59. Civ. Dei 14.13 (CCL 48:434–35); trans. Walsh and Monahan, FOTC 14:380–83.
On the City of God 353 selves the source of their being. For created gods are gods not in virtue of their own being but by a participation in the being of the true God.58
Thus, there is a wickedness by which a human being, who is self-satisfied as if he were the light, turns himself away from that true Light which, had humanity loved it, would have made us a sharer in the Light; it was this wickedness which secretly preceded and was the cause of the bad act which was committed openly.59
The Divided Self: How the Punishment
Fits the Crime
Augustine argues that the sin of disobedience shaped God's punishment: As we had once disobeyed God, so our wills and our bodies now disobey us. We desire eternal life, but our bodies disobey us by corrupting and dying, while our wills disobey us by our out-ofcontrol desires (evident in sexuality as well as our routine anxieties). From On the City of God, Book 14:
(15) For many reasons, then, the punishment meted out for disobeying God's order was just. It was God who had created humanity. He had made human beings to His own image, set them above all other animals, placed them in Paradise, and gave them an abundance of goods and well-being. God had not burdened them with many precepts that were heavy and hard, but had propped them up with a single precept that was momentary and utterly easy and that was meant merely as a medicine to make human obedience strong, and as a reminder that it was good for one who is a creature to give service freely to God who is our Master.
This just punishment involved many consequences. Humanity, which would have become spiritual even in its flesh—if only it had kept the commandment—became, instead, fleshly even in its soul. [Adam] who, by human pride, had had his own way was, by divine justice, abandoned to his own resources—not, that is, to power but to weakness. The very self that had once been obeyed now became, once he had sinned, a tyrant to torment and, in place of the liberty he longed for, he had to live in the misery of servitude. He had chosen freely the death of his soul; he was now condemned, unwillingly, to the death of this body. He had been a deserter from eternal life; he
58. "Participation in the being of the true God": Here is one side of Augustine's doctrine of deification. He plays here off the serpent's temptation ("You shall be as gods," Gn 3:5) to distinguish between a false deifying of self (i.e., pride) and true deification ("participation" in the "being of God" as a fruit of obedience). For more on this issue, see the sources cited above in n. 31.
59. Civ. Dei 14.13 (CCL 48:434–35); trans. Walsh and Monahan, FOTC 14:380–83.