. The Almighty does not manipulate pre-existing materials with physical tools; His power is His hand, operating invisibly to accomplish visible results. Those who judge the original acts of creation incredible because they fall outside routine experience should reflect that ordinary human generation, conception and birth, would sound equally implausible to anyone who had never witnessed it.

Augustine next challenges those Platonists who attribute the making of mortal creatures to subordinate deities acting under the Supreme God’s commission. Whatever assistance celestial ministers may render in the unfolding of the world, they remain stewards rather than authors, much as those who tend orchards are not the originators of the fruit. The internal form and vitality of every living thing issue from God’s own decree, not from any external fashioner. Were His sustaining energy withdrawn, every creature would lapse immediately into the nothingness from which it was called. This holds whether the causes at work are bodily, seminal, emotional, or angelic: the underlying natures themselves owe their existence solely to the Most High.

The Platonic position becomes especially untenable when it simultaneously declares the body a penal burden for the soul and urges veneration of whichever beings fashioned that body. To honor as divine parents those whose handiwork one is counseled to flee is self-defeating: the supposed benefactors turn out to be the architects of our confinement, not our liberation. Both claims are false: souls do not re-enter mortal life as punishment, and no being other than the one Creator has brought anything into existence in heaven or on earth.

The argument draws to its close by affirming that the whole human family was contained seminally in the first man. Hidden from human eyes but present to divine foreknowledge, two communities took their rise in him: one destined to share the reward of the faithful angels, the other to suffer alongside the rebellious. God’s secret yet perfectly just judgment orders all these outcomes, so that His generosity violates no claim of equity and His severity indulges no cruelty—for all the paths of the Lord combine compassion with faithfulness.

Having concluded his examination of the world’s origins and humanity’s beginning, Augustine turns to the first transgression and the entrance of death into human experience. The question before him is not merely historical but profoundly theological: what is the nature of death, and how did it come to afflict all mankind? The answer requires careful distinction, for Scripture speaks of death in multiple senses, and understanding these distinctions proves essential for grasping both the severity of the Fall and the triumph of redemption.

God did not create humanity in the fixed immortality of the angels, who cannot die even when they sin. Rather, He established a conditional arrangement: obedience would lead to an angelic immortality and blessed eternity without any experience of death, while disobedience would bring death as a just sentence. This framework establishes from the outset that death is not natural to humanity but penal—a consequence of broken covenant rather than an inherent feature of created existence.

To understand death properly, one must recognize that the immortal soul can experience its own form of death. The soul is called immortal because it never ceases to exist or to feel, yet it can be forsaken by God, who is its true life. Similarly, the body is called mortal because it can be abandoned by the soul, which is its animating principle. Thus death operates at two levels: the soul dies when God abandons it, and the body dies when the soul departs from it. The death of the whole person occurs when the soul, already forsaken by God, in turn forsakes the body—leaving neither God as the soul’s life nor the soul as the body’s life.

This first death, which sunders the connections between God and soul and between soul and body, is followed by what Scripture calls the second death. Christ’s warning to fear Him who can destroy both soul and body in hell points toward this ultimate punishment. Yet this raises a conceptual difficulty: in the second death, the soul is not separated from the body but joined to it eternally. How can the body be said to die when it remains animated by the soul? The answer lies in recognizing that mere animation is not true life. In eternal punishment, the soul provides sensation but not blessedness—it becomes the cause of torment rather than the source of genuine vitality. Since life in its proper sense is good, and the condition of the damned is purely painful, their state is more accurately called death than life. The second death receives its name because it follows the first, completing the pattern of separation that began with God’s abandonment of the soul.