Augustine in His Own Words
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.
sin and a necessity to die. Moreover, the kingdom of death so dominated humankind that all would have been hurled, by a just punishment, into a second and endless death had not some been saved from this by the gratuitous grace of God. This is the reason why, for all the differences of the many and very great nations throughout the world in religion and morals, language, weapons, and dress, there exist no more than the two kinds of society, which, according to our Scriptures, we have rightly called the two cities. One city is that of human beings who live according to the flesh. The other is that of those who live according to the spirit. Each of them chooses its own kind of peace, and, when they attain what they desire, each lives in the peace of its own choosing.
(2) Our immediate task, then, must be to see what it means to live, first, according to the flesh and, second, according to the spirit. It would be a mistake for anyone to take what I have said at face value and without recalling or sufficiently considering the manner of speech used in Holy Scripture. . . . Scripture uses the word "flesh" not only in reference to the body of an earthly and mortal animal, but also to a person, that is, to human nature. . . .
(3) Should anyone say that the cause of vices and evil habits lies in the flesh because it is only when the soul is influenced by the flesh that it lives in such a manner, he cannot have sufficiently considered the entire scope of human nature. It is true that "the corruptible body is a load upon the soul" (Wis 9:15). . . . On the one hand, our corruptible body may be a burden on our soul; on the other hand, the cause of this encumbrance is not in the nature and substance of the body, and, therefore, aware as we are of its corruption, we do not desire to be divested of the body but rather to be clothed with its immortality. In immortal life we shall have a body, but it will no longer be a burden since it will no longer be corruptible. Now, however, "the corruptible body is a load upon the soul, and the earthly habitation presses down the mind that muses upon many things" (Wis 9:15). Yet it is an error to suppose that all the evils of the soul proceed from the body. . . . Our faith teaches something very different [from the Platonists]. For the corruption of the body, which is a burden on the soul, is not the cause, but the punishment of Adam's first sin. Moreover, it was not corruptible flesh that made the soul sinful; on the contrary, it was the sinful soul that made flesh corruptible. . . .
(5) We ought not, therefore, to blame our sins and defects on the nature of the flesh, for this is to disparage the Creator. The flesh, in its own kind and order, is good. But what is not good is to abandon the Goodness of the Creator in pursuit of some created good, whether by living deliberately according to the flesh, or according to the soul, or according to the entire person. . . . Anyone, then, who extols the nature of the soul as the highest good and con-