City of God 13.19–13.23

Chapter 19. Against the teachings of those who do not believe that the first human beings would have been immortal had they not sinned, and who want the eternity of souls to be without bodies.

Now let us explain what we set out to say about the bodies of the first human beings: that not even this death, which is said to be good to the good, and is known not only to a few who understand or believe but to all, by which the soul is separated from the body, by which certainly the body of a living being, which evidently was living, evidently dies, could have befallen them had it not followed as the desert of sin. For although it is not lawful to doubt that the souls of the righteous and godly departed live in rest, yet it would be so much better for them to live with their bodies in good health that even those who think that to be without a body is in every way most happy refute this opinion of theirs by a view that contradicts it. For none of them will dare to set their wise men, whether about to die or already dead, that is, either lacking bodies or about to leave them, above the immortal gods, to whom the supreme God in Plato promises a great gift, namely indissoluble life, that is, eternal partnership with their bodies. And the same Plato thinks that it goes best with men if, having passed this life piously and justly, they are received, separated from their bodies, into the bosom of those very gods who never forsake their bodies:

That, forgetful, they may see again the vault above, and begin once more to wish to return into bodies;

which Virgil is praised for having said from Platonic teaching. For so he thinks that the souls of mortals can neither be always in their bodies, but are dissolved by the necessity of death, nor last perpetually without bodies, but thinks that by alternating turns the living are unceasingly made from the dead and the dead from the living; so that the wise seem to differ from other men in this, that after death they are carried to the stars, so that each may rest somewhat longer in the star suited to him, and from there again, forgetting his former misery and overcome by the desire to have a body, return to the toils and hardships of mortals; while those who have led a foolish life are rolled back at once into bodies owed to their deserts, whether of men or of beasts. In this very harsh condition, then, he has placed even good and wise souls, to whom such bodies are not allotted with which they might live always and immortally, so that they can neither remain in bodies nor endure without them in eternal purity. Of this Platonic teaching we have already said in earlier books that Porphyry was ashamed of it in Christian times, and not only removed the bodies of beasts from human souls, but also wanted the souls of the wise to be so freed from bodily bonds that, fleeing every body, they may be held happy with the Father without end. And so, lest he seem to be outdone by Christ, who promises everlasting life to the saints, he too established purified souls in eternal felicity without any return to their former miseries; and, to oppose Christ, denying the resurrection of incorruptible bodies, he asserted that they would live forever not only without earthly bodies but without any bodies at all. Yet with this opinion of his, whatever it is worth, he did not at least teach that they should not be subject in religious worship to gods with bodies. Why so, unless because he did not believe that they, though joined to no body, were better than those gods? Therefore, if these men will not dare, as I do not think they will, to set human souls above the most happy gods who are nevertheless established in eternal bodies, why does it seem absurd to them, what the Christian faith proclaims, both that the first human beings were so created that, had they not sinned, they would have been loosed from their bodies by no death, but, gifted with immortality for the merit of obedience kept, would live with them forever; and that the saints in the resurrection will have those same bodies in which they toiled here, such that neither any corruption or difficulty can befall their flesh, nor any pain or unhappiness their happiness?

Chapter 20. That the flesh of the saints, which now rests in hope, is to be restored to a better quality than that of the first human beings before sin.

Accordingly the souls of the departed saints do not now find heavy the death by which they have been separated from their bodies, because their flesh rests in hope, whatever insults it may seem to have received, now without any feeling. For they do not, as Plato thought, desire bodies through forgetfulness; but rather, because they remember what has been promised them by him who deceives no one, who gave them assurance even of the preservation of their hair, they await with longing and patience the resurrection of the bodies in which they suffered many hardships, and in which they will feel nothing of the kind any more. For if they did not hate their flesh when, as it resisted their mind by its weakness, they restrained it by spiritual right, how much more do they love it, since it too is to be spiritual! For as the spirit serving the flesh is not unfittingly called carnal, so the flesh serving the spirit will rightly be called spiritual; not because it will be converted into spirit, as some think from what is written, “It is sown an animal body, it will rise a spiritual body,” but because it will be subject to the spirit with a supreme and wonderful readiness of obedience, to the point of fulfilling the most secure will of indissoluble immortality, every feeling of trouble, all corruptibility and sluggishness being taken away. For it will not only not be such as it is now in the very best health, but not even such as it was in the first human beings before sin. They, though they would not have died had they not sinned, nevertheless used food as men do, bearing earthly bodies not yet spiritual but still animal. And though these did not grow old with age so as to be brought by necessity to death (this state was given them, by the wonderful grace of God, from the tree of life, which was in the middle of paradise together with the forbidden tree), yet they took other foods besides the one tree which had been forbidden, not because it was itself evil, but in order to commend the good of pure and simple obedience, which is a great virtue of a rational creature set under the Lord Creator. For where nothing evil was touched, surely, if the forbidden thing were touched, the sin was disobedience alone. They ate, then, of the other things they took so that their animal bodies might not feel any distress through hunger and thirst; and they tasted of the tree of life so that death might not creep upon them from anywhere, or that they might not perish, worn out by old age, when the spans of time had run their course; as if the other things were for nourishment, that one for a sacrament; so that the tree of life may be taken to have been in the bodily paradise what the wisdom of God is in the spiritual, that is, the intelligible, paradise, of which it is written: “She is a tree of life to those who embrace her.”

Chapter 21. Of the paradise in which the first human beings were: that something spiritual is rightly understood by its signification, while the truth of the historical narrative about a bodily place is kept.

Hence some refer the whole of paradise itself, where the first human beings, the parents of the human race, are told by the truth of Holy Scripture to have been, to intelligible things, and turn those trees and fruit-bearing woods into virtues and ways of life; as if those things were not visible and bodily, but were said or written in that way for the sake of signifying intelligible things. As if, because a spiritual paradise can also be understood, there could not have been a bodily one; as if, therefore, there were not two women, Hagar and Sarah, and from them two sons of Abraham, one of the slave woman and the other of the free, because the apostle says that the two covenants were prefigured in them; or as if no water flowed from any rock when Moses struck it, because Christ too can be understood there by a figurative signification, the same apostle saying: “And the rock was Christ.” No one, then, forbids understanding paradise as the life of the blessed; its four rivers as the four virtues, prudence, fortitude, temperance, and justice; its trees as all useful disciplines; the fruits of the trees as the ways of life of the godly; the tree of life as wisdom itself, the mother of all goods; and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil as the experience of a commandment transgressed. For God appointed a penalty for sinners well, since justly; but man does not experience it to his own good. These things can also be understood of the church, so that we may better take them as prophetic signs going before of things to come: namely, paradise as the church itself, as we read of her in the Song of Songs; the four rivers of paradise as the four Gospels; the fruit-bearing trees as the saints, and their fruits as their works; the tree of life as the Holy of Holies, Christ himself; the tree of the knowledge of good and evil as the will's own choice. For man, if he despises the divine will, can only use himself to his own ruin; and so he learns what a difference it makes whether he cleaves to the good common to all or delights in his own. For loving himself, he is given over to himself, so that, filled then with fears and sorrows, he may sing in the psalm, if indeed he feels his evils: “My soul is troubled within me”; and, once corrected, may say: “My strength I will keep for you.” These things, and any others that can be said more fittingly about understanding paradise spiritually, may be said without anyone forbidding it, provided that the truth of that history too, commended by a most faithful narrative of events, is believed.

Chapter 22. Of the bodies of the saints after the resurrection, which will be spiritual in such a way that the flesh is not turned into spirit.

The bodies of the righteous, then, which will be in the resurrection, will need neither any tree to keep them from dying by disease or worn-out old age, nor any other bodily foods by which any distress of hunger and thirst may be avoided; since they will be clothed with the sure and in every way inviolable gift of immortality, so that they will eat, if they wish, by ability, not by necessity. The angels too did this when they appeared visibly and tangibly, not because they needed to, but because they wished and were able, in order to suit themselves to men by a certain humanity of their ministry. For it is not to be believed that the angels ate in appearance only when men received them as guests, although to those who did not know whether they were angels they seemed to eat from a need like ours. Hence what the angel says in the book of Tobit: “You saw me eating, but you saw it with your own sight”; that is, you thought I took food out of the need to refresh the body, as you do. But even if something more credible can perhaps be argued about the angels, the Christian faith certainly does not doubt about the Savior himself that, even after the resurrection, in flesh now spiritual but still true, he took food and drink with his disciples. For it is not the power but the need of eating and drinking that will be taken from such bodies. Hence they will also be spiritual, not because they will cease to be bodies, but because they will subsist by the life-giving spirit.

Chapter 23. What is to be understood by the animal body and the spiritual body, and who die in Adam and who are made alive in Christ.

For as those bodies which have a living soul, not yet a life-giving spirit, are called animal bodies, and yet are not souls but bodies, so those are called spiritual bodies; yet far be it from us to believe that they will be spirits, but bodies having the substance of flesh, yet suffering no fleshly sluggishness or corruption, the spirit giving them life. Then man will be no longer earthly but heavenly; not because the body which was made from earth will not be itself, but because by a heavenly gift it will be such that it befits even dwelling in heaven, its nature not lost but its quality changed. But the first man, earthly from the earth, was made a living soul, not a life-giving spirit, which was reserved for him after the merit of obedience. Therefore his body, which needed food and drink so as not to suffer hunger and thirst, and was kept from the necessity of death not by that absolute and indissoluble immortality but by the tree of life, and was held in the flower of youth, was undoubtedly not spiritual but animal; yet it would by no means have died, had he not fallen, by sinning, under the sentence of God, who foretold and threatened it. And though food was not denied him even outside paradise, yet, being barred from the tree of life, he was handed over to time and old age to be ended, at least as regards that life which, though in an animal body until it became spiritual by the merit of obedience, he could have had forever in paradise had he not sinned. Therefore, even if we understand that this manifest death, by which the soul is separated from the body, was signified together with the others when God had said, “On the day you eat of it, you will die the death,” it ought not therefore to seem absurd that they were not loosed from the body on the very day they took the forbidden and deadly food. For on that day their nature was changed for the worse and vitiated, and by their most just separation from the tree of life the necessity of bodily death too was produced in them, with which necessity we are born. For this reason the apostle does not say, “The body is going to die because of sin,” but says, “The body is dead because of sin, but the spirit is life because of righteousness.” Then he adds: “But if the Spirit of him who raised Christ from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will give life also to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you.” Then, therefore, the body will be a life-giving spirit which is now a living soul; and yet the apostle calls it dead, because it is already bound by the necessity of dying. But then it was a living soul, though not a life-giving spirit, in such a way that it could not rightly be called dead, because it could not have the necessity of dying except by committing sin.

But since God, by saying, “Adam, where are you?”, signified the death of the soul, which came about when he forsook it, and by saying, “You are earth, and to earth you will go,” signified the death of the body, which comes to it when the soul departs, it must be believed that he said nothing of the second death because he willed it to be hidden for the sake of the dispensation of the New Testament, where the second death is most plainly declared; so that first this first death, which is common to all, might be shown to have come from that sin which was made common to all in one; but the second death is certainly not common to all, because of those who are called according to his purpose, whom he foreknew and predestined, as the apostle says, to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers, whom the grace of God has freed from the second death through the Mediator.

In this way, then, the apostle says the first man was made in an animal body. For, wishing to distinguish this which is now animal from the spiritual body which will be in the resurrection, he says: “It is sown in corruption, it will rise in incorruption; it is sown in dishonor, it will rise in glory; it is sown in weakness, it will rise in power; it is sown an animal body, it will rise a spiritual body.” Then, to prove this: “If there is an animal body,” he says, “there is also a spiritual one.” And to show what an animal body is: “Thus it is written,” he says, “The first man was made a living soul.” In this way, then, he meant to show what an animal body is, although Scripture did not say of the first man, who was called Adam, when his soul was created by the breath of God, “And man was made in an animal body,” but, “Man was made a living soul.” By what is written, then, “The first man was made a living soul,” the apostle meant the animal body of man to be understood. And how the spiritual body is to be understood he showed by adding: “The last Adam a life-giving spirit,” beyond doubt signifying Christ, who has now so risen from the dead that he cannot die any more at all. Then he goes on to say: “But it is not the spiritual that is first, but the animal, and afterward the spiritual.” Here he declared much more plainly that he had intimated the animal body in what is written, that the first man was made a living soul, and the spiritual in what he says, “The last Adam a life-giving spirit.” For first comes the animal body, such as the first Adam had, though it would not have died had he not sinned; such as we too now have, his nature being changed and vitiated to the extent that was brought about in him after he sinned, so that he now had the necessity of dying; such as Christ too deigned at first to have for our sake, not indeed by necessity but by power; but afterward the spiritual, such as has already gone before in Christ as in our head, and is to follow in his members at the last resurrection of the dead.

Then the apostle adds the most evident difference between these two men, saying: “The first man was from the earth, earthly; the second man is from heaven, heavenly. As was the earthly, so are those who are earthly; and as is the heavenly, so are those who are heavenly. And as we have borne the image of the earthly, let us bear also the image of him who is from heaven.” The apostle put this in such a way that it takes place in us now according to the sacrament of regeneration, as he says elsewhere, “As many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ”; but in reality it will be completed then, when in us too what is animal by being born has become spiritual by rising again. For, to use his words likewise, “In hope we have been saved.” We bear the image of the earthly man by the propagation of transgression and death, which generation has brought upon us; but we bear the image of the heavenly man by the grace of pardon and everlasting life, which regeneration grants us, only through the Mediator of God and men, the man Christ Jesus. He wants him to be understood as the heavenly man because he came from heaven to be clothed with the body of earthly mortality, which he would clothe with heavenly immortality. And he calls others heavenly too because they become his members by grace, so that with them there is one Christ, as head and body. He puts this more plainly in the same letter: “By a man came death, and by a man the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive”; now, that is, in the spiritual body which will be a life-giving spirit; not because all who die in Adam will be members of Christ (for many more of them will be punished with the second death forever), but it is said “all” and “all” because, as no one dies in an animal body except in Adam, so no one is made alive in a spiritual body except in Christ. Therefore it must by no means be thought that we shall have in the resurrection such a body as the first man had before sin; nor is the saying, “As was the earthly, so are those who are earthly,” to be understood according to what came about by the committing of sin. For it is not to be thought that before he sinned he had a spiritual body and by the desert of sin it was changed into an animal one. For if this is thought, too little attention is paid to the words of so great a teacher, who says: “If there is an animal body, there is also a spiritual one; thus it is also written, The first man Adam was made a living soul.” Did this happen after sin, when it is the first creation of man, from which the most blessed Paul took this testimony of the law to show the animal body?