The City of God: Book 13

Having addressed the deeply difficult questions surrounding the origin of our world and the beginning of the human race, the natural order of our discussion now requires us to turn to the fall of the first man (or, we might say, the first humans), and to examine how human death originated and spread. God had not made humanity like the angels, who, even if they sinned, could not be made to die. Instead, He made human beings in such a way that if they fulfilled their obligation of obedience, they would attain an angelic immortality and a blessed eternity, with no death intervening; but if they disobeyed, death would be visited on them as a just sentence. This too was touched on in the preceding book.

But I need to be more precise about the nature of death itself. Although we rightly affirm that the human soul is immortal, it still has its own kind of death. The soul is called immortal because it never entirely ceases to live and to perceive; the body, by contrast, is called mortal because it can be completely abandoned by life and cannot sustain itself at all. The soul's death, then, occurs when God abandons it, just as the body's death occurs when the soul abandons it. The death of both together, meaning the death of the whole person, happens when the soul, having been forsaken by God, in turn forsakes the body. At that point, God is no longer the life of the soul, and the soul is no longer the life of the body. This death of the whole person is followed by what the divine scriptures call the second death. The Savior referred to this when He said, "Fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell" (Matt 10:28). Since this second death doesn't occur until the soul is so permanently united to its body that the two can never again be separated, one might reasonably wonder how the body can be said to die in that state, given that the soul doesn't abandon it there but instead animates it and makes it capable of suffering. In that eternal punishment, which we will discuss more fully in its proper place, the soul can rightly be said to die because it no longer lives in connection with God. But how can we say the body is dead, when it lives by the soul? Without that life, it couldn't feel the physical torments that follow the resurrection. Perhaps the answer is this: since life of every kind is a good thing and pain is an evil, we hesitate to call it true life when the soul's role in the body is not to sustain life but to inflict suffering. The soul lives by God when it lives rightly, and it cannot live rightly except through God's work within it. The body lives by the soul when the soul inhabits it, regardless of whether the soul itself is living by God or not. Even in the wicked, the body's life is not a life drawn from the soul's highest nature but simply from its presence; even souls that are spiritually dead, having been forsaken by God, can still sustain bodily life, however little of their own proper immortal life they retain. But in final damnation, although a person never ceases to feel, that feeling holds no sweetness of pleasure and no comfort of rest; it is purely and painfully punitive. For that reason, it is rightly called death rather than life. It is called the second death because it follows the first, which severs two things that were joined together, whether that means God and the soul, or the soul and the body. Of the first and bodily death, we can say that it is good for the good and evil for the evil. The second death, however, since it befalls none of the good, can be good for no one at all.

There is a question here we cannot avoid: is death, the separation of soul and body, actually good for the righteous? If it is, how did it come to be the punishment for sin? After all, the first humans would never have died had they not sinned. How can something be good for the good when it could only have come about through evil? And if it could only happen to the evil, then it shouldn't be good for the good at all; it simply shouldn't exist for them. Why would there be punishment where there is nothing deserving punishment? We must therefore say this: the first humans were created in such a way that, had they not sinned, they would never have experienced death in any form. But once they became sinners, they were punished with death, and that same death was passed on to everything that came from them. Nothing else could have come from them, because they could only pass on what they themselves had become. Their nature was diminished in proportion to the severity of their condemnation, so that what was a punishment in those who first sinned became a natural condition in their children. A human being is not produced the way the first man was, formed from the dust of the ground. Dust was the raw material from which man was made; a human parent is the one through whom human offspring are born. Earth and flesh are not the same thing, even though flesh is made from earth. The offspring is what the parent is. In that first man, then, the whole of human nature was contained, the nature that would be passed on through the woman to all future generations, at the very moment when that marriage union received God's sentence of condemnation. What man became, not at his creation but through his sin and its punishment, is what he transmitted to his descendants, at least as far as the origin of sin and death are concerned. Neither sin nor its punishment, however, reduced him to that helpless physical and mental weakness we see in infants. God arranged that human infants would begin life as the young of animals do, since their parents had fallen to the level of animals in the manner of their living and dying, as it is written: "Man when he was in honor understood not; he became like the beasts that have no understanding." In fact, infants are even weaker in the use and movement of their limbs, and less capable of choosing or refusing, than the most vulnerable offspring of other animals. It is as though the power latent in human nature is destined to surpass all other living things by precisely the degree to which its energy has been held back longer, and its full exercise delayed, much as an arrow flies higher the further back it has been drawn. The first man did not fall into this infantile helplessness through his reckless presumption and the just sentence that followed. Rather, human nature was corrupted and transformed in him to such a degree that he felt the war of disobedient desire raging in his body, and became subject to the necessity of dying. What he himself had become through sin and punishment, he passed on to his children: subject to both sin and death. If infants are freed from this bondage of sin by the grace of the Redeemer, they may still face the death that separates soul from body; but having been redeemed from the debt of sin, they will not pass into that second death, the endless and punishing death that has no end.

If anyone is troubled by this question, namely, how those whose guilt has been cancelled by grace can still suffer death if death is itself the punishment of sin, this difficulty has already been addressed and resolved in our other work on the baptism of infants. There we argued that the separation of soul and body was allowed to remain, even after its connection to sin was removed, for a specific reason: if the body became immortal immediately upon receiving the sacrament of regeneration, faith itself would be hollowed out. Faith is only truly faith when it waits in hope for what it cannot yet see. And it was through the strength and struggle of faith that the fear of death was overcome, as was especially evident in the holy martyrs, who could have had no victory, no glory, and indeed no conflict at all, if saints could not suffer bodily death after the washing of regeneration. Who, then, would not rush to the grace of Christ alongside the infants brought for baptism, simply to avoid leaving the body? Faith would never be tested by an unseen reward, and so it would cease to be faith altogether, demanding and receiving immediate payment for its works. But now, through the greater and more wonderful grace of the Savior, the punishment of sin has been turned into the instrument of righteousness. In the beginning, the word to humanity was: "If you sin, you will die." Now the word to the martyr is: "Die, so that you do not sin." Once it was said, "If you break the commandments, you will die;" now it is said, "If you refuse death, you break the commandment." What was once held up as a terror to keep people from sinning must now be embraced in order not to sin. Through the unspeakable mercy of God, even the punishment of wickedness has become the armor of virtue, and what was once the penalty of the sinner has become the reward of the righteous. Death was once incurred by sinning; now righteousness is fulfilled by dying. This is what we see in the holy martyrs, to whom the persecutor offers a stark choice: renounce your faith or die. The righteous choose to suffer through believing what the first transgressors suffered through not believing. Those first transgressors died because they sinned; the martyrs would sin if they did not die. The former died as a consequence of guilt; the latter prevent guilt by accepting death. It is not that death, which was once an evil, has somehow become a good. Rather, God has granted to faith this grace: that death, which stands in direct opposition to life, should become the very means by which life is reached.

The apostle, wanting to show how destructive sin is when grace doesn't come to our aid, didn't hesitate to say that the very law prohibiting sin is what gives sin its power. "The sting of death is sin, and the strength of sin is the law" (1 Cor 15:56). This is absolutely true: prohibition intensifies the desire for what is forbidden, unless righteousness is loved deeply enough that this love overcomes the pull of sin. And without divine grace, we can neither love nor find genuine delight in true righteousness. But lest anyone conclude that the law itself is evil, simply because it's called the strength of sin, the apostle addresses a similar point elsewhere: "The law indeed is holy, and the commandment holy, and just, and good. Was then that which is holy made death unto me? God forbid. But sin, that it might appear sin, working death in me by that which is good; that sin by the commandment might become exceeding sinful" (Rom 7:12-13). He says *exceeding* because the transgression becomes far worse when the growing appetite for sin leads a person to despise the law itself. Why does this matter here? Because just as the law is not evil when it inflames the desires of those who sin, neither is death a good thing simply because it magnifies the glory of those who endure it. In one case, the law is wickedly abandoned and produces transgressors; in the other, death is embraced for the sake of truth and produces martyrs. The law is genuinely good because it forbids sin, and death is genuinely evil because it is sin's wages. Yet just as wicked people misuse not only evil things but good ones as well, the righteous make good use not only of good things but of evil ones too. This is why the wicked can misuse the law even though the law is good, and why the righteous can die well even though death is an evil.

When it comes to physical death, the separation of the soul from the body, it is good for no one while it is actually happening to those in the process of dying. The sheer violence of it, the tearing apart of body and soul that had been so intimately joined and intertwined in life, produces a brutal experience that grates against nature for as long as it lasts, until sensation is finally lost altogether. That loss of sensation itself arises from the very depth of union that once existed between spirit and flesh. Sometimes this anguish is cut short by a single blow to the body or a sudden departure of the soul, so swift that nothing is felt at all. But whatever it is in the dying process that strips away all sensation through violently painful sensation, when it is borne with genuine faith and piety, it deepens the merit of patience, even if it remains, by its very nature, a punishment. Death, passing down through ordinary generation from the first man, is the punishment of all who are born from him. Yet when it is endured for the sake of righteousness, it becomes the glory of those who are born again. And though death is the consequence of sin, it can sometimes ensure that sin itself receives no further reward.

For every unbaptized person who dies confessing Christ, that confession carries the same power to forgive sins as if they had been washed in the sacred waters of baptism. The One who said, "Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God" (John 3:5), also made an exception in their favor when He said with equal force, "Whosoever shall confess me before men, him will I confess also before my Father which is in heaven" (Matt 10:32), and elsewhere, "Whosoever will lose his life for my sake, shall find it" (Matt 16:25). This is what gives meaning to the verse, "Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of His saints" (Ps 116:15). What could be more precious than a death through which all of a person's sins are forgiven and their merits multiplied a hundredfold? Those who received baptism only when death was already unavoidable, and who departed this life with their sins wiped clean, do not share the same merit as those who, though they could have delayed death, chose not to. These latter souls preferred to end their lives confessing Christ rather than denying Him in order to secure time for baptism. And even if they had denied Him under the crushing weight of fear, that too would have been forgiven in baptism, the same baptism that washed away even the staggering wickedness of those who had killed Christ Himself. How abundantly, then, must the grace of the Spirit have worked in these martyrs, He who breathes where He wills (John 3:8), given that they loved Christ so deeply they could not bring themselves to deny Him even in the most desperate of circumstances, and with so confident a hope of pardon available to them. Precious, then, is the death of the saints, those on whom the grace of Christ has worked with such transforming power that they do not hesitate to face death itself, if only they might thereby meet Him. It is precious also because it demonstrates that what was originally ordained as punishment for the sinner has been turned into the ground from which a richer harvest of righteousness grows. Yet we should not conclude from this that death is therefore a good thing. It is redirected to such beneficial ends not through any virtue of its own, but through God's direct intervention. Death was originally set before humanity as something to be dreaded, so that sin would not be committed. Now it must be faced so that sin will not be committed, or, where it has been committed, so that it may be forgiven and the reward of righteousness given to the one whose victory has earned it.

If we look at this more carefully, we'll see that even when a person dies faithfully and honorably for the truth, it is still death he is trying to avoid. He accepts one part of death precisely to escape the whole of it, including the second and eternal death beyond. He accepts the separation of soul from body so that his soul will not be separated from both God and the body at once, which would complete the full first death and deliver him into the second death forever. So death is, as I said, genuinely good for no one while it is actually being endured and while it is bringing the dying person under its power. Yet it can be accepted with merit for the sake of keeping or gaining something good. And as for what comes after death, there is nothing unreasonable in saying that death is good for the righteous and evil for the wicked. The spirits of the just, freed from their bodies, are at rest; but the spirits of the wicked suffer punishment until their bodies rise again: the righteous to everlasting life, and the others to eternal death, which is called the second death.

The moment when the souls of the good and the wicked are separated from the body raises a question: does this happen after death, or during death itself? If it happens after death, then death itself is neither good nor evil, since it is already over and done with. What matters then is the life the soul has entered into. Death was an evil when it was present, meaning when the dying person was actually experiencing it, because it brought with it a severe and painful ordeal, which good people nonetheless turn to good use. But once death has passed, how can something that no longer exists be either good or evil? If we look even more closely, we find that the intense suffering experienced by the dying is not actually death itself. As long as a person still has sensation, they are clearly still alive, and if still alive, they should be described as being on the threshold of death rather than in death. When death actually arrives, it strips away all bodily sensation, the very sensation that was so painful while death was only approaching. This makes it difficult to explain how we speak of someone who is not yet dead but is suffering through their final, mortal agony as being "in the article of death." Yet what else can we call them but dying? Because once death has actually come, we can no longer call them dying but dead. No one, then, is dying unless they are also living, since even a person in their final extremity, drawing their last breath, is still alive. The same person is therefore simultaneously dying and living: drawing near to death, departing from life, yet still in life because the spirit remains in the body, and not yet in death because the spirit has not yet left the body. But if, once the spirit has departed, the person is not even then in death but rather after death, then when exactly is anyone ever in death? On one hand, no one can be called dying if a person cannot be dying and living at the same time, and as long as the soul remains in the body, we cannot deny that the person is alive. On the other hand, if the person approaching death is to be called dying, then I cannot say who is actually living.

The moment we begin to live in this dying body, we begin moving without pause toward death. Throughout the entire course of this life (if we can even call it that), every change carries us closer to the end. There is no one who is not nearer to death this year than last, tomorrow than today, today than yesterday, a moment from now than right now, and right now than a moment ago. Whatever time we live is subtracted from our total allotment, and what remains grows smaller every day. Our whole life, then, is nothing but a race toward death, in which no one is permitted to pause, even briefly, or to slow their pace. Everyone is driven forward with the same relentless motion and equal speed. The person with a short life does not spend a single day more quickly than the person with a long one. While equal moments are taken from both without distinction, one has a nearer finish line and the other a more distant one, yet both run at the same speed. There is a difference between traveling a longer road and walking more slowly. The person who spends more time on the way to death is not moving at a more leisurely pace; he is simply covering more ground. Furthermore, if every person begins to die (that is, enters into death) as soon as death begins to make itself known by gradually withdrawing life, then he begins to die the very moment he begins to live. After all, what else is happening through all his days, hours, and moments, until this slow-working death is finally complete? Then comes the time *after death*, replacing the period in which life was being withdrawn, which we rightly call being *in death*. A person, then, is never truly in life from the moment he inhabits this dying rather than living body, at least if we accept that he cannot be in life and death simultaneously. Or should we say he is in both? In life, yes, which he lives until it is entirely spent; but also in death, which he dies as that life is consumed. If he is not in life, what exactly is being consumed until nothing remains? And if he is not in death, what is this process of consumption itself? Once all of life has been spent, the phrase "after death" would be meaningless if that consumption had not itself been death. And if, when everything has been consumed, a person is not in death but after it, then when exactly is he in death, if not during the very time when life is being consumed?

But if it's absurd to say that a man is in death before he actually reaches death (for what exactly is he moving toward as he passes through life, if he is already in death?), and if it violates ordinary usage to speak of a man as simultaneously alive and dead, just as it would be strange to call him simultaneously asleep and awake, then we are left with a genuine question: when, precisely, is a man dying? Before death arrives, he is not dying but living; and once death has come, he is not dying but dead. One state comes before death, the other after it. So when exactly is he in death, such that we can rightly call him dying? There are three moments: before death, in death, and after death. Corresponding to these are three states: living, dying, and dead. Yet it is remarkably difficult to identify the moment when a man is in death or dying, since he is neither living (which belongs to the time before death) nor dead (which belongs to the time after death), but dying (which supposedly belongs to death itself). For as long as the soul remains in the body, especially while consciousness persists, the man is clearly alive, since body and soul together constitute the man. So before death, we cannot say he is in death. But when the soul has departed and all bodily sensation is gone, death is already past, and the man is dead. Between these two states, the condition of dying finds no place to exist. If a man still lives, death has not yet arrived; if he has ceased to live, death is already past. He is therefore never actually dying, never truly caught within the state of death itself. This is similar to what happens when we try to locate the present moment in the flow of time: you reach for it and find nothing, because the present occupies no space at all; it is simply the passage of time from future to past. Should we then conclude that there is no such thing as bodily death? If death exists, where is it? It resides in no one, and no one can reside in it. If life still continues, death has not yet come, since that state belongs before death, not within it. If life has already ended, death is no longer present, since that state belongs after death, not within it. Yet if death exists neither before nor after itself, what do we mean when we say "after death" or "before death"? Such phrases are meaningless if death itself does not exist. Would that we had lived so faithfully in Paradise that death truly had no existence now. But not only does it exist; it is so terrible a thing that no human skill is adequate either to explain it or to escape it.

Let us, then, speak in the customary way (as everyone should), and call the time before death arrives "before death," as it is written: "Praise no man before his death." And when death has come, let us say that this or that took place "after death." For the present moment, we do our best with language, as when we say, "He, while dying, made his will and left this or that to such and such persons," even though, of course, he could only do so while still living, and therefore did it before death rather than in death. Let us follow the same usage Scripture itself employs, since Scripture has no hesitation in saying that the dead are not after death but in death. Consider that verse: "For in death there is no remembrance of thee" (Ps 6:5). Until the resurrection, people are rightly said to be in death, just as anyone is said to be in sleep until they wake. Yet while we can say of those who are asleep that they are sleeping, we cannot apply the same logic to the dead and say they are dying. As far as the death of the body is concerned, which is what we are discussing here, we cannot say that those already separated from their bodies are still in the process of dying. But this, you see, is precisely the point I was making: no words can adequately explain how the dying are said to live, or how the dead are said, even after death, to be in death. For how can they be after death if they are in death, especially when we don't even call them dying, the way we call those in sleep "sleeping," those in weakness "languishing," those in grief "grieving," and those in life "living"? And yet the dead, until they rise again, are said to be in death, while they cannot be called dying.

It's worth noting, then, that something fitting seems to have happened here, not by human design but perhaps by divine intention: the Latin word *moritur* (he dies) cannot be declined by grammarians according to the rules that govern similar words. The verb *oritur* (he rises) forms its perfect tense as *ortus est*, and all verbs of that type follow the same pattern, building the perfect from the past participle. But when you ask for the perfect of *moritur*, the answer you get is *mortuus est*, with a double *u*. The word *mortuus* is pronounced like *fatuus*, *arduus*, or *conspicuus*, words that are not perfect participles at all but adjectives, declined without reference to tense. Yet *mortuus*, though it has the form of an adjective, is used as a perfect participle, as though something that cannot properly be declined were being forced into that role. And so it has turned out fittingly: just as death itself cannot be declined or avoided in reality, the word that signifies it cannot be declined in grammar. Yet through the grace of our Redeemer, we may at least hope to escape the second death. That second death is far worse than the first, and is in truth the greatest of all evils, because it consists not in the separation of soul and body but in their union within eternal death. There, in stark contrast to our present experience, people will exist neither before death nor after it, but perpetually within it: never truly living, never fully dead, but dying without end. And no condition could be more catastrophically fatal than one in which death itself never dies.

When we ask what kind of death God threatened our first parents with if they broke His commandment and failed to remain obedient, whether it was the death of the soul, the death of the body, the death of the whole person, or what is called the second death, the answer is: all of them. The first death consists of two parts; the second death is the complete death, encompassing all of them. Just as the whole earth consists of many lands, and the universal Church consists of many congregations, so universal death consists of all deaths. The first death has two parts: one for the body and one for the soul. The first death is therefore a death of the whole person, since the soul, cut off from God but not yet reunited with the body, suffers punishment for a time. The second death occurs when the soul, still cut off from God but now reunited with the body, suffers punishment eternally. So when God said to the first man He had placed in Paradise, referring to the forbidden fruit, "In the day that you eat of it you shall surely die" (Gen 2:17), that warning included not only the first part of the first death, by which the soul is cut off from God; not only the second part of the first death, by which the body is cut off from the soul; not only the whole of the first death, in which the soul suffers in separation from both God and the body; but it included every form of death, all the way to that final death called the second, beyond which there is nothing further.

For as soon as our first parents broke God's commandment, divine grace abandoned them. Suddenly aware of their own wickedness, they felt shame for the first time, and so they grabbed fig leaves (probably the first thing within reach in their panicked state) to cover themselves. Their bodies hadn't changed, yet they now felt shame where before they had felt none. They experienced a strange new impulse in their flesh, a rebellion of the body against them, which was a fitting consequence of their own rebellion against God. The soul, drunk on its own freedom and refusing to serve God, lost the authority it had once held over the body. Because it had willfully abandoned its rightful Lord, it could no longer govern its own servant below. It could no longer keep the flesh in check, as it always would have been able to do had it remained subject to God. And so the flesh began to war against the spirit. We are born into that conflict, inheriting from that first sin a seed of death, and carrying in our bodies and in our corrupted nature the ongoing struggle, and sometimes the outright victory, of the flesh.

God, who is the author of human nature but not of human vice, created humanity in an upright state. Yet through an act of his own will, man became corrupted and was justly condemned, and he passed that corruption and condemnation on to his children. We were all present in that one man, because we all, in a sense, were that one man who fell into sin through the woman formed from him before the fall occurred. At that point, the distinct individual form in which each of us would live had not yet been created and distributed among us, but the seminal nature from which we would all descend was already there. Once that nature was corrupted by sin and bound by the chain of death, standing under a just condemnation, there was no other state in which a human being could be born from another human being. And so, from the misuse of free will, the entire cascade of evil originated. That evil, with all its interlocking miseries, escorts the human race from its corrupted origin, as though from a poisoned root, all the way to the destruction of the second death, which has no end. The only exceptions are those who are set free by the grace of God.

You might think that because God said "you shall die the death" rather than "deaths," He meant only the death that comes when God withdraws from the soul as its life. The soul, after all, was not abandoned by God first; it abandoned God, and was then abandoned in return. The soul's own will was the source of its evil, just as God was the source of its movement toward good, both when He first created it from nothing and when He restored it after it had fallen and perished. But even if we assume God meant only this one death, and that the words "in the day you eat of it you shall die the death" should be read as "in the day you desert me in disobedience, I will desert you in justice," then all the other deaths that inevitably follow were still implied in that warning. When the first stirring of disobedience was felt in the flesh of the disobedient soul, prompting our first parents to cover their shame, one death was already being experienced: the death that occurs when God withdraws from the soul. This was signaled by the words God spoke when Adam, paralyzed by fear, had hidden himself: "Adam, where are you?" God asked not because He didn't know, but to make Adam consider where he now stood, since God was no longer with him. Then, when the soul itself abandoned the body, leaving it to decay with age, the second death arrived, the one God had announced in pronouncing sentence on the man: "Earth you are, and to earth you shall return." These two deaths together make up what we call the first death of the whole person. And this first death is ultimately followed by the second, unless a person is freed by grace. The body would not return to the earth from which it was made except through its own proper death, which occurs when the soul, its life, departs from it. It is therefore agreed among all Christians who sincerely hold the catholic faith that we are subject to bodily death not by the law of nature, since God ordained no death for humanity in the natural order, but by His righteous judgment on account of sin. For God, in taking vengeance on sin, said to the man in whom we all then existed: "Dust you are, and to dust you shall return."

The philosophers against whom we are defending the city of God, that is, His Church, think they have good reason to mock us for claiming that the separation of the soul from the body should be understood as part of humanity's punishment. In their view, the soul reaches its fullest blessedness only when it is completely stripped of the body and returns to God as a pure, simple, and, so to speak, naked soul. If I could find nothing in their own writings to counter this position, I would be forced to argue at length that it is not the body itself, but the body's corruptibility, that weighs the soul down. This is what the scripture we quoted in an earlier book expresses: "For the corruptible body presseth down the soul" (Wis 9:15). The word "corruptible" is included to make clear that the soul is burdened not by just any body, but by the body as it has become as a consequence of sin. Even if that word had not been included, we could reasonably understand nothing else. But when Plato states quite explicitly that the gods created by the Supreme Being have immortal bodies, and when he depicts their Maker personally promising them, as a great gift, that they would remain in their bodies forever and never be released from them by any form of death, why do our opponents pretend to be ignorant of what they know perfectly well? Why, for the sake of unsettling the Christian faith, do they choose to contradict themselves rather than pass up a chance to contradict us? Here are Plato's own words, as translated by Cicero, in which he depicts the Supreme Being addressing the gods He had made: "Ye who are sprung from a divine stock, consider of what works I am the parent and author. These, your bodies, are indestructible so long as I will it, although all that is composed can be destroyed. But it is wicked to dissolve what reason has compacted. Since ye have been born, ye cannot indeed be immortal and indestructible; yet ye shall by no means be destroyed, nor shall any fates consign you to death and prove superior to my will, which is a stronger assurance of your perpetuity than those bodies to which ye were joined when ye were born." Plato, then, acknowledges that the gods are mortal by virtue of the union of body and soul, and yet are made immortal by the will and decree of their Maker. If it were truly a punishment for the soul to be joined to any body at all, why does God address them as though they feared death, that is, the separation of soul and body? Why does He reassure them by promising immortality, not on the basis of their nature, which is composite rather than simple, but on the basis of His own unbreakable will, by which He ensures that what is born does not die, and what is compounded is not dissolved, but preserved forever?

Whether Plato's view about the stars is actually true is a separate question entirely. We can't simply accept his confident claim that these luminous bodies and globes, which light the earth day and night through their physical substance, also possess intellectual and blessed souls that animate each of their bodies, just as he asserts of the universe itself, which he treats as one vast living creature containing all other creatures within it. But as I said, that's a separate question, and not one we've set out to address here. What I did think worth raising is this: a rebuttal to those who take such pride in being Platonists, or in being called Platonists, that they're embarrassed to be Christians. They can't bear to share a name with ordinary people, as if doing so would drag down the philosophers' circle, whose prestige depends entirely on its exclusivity. These men, looking for a weak point in Christian teaching, zero in on the eternity of the body as their target. They treat it as a contradiction to argue for the blessedness of the soul while also wishing it to remain permanently housed in a body, bound, as it were, in a miserable chain. And yet Plato himself, their own founder and teacher, affirms that the Supreme God granted it as a gift to the gods He had made: that they would not die, meaning they would not be separated from the bodies to which He had joined them.

These same philosophers also argue that earthly bodies cannot be eternal, yet they have no doubt that the earth itself is eternal. The earth, after all, is the central member of their god's body, not the greatest god, but still a significant one: the whole world. According to their view, the Supreme Being created another god, namely this world, which ranks above the lesser gods beneath Him. They imagine this world-god as a living creature with a rational or intellectual soul enclosed within the vast mass of its body, and with the four elements as its properly arranged and fitted members. They insist that the union of these elements must be indestructible and eternal, presumably to ensure that their great god never perishes. Given all of this, what reason is there to say that the earth, which is merely the central member in the body of a greater creature, must be eternal, while the bodies of other earthly creatures could not possibly be eternal if God chose to make them so? Earth must return to earth, they say, because the physical bodies of animals are taken from it. This, in their view, explains why death and dissolution are necessary, and how those bodies are restored to the solid, eternal earth from which they came. But if someone applied the same logic to fire, arguing that the bodies derived from it to form celestial beings must eventually return to the universal fire, wouldn't the immortality that Plato attributes to these gods, granted by the Supreme Being, simply dissolve in the heat of that argument? Or does this not happen with celestial beings because God, whose will Plato himself says overpowers all other powers, has simply willed it otherwise? If so, what prevents God from making the same provision for earthly bodies?

Plato himself acknowledges that God can prevent things that are born from dying, things that are joined from being separated, and things that are composed from being dissolved. He acknowledges that God can ordain that souls, once assigned to their bodies, will never abandon them, but will instead share with them immortality and everlasting happiness. Why, then, could He not also ensure that earthly bodies never die? Is God somehow powerless to accomplish everything the Christian faith affirms, yet fully capable of accomplishing everything the Platonists wish? Have the philosophers been granted insight into the divine purposes and power that was denied to the prophets? The truth is quite the opposite: the Spirit of God taught His prophets as much of His will as He saw fit to reveal, while the philosophers, in their attempts to discover it on their own, were led astray by human speculation.

But they should not have been led so far astray, not by ignorance alone but by sheer stubbornness, as to contradict themselves so consistently. They argue with great confidence that for the soul to achieve true happiness, it must leave behind not only its earthly body but every kind of body altogether. And yet they also hold that the gods, whose souls are supremely blessed, are permanently bound to their bodies: the celestial gods to bodies of fire, and the soul of Jupiter himself (or the world, as they prefer to interpret it) to all the physical elements that make up this entire mass stretching from earth to heaven. Plato believed that this soul is extended and diffused through musical ratios, spreading outward from the center of the earth (what geometricians call the centre) through all its parts to the farthest heights and edges of the heavens. In his view, the world is a vast, blessed, and immortal living being whose soul possesses perfect wisdom and never departs from its body, and whose body enjoys everlasting life from that soul without being hindered or weighed down by it, even though the body itself is not simple but composed of so many enormous elements. If they are willing to grant all of this on the basis of their own philosophical speculation, why do they refuse to believe that by divine will and power, immortality can be granted to earthly bodies as well, bodies in which souls would neither be crushed under their weight nor separated from them by death, but would live forever in blessedness? Do they not already claim that their own gods live in bodies of fire, and that Jupiter himself, their king, lives within the physical elements? If the soul must abandon every kind of body in order to be blessed, then let their gods flee from the starry spheres, and let Jupiter escape from earth and sky alike. And if they cannot do so, let them be declared miserable. But neither option is one these thinkers are willing to accept. On one hand, they cannot bring themselves to say that their gods have left their bodies, for that would make them appear to worship mortals. On the other hand, they cannot deny that their gods are happy, for that would mean acknowledging wretched beings as gods. The conclusion, then, is clear: blessedness does not require abandoning every kind of body, only the corruptible, burdensome, painful, and mortal kind. Not the bodies that God in His goodness designed for the first man, but only those that came as a consequence of human sin.

The philosophers argue that the natural weight of earthly bodies either keeps them on the ground or pulls them back to it, and therefore such bodies cannot exist in heaven. Our first parents did indeed live on earth, in a lush and fertile garden called Paradise. But let our opponents think more carefully about this matter of earthly weight, because it has serious implications for both the ascension of Christ's body and the resurrection bodies of the saints. If human skill can engineer vessels from metals that would otherwise sink the moment they touch water, how much more believable is it that God, working through means we cannot fully understand, could far more certainly free these earthly masses from the downward pull of gravity? This cannot be impossible for the God whose almighty will, as even Plato acknowledged, prevents created things from perishing and composite things from falling apart. And this is especially true given that the union of spiritual and bodily essences is a far greater wonder than any adjustment of bodies to other material substances. Can we not also readily believe that souls, made perfectly blessed, would be given the power to move their earthly but incorruptible bodies wherever they wish, with something close to effortless motion, and to place them wherever they choose with the greatest ease? If angels can transport any earthly creature from any location to any destination they choose, are we really to believe they do so with strain and the sensation of burden? Why, then, should we not believe that the spirits of the saints, made perfect and blessed by divine grace, can carry their own bodies wherever they please and set them down wherever they will? We have grown accustomed to noticing, when lifting heavy objects, that the larger an earthly body is, the heavier it is, and the heavier it is, the more burdensome it becomes. Yet the soul carries the limbs of its own flesh with less difficulty when those limbs are full and healthy than when they are wasted by sickness. And while a healthy, well-built man feels heavier to someone else carrying him than a thin and sickly one, the man himself moves and carries his own body with less sense of effort when he is at his strongest than when hunger or disease has reduced him to a shadow. Even in our current corruptible and mortal state, then, what matters in assessing the weight of earthly bodies is not dead weight alone, but the healthy balance of the body's parts. And what words could possibly capture the difference between what we now call health and the immortality that is yet to come? The philosophers should not think they can undermine our faith with arguments about the weight of bodies. I won't even bother asking why they find it impossible for an earthly body to exist in heaven, given that the entire earth hangs suspended on nothing. Perhaps the world holds its central position by the same law that draws all heavy bodies toward its center. But here is what I will say: if the lesser gods to whom Plato assigned the creation of humanity and other earthly creatures were able, as he claims, to strip fire of its burning quality while leaving it its capacity to illuminate, so that it could shine through the eyes; and if Plato also grants to the supreme God the power to preserve from death things that have been born, and to preserve from dissolution things composed of parts as different as body and spirit, then why should we hesitate to grant this same God the power to work on the flesh of those He has made immortal, withdrawing its corruption while leaving its nature intact, removing its burdensome weight while retaining its proper form and members? As for our belief in the resurrection of the dead and the nature of their immortal bodies, we will address that at greater length, God willing, toward the end of this work.

Let us continue, as we have been doing, to offer some explanation regarding the bodies of our first parents. My position is this: apart from sin and its just consequences, they would not have been subject even to the death that is, in its own way, good for the righteous. I mean the death that is not known only to a select few but is universally understood: the separation of soul from body, by which a creature that was visibly alive moments ago becomes visibly dead. Now, while there is no question that the souls of the just and holy dead rest in peace, it would be far better for them to be alive in healthy, sound bodies. Even those who hold that the greatest blessing is to be free of the body entirely end up contradicting themselves on this point. No one, after all, would dare to place wise men (whether still living or already dead, still in the body or soon to leave it) above the immortal gods, to whom the Supreme God in Plato promises, as a generous gift, life bound inseparably to their bodies for eternity. And yet this same Plato believes that the best thing that can happen to human beings is that they live piously and justly, and then, once separated from their bodies, are received into the company of the gods who never leave theirs. From there, "oblivious of the past, they may revisit the upper air, and conceive the longing to return again to the body." Virgil is praised for borrowing this idea from the Platonic system. Plato clearly holds that mortal souls cannot remain in their bodies forever but must inevitably be released by death; and equally, that without bodies they cannot endure eternally either, but pass in endless alternation from life to death and back again. The distinction he draws between the wise and everyone else is this: after death, the wise are carried to the stars, where each soul rests for a time in a star suited to it, before returning to the labors and miseries of mortal life once it has forgotten its former suffering and developed a renewed desire for embodiment. Those who lived foolishly, by contrast, transmigrate into bodies appropriate to their character, whether human or animal. In this way, Plato assigns even the good and wise souls a rather harsh fate, since they receive not bodies they might inhabit permanently and immortally, but only bodies they can neither keep forever nor enjoy in a state of eternal purity. We noted in an earlier book that Porphyry, in the light of the Christian era, was embarrassed by this aspect of Plato's thought. He not only freed human souls from the prospect of inhabiting animal bodies but also argued for the complete liberation of wise souls from all bodily ties, so that, escaping the flesh entirely, they might dwell as bare and blessed souls with the Father forever. And so that he would not appear to be outbid by Christ's promise of eternal life to His saints, Porphyry also placed purified souls in endless happiness, with no return to their former miseries. But to contradict Christ, he denied the resurrection of incorruptible bodies, insisting that these souls would live eternally without earthly bodies or, indeed, without any bodies at all. Whatever he intended by this teaching, he at least did not argue that these souls should withhold religious devotion from the gods who dwelt in bodies. And why not, unless because he did not believe that souls, even when separated from the body, were superior to those gods? So then: if these philosophers will not dare (and I do not think they will) to place human souls above the gods who are supremely blessed and yet are bound to their bodies for eternity, why do they find it absurd when the Christian faith teaches that our first parents were created in such a condition that, had they not sinned, they would never have been dismissed from their bodies by death? Instead, they would have received immortality as the reward of their obedience and lived forever in their bodies. And further, that the saints in the resurrection will inhabit the very bodies in which they labored here, but in such a way that no corruption or weakness will cling to their flesh, and no grief or trouble will cloud their joy.

The souls of departed saints are not troubled by the death that separates them from their bodies, because their flesh rests in hope, regardless of whatever indignities it suffers once sensation is gone. They don't wish their bodies to be forgotten, as Plato suggests they should; rather, they remember what has been promised by One who never deceives, who guaranteed the safekeeping of even the hairs of their heads. With patient longing, they wait in hope for the resurrection of their bodies, bodies that endured so much hardship and will never suffer again. If they did not "hate their own flesh" when it resisted their will through its natural weakness and had to be restrained by the spiritual law, how much more will they love it when it has itself become spiritual? Just as the spirit is rightly called carnal when it serves the flesh, so the flesh will rightly be called spiritual when it serves the spirit. This doesn't mean it's converted into spirit, as some imagine from the words "It is sown in corruption, it is raised in incorruption" (1 Cor 15:42); rather, it means the flesh will be perfectly and wonderfully subject to the spirit, responding in all things to a will that has entered into immortality, with all resistance, all corruption, and all sluggishness stripped away. The body will not only surpass its finest condition of health in this life; it will exceed even the bodies of our first parents before they sinned. Though they were not destined to die unless they sinned, they still ate food as we do now, their bodies being not yet spiritual but merely physical. And though they did not decay with age or draw closer to death (a condition secured for them by God's remarkable grace through the tree of life, which grew alongside the forbidden tree in the middle of Paradise), they still required other nourishment, though not from that one tree. That tree was forbidden not because it was harmful in itself, but to uphold a pure and simple obedience, which is the great virtue of a rational creature living under the Creator as Lord. Though nothing evil was touched, touching anything that was forbidden was itself sin through the very act of disobedience. They were nourished by other fruit, which they ate so that their physical bodies would not suffer the discomfort of hunger or thirst; but they ate from the tree of life so that death could not approach them from any direction and so that age could not wear them down into decay. Other fruits were, so to speak, their daily nourishment, while this one was their sacrament. In this way, the tree of life in the earthly Paradise appears to have served the same role that the wisdom of God serves in the spiritual realm, of which it is written, "She is a tree of life to them that lay hold upon her" (Prov 3:18).

Some interpreters allegorize everything connected with Paradise, the place where, according to the truth of holy Scripture, the first human beings and parents of our race actually lived. They treat all its trees and fruit-bearing plants as symbols of virtues and ways of life, as though none of these things existed in the physical world but were described only to convey spiritual meaning. As if a real, earthly Paradise were impossible! As if Sarah and Hagar never actually existed as women, and as if the two sons born to Abraham, one by the slave woman and one by the free, never truly lived, simply because the apostle says they prefigured the two covenants. Or as if water never literally flowed from the rock when Moses struck it, simply because Christ can be seen in that event as a figure, as the same apostle says: "Now that rock was Christ!" No one, of course, denies that Paradise can signify the life of the blessed; that its four rivers can represent the four virtues of prudence, fortitude, temperance, and justice; that its trees can stand for all useful knowledge; its fruits for the habits of the godly; its tree of life for wisdom herself, the mother of all good; and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil for the experience of a broken commandment. The punishment God appointed was just in itself, and therefore good; but man's experience of it is anything but good.

All of this can be understood more profitably as referring to the Church, so that these details become prophetic foreshadowings of things to come. In this reading, Paradise is the Church, as it is called in the Song of Songs; the four rivers of Paradise are the four Gospels; the fruit trees are the saints, and their fruit represents the saints' works; the tree of life is the holy of holies, Christ Himself; and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is the free choice of the will. If a man despises the will of God, he can only bring ruin on himself, and in doing so he learns the difference between dedicating himself to the common good and wallowing in self-indulgence. The person who loves only himself is left to himself, so that, overwhelmed by fears and sorrows, he may cry out (if there is still enough soul in him to feel his misery) in the words of the psalm, "My soul is cast down within me" (Ps 42:6), and then, once chastened, may say, "Because of His strength I will wait upon You." These and similar allegorical readings of Paradise can be offered without offending anyone, provided we still hold firmly to the literal truth of the history, which is confirmed by its detailed and circumstantial account of actual events.

The bodies of the righteous, as they will exist after the resurrection, will have no need of fruit to protect them from disease or the slow decay of old age, nor any other physical nourishment to quiet the pangs of hunger or thirst. They will be clothed in an immortality so complete and unassailable that they will eat only when they choose, free from any compulsion to do so, while still retaining the full capacity for it. This is consistent with how the angels presented themselves to human sight and touch: not because they had no other option, but because they were both able and willing to accommodate themselves to human beings through a kind of ministry suited to our nature. We should not assume, when men received angels as guests, that those angels only appeared to eat. To anyone who did not know them to be angels, they might well have seemed to eat out of the same necessity as we do. Hence the words spoken in the Book of Tobit: "You saw me eat, but you saw it only in a vision" (Tob 12:19), meaning: you assumed I was taking food as you do, to sustain my body. If a different interpretation seems more defensible in the case of the angels, our faith certainly leaves no room for doubt regarding our Lord Himself. Even after His resurrection, now present in flesh that was spiritual yet genuinely real, He ate and drank with His disciples. What is removed from these bodies is not the capacity for eating and drinking, but the necessity of it. They will be spiritual, then, not because they will cease to be bodies, but because they will be sustained by the life-giving Spirit.

For just as our bodies, which have a living soul but not yet a life-giving spirit, are called soul-animated bodies without actually being souls themselves, so too are those future bodies called spiritual without being spirits. God forbid we should think otherwise. These bodies will be quickened by the Spirit and will possess the substance of flesh, but none of its heaviness or decay. At that point, humanity will be not earthly but heavenly, not because the body will be something other than what was made from earth, but because its heavenly transformation will make it a fitting inhabitant of heaven. This happens not by abandoning its nature, but by changing its quality. The first man, earthly and made from earth, was given a living soul rather than a life-giving spirit, since that higher rank was reserved for him as the reward of obedience. His body required food and drink to satisfy hunger and thirst, and it had no absolute or indestructible immortality; instead, it held death at bay through the tree of life, remaining in the fullness of youth. That body was undoubtedly not spiritual but animal in nature, and yet it would never have died had it not provoked God's threatened judgment through sin. And though sustenance was not denied him even outside Paradise, once he was cut off from the tree of life he was handed over to the slow erosion of time, at least with respect to that life which, had he not sinned, he might have retained forever in Paradise, even in an animal body, until obedience had earned its transformation into something spiritual.

So, while we understand that this visible death, the separation of soul and body, was also implied when God said, "In the day you eat of it you will surely die" (Gen 2:17), we shouldn't find it strange that Adam and Eve were not immediately expelled from their bodies on the very day they ate the forbidden fruit. On that day, their nature was genuinely corrupted and degraded, and through their entirely just exclusion from the tree of life, they were bound to the necessity of bodily death, the same necessity into which we are all born. This is why the apostle doesn't say, "The body is doomed to die because of sin," but rather, "The body is dead because of sin." He then adds, "But if the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through His Spirit who dwells in you" (Rom 8:11). In that future state, the body will become a life-giving spirit, though right now it is merely a living soul; and yet the apostle already calls it "dead," because it already lies under the inescapable sentence of dying. In Paradise, however, the body was made a living soul, though not yet a life-giving spirit, and it could not rightly be called dead, because apart from sin it had no power over it. Now, since God's words "Adam, where are you?" (Gen 3:9) pointed to the death of the soul, which occurs when He withdraws from it, and since the words "You are dust, and to dust you will return" (Gen 3:19) signified the death of the body, which occurs when the soul departs from it, we are led to conclude that God said nothing about the second death, choosing to keep it hidden and reserving its full disclosure for the New Testament era, where it is revealed with complete clarity. He did this so that, first of all, it would be plain that this first death, which is universal, was the consequence of that sin which in one man became universal. The second death, however, is not universal; those are excepted who were "called according to His purpose. For whom He foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the firstborn among many brothers" (Rom 8:28-29). These are the ones whom the grace of God, through a Mediator, has rescued from the second death.

Thus the apostle establishes that the first man was made with a physical, animal body. Wanting to distinguish the animal body we now have from the spiritual body we will receive at the resurrection, he writes: "It is sown in corruption, it is raised in incorruption; it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body" (1 Cor 15:42-44). He then moves to prove this point: "There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body" (1 Cor 15:44). To clarify what the animal body actually is, he adds, "Thus it was written, The first man Adam was made a living soul, the last Adam was made a quickening spirit" (1 Cor 15:45). His aim here is to explain the nature of the animal body, even though Scripture itself, when describing how God breathed life into Adam, does not say "Man was made in an animal body" but rather "Man was made a living soul" (Gen 2:7). Through the phrase "the first man was made a living soul," then, the apostle intends us to understand man's animal body. And to show what the spiritual body is, he adds that "the last Adam was made a quickening spirit," a clear reference to Christ, who rose from the dead in a state that can never again be touched by death. He then continues: "But that was not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural; and afterward that which is spiritual" (1 Cor 15:46). Here he makes his meaning even more explicit: when he spoke of the first man being made a living soul, he meant the animal body, and when he spoke of the last man being made a quickening spirit, he meant the spiritual body. The animal body comes first. It is the body the first Adam possessed, a body that would never have died had he not sinned. It is also the body we now carry, though sin has so altered and corrupted its nature that death has become inescapable for us. It is, moreover, the body that Christ himself chose to take on, not because He had to, but because He freely willed it. After this comes the spiritual body, which Christ as our head already wears in anticipation of the resurrection, and which His members will one day share when the dead are raised.

Paul then draws a striking contrast between these two men, writing: "The first man is of the earth, earthy; the second man is the Lord from heaven. As is the earthy, such are they also that are earthy; and as is the heavenly, such are they also that are heavenly. And as we have borne the image of the earthy, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly" (1 Cor 15:47-49). Elsewhere he says, "As many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ" (Gal 3:27); but this will only be fully realized when what is natural in us by birth has become spiritual through resurrection. To use his words again, "We are saved by hope" (Rom 8:24). We bear the image of the earthly man through the transmission of sin and death, which pass to us through ordinary generation; but we bear the image of the heavenly man through the grace of forgiveness and eternal life, which regeneration grants us through the one Mediator between God and humanity, the man Christ Jesus. He is the heavenly Man Paul speaks of, because He came down from heaven to take on a body of earthly mortality, so that He might clothe it with heavenly immortality. Paul calls others heavenly because, by grace, they become Christ's members, so that together with them He becomes one Christ, as head and body. In the same letter, Paul makes this even clearer: "Since by man came death, by Man came also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive" (1 Cor 15:21-22), that is, in a spiritual body that will be made a life-giving spirit. This doesn't mean that everyone who dies in Adam will become a member of Christ, since the great majority will face eternal death; rather, Paul uses "all" in both clauses because, just as no one dies in a natural body except in Adam, so no one is raised in a spiritual body except in Christ. We should not, therefore, assume that in the resurrection we will have the same kind of body the first man had before he sinned, nor should we read the words "as is the earthy, such are they also that are earthy" as referring to something brought about by sin. We should not imagine that Adam had a spiritual body before he fell and that it was changed into a natural body as punishment for his sin. Anyone who thinks this has paid little attention to the words of so great a teacher, who says: "There is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body; as it is written, The first man Adam was made a living soul" (1 Cor 15:44-45). Was Adam made a living soul only after he sinned? Wasn't this precisely his original condition, the very state from which the apostle draws his evidence to explain what the natural body is?

Some readers have hastily concluded from the words "God breathed into Adam's nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul" that no new soul was given to man at that moment, but rather that a soul already present was quickened by the Holy Spirit. They find support for this reading in the fact that after His resurrection, the Lord Jesus breathed on His disciples and said, "Receive the Holy Spirit." From this they infer that both events accomplished the same thing, as if the evangelist had continued by writing that the disciples became living souls. But even if he had added those words, we would only understand that the Spirit is, in some sense, the very life of souls, and that without Him rational souls must be considered dead, however alive their bodies may appear to our eyes. The actual words of the creation account, however, show clearly enough that this is not what happened when man was first made: "And God made man dust of the earth," which some have tried to render more precisely as "And God formed man of the clay of the earth." This reading is supported by an earlier verse stating that "a mist went up from the earth and watered the whole face of the ground," which sets up the image of clay formed from that moisture and dust. Immediately following that verse comes the announcement "And God created man dust of the earth," at least according to those Greek manuscripts from which this passage was translated into Latin. Whether one prefers "created" or "formed" as a translation of the Greek επλασεν is not a matter of great importance, though "formed" is the stronger rendering. Those who preferred "created" believed it helped them avoid an ambiguity in Latin, where the verb "to form" (formare) can carry the sense of fabricating something false or fictitious. In any case, this man, shaped from the dust of the earth or from moistened dust and clay, this "dust of the earth" (to use Scripture's own words) was made, as the apostle teaches, an animated body when he received a soul. As Paul puts it, this man "was made a living soul," meaning that this fashioned dust became a living soul.

They argue that he already had a soul, otherwise he could not be called a man, since a man is neither body alone nor soul alone, but a being composed of both. This is true enough: the soul is not the whole man, but the *better part* of man; the body is not the whole man either, but the lesser part; and when the two are joined together, they receive the name "man," though they don't individually lose that name even when we speak of them separately. Who is prevented from saying, in ordinary conversation, "That man is dead, and is now at rest or in torment," even though this can only refer to the soul? Or "He is buried in such and such a place," even though this refers only to the body? Will they claim that Scripture avoids this kind of usage? On the contrary, Scripture embraces it so thoroughly that even while a man is alive and body and soul are united, it refers to each of them individually as "*man*," calling the soul the "inward man" and the body the "outward man," as though there were two men, when in reality both together are only one. We must be careful, though, to understand in what sense man is said to be made in the image of God, and yet is dust and will return to dust. The first statement refers to the rational soul, which God conveyed to man, that is, to his body, through His breathing, or more precisely, through His inspiration. The second refers to the body, which God formed from the dust and to which a soul was given so that it might become a living body, and so that man might become a living soul.

When our Lord breathed on His disciples and said, "Receive the Holy Spirit," He clearly intended them to understand that the Holy Spirit belongs not only to the Father but equally to the only-begotten Son. The Spirit is, in fact, the Spirit of both Father and Son, forming with them the Trinity of Father, Son, and Spirit, not a creature but the Creator. The physical breath that came from His bodily mouth was not the actual substance and nature of the Holy Spirit; it was, as I noted, a sign that the Holy Spirit is shared between Father and Son, for they do not each possess a separate Spirit but together share one and the same Spirit. In sacred Scripture, this Spirit is consistently referred to by the Greek word *pneuma*, just as the Lord used it in the passage cited when He gave the Spirit to His disciples and signaled the gift through the breath of His lips. I cannot recall a single place in all of Scripture where the Spirit is called by any other name. In the passage that reads, "The Lord formed man from the dust of the earth and breathed into his face the breath of life," however, the Greek does not use *pneuma*, the standard word for the Holy Spirit, but rather *pnoe*, a word more commonly applied to creatures than to the Creator. For this reason, some Latin translators have preferred to render it as "breath" rather than "spirit." This same word also appears in the Greek of Isa 57:16, where God says, "I have made all breath," meaning, without question, all souls. Accordingly, *pnoe* is translated variously as "breath," "spirit," "inspiration," "aspiration," or "soul," even when it refers to God. *Pneuma*, by contrast, is consistently rendered as "spirit," whether referring to the spirit of a human being (as the apostle says, "What man knows the things of a man, except the spirit of man which is in him?"), or to the spirit of an animal (as in the book of Solomon: "Who knows the spirit of man that goes upward, and the spirit of the beast that goes downward to the earth?"), or to the physical spirit we call wind (as the Psalmist names it: "Fire and hail, snow and vapors, stormy wind"), or to the uncreated Creator Spirit, of whom the Lord said in the Gospel, "Receive the Holy Spirit," signaling the gift through the breath of His mouth, and of whom He also spoke when He said, "Go and baptize all nations in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit," words that express and commend the Trinity with particular clarity, and again when Scripture says, "God is a Spirit," along with many other passages throughout the sacred writings. In none of these scriptural quotations does the Greek use *pnoe*; it uses *pneuma* throughout, and in Latin, not *flatus* but *spiritus*. Returning, then, to the passage that reads, "He breathed into his face the breath of life," we should note that even if the Greek had used *pneuma* rather than *pnoe* (which it does not), that would still not require us to conclude that the Creator Spirit, who within the Trinity is distinctively called the Holy Spirit, was intended, since, as has already been shown, *pneuma* clearly applies not only to the Creator but to creatures as well.

But they argue that when Scripture uses the word "spirit," it would not have added "of life" unless it meant us to understand the Holy Spirit; and that when it says "Man became a soul," it would not have inserted the word "living" unless this referred to the life of the soul that is given to it from above as a gift from God. Since the soul already has a life of its own, they ask, why would Scripture need to add "living" at all, unless to indicate the life imparted by the Holy Spirit? Yet this is nothing more than fighting stubbornly for their own assumptions while carelessly ignoring what Scripture actually teaches. With very little effort, they could have found, just a few pages earlier in this same book of Genesis, the words "Let the earth bring forth the living soul," spoken at the creation of all the land animals. And then, a short while later in the same book, how could they have missed this verse: "All in whose nostrils was the breath of life, of all that was in the dry land, died" (Gen 7:22), which signifies that every creature living on the earth had perished in the flood? If Scripture habitually speaks of both the "living soul" and the "spirit of life" even in reference to animals, and if in the passage that reads "All things which have the spirit of life" the Greek word used is *pnoe* (breath, *πνοή*) rather than *pneuma* (spirit, *πνεῦμα*), then we might just as reasonably ask: why was it necessary to add "living," since a soul cannot exist without being alive? Or why add "of life" after the word "spirit"? The answer is that Scripture uses these expressions in its ordinary way when speaking of animals, that is, of animated bodies in which the soul serves as the seat of sensation. But when Scripture turns to speak of man, we suddenly forget this ordinary and well-established usage, by which it indicates that man received a rational soul, one that was not drawn from the waters and the earth as the other living creatures were, but was created directly by the breath of God. Even so, this act of creation was ordered in such a way that the human soul would live in an animal body, just like those other creatures of which Scripture says "Let the earth produce every living soul," and of which it again says that in them is the breath of life, using the Greek word *pnoe* (*πνοή*) rather than *pneuma* (*πνεῦμα*), where clearly it is not the Holy Spirit being named, but simply their own spirit.

But they also object that the breath was said to come from the mouth of God, and if we take that breath to be the soul, we must therefore conclude that the soul shares the same substance as, and is equal to, that Wisdom which says, "I come out of the mouth of the Most High." Wisdom, however, does not say it was breathed out of God's mouth, but that it proceeded from it. Now, when we breathe, we can produce breath not from our own human nature but from the surrounding air, which we draw in and release with each breath. In the same way, almighty God was able to create breath not from His own nature, nor from any creature below Him, but from nothing at all. When He communicated this breath to the human body, it is entirely fitting to say that He breathed or inspired it into man: the Immaterial breathing something also immaterial, but the Immutable not breathing something equally immutable, since the breath was created while He remains uncreated. Yet, for the benefit of those who are quick to quote Scripture but unfamiliar with its patterns of speech, let them consider that not everything said to proceed from God's mouth is therefore equal to Him or of the same substance. Let them hear or read what God Himself says: "So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth" (Rev 3:16).

There is no basis, then, for objecting when the apostle so clearly distinguishes the natural body from the spiritual one, that is, the body we inhabit now from the body we will one day have. He writes: "It is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body. There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body. And so it is written, The first man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit. However, that which is spiritual was not first, but that which is natural; and afterward that which is spiritual. The first man is of the earth, earthy; the second man is the Lord from heaven. As is the earthy, such are they also that are earthy; and as is the heavenly, such are they also that are heavenly. And as we have borne the image of the earthy, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly" (1 Cor 15:44-49). We have already discussed all of these words at length. The natural body in which the apostle says the first man Adam was made was not created incapable of death, but rather capable of avoiding death so long as he did not sin. The body that will one day be made spiritual and immortal by the quickening Spirit, however, will be entirely incapable of dying. Consider how the soul was created immortal: even though sin can be said to cause a kind of death in it, and it does lose something vital, namely the Spirit of God by whom it was enabled to live wisely and blessedly, it never stops living some form of life, however miserable, because immortality is woven into its very nature. In the same way, the rebellious angels, though they died in a certain sense by sinning, because they abandoned God, the Fountain of life, from whom they drew the wisdom and goodness to live well, could not die so completely as to cease living and feeling altogether, for they too are immortal by creation. After the final judgment, they will be cast into the second death, and even there they will not be stripped of life or sensation, but will endure torment. As for those people who have been embraced by God's grace and have become fellow citizens with the holy angels who remained in blessedness, they will never again sin or die; clothed in spiritual bodies and wrapped in the same immortality the angels enjoy, an immortality that cannot be stripped away even by sin, the nature of their flesh will remain, but every trace of corruption and heaviness will be gone.

There is one more question that must be addressed and, with the help of the Lord God of truth, answered: If the unruly stirring of desire in the bodies of our first parents arose from their sin, and only after divine grace had abandoned them; and if it was at that moment that their eyes were opened to see, or more precisely to notice, their nakedness, and they covered their shame because the shameless movement of their bodies was no longer subject to their will, then how would they have conceived children had they remained sinless as God created them? But since this book must now come to a close, and so large a question cannot be dealt with briefly, we will carry it forward into the next book, where it can be treated more fully and properly.