The City of God: Book 14

In our previous books, we said that God chose to bring all people into existence from one man, both to preserve human nature within a single social bond and to make their shared origin the foundation of their unity of heart. None of this race would ever have died, had not the first two (one made from the other, and the other from nothing) brought this punishment on themselves through their disobedience. By committing so great a sin, they corrupted their entire nature, and that corruption passed down to all their descendants in equal measure, along with the necessity of death. Death's dominion over humanity became so absolute that all would have been cast headlong into the second death, which has no end, as the just consequence of that sin, had not God's undeserved grace rescued some from it. And so it is that, while humanity is divided into countless nations, each distinct in language, customs, dress, and way of life, there are really only two kinds of people, and these make up the two cities we have been describing: those who live according to the flesh, and those who live according to the spirit. Each kind, when it reaches what it desires, lives in its own particular peace.

We need to begin by understanding what it means to live "according to the flesh" and what it means to live "according to the spirit." A careless reader, one who hasn't thought carefully about Scripture, might assume that the Epicureans were the ones who lived according to the flesh, since they made bodily pleasure their *summum bonum* (highest good), along with anyone else who held physical enjoyment to be humanity's greatest end. The same might be said of ordinary people who, not out of any philosophical conviction but simply out of their own appetite for pleasure, can find delight only in what is physical and sensual. By contrast, such a reader might assume that the Stoics, who placed the highest good in the mind, lived according to the spirit, since what is the human mind if not the spirit? But Scripture proves that both groups are following the way of the flesh. The word "flesh" in Scripture refers not only to an earthly, animate body, as when it says, "All flesh is not the same flesh; for there is one flesh of men, and another flesh of beasts, and another of fishes, and another of birds" (1 Cor 15:39); it is also used in quite different senses. Among those senses is one in which the whole person, that is, the entire human nature, is called "flesh," using the part to stand for the whole. Consider: "By the works of the law shall no flesh living be justified" (Ps 143:2). What does "no flesh" mean here but "no person"? Paul makes this plain immediately: "A man is justified by faith without the works of the law" (Rom 3:28). And elsewhere: "No man is justified by the law" (Gal 3:11). Then there is "The Word was made flesh" (John 1:14): what does that mean but that He became a man? Some who misread that passage concluded that Christ had no human soul. For just as the part stands for the whole in Mary Magdalene's words, "They have taken away my Lord and I know not where they have laid Him" (John 20:13), where she was referring only to the body of Christ, which she believed had been removed from the tomb, so too "flesh" stands for the whole person in the passages cited above. Since Scripture uses "flesh" in so many senses (too many to catalogue here), and since living according to the flesh is a course of evil even though the flesh itself is not evil, let us look carefully at the passage in Paul's letter to the Galatians where he writes: "The works of the flesh are manifest, which are adultery, fornication, uncleanness, wantonness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, debate, emulation, wrath, contentions, seditions, heresies, envy, drunkenness, gluttony, and suchlike, whereof I tell you now, as I told you before, that they which do those things shall not inherit the kingdom of God" (Gal 5:19-21).

A careful reading of this passage from the apostle will quickly show us (as far as we need to establish here) what it means to live according to the flesh. Among the works of the flesh that he lists and condemns, we find not only sins tied to bodily pleasure and indulgence, such as fornication, impurity, excess, and drunkenness, but also sins that expose the corruption of the mind, which have nothing to do with fleshly pleasure at all. Who would argue that idolatry, witchcraft, enmity, contention, rivalry, wrath, envy, sedition, and heresy are bodily vices rather than mental ones? A man might, out of reverence for some idolatrous or heretical error, abstain entirely from the lusts of the body, and yet, by the apostle's own words, he still "lives according to the flesh." In avoiding one kind of fleshly work, he commits the most damnable works of all. Who harbors enmity in his heart? Or who says to his enemy, or to someone he takes for an enemy, "You have an evil flesh against me"? Nobody says that. They say: "You have an evil mind against me." Finally, just as everyone who hears those carnal vices listed would agree they belong to the flesh, so everyone who hears those mental crimes named refers them to the mind. Why, then, does this true and faithful teacher of the Gentiles call them "the works of the flesh," unless he uses "flesh" to mean the whole person, taking the part for the whole?

If anyone claims that the flesh is the cause of the soul's corruption, they misunderstand human nature. The corruptible body does burden the soul, and the apostle, speaking of this corruptible body (having already said that "our outward man" is being corrupted), writes: "That if our earthly house of habitation be destroyed, we have a building given of God, an house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens, for this we sigh, desiring to be clothed with that habitation which we have in heaven. For we that are in this habitation, sigh, and are burdened, because we would not be unclothed, but clothed upon, that mortality might be swallowed up of life" (2 Cor 5:1-4). We are therefore burdened by this corruptible body, and yet knowing that it is not the body's nature but its corruption that causes this burden, we do not wish to be stripped of it, but rather to have immortality clothed over it. It will still be a body, but no longer a burden, because it will have become incorruptible. So for now, the corruptible body weighs heavily on the soul, and our earthly dwelling holds down the mind that strains to expand. Yet those who think the evils of the mind arise from the body are mistaken. Even Virgil, who seems to express a straightforward Platonism in these lines:

"Igneus est ollis vigor et celestis origo,

Seminibus, quamtum non noxia corpora tardant,

Terrenique hebetant artus, moribundaque membra."

'Those seeds have fiery vigor, heavenly spring,

So far as bodies hinder not with fullness,

Or earthly dying members clog with dullness.'

appears to trace the four well-known passions of the mind, desire, fear, joy, and sorrow, as the roots of all guilt, entirely back to the body, in the lines that follow:

"Hinc metuunt, cupiuntque, dolent, gaudentque, nec auras

Suscipiunt, clausæ tenebris et carcere cæco."

'Here hence they fear, desire, displeased, content,

Nor look to heaven, in dark blind prison pent.'

Yet our faith teaches us otherwise. The corruption that weighs so heavily on the soul is the *punishment* of the first sin, not its cause. The corruptible flesh did not make the soul sin; the sinning soul made the flesh corruptible. And while that corruption does give rise to certain temptations and sinful desires, we cannot blame all the sins of an evil life on the flesh. If we did, we would have to call the devil sinless, since he has no flesh. We cannot call him a fornicator or a drunkard, or apply any of those carnal labels to him (though he secretly provokes others to all of these), yet he is rightly called supremely proud and envious, and those vices have taken such complete hold of him that he is destined for eternal torment in the dark prisons of the lower air. Now the apostle calls the vices that dominate him "works of the flesh," even though the devil clearly has no flesh. Paul says that enmity, contention, jealousy, wrath, and envy are works of the flesh, and all of these are rooted in pride, yet pride reigns in the fleshless devil. Who hates the saints more than he does? Who is more envious, contentious, jealous, and wrathful toward them? He does all of this without a body, so how can these be called works of the flesh? Because they are the works of humanity, which, as I noted earlier, is what the apostle means by "flesh." For humanity came to resemble the devil not by having a body (the devil has none) but by living according to its own desires, that is, according to the merely human, or fleshly, self. This is what the devil chose when he abandoned the truth and became a liar, not through God but through himself, who is both a liar and the father of lies. He lied first, and from him both sin and lying had their beginning.

Therefore, a man who lives according to his own nature rather than according to God is like the devil. An angel should not live according to his own angelic nature either, but according to God: remaining in the truth, speaking truth that comes from God, and not lies that come from himself. The apostle speaks of this when he writes, "If the truth of God hath abounded through my lying" (Rom 3:7), calling the lie his own and the truth God's. So whoever lives according to the truth lives according to God, not according to himself. For God said, "I am the truth" (John 14:6). But whoever does not live this way, living instead according to himself, lives according to lying. This is not because man, whom God created and who never created a lie, is the author of lying. Rather, it is because man was created upright, meant to live according to his Creator rather than himself: to do God's will rather than his own. To fail to live as he was made to live is itself a lie. He wants to be blessed, yet refuses to live in the way that makes blessedness possible. What could be more dishonest than such a desire? And so it is rightly said that every sin is a lie. For we never sin except out of a desire to do ourselves good, or to spare ourselves some harm.

Therefore, when what we think will help us actually harms us, or what we think will improve us only makes us worse, where does this come from if not from the fact that a person can only find true good in God? When we sin, we forsake God, and we find nothing good in ourselves when we live according to our own nature, since that very way of living is itself sin. When we said earlier that the conflict between the two cities arose because some lived according to the flesh and others according to the Spirit, we could just as well have said it is because some live according to human nature and others according to God. Paul says plainly to the Corinthians, "Seeing there is emulation and contention amongst you, are ye not carnal, and walk according to man?" (1 Cor 3:3). To walk according to man, then, is to walk according to the flesh, since "man" here is understood in his lower aspect. Those whom Paul calls "carnal" in that passage he had earlier called "natural," saying: "What man knoweth the things of a man but the spirit of a man, which is in him? even so, no man knoweth the things of God but the Spirit of God. Now we have not received the Spirit of the Word, but the Spirit which is of God, that we might know the things that God hath given us, which things also we speak, not in the words which man's wisdom teacheth, but being taught by the Spirit, comparing spiritual things with spiritual things. But the natural man perceiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him" (1 Cor 2:11-14). Then, a little later, he addressed those same natural men: "I would not speak unto you brethren as unto spiritual men, but as unto carnal" (1 Cor 3:1). Here we see the rhetorical figure in which a part stands for the whole: the whole person can be represented either by the soul or by the flesh, since both are parts of the person. So "natural man" and "carnal man" are not two different things but one and the same, namely a person who lives according to human nature, which is precisely what those passages intend. "By the works of the law shall no flesh be justified" (Gal 2:16), and where it says "seventy-five souls went down with Jacob into Egypt" (Acts 7:14), in the first case "flesh" means the whole person, and in the second, "seventy-five souls" means seventy-five persons. In the same way, where Paul writes "not in the words which man's wisdom teaches," he could equally have written "which carnal wisdom teaches," or, instead of "according to man," he could have written "according to the flesh." This becomes even clearer in what follows: "When one says, I am of Paul, and another, I am of Apollos, are ye not men?" (1 Cor 3:4). What he had previously called "natural" and "carnal," he now calls simply "men," meaning: you are living according to human nature rather than according to God. If you had followed God in your lives, you would have been made gods from men.

We should not wrong our Creator by blaming our vices on the flesh. The flesh itself is good; the problem is abandoning the Creator in order to live according to this created good. This applies whether a person chooses to live according to the body, the soul, or both together, which together make up the whole human being, who may rightly be described by either part. The person who treats the soul's nature as the highest good and the body's nature as the greatest evil ends up desiring the soul in a carnal way and fleeing the flesh in a carnal way, forming his conception of both from human vanity rather than from what divine truth teaches. The Platonists, to their credit, are not as extreme as the Manichees, who despise the physical body as the natural source of all evil while simultaneously making God the Creator of all the elements, parts, and qualities that make up the visible world. Yet even the Platonists hold that our mortal members produce the emotions of fear, desire, joy, and sorrow in our bodies, and that from these four disturbances (which Cicero calls *perturbations*, though other translators prefer *passions*) the whole flood of human wickedness has its source and origin. If that is so, then why does Aeneas in Virgil, on hearing from his father that souls were to return to bodies, react with wonder and cry out:

"O pater anne aliquas ad cœlum hinc ire putandum est,

Sublimes animas, iterumque ad tarda reverti

Corpora? quæ lucis miseris tam dira cupido?"

"What, father, do you think the souls are taken

To heaven, and thence to this dull flesh return?

What dire compulsion drives them back to pain?"

Is this same dire effect still present in the soul after it has been freed from the body's burden in such celebrated purity? Does he not claim they are purged of all bodily infection, when they desire to return to the body again? If that were so (and it is a completely empty position to hold), there would be an eternal cycle of pollution and purification. In that case, it cannot truly be said that all corrupt desires are effects of the flesh, because, as this distinguished speaker himself says, "that dire effect which compels the soul, purged of all earthly contagion, to desire the body again" does not come from the body. And so they end up conceding what they set out to deny: that the soul's evil affections, including desire, fear, joy, and sorrow, all arise from the flesh. But in fact, the soul may have those passions entirely on its own.

But the quality of a person's will matters enormously. If the will is corrupt, all those emotional motions are corrupt as well; if it is good, they are both blameless and praiseworthy. There is a will present in all of them, and more than that: they are all expressions of will. What is desire but a will consenting to what we want? What is fear but a will recoiling from what we dislike? When we consent to wanting something, that is desire; when we consent to enjoying something, that is delight. When we dislike something and wish it would not happen, that will is fear; when we dislike something that has already happened, that is grief or sorrow. And so our passions vary according to the things we seek or avoid, and according to whether the will consents or recoils.

A person who makes God, rather than himself, the guide of his life should love what is good and therefore hate what is evil. And since no one is evil by nature but only by vice, the person who lives according to God's love must direct his full hatred toward the evil itself: not hating the person for his vice, nor loving the vice for the person's sake, but hating the vice and loving the person. For once the vice is healed, there will be nothing left to hate and everything left to love.

For anyone resolved to love God and their neighbor according to God rather than human standards: this love is called good will, and more commonly in Scripture it is called charity, though sometimes it is also called love there. The apostle, after all, requires his bishop to be a lover of good. And when our Lord asked Peter, "Simon son of Jonas, do you love Me more than these?" Peter answered, "Lord, you know that I love You." He asked him again, and Peter answered the same way. Then He asked him a third time, using the Greek *φιλῶ* (the Latin *amo*, meaning "to love"), whereas He had used *ἀγαπάω* (the Latin *diligo*, meaning "to cherish") in the first two questions. This was simply to show that *diligere* and *amare* both mean "to love," just as Peter had used the same word in all three of his answers. I thought this worth noting. Some argue that *dilectio* (charity) is one thing and *amor* (love) another, and that the first applies to good affections while the second applies to bad ones. But secular authors certainly never used them that way. Let the philosophers sort out their own distinctions. Their books use *amor* in positive senses, and most frequently in reference to God. What we needed to show, however, is that our Scriptures, which we place far above philosophical authorities, do not use *amor* and *dilectio* with any such sharp distinction. We have already shown that Scripture uses *amor* in a good sense. If anyone thinks *amor* can go either way while *dilectio* is reserved for good affections only, let them look at this verse from the Psalms: "He that loveth [*diligit*] iniquity hateth his own soul" (Ps 11:5). There is *diligo* applied to something evil. And here is the Apostle John: "If any man love [*dilexerit*] the world, the love [*dilectio*] of the Father is not in him" (1 John 2:15). There you have *dilectio* used in both senses within a single passage. And if anyone wants to know whether *amor* is used in an evil sense (we have already shown it used in a good one), let them read this: "Men shall be lovers of themselves" and "lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God" (2 Tim 3:2, 4). An upright will, then, is good love, and a perverse will is bad love. Love longing to possess what it loves becomes desire; possessing it, it becomes joy; fleeing what it hates, it becomes fear; and when it encounters what it hates, it becomes sorrow.

These emotions are evil when the love behind them is evil, and good when the love is good. Let Scripture prove the point. The apostle "desires to be dissolved, and to be with Christ," and, "My heart breaketh for the continual desire I have unto Thy judgments." Or, if this reading is better: "My soul hath coveted to desire Thy judgments," and, "Desire of wisdom leadeth to the kingdom." Yet custom has established a rule: where *concupiscentia* or *cupiditas* (desire or craving) appears without specifying its object, it is always taken in a bad sense. Joy and gladness, on the other hand, the Psalms use well: "Be glad in the Lord, and rejoice, ye righteous," and, "Thou hast given gladness to mine heart," and, "In Thy presence is the fulness of joy." Fear, too, the apostle uses in a good sense: "Work out your salvation with fear and trembling," and, "Be not high-minded, but fear," and, "But I fear lest as the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtlety, so that your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ." As for sorrow (which Cicero preferred to call *egritude*, and Virgil *dolour*, as in his phrase *dolentque, gaudentque*, "they grieve and they rejoice"), I prefer the word *tristitia*, "sadness," since *egritude* and *dolour* are more commonly used for bodily ailments. Whether sadness can ever be used in a good sense is a question worth examining more carefully.

What the Greeks call εὐπαθείαι and Cicero calls "constantiæ," the Stoics count as three, corresponding to three states in a wise person's mind: will (in place of desire), joy (in place of exultation), and wariness (in place of fear). But where sadness or grief would otherwise appear (we say "sadness" to avoid ambiguity), the Stoics deny that a wise mind can experience anything of the kind. Will, they say, reaches toward the good, which is what a wise person pursues; joy concerns the good already attained; and wariness avoids what should be avoided. Since sadness arises from an evil that has already occurred, and no evil can befall a wise person, wisdom has no room for it. Therefore, the Stoics argue, only wise people can truly will, rejoice, and be vigilant, while only fools can covet, exult, fear, and be sad. The first three are what Cicero calls the constancies; the latter four are the perturbations. The Greeks, as I said, call the three εὐπαθείαι and the four πάθη.

When I looked for how this framework corresponds to the language of Scripture, I found this in the prophet: "There is no joy," says the Lord, "to the wicked" (Isa 57:21), as if the wicked might exult rather than truly rejoice in their misdeeds, since joy properly belongs to the good and godly. Similarly in the Gospel: "Whatever you would that men should do to you, do also to them" (Matt 7:12). This seems to suggest that a person cannot truly will evil, but only covet it. Because of this interpretive habit, some translators inserted the word "good," reading "Whatever good thing you would," and so on, thinking it proper that people should desire others to do them no wrong, and adding the word to prevent anyone from imagining that they could fulfill this precept by sharing in one another's debaucheries at lavish banquets, to say nothing of more obscene matters. But "good" does not appear in the original Greek; it reads simply, as we have it: "Whatever you would," and so on, for in saying "you would," the text already implies "good." It does not say "whatever you covet." Even so, we should not always bind our language to this strict usage; we must allow ourselves some flexibility when occasion demands it, and when we encounter passages we cannot set aside, we should read them in such a way that the true meaning is not obscured. Take, for example, those very passages from the prophet and the apostle: who does not know that the wicked exult in pleasure? And yet the Lord says there is no joy to the wicked. Why? Because "joy" is used here in its proper and precise sense. In the same way, someone might object that the precept "Whatever you would" is not well stated, since people might use it to justify corrupting one another with impurity, and so on. Nevertheless, the command is well given and is entirely true and wholesome. Why? Because "will," which in its proper sense cannot be directed toward evil, is used here in exactly that proper sense. In ordinary speech, however, we would not say "Have no will to tell a lie," since there is clearly such a thing as a bad will, distinct from the will the angels praised when they said, "Peace on earth to men of goodwill" (Luke 2:14). The word "good" would be superfluous there if all will were already good by definition. And how weakly would the apostle have praised charity by saying "it rejoices not in iniquity" (1 Cor 13:6), if joy could not also be used in an evil sense?

The classical authors themselves observe these distinctions. "I desire," says Cicero, "Conscript Fathers, I desire to be merciful." Here he uses *cupio* in a good sense, and who would be so perverse as to say he should have used *volo* instead? And Terence's dissolute young man says, "I would have none but Philumena." That this "will" was nothing more than lust is made plain by his old servant's reply to him: "How much better it would be for you to cast this love out of your heart, rather than seek to inflame it further!" That "joy" was also used in an evil sense, Virgil's verse on the four perturbations records:

These lines come from Virgil:

"Hinc metuunt, cupiuntque, dolent, gaudentque."

"Hence they fear, desire, grieve, and rejoice."

And the same author says elsewhere:

"Mala mentis gaudia."

"The mind's corrupt joys."

So both the good and the evil will, desire, stay alert, and rejoice; or to put it another way, the good and the bad alike wish, fear, and feel joy. The difference is that the good do these things well and the bad do them badly, depending on the direction of their wills. As for sadness, which the Stoics refuse to allow even a wise man, it is plainly present in good people, especially among those of our faith. The apostle commends the Corinthians precisely because they grieved in a godly way. But someone might object that the apostle is praising their grief over sin in repentance, and that this applies only to sinners. His words run as follows:

"For I perceive that the same epistle hath made you sorry, though it were but for a season. Now I rejoice, not that ye were made sorry, but that ye sorrowed to repentance: for ye were made sorry after a godly manner, so that in nothing ye were hurt by us. For godly sorrow causeth repentance unto salvation, not to be repented of: but the worldly sorrow causeth death. For behold this godly sorrow, what carefulness it hath wrought in you." (2 Cor 7:8-11)

The Stoics might respond that this sorrow was useful for repentance, but that it cannot exist in a truly wise man, since a wise man cannot commit a sinful act worthy of repentance, nor can he admit anything into his life that would produce sadness. They point to the case of Alcibiades (if I am remembering the name correctly): believing himself happy, and then hearing Socrates argue against it and demonstrate that he was in fact miserable because he lacked wisdom, Alcibiades broke down in tears. His lack of wisdom was the cause of that beneficial sorrow, the grief of a man who recognized he was not what he ought to be. But a truly wise man, the Stoics insist, can never find himself in that condition.

But on the question of emotional disturbances, the philosophers have already been answered in Book 9, where I showed that their dispute is more about words than substance. According to our religion and the scriptures, however, the citizens of God, as long as they are pilgrims on the road to God, do experience fear, desire, joy, and sorrow. But because their love is rightly ordered, it shapes all these emotions properly. They fear eternal punishment and desire eternal joy. They grieve in the present, because they still sigh within themselves, waiting for their adoption, the redemption of their bodies. They rejoice in hope, because what is written will be fulfilled: "Death is swallowed up in victory." They fear to offend God and desire to persevere. They grieve over sin and rejoice in doing good. They fear to sin, because "iniquity shall be increased, the love of many shall wax cold." They desire to persevere, because "he that endureth to the end shall be saved." They grieve over sin, because "if we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us." They rejoice in good works, because "God loveth a cheerful giver." And depending on whether they are strong or weak, they either desire or fear to be tempted, and they either rejoice or grieve when temptations come. They fear temptation, because of the warning: "If any man fall into a fault by any occasion, ye which are spiritual, restore such an one in the spirit of meekness, considering thyself, lest thou also be tempted." They desire to be tempted, as David said: "Prove me, O Lord, and try me, examine my reins and mine heart." They grieve in temptations, as we see in how Peter wept. And they rejoice in them, because James says: "Brethren, count it exceeding joy when ye fall into divers temptations."

And these affections are not felt for themselves alone, but for others too, for those they long to see freed, those they fear may perish, those whose fall brings grief and whose deliverance brings joy. If we who have come from paganism to Christianity may offer a particular example, consider that worthy and fearless man who boasted of his weaknesses: that teacher of faith and truth to the nations, that laborer who outworked all his fellow apostles, that builder of God's people through sermons when present and through more letters than all the rest when absent. I mean the blessed Paul, Christ's champion, taught by Him, anointed from Him, crucified with Him, glorified in Him. In the theater of this world, where he was made a spectacle to God, angels, and men, he fought a lawful and great fight, "following hard towards the mark for the prize of the high calling." How gladly do we, with the eyes of faith, behold him: weeping with those who weep and rejoicing with those who rejoice, facing fightings without and fears within, "longing to depart and to be with Christ," eager to see the Romans and to receive fruit from them as from the others, jealous over the Corinthians and fearing lest their minds should be corrupted "from the chastity which is in Christ," carrying great sadness and continual sorrow of heart for Israel, who, being ignorant of God's righteousness, sought to establish their own and would not submit to God, and grieving bitterly that many had not repented of their fornication and uncleanness. If these affections, arising from the love of good, are vicious, then let true vices be called virtues. But since their exercise is governed by the rule of reason, who would dare call them frail or imperfect passions of the mind? Our Lord Himself, living in the form of a servant yet without sin, exercised these same affections when He judged it fitting. We cannot suppose that, having a genuine human body and soul, He had only the appearance of emotions.

And so His sorrow over Jerusalem's hardness of heart, His joy over those who believed, His tears for Lazarus, His desire to eat the Passover with His disciples, and the crushing weight of soul He felt as His passion approached: none of these are invented or performed.

He experienced these human emotions when it pleased Him to do so, just as He became man when it pleased Him. We therefore acknowledge that such emotions, even at their best, belong to this present life and not to the life we hope for hereafter; and that we are often overwhelmed by them. A worthy desire or love may move us, and yet we will weep whether we choose to or not. We carry these emotions because of our human weakness, but Christ did not have them in that way, for even His weakness was something He took on by His own power. Yet as long as we live in this weakness, we will live worse lives if we lack these emotions entirely. The Apostle condemns and detests those who are without natural affection. So does the Psalmist, who writes, "I looked for some to pity me, and there was none" (Ps 69:20). For to be entirely without the capacity for sorrow in this mortal life (as one great scholar observed) never happens to a person without a profound numbness of body and a coarseness of mind.

Therefore, the Greek concept of *apatheia* (impassibility), when applied to the mind rather than the body, is worth defending and pursuing, if it means freedom only from those disturbances that cloud the mind and resist reason. For the godly, wise, and holy (not common debaters) say plainly: "If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us" (1 John 1:8). But if a person truly possessed this *apatheia* in the sense just described, he would have no sin in him at all. It is already a great achievement to live here without serious crime; but anyone who thinks he lives without sin does not avoid sin so much as he shuts out all possibility of pardon. And if *apatheia* means the complete elimination of every mental emotion whatsoever, who would not say that such numbness is worse than sin itself?

We can rightly say that true happiness will be entirely free of fear and sorrow. But who can say it will be free of love and joy, except someone who sets himself against the truth? If *apatheia* means freedom from fear and sorrow, we should not aim at it in this life, if we intend to live according to the law of God. In the other life, the eternal life that has been promised to us, all fear will be removed. The fear that the Apostle John speaks of when he says, "There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear, and he who fears is not perfect in love" (1 John 4:18), is not the same fear Paul had for the Corinthians' spiritual welfare, for love itself produces that kind of fear and nothing but love does. The other fear is not in love at all, and of that fear Paul writes: "For you have not received the spirit of bondage to fear again" (Rom 8:15). But that pure and reverent fear, which endures forever, if it exists in the world to come (and how else could it endure forever?), will not be a fear that drives us away from evil, but a fear that holds us inseparably to an unchanging good. For where a good that has been attained is loved without any possibility of change, the fear of losing it is bound inseparably to that love. This pure fear, then, means the will we must necessarily have to avoid sin: not an anxious, groundless worry that we might sin, but a watchfulness rooted in the peace of love. Yet if that firm and eternal security is entirely free of fear and contains only the fullness of joy, then the saying that "the fear of the Lord is clean, and endures forever" (Ps 19:9) must be understood in the same way as that other passage: "The patience of the afflicted shall not perish forever" (Ps 9:18).

Their patience will not be eternal, since eternity is only needed where miseries must be endured forever. But what their patience will ultimately achieve is eternal. So it may be that this pure fear is said to endure forever because the goal it aims at is everlasting. Given this, and given that only a good path leads to blessedness, a bad life produces bad affections and a good life produces good ones. Everlasting blessedness will hold both joy and love, not merely right but firm and unshakeable, while fear and sorrow will be gone entirely. From this it becomes clear what course God's citizens should follow on this earthly pilgrimage: letting the spirit, not the flesh, and God, not human wisdom, be the light for their path. Here too we see what their state will be in their eternal future. But the city of the ungodly, who steer by the compass of carnality and, even in their most sacred matters, reject the truth of God and rely on human teaching, is shaken by these affections as if by earthquakes and infected by them as by a plague. And if any of its citizens seem to hold themselves back from these impulses, they grow so impiously proud and vain that the less they are troubled by these passions, the worse their disease becomes. And if any among them are so remarkably hollow and hardened as to embrace outright callousness, becoming numb to all feeling, they have not achieved true peace but have simply abandoned true humanity. Hardness does not make a thing right, and numbness cannot produce genuine soundness.

But here a fair question arises: did our first parent, or parents (for they were two, joined in marriage), experience those natural emotional disturbances before they sinned, the same ones we will be freed from when we are fully purified? If they did, how could they have enjoyed that celebrated bliss of Paradise? Who can truly be happy while living in fear or grief? And how could they have feared or grieved in that abundant state of blessing, where they faced no danger of death or sickness, where a good will found everything it desired and lacked everything that might give genuine cause for unhappiness? Their love for God was steady, their union sincere and therefore deeply joyful, with the full power to enjoy what they loved. They lived in a peaceful freedom from sin, and that tranquility kept all external trouble at bay. Do you suppose they longed to taste the forbidden fruit and yet held back out of fear of death? God forbid we should think such a thing existed where there was no sin, for it would itself be a sin to desire to break God's command and to hold back only out of fear of punishment rather than love of righteousness. God forbid, I say, that before that sin was committed, what Christ says of a man looking at a woman should already have been true of the forbidden fruit: "Whosoever looketh after a woman to lust after her hath already committed adultery with her in his heart" (Matt 5:28). How happy were our first parents, troubled by no disturbances of mind and no sickness of body! All of humanity would have been equally happy had they not passed on to their descendants the misery their sin brought upon them, and had none of their offspring committed any act deserving condemnation. And had that bliss continued until the command to increase and multiply had filled the full number of the predestined, a greater gift would then have been given: the life the angels enjoy, with its eternal security from sin and death. The saints would have lived without ever tasting labor, sorrow, or death, just as they will live in the resurrection after having endured all of those things.

God, who foreknows all things, could not have been unaware that man would fall. We must therefore ground our understanding of His city on His foreknowledge and purpose, not on what He has not revealed to us. Man's sin could not disturb God's decree or force Him to change His resolve. God foreknew and anticipated both realities: how corrupt the man He had made would become, and what good He intended to draw from him despite that corruption. When Scripture speaks of God changing His mind or repenting, this is figurative language that reflects man's perspective or the natural order of things, not any change in God's own foreknowledge. God made man upright, and therefore with a good will, since without a good will he could not have been upright at all. That good will was God's own work, given to man at creation. But the evil will that arose in man before his evil deeds was not really a work at all: it was a turning away from God's work toward man's own devices. The works that followed were evil precisely because they conformed to man's own inclinations rather than to God's, with this evil will serving as a tree bearing bad fruit, or as man himself considered in terms of his corrupted will. Now, although this evil will opposes rather than follows nature, and is itself a fault, it still belongs to the same category as vice, which can only exist within some nature. But it must exist within the nature God made from nothing, not within the nature He begot from Himself, as He begot the Word through whom all things were made. Though God made man from dust, He first made dust from nothing, and He made the soul from nothing as well, joining it to the body to make the complete human being. Evils are so thoroughly subordinate to good that, while they are permitted to exist in order to show what wise use God's justice can make of them, the good can exist without them entirely, as God Himself does in His true glory, and as the bright and shining heavens do above our own darkened and murky air. But evils cannot exist except within something good, since all the natures in which they reside, considered simply as natures, are good. Evil is drawn out of nature not by cutting away some opposing nature or any part of it, but only by purifying what has been corrupted. The will is truly free, then, only when it serves neither vice nor sin. Such a will God gave us; such a will we lost; and we can recover it only from the One who gave it. As the truth declares, "If the Son shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed" (John 8:36), which is as much as to say: if the Son saves you, you are truly saved, for He is the Liberator, that is, the Savior. In Paradise, both physical and spiritual, man made God his rule of life. It was not a physical paradise for the body's benefit only, with no spiritual dimension for the spirit; nor was it a spiritual paradise for the spirit alone, with no physical place for the body. It was both for both. But then that proud, and therefore envious, angel fell through his pride from God into himself, choosing in a tyrannical empty pride to rule rather than be ruled, and so fell from the spiritual paradise. (I discussed his fall, and that of his companions, and how the good angels thereby became his enemies, in my ninth book, as God gave me grace and means.) Desiring to creep into man's mind through his subtle and malicious persuasion, and envying man's steadfastness even as he himself was falling, he chose the serpent, one of the creatures then living harmlessly alongside the man and woman in the earthly Paradise: a slippery, flexible creature, coiled in knots and perfectly suited to his purpose. Through this creature he began to speak deceitfully to the woman, starting with the weaker part of humanity in order to invade the whole by degrees. He calculated that the man would not be as credulous or as easily deceived as he would be after watching another fall before him. Consider the parallel: Aaron did not consent to the Hebrews' idolatry through persuasion but yielded to it under compulsion when they demanded he make them an idol; and Solomon, it is generally thought, did not worship idols out of his own mistaken belief but was drawn into that sacrilege by the persuasion of his wives. So too we should understand that the first man did not yield to his wife's transgression of God's command because he believed she was telling the truth. He yielded only because he could not bear to be separated from his companion, being one with one, both of the same nature and kind. It is not without reason that the apostle says, "Adam was not deceived: but the woman was deceived" (1 Tim 2:14). This shows that the woman genuinely believed the serpent's words were true, while Adam simply refused to abandon his partner, even in sin, and so sinned knowingly. The apostle does not say he did not sin; he says he was not deceived. He makes clear that Adam did sin, saying, "By one man sin entered into the world" (Rom 5:12), and a little later, more plainly still, "after the manner of the transgression of Adam" (Rom 5:14). Those who are deceived, in the apostle's sense, are those who believe the first act was no sin at all, whereas Adam knew it was a sin. Otherwise, why would Paul say "Adam was not deceived"? Someone unfamiliar with the severity of God's judgment might be misled into thinking his sin was only a minor one. So while the woman was deceived, Adam was not; yet what did deceive him was the judgment he would face for his false excuse: "The woman that Thou gavest me to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat" (Gen 3:12). What more need be said? Though they were not both deceived, they were both caught in sin and made captives of the devil.

If anyone is troubled by the fact that other sins don't alter human nature the way that first transgression did, consider what that transgression actually cost us. It made us liable to death, to the torment of disordered passions, and to the corruption we all experience now, none of which Adam felt before, and none of which he would ever have felt had he not sinned. If this troubles you, don't conclude that eating the forbidden fruit was therefore a minor offense. The fruit itself was not harmful; it was harmful only because God had forbidden it. God would never have planted anything genuinely harmful in that beautiful Paradise. Rather, the whole point of the command was obedience: the mother and guardian of every other virtue of the soul. To be subject to obedience is good; to abandon it is ruinous, because in abandoning obedience one abandons the will of the Creator and follows one's own instead. The command itself was simple: abstain from one fruit among the many available. It was easy to observe and easy to remember, and at that time no disordered desire (itself a later penalty for transgression) stood in the way of the will. The very ease of keeping this command is precisely what made breaking it so wicked.

But evil began within them secretly at first, before drawing them into open disobedience. There would have been no evil act without an evil will preceding it, and what could have started that evil will but pride, which is the beginning of all sin? And what is pride but a twisted desire for self-elevation, in which the soul abandons the One to whom it should wholly cleave as its true source, and instead makes itself out to be its own origin? This happens when the soul is too pleased with itself, or when it loves itself so much that it abandons the unchangeable Good that should delight it more than anything else. This failure is voluntary: if the will had remained firm in its love for that higher and stronger Good, which gave it light to see and zeal to love, it would never have turned away to take pleasure in itself. It would not have grown so blind in sight and so cold in zeal that Eve would believe the serpent's words, or that Adam would dare to put his wife's wishes above God's command, thinking he had committed only a minor offense by keeping company with her in her sin. The evil, then, this transgression, was committed only by those who were already evil before they ate the forbidden fruit. There can be no evil fruit from anything but an evil tree, and the tree became evil contrary to its nature, because it had been corrupted by an unnatural defect of the will. No nature can be corrupted by vice except one that was created from nothing. Therefore, insofar as it is a nature, it has its being from God; but it falls away from God in that it was made from nothing. Yet when man fell, he did not become nothing: he was diminished in excellence by turning toward himself, having been most excellent in his adherence to God. Leaving God to cling to himself and take pleasure in himself, he moved not toward nothingness, but toward it. This is why Scripture calls proud people, in another sense, pleasers of themselves. It is good to lift the heart high, but not toward oneself: that is pride. To lift it toward God: that is obedience, which belongs only to the humble.

Humility, then, has this remarkable quality: it lifts the heart up. Pride has the opposite quality: it brings the heart down. This seems like a strange paradox, that elevation should lead downward and dejection upward. But godly humility places a person under his superior, and since God is above all things, humility actually raises a person by making him God's subject. Pride, on the other hand, refuses this submission and falls away from the One who is above all things, becoming far more degraded as a result. This fulfills what the Psalm says: "Thou hast cast them down in their own exaltation" (Ps 73:18). Notice that the Psalmist does not say they were first exalted and then brought low afterward. He says that in the very act of their exaltation they were cast down. Their elevation was their ruin.

This is why humility is so praised and commended in the City of God, which is still a pilgrim on earth, and so highly honored by Christ its King, while pride, its direct opposite, is shown by Holy Scripture to be the defining mark of His adversaries, the devil and his angels. In this very contrast lies the clearest difference between the two cities, the godly and the ungodly, along with their respective angels: one city is governed by love of God, the other by love of self. The devil could never have drawn humanity into such a blatant violation of God's explicit command if self-love had not already taken root in them first. They were seduced by the promise, "Ye shall be as gods," yet they might have reached that very condition far sooner through obedience and union with their Creator than through the proud delusion that they were the authors of their own being. For created gods are not gods in themselves; they are gods only by participation in the God who made them. But humanity, reaching for more, became less, and by choosing to be sufficient in itself, fell away from the God who is all-sufficient.

This, then, is the real harm: a man, pleased with himself as though he were his own source of light, turns away from the true light. Had he found his pleasure in that light instead, he could have become like it. This harm, I say, began in his soul and then drew him toward the sinful act that followed. For scripture is right when it says, "Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty mind before the fall" (Prov 16:18). The fall that happens in secret comes before the fall that happens in public, and the first is not even recognized as a fall at all. After all, who sees exaltation as ruin, even when the defect is already present at the height?

But who can fail to see that ruin lies in the open breaking of God's commands? God forbade it precisely so that, once broken, there would be no excuse and no escape from justice. And so I will go so far as to say this: it is actually good for the proud to fall into some obvious and shameful sin, so that they might come to despise themselves, having fallen through too much self-love. Peter's sorrowful self-reproach, expressed in his tears, did his soul far more good than the false confidence he had taken in himself when he presumed on his own strength. This is why the Psalmist says, "Fill their faces with shame, that they may seek Thy name O Lord" (Ps 83:16): that is, so that those who once delighted in themselves and sought their own glory might instead delight in God and seek His name.

But pride that drives a person to excuse their guilt is far more damnable than the guilt itself, as we see in the first humans. She could say, "The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat." He could say: "The woman Thou gavest me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat." There is no sound of asking for mercy here, no breath of seeking help. Though they don't deny their guilt as Cain did, their pride still tries to shift their own evil onto someone else: the man's onto the woman, and hers onto the serpent. But this only makes their case worse rather than better, given how plain and obvious a violation of God's command it was. The woman's persuading of the man, and the serpent's seducing of the woman, does nothing to clear either of them of guilt, as if anything could be believed or obeyed before God, or in preference to the Most High.

Therefore, because God (who had made man in His own image, placed him in Paradise above all other creatures, given him abundance of everything, and laid on him no harsh or burdensome law, but only that one brief command of obedience, to show that He was Lord over a creature whom willing service best befitted) was so utterly disregarded, a just sentence followed: the man who might have kept that command and remained spiritually minded in body became instead carnally minded in soul. Because he had first delighted in his own pride, he now tasted God's justice. He became not what he had desired, fully his own master, but fell away even from himself and became the slave of the one who had taught him to sin, trading his sweet liberty for wretched bondage. Willingly dead in spirit, yet unwilling to die in the flesh, he forsook eternal life and was condemned to eternal death, and would have remained so had God's grace not delivered him. Anyone who finds this sentence too severe has failed to weigh honestly both the guilt that incurred it and the ease with which it could have been avoided. Just as Abraham's obedience is rightly celebrated because what was commanded of him was genuinely hard (the killing of his own son), so the disobedience in Paradise was all the more extreme precisely because the command was so easy to keep. And just as the obedience of the second Adam was all the more remarkably excellent because He kept it even unto death, so the disobedience of the first man was all the more truly detestable because he broke his obedience and brought death upon himself. When the punishment for breaking a command is so severe, and the command itself so easy to keep, who can fully describe the guilt of the one who breaks it, showing neither reverence for the majesty of the One who gave it nor fear of the terrible consequences of its breach?

In a word, what reward or punishment follows disobedience but disobedience itself? What is human misery, if not our own disobedience to ourselves: that because we would not do what we could, we now cannot do what we would? In Paradise, not everything was within our power even during our obedience, yet we desired nothing beyond what was in our power, and so we did as we wished.

But now, as Scripture says and experience confirms, "Man is like to vanity" (Ps 144:4). Who can count the endless desires for impossibilities? The flesh and the mind, which are ourselves, disobey the will, which is also ourselves. The mind is troubled, the flesh is pained, age and death draw near, and a thousand other disturbances seize us against our will, which they could not do if our nature were wholly obedient to our will. The flesh suffers things that hinder the soul's service, but what does that matter? It is God's almighty justice at work: because we refused to be subject to Him, our flesh refuses to be subject to our soul and instead troubles it, though it was once wholly subject to it. Yet in failing to serve God, we trouble ourselves, not Him, for He has no need of our service as we have need of our bodies. It is our pain to have a body in this condition; it is no injury to Him that we have made it such. Beyond this, what we call bodily pains are really the soul's pains, felt in and through the flesh, for what can the flesh feel or desire without the soul? When we say the flesh does either, we mean either the person as a whole, as I said before, or some part of the soul that fleshly passion affects, whether through sharpness, producing pain and grief, or through sweetness, producing pleasure. Bodily pain is simply an offense given to the soul by the flesh, a rejection of the sensation the flesh produces, just as what we call sadness is a distaste for things that happen against our will. Fear commonly precedes sadness, and fear belongs entirely to the soul, not the flesh. Bodily pain, by contrast, is not preceded by any bodily fear felt in the flesh before the pain arrives. Pleasure, however, is ushered in by certain appetites felt in the flesh, such as hunger, thirst, and the carnal appetite commonly called lust, though lust is in fact a general name for all fleshly desires. Anger is nothing but a lust for revenge, as the ancient writers defined it, although a person will sometimes rage at senseless things without any thought of revenge, as when someone breaks a pen in frustration over bad writing. Even this, however, is a kind of desire for revenge: though it is irrational, it is a shadow of the impulse to repay evil with evil. So anger is a lust for revenge; greed, a lust for money; stubbornness, a lust for victory; boasting, a lust for empty pride. There are many such lusts, some with recognized names and some without. Who, for instance, can give a fitting name to the lust for power, which tyrants nonetheless display plainly enough through their wars against their own people?

Although there are many forms of lust, when we read the word "lust" alone, without any mention of its object, we commonly take it to mean the unclean stirring of the reproductive organs. This impulse dominates the whole body, moving the entire person, inwardly and outwardly, with such a blend of mental passion and physical appetite that it produces the highest bodily pleasure of all. So complete is its power that at the very moment of consummation, it overwhelms nearly all clarity and capacity for thought. What wise and godly married man, who knows, as the apostle says, "how to possess his vessel in holiness and honor, and not in the lust of concupiscence, as the Gentiles do, which know not God" (1 Thess 4:4-5), would not prefer, if he could, to beget his children without this lust? He would want his body to obey his mind in the act of procreation just as it does in other acts, governed by his will rather than driven by desire. But even those who pursue these carnal pleasures cannot command this impulse at will, whether in lawful marriage or in shameful indulgence. The impulse will sometimes force itself on a person against their will, and at other times remain stubbornly absent when desired; the mind may burn with it while the body stays cold. In this remarkable way, lust assails us both in the honorable desire for children and in wanton craving: sometimes overriding the mind's full resistance, and sometimes opposing itself, existing entirely in the mind while having no presence in the body at all.

It is entirely right that humanity feels shame over this lust, and equally right that the parts of the body which lust moves or suppresses against our will are called shameful. Before the fall, they were not so. Scripture records that "they were both naked, and were not ashamed" (Gen 2:25), not because they failed to see their nakedness, but because that nakedness was not yet a source of shame. Lust had not yet moved those parts against their will, and the disobedience of the flesh had not yet become a living testimony to the disobedience of the human will.

They were not struck blind, as the unenlightened masses tend to imagine. The man saw the creatures he named, and the woman saw "that the tree was good for food, and pleasing to the eyes" (Gen 3:6). Their eyes were open, then, but they had not yet been opened in the deeper sense: they were not yet occupied with perceiving what the garment of grace had been doing for them, namely, shielding them from any awareness of their members' rebellion against the will. When that grace was withdrawn, so that disobedience might be punished by disobedience, a new shame descended on those bodily movements, making their nakedness seem indecent. They noticed this, and they were ashamed of it. This is why, after they broke the commandment, Scripture says: "And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves aprons" (Gen 3:7). Their eyes were opened not to see, for they could already see, but to perceive the difference between the good they had lost and the evil they had incurred. This is also why the tree was called "the tree of the knowledge of good and evil" (Gen 2:17): because if they tasted it in defiance of the commandment, they would be forced to see that difference firsthand. As the pain of illness makes the pleasure of health all the sweeter, so they came to know what they were naked of: stripped of the grace that had kept their physical nakedness innocent and undisturbing to the mind's will. This was the knowledge they gained. How fortunate they would have been had they kept God's commands, trusted Him, and never learned the harm that faithless disobedience brings. But now, ashamed of this bodily disobedience that threw their own disobedience toward God back in their faces, they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for their nakedness. The Latin word used is *campestria*, taken from the garments with which young men who wrestled or exercised naked in the field (*in campo*) covered their male members, and were therefore called by common people *campestrate*. In this way, their sense of shame wisely covered what lust had disobediently stirred, as a constant reminder of their disobedient wills, justly punished in this manner. From this point on, all humanity, descending from that one original pair, carries the instinct to keep those members covered. Even some of the most remote peoples will not bathe with them exposed, but wash while keeping that part of their nakedness concealed. And though there are philosophers known as Gymnosophists because they live naked in the remote regions of India, even they cover their male members while leaving the rest of their bodies bare.

But the act of lust, not only in punishable adulteries but even in the use of prostitutes that the earthly city permits, is ashamed of the public eye, even when the deed carries no legal penalty. Even brothels make private provisions for it, out of natural shame. It was easier for unchasteness to win permission than for shamelessness to practice it openly. Those who are themselves corrupt will call this behavior filthy, and though they love it, they dare not openly admit it. But what about copulation in marriage, which according to the laws of matrimony must be used for the purpose of procreation? Does it not seek a private corner for its performance, even though it is honest and lawful? Does the bridegroom not send away all the guests, the attendants, the musicians, and everyone else from his chamber before he begins to embrace his bride? As that great master of Roman eloquence said: while all honorable deeds desire the light, meaning they love to be known, this one alone desires to be known in such a way that it is ashamed to be seen. For who does not know what a man must do with a woman to beget a child, given that a wife is solemnly married for precisely this purpose? And yet when it is done, even the children they already have will not be permitted to witness it. This act does invite the understanding of the mind, yet it flees the gaze of the eye. Why should this be, unless this lawful act of nature has been, since our first parents, accompanied by our penal shame?

Here the most perceptive and discerning philosophers held that anger and lust were two corrupt faculties of the mind, because they drove a person toward actions that wisdom had not sanctioned, operating without order or restraint, and therefore needed to be governed by judgment and reason. This third part of the soul they placed, as it were, in a commanding tower above the rest, so that by its rule and their obedience, the harmony of justice might be fully preserved within a person. These faculties, which the philosophers acknowledge as corrupt even in the wisest and most self-controlled person (so that the mind must constantly rein them back from excess and permit them only the freedom that wisdom allows, such as anger in rightful resistance to injustice, and lust in the procreation of children): these, I say, were not corrupt at all in humanity while we lived without sin in Paradise. There they never reached beyond what was right, since reason guided them without needing to hold them back. But now, whenever they stir in even a just and temperate person, they must be reined in by restraint, which some manage easily and others only with great difficulty. They are no longer parts of a healthy nature, but symptoms of a diseased one. And yet shame does not conceal anger or other emotions when they break into excess the way it conceals lust. Why is this? Because it is not the emotion itself but the commanding will that moves the other bodily members to carry out the actions prompted by those emotions, since the will governs their use as chief. A person who, in anger, shouts or strikes could not do so unless the tongue and hand were directed by the will, which moves them equally when anger is absent. But in the organs of generation, lust holds a uniquely exclusive claim: they cannot move if lust is absent, and they will not stir unless lust (whether arising voluntarily or by force) sets them in motion. This is the source of shame and the instinct to avoid observers during that act, and it explains why a person burning with unlawful anger toward a neighbor would rather have a thousand witnesses than a single one when lying with his own wife in lawful intercourse.

The so-called cynic philosophers, true to their name as the "dog philosophers," took no notice of this. They advanced that truly shameless and degrading argument against human modesty: that since the marital act is lawful, it carries no shame, and therefore, if one feels the urge, it should be performed in the street. Even the most basic natural sense of shame was enough to overturn this ugly error. Diogenes is said to have done this once, boasting that his brazenness would make his school more famous; yet afterward the cynics abandoned the practice, and their humanity proved stronger than their absurd philosophy. I suspect that he, or whoever else attempted this, was merely mimicking the motions of intercourse for onlookers who could not see what was actually happening beneath the cloak, rather than performing the act itself in full view. The philosophers were not embarrassed to put on a show of copulation in public, yet lust itself was too embarrassed to actually cooperate. We still see cynics today, wearing their cloaks and carrying their clubs, but none of them dare do this. If they tried, the crowd would be on them in an instant, pelting them with stones or spitting at them. It is clear, then, that human nature is rightly ashamed of this act. The disobedience by which the genital members are taken out of the will's control and handed over to lust is a vivid demonstration of the penalty our first father earned through his sin. It is fitting that this penalty shows itself most plainly in those very parts, since it is through them that we inherit the nature so deeply corrupted by that original offense. No one is freed from this bond except through the grace of God, which atones in each person for what was committed to the ruin of us all when we were all, in a sense, contained in one.

God forbid, then, that we should believe our first parents in Paradise fulfilled that blessing, "Increase and multiply, and replenish the earth," through the kind of lust that made them blush and cover their private parts. That lust was not in them until after sin; and when it appeared, their now-shamed nature, having lost its easy command over the body, perceived it, blushed at it, and hid it. But the blessing of marriage for increase, multiplication, and the peopling of the earth, though it remained with them after sin, was given before sin so they would understand that the procreation of children belonged to the glory of marriage, not to the punishment of sin. But people alive today, knowing nothing of the happiness of Paradise, assume that children cannot be conceived without the lust they themselves have experienced, and this is what makes honest marriage ashamed of the act.

Others reject and mockingly dismiss the Holy Scriptures that say our first parents were ashamed of their nakedness after they sinned and covered their private parts. Still others, though they accept the Scriptures, hold that the blessing "Increase and multiply" refers to spiritual rather than physical fruitfulness, pointing to the Psalm's words, "Thou shalt multiply me with strength in my soul," and interpret the following words of Genesis, "And replenish the earth and subdue it," this way: the earth means the flesh, which the soul fills with its presence and rules over when it grows in virtue. On this reading, physical reproduction cannot happen without the lust that arose in humanity after sin, was discovered, brought shame, and was concealed; and that Adam and Eve's descendants were never meant to live in Paradise but outside it, as in fact they did, since they begot no children until they were driven out, and only then came together and conceived.

But we have no doubt that this blessing of increase, multiplication, and filling of the earth was a gift of God's goodness, bestowed on the marriage He ordained at the beginning, before man sinned, when He made them male and female, with the distinction of sex plainly visible in the flesh. No sooner was this done than it was blessed: for after Scripture says, "He created them male and female," it immediately adds, "And God blessed them, saying, Increase and multiply," and so on. All of this may reasonably be applied in a spiritual sense, yet male and female cannot in any way be mapped onto anything spiritual within a person: not onto the part that rules and the part that is ruled. Rather, as the real distinction of sex makes clear, they were made male and female to bear fruit through generation, to multiply and fill the earth. Only fools will argue against this plain truth. It cannot refer to the spirit ruling and the flesh obeying, to reason governing and emotion working, to the contemplative part excelling and the active part serving, or to the mind's understanding and the body's senses. It refers directly to the bond of marriage, which joins both sexes into one. When Christ was asked whether a man might divorce his wife for any cause, given that Moses had permitted a bill of divorce because of the hardness of their hearts, He answered: "Have ye not read, that He which made them at the beginning, made them male and female? and said for this cause shall a man leave his father and mother and cleave unto his wife, and they twain shall be one flesh?" So that now they are no more two but one. Let no man therefore sunder what God has coupled together. It is certain, then, that male and female were established at the beginning in the same form and distinction that humanity exists in now. They are called one, either because of their union, or because of the woman's origin, since she came out of the side of man: for the apostle uses this very example to urge all married men to love their wives.

But whoever says there would have been neither sexual union nor procreation without sin is essentially making sin the origin of the holy company of saints. If those two had lived alone without sinning, and sin (as these people claim) was their only means of producing children, then sin would have been necessary to make the number of saints greater than two. But if that conclusion is absurd, then we should accept this one instead: that the number of God's citizens would have been just as great, had no one sinned, as the number now being gathered by God's grace from the multitude of sinners, for as long as this world's multiplication of earthly people continues. Therefore, the marriage that was fitting for Paradise would have brought increase, but without lust, had sin never entered. This is not the right place to explore how that would have worked, but it need not seem incredible that one member could serve the will without lust, when so many members serve it now. We move our hands and feet readily enough when we want them to perform their functions, without any resistance, as we can see in ourselves and others, especially in craftsmen, where practice has made sluggish nature quick. Can we not believe, then, that those members could have served our first father in procreation, had they not been seized by lust as the penalty for his disobedience, just as all his other members served him in everything else? Cicero himself, in his treatise *On the Commonwealth*, while discussing the differences between forms of government and drawing a comparison from human nature, says that we command our bodily members like obedient sons, and that we must exercise a harsher kind of rule over the vicious parts of our mind, as we would over slaves. By nature's order, the soul stands above the body, yet it is harder to govern than the body.

But the lust we are speaking of is all the more shameful because the soul neither governs itself in it (so as not to lust) nor governs the body either (so that the will, rather than lust, might move those parts). If the will alone moved them, there would be nothing to be ashamed of. In other rebellious impulses, the soul feels less shame, because when it is overcome by itself, it is at least overcoming itself, however disordered and wrongly. Even though the parts that overcome it are irrational, they are still parts of itself, and so, as I say, it is conquered by itself. When the soul conquers itself rightly and brings all its parts under reason, this is a praiseworthy and virtuous victory, provided the soul is itself subject to God. But the soul is less ashamed when it fails to govern its own vicious parts than when the body fails to obey it, because the body is beneath it, depends on it, and cannot live without it. The other members, however, all remain under the will's control, and without them nothing can be done against the will, so chastity is kept intact, even if the pleasure of sin is not permitted. This conflict, this struggle and tension between lust and will, this dependence of lust on the will's sufficiency, would never have been imposed on marriage in Paradise, had not disobedience become the fitting punishment for the sin of disobedience. Otherwise, those members would have obeyed the will as readily as all the rest. The seed of generation would have been sown in its vessel as grain is now sown in a field.

What more I might say on this subject, modesty urges me to hold back for a moment, and first to ask the pardon of chaste ears. I need not do so, and could proceed freely on any topic relevant to this theme without any fear of being obscene or of impurity being charged to the words, since they are spoken as honestly as anything said about any other part of the body. So if anyone reads this with unchaste thoughts, let him blame his own fault, not the nature of the subject. Let him recognize the effect of his own corruption in himself, not any impropriety in us. The chaste and devout reader will readily grant us this freedom, especially since we are writing to refute an adversary who argues from experience rather than belief. For anyone who is not offended by the apostle's rebuke of the horrible depravity of women who perverted natural use and acted against nature will read this without taking offense, particularly since we are not rehearsing or condemning that damnable perversion he denounces, but are simply examining the impulses involved in human generation, while carefully avoiding obscene language, just as he does.

Man would therefore have sown his seed, and woman received it, as need required, without any lust and entirely as their wills directed. As things stand now, our articulated members obey our will not only in obvious cases like hands and feet, but even those parts we move by the smallest sinews and tendons we contract and turn as we please, as you can see in the voluntary movements of the mouth and face. The lungs, the softest of all the internal organs except the brain, and therefore placed within the hollow of the chest for greater protection in drawing breath and releasing it, and in shaping the voice, serve a person's will entirely, like a blacksmith's bellows or an organ's: for breathing, speaking, crying, or singing. I will not dwell on the fact that some creatures, when they feel something biting them, can move the skin precisely at that spot and nowhere else, shaking off not only flies but even arrows and darts by this motion of the skin. Man cannot do this, but so what? Could God not have given it to whatever creatures He chose? In the same way, man might have had the obedience of his lower parts, which his own disobedience forfeited. For God could easily have made him with all his members subject to his will, including those that now move only through lust. We can see that some people's bodies are far different from others, performing things so remarkable that others can neither do them nor quite believe they are possible. Some people can move their ears, one or both, at will. Some can move all their hair toward their forehead and back again without moving their heads. Some can swallow twenty objects whole and, by pressing their stomach lightly, bring every one back up as intact as if they had simply placed them in a bag. Some can imitate the voices of birds and other people so convincingly that unless you see them doing it, you cannot tell the difference. Some can break wind continuously in a controlled way, so that you might almost think they were singing. I have seen a man sweat whenever he chose, and it is well established that some people can weep at will and shed tears abundantly. But even more remarkable was a case recently witnessed by some of the brethren involving a priest named Restitutus, from the village of Calamon. When he pleased, and when they asked him to demonstrate this unusual ability, he would imitate the sound of funeral wailing and draw himself into such a deep trance that he lay as if dead, insensible to all pain, pricking, and even burning, though he felt the effects keenly after he came around. The trance was confirmed as genuine rather than feigned by the fact that he lay completely still without breathing, yet he said afterward that if someone spoke loudly, he believed he could hear it, as though from a great distance. Since, then, in this frail condition of ours the body serves the will in such extraordinary ways, why should we not believe that before his disobedience, the first man might have had his reproductive members and faculties free from lust? But he took delight in himself, was abandoned by God to himself, and therefore could not govern himself, because he had refused to obey God. His misery is all the more evident in that he cannot live as he would wish. If he could do so, he might at least imagine himself happy; yet living in obscenity, he would not truly be so.

But if we think clearly about it, no one lives as he wishes unless he is happy, and no one is happy without being righteous. Yet even the righteous man does not live as he wishes until he reaches that secure, eternal, painless, and undeceiving state. He naturally desires that state, and he cannot be complete until he has it. But what person on earth can claim to live as he wishes, when his life is not in his own hands? He longs to live, yet he must die. How, then, does he live as he pleases, if he cannot live as long as he pleases? And if he desires to die, how can he live as he desires when he does not wish to live at all? If he desires to die not to abandon life entirely but to exchange it for a better one, then he is not yet living as he likes; he only attains that better life by dying. Suppose we grant, however, that he does live as he likes, because he has disciplined himself to desire nothing beyond what is within his power, as Terence says: "Since you cannot have what you would have, desire that which you may have." Even so, he is not blessed, because he is merely enduring his misery with patience. Beatitude cannot be reached unless it is also loved. And if it is both reached and loved, then that love must surpass every other love, because everything else is loved for the sake of beatitude. If beatitude is loved as it should be (for whoever does not love it rightly cannot be happy), then one cannot help desiring it to be eternal. It follows, therefore, that the blessed life must be inseparably joined to eternity.

Therefore, man lived in Paradise as he wished, as long as he wished only what God commanded. He enjoyed God, from whom all his good came. He lived without need and held eternal life within his reach. He had food for hunger, drink for thirst, and the tree of life to hold off age. He was free from all bodily corruption and physical distress. He feared neither disease within nor violence without. His flesh was in perfect health, and his soul was filled with complete peace. Just as Paradise was neither scorching nor freezing, so the inhabitant's good will was troubled by neither desire nor fear. There was no genuine sorrow, no empty joy. Their joy was sustained by God's mercy, and they loved Him with a pure conscience and sincere faith. Their love in marriage was holy and honorable, and they kept the commandment without effort or trouble. They were neither weary of rest nor reluctantly drowsy. In such great happiness and ease of life, we should be far from suspecting that children could not have been conceived without the disease of lust. Rather, those members would have responded to the same quiet direction of the will as all the others, and without the alluring sting of heat, the husband would have joined his wife in tranquility of soul and body, with no harm to her integrity. Nor should this be disbelieved simply because it cannot be proved by experience. When those parts of the body were governed not by turbulent heat but by a spontaneous power, he would have applied them as need required. The male seed could have been sent into the womb of the wife while her feminine integrity remained whole, just as now the menstrual flow of blood can leave a virgin's womb without any breach of integrity. For by the same way that one may go out, the other might have gone in. Just as childbirth would have been opened not by groans of pain but by the impulse of maturity, so conception would have been brought about not by the appetite of lust but by a willing and deliberate act joining the two natures together. This subject is immodest, and so let us reason as best we can about how the first parents of humanity were before they knew shame. Our discussion here must yield to modesty rather than trust to eloquence: the one restrains us greatly, and the other helps us little. Since those who might have experienced this never did, having chosen through sin to be expelled from Paradise before they had used their means of bringing forth children, how can anyone now conceive of it happening except through that headlong lust, rather than through any quiet act of will? This is what silences me, even as I see the reason clearly in my heart. Yet Almighty God, the Creator of all nature, the helper and rewarder of all good wills, the just condemner of the bad, and the ordainer of both, was never without the foreknowledge needed to complete the number of those He had destined for His city, even from the condemned line of humanity. He distinguished them not by their merits (for the whole fruit was condemned in the corrupted stock) but by His own grace, freeing them both from themselves and from a world in bondage, and showing them what He had given them. For each one now acknowledges that it is not his own deserving but God's goodness that has freed him from evil and from the company of those with whom he would otherwise have shared a just condemnation. Why, then, could God not create those He knew would sin, in order to show through them and their descendants both what sin deserved and what His mercy bestowed, and to demonstrate that their perverse and disordered rebellion against Him could not overturn the right order He had established?

The angels and men who sinned did nothing to hinder the great works of God, who accomplishes everything He wills. His omnipotence extends to all things and all creatures, and He knows how to make use of both the good and the wicked. Why, then, could God not put the evil angel to good use? Having justly condemned that angel for his corrupt will and stripped him of all good, God permitted him to tempt the first man, in whom He had placed an upright will. That first man stood in such a condition that, if he chose to rely on God's help, a good man could overcome an evil angel; but if he fell away from God in pride, delighting in himself, he would be overcome. A reward was laid up for him if his will remained upright through God's help, and a punishment awaited him if his will turned perverse by abandoning God.

He could not trust in God's help without God helping him, yet it does not follow that he had no power of his own to abandon that divine help by relying entirely on himself. Though we cannot live well in the body without nourishment, we can still leave the body whenever we choose, as those who take their own lives demonstrate. In the same way, the man in Paradise could not live well without God's help, yet it was within his power to live badly, to choose a false happiness and a certain misery. Why, then, could God not permit him to be tempted by the malicious evil spirit, knowing full well what would happen? God was not ignorant that man would fall, but He also knew how thoroughly the devil would be defeated through those whom His grace would choose from among humanity's descendants. So God was neither ignorant of what would come, nor did He compel anyone to sin. Instead, He showed through the unfolding of events, to both men and angels, what difference there is between presuming on oneself and trusting in Him. For who would dare to say or even think that God could not have kept both men and angels from falling? He simply chose not to remove that possibility from their power, and in doing so revealed the wickedness of their pride and the greatness of His own grace.

Two loves, then, have given rise to these two cities: self-love in contempt of God has built the earthly city, while love of God in contempt of self has built the heavenly one. The earthly city seeks the glory of men; the heavenly city desires God alone as the witness of its conscience, which is its greatest glory. The one glories in itself; the other glories in God. The one exalts itself in its own pride; the other says to God, "My glory and the lifter up of my head" (Ps 3:3). The one boasts of ambitious conquerors driven by the lust for power; in the other, everyone serves one another in charity, rulers by giving wise counsel and subjects by giving willing obedience. The one loves worldly strength in its rulers; the other says to God, "I will love Thee, O Lord, my strength" (Ps 18:1). The wise men of the earthly city pursue either the goods of the body, or of the mind, or both, living according to the flesh. Though they could have known God, they neither honored Him as God nor gave thanks to Him, but became vain in their own imaginations, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, that is, proudly exalting themselves in their own wisdom, they became fools, exchanging the glory of the incorruptible God for images resembling a corruptible man, birds, four-footed beasts, and serpents (Rom 1:21-23). They were either the people's guides into all those idolatries, or their willing followers, and they served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. But in the heavenly city, there is no human wisdom at all, only the devotion that worships the true God and awaits its reward in the fellowship of the holy angels and redeemed humanity, so that God may be all in all.