Augustine: Earlier Writings
would be no such evil if the soul recognized its Creator, subjected itself to him alone, and understood that other things were made subject to it by him.
40. Ever\' corporeal creature, when possessed by a soul that loves God, is a good thing of the lowest order, and beautiful in its own way, for it is held together by form and species. If it is loved by a soul that neglects God, not even so is it evil in itself But the sin of so loving it brings a penalty to him who so loves it. It involves him in miseries, and feeds him with fallacious pleasures which neither abide nor satisfy, but beget torturing sorrows. Time in all the beauty of its changefulness holds on its appointed course, and the thing desired escapes him who loved it. It torments him by passing beyond his power to sense it, and disturbs his mind with errors. For it makes him suppose that the material object which the flesh had wrongly delighted in, and which he had known through the uncertain senses, was the primal form, when in fact it was the lowest form of all; so that, when he thinks, he believes he understands, being deluded by shadowy phantasms. If he does not hold fast to the whole discipline of divine providence but imagines he does, and tries to resist the flesh, he merely reaches the images of \'isible things. He vainly excogitates vast spaces of light exactly like ordinary light which he sees has fixed limits here, and promises himself a future habitation there. He does not know that he is still entangled in the lust of the eye, and that he is carr^-ing this world with him in his endeavour to go beyond it. He thinks he has reached another world simply by falsely imagining the bright part of this world infinitely extended. One could do the same not only with light but also with water, wine, honey, gold, silver, even with the flesh, blood and bones of animals, and other like things. There is no bodily object seen singly which cannot in thought be infinitely multiplied, and there is nothing which, as we sec it, occupies a small space, which cannot by the same faculty of imagination be infinitely extended. It is ver\' easy to execrate the flesh, but very difficult not to be carnally minded. xxi, 41. By this perversity of the soul, due to sin and punishment, the whole corporeal creation becomes, as Solomon says: * 'Vanity of them that are vain, all is vanity. What advantage has man in all his labour which he does under the sun?"
(Eccl. 1:2). Not for nothing does he say, "of them that are vain,'* for if you take away vain persons who pursue that which is last as if it were first, matter will not be vanity but will show its own beauty in its own way, a low type of beauty, of course, but not