Augustine in His Own Words (continued)
On the City of God 345 the proud despise this divine Teacher is because "the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us" (Jn 1:14). For such unfortunates it is not enough to be sick; they must take pride in their sickness and think it below their dignity to take the medicine which could cure them. The result is that, instead of being cured, they suffer a serious relapse.50
Original Sin and Its Consequences (Book 14)
Human Nature: Flesh ≠ Body
Book 14 opens with a meditation on human nature. It is hard to underestimate the significance of what, at first sight, seems an abstract discussion. Augustine here overturns 800 years of thinking about the human person, thinking as old as Plato, namely, that the body is the ultimate source of human downfall. He also rejects reading Scripture from that vantage point, noting that when the Bible speaks of "flesh" it is not referring simply to "body." As Paula Fredriksen notes, "Augustine held not only that the soul, not the flesh, was the seat of sin but also that, after the Fall, the soul was divided against itself. The fault line caused by Adam's sin not only violated man's nature, sundering the fundamental unity of body and soul; it also ran right through the soul, separating intention and affect, dividing man's will from man's loves, the loves that escape his conscious control. Accordingly, the nature of both body and soul, of flesh and spirit, was vitiated by the Fall, Augustine held, because it is one nature, human nature. . . . After the Fall, both the body and soul are 'carnal' because human loves are oriented away from God and toward the self."51 From On the City of God, Book 14:
(1) I have already said, in previous Books, that God had two purposes in deriving the whole human race from one human being. His first purpose was to give unity to the human race by the likeness of nature. His second purpose was to bind humankind by the bond of peace, through blood relationship, into one harmonious whole. I have said further that no member of this race would ever have died had not the first two—one created from nothing and the second from the first—merited this death by disobedience. The sin which these two committed was so great that it impaired all human nature—in this sense: that the nature has been transmitted to posterity with a propensity to
50. Civ. Dei 10.29 (CCL 47:306–7); trans. Walsh and Monahan, FOTC 14:173–74 (modified). 51. Paula Fredriksen, "A Response to 'Vitiated Seeds and Holy Vessels' by Elizabeth A. Clark," in Images of the Feminine in Gnosticism, Studies in Antiquity and Christianity, ed. Karen L. King (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988), 402–3. See also Brown, Body and Society, 418.