Augustine in His Own Words
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.
sion which, as soon as it began with the Fall, made Adam and Eve so selfconscious, so confused, and so eager for concealment. In any case, they say, there would never have been any intercourse in the Garden but only outside, as, in fact, turned out to be the case, since it was only after the expulsion that children were conceived and born.
(22) For ourselves, we do not have the slightest doubt that to "increase and multiply and fill the earth" in obedience to the blessing and command of God is the very mission which God gave to marriage as He instituted it from the beginning and, so, before the Fall. That is why He made the bodies of the two sexes, male and female, so clearly different. And it was precisely on the conjugal duty itself that God's blessing was handed down, for as soon as Scripture notes, "Male and female He created them," the text continues: "And God blessed them, saying: Increase and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it" (Gn 1:27–28), and so on. True—much of what is here said is susceptible of a spiritual interpretation, but it makes no sense to say that "male" and "female" are allegories of two qualities in a single person: that, for example, "male" stands for the part that rules and "female" for the part that is ruled. The simple truth is—as is luminously clear from the bodies of the different sexes—that males and females were made as they were for the purposes of increasing and multiplying and filling the earth by becoming fathers and mothers. To deny this would be utterly absurd. . . . It is, therefore, certain that male and female were created in the beginning exactly as we see and know them now, as human beings of different sexes. If the two are spoken of as "one," that is explained either by their unity in marriage or by the fact that the first woman was made from the side of the man. To confirm this we have the Apostle appealing to this first marriage as a model, as the marriage instituted by God from the beginning, when he calls upon the husbands in every family to love their wives.
(23) The view that there could have been no procreation in Paradise if there had been no sin amounts to this: that humankind had to sin to fill up the number of the saints [in the City of God]. The argument runs: If no sin, then no procreation; but if no procreation, only two saints; but more than two saints were necessary; therefore, sin was necessary. Now this conclusion is an absurdity. Hence, we must believe that the number of saints required to populate the city of the blessed would have been brought into existence even if no one had sinned, and this number equals the number of those who, as things are now, continue to be gathered by God's grace from the multitude of sinners and will continue to be gathered so long as there are parents and babies among the children of this world. We conclude, therefore, that even if there had been no sin in the Garden, there would still have been marriag-