Chapter 459
On the City of God 349
Augustine we need to disentangle what he was telling his contemporaries from that which he shared with them and questioned no more than did most of them. What we must listen to is the quiet debate between him and them, indeed a debate within his own mind, concerning the right attitude to take on questions on which his predecessors had already reflected deeply."54 One of those shifts concerned sexuality. The early Augustine, like his Christian contemporaries, held that Adam and Eve had been created sexless, that, had they not sinned, sexual intercourse would have been unnecessary. But between 400 and 410, Augustine quietly revised these views, recording his new perspectives in his Literal Interpretation of Genesis. There he announced one sharp reversal: "I see no reason why there should not have been honorable marriage in paradise."55 In Book 14 of On the City of God, Augustine speculates at length on unfallen sexuality and this "honorable marriage in paradise." As Markus notes, "we need hardly underline the gulf that divides Augustine from, for instance, Jerome, or even Ambrose or the Cappadocian Fathers on the subject. . . . His change of view is remarkable, an impressive result of the independence of mind which enabled him to break from some of the deep-seated ideas current in his circle. . . . [H]e had come to assert that human sexuality was a part of man's created nature, not a result of its corruption through sin. Henceforth sexual existence was no longer a problem for Augustine. What had to be accounted for was no longer the existence of sex, but rather, now, its mode of functioning; and the effect of Adam's sin on the sexuality of his heirs."56 From On the City of God, Book 14:
(21) Unfortunately, there are some people today who know so little of the graces that were given in the Garden that they can imagine no other way of begetting children except by arousing that lust which they themselves have experienced, but which involves, as everyone knows, an element of shame even in the most high-minded marriages. There are other people who have no faith in the Scriptures and who simply laugh at the story that it was only after the fall into sin that Adam and Eve were ashamed of their nakedness and covered their shamed parts. A third class accepts and reveres the Scriptures but insists on giving an allegorical interpretation to the text: "Increase and multiply" (Gn 1:28). They say there is no more reference here to increase in population than there is in the words: "You increased strength in my soul" (Ps 137:3). So, too, with the rest of the text in Genesis: "and fill the earth and subdue it" (Gn 1:28). On the theory of spiritual interpretation, they take "earth" to mean the body which is "filled" by the presence of the soul and which is most perfectly "subdued" when the soul is increased in virtue. They also hold that birth could no more take place then than now without that pas-
54. Robert A. Markus, The End of Ancient Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 59. 55. Gn. litt. 9.3.6 (BA 49:96). 56. Markus, The End of Ancient Christianity, 59–60.