Chapter IV: Immortality, a Part of the Divine Image
CHAPTER IV: ON IMMORTALITY, A PART OF THE DIVINE IMAGE
§ 99. Part (or at least the consequence) of the divine image before the fall was immortality. There are different opinions about this in the church today. The new Photinians expressly deny that Adam was created in immortality (Catech. Racov., p. 21); and in fact they even add (p. 26): “Adam could not have even known the way to immortality.” They borrowed this from the ancient Pelagians, who used to teach that man was going to die even if he had not sinned (Augustine, Letter 106; De haeres., ch. 88). Eugubinus was misled by this error to write (notes on Genesis 2): “From the fall of Adam the human race incurred the death not of the body but of the soul; people were going to die even if they had not sinned.”
The death of the body is the punishment for human crime.
§ 100. The death of the body is not a condition of nature but the punishment for sin. This can be proved clearly. (I) Wisdom 2:23: “Man was created by God in incorruption [ἐν ἀϕθαρσίᾳ]” (other readings have “for incorruption [ἐπ᾽ἀϕθαρσίᾳ]”), or “imperishable [inexterminabilis],” as the Vulgate translates it, or “according to an uncorrupted condition [ad conditionem incorruptam],” as Tremellius has it. Surely, then, he was immortal and without corrupting evil. There is no reason to object that this book is apocryphal, because this present testimony is in harmony with other statements of canonical Scripture.
(II) Gen. 1:27: “Man was created after the image of God.” But now, the image of God also includes immortality within itself. How could man, being mortal himself, have represented the image of the immortal God? Therefore, after the wise one had said that man was created immortal by God, he then adds, as if by way of explanation, Wisdom 2:23: “And after the image of His very own nature had He created him.”
(III) Whatever is declared to man as a threat is not a condition of nature. But now, death is declared to man as a threat. Gen. 2:17: “On the day that you eat of that tree, you will die by death,” or in the Hebrew: “You will most surely die.” There is no reason to turn this around to be understood as a reference only to the death of the soul, because the execution of this decree shows that it is to be understood as a reference also to the death of the body. Gen. 3:19: “By the sweat of your face you will eat your bread until you return to the ground from which you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Augustine (De civ. Dei, bk. 13) and Ambrose (De parad., ch. 9) understand these divine words of warning as referring to death of the soul and the body.
(IV) Wisdom 2:24: “Through the devil’s envy death entered the world.” Therefore [death] is not a condition of the nature which God created.
(V) Rom. 5:12: “Death entered into the world through the sin of the first man.” Rom. 6:23: “The wages of sin is death.” Rom. 8:10: “The body dies because of sin.” 1 Cor. 15:21: “By man came death.” 1 Cor. 15:22: “In Adam all die.” 1 Cor. 15:55: “The sting of death is sin.” Therefore the death of man is not a condition of nature.
(VI) In eternal life there will be a restoration [ἀποκατάστασις] of all things (Acts 3:20). But now, in eternal life “death shall be no more” (Rev. 21:4). Therefore it did not exist in the state of integrity. In our earlier treatise On Predestination([Commonplace X] § 6), we explained how God strengthened man inwardly and outwardly against death.
Immortality was not a supernatural gift.
§ 101. Bellarmine argues (De grat. primi hominis, ch. 9): “Immortality was a supernatural gift of the first man, not a natural property.” And yet: (1) This opinion rests upon the false assumption that the image of God in man was a supernatural gift added externally.
(2) If death had been natural for man, created in his purely natural state, it would follow that immortality befits him only by accident. (3) The body of the first man would have been preserved from death by natural means. So the body itself was immortal by nature.
(4) Whatever abides in a precise harmony of primary and secondary qualities is, of itself and inwardly, immortal. Yet such was the body of the first man. (5) Whatever has been united with the soul, which was created for immortality, by an essential and indissoluble bond is surely immortal. But now, such was the body of the first man. (6) Just as the descendants of Adam after the fall are “by nature the children of wrath” (Eph. [2]:3), so Adam before the fall was “by nature a child of grace and life.”
§ 102. Bellarmine does not engage our arguments but shapes for himself three objections which he solves. Let us see what he offers.
(I) Augustine writes (De civ. Dei, bk. 13, ch. 15): “Christians who hold to the catholic faith agree that bodily death itself was inflicted upon us not by a law of nature but deservedly by the law of sin.” Bellarmine counters: “Augustine intends only to say that the necessity of death, which would have followed from the nature of man, was removed by the grace of God.”
We respond. Augustine is speaking about the very nature of man and not about supernatural gifts, for he is not setting the gift of God and the merit of sin in opposition, but the law of nature and the merit of sin. It was according to the law of nature, that is, the natural condition of the first man, that he could not die as long as he lacked the wages of sin.
(II) The second Council of Orange (canon 2) claimed: “Those who assert that human beings were going to die even if they had not sinned attribute an injustice to God.”
We respond. We do not primarily use this argument, for we are aware that this canon was opposed to the Pelagians. Meanwhile, Bellarmine has in common with the Pelagians that he claims that death was natural to man as he was created in his purely natural state, though he does add that immortality was given to him through the supernatural gift of original righteousness.
(III) “The rational soul was immortal by nature”; therefore its body should have been immortal. Bellarmine makes the exception: “That body was compounded out of contrary humors and qualities, from which compounding the necessity of dying naturally followed.”
We respond. God could have found a way to bring those contrary qualities into a most precise harmony, so that one would not have to fear the necessity of dying. Are not the bodies of Christ and of the elect true bodies (albeit spiritual and glorified)? Shall we really attribute the necessity of dying to them too?
Arguments for the supernatural gift of immortality.
§ 103. In order to confirm his opinion, Bellarmine offers some words of Augustine (from De Gen. ad lit., bk. 1, ch. 25; De civ. Dei, bk. 13, ch. 20; and De pecc. merit. et remiss., bk. 1, ch. 4), saying: “The immortality of the first man consisted in that he was able not to die. Thus it was given him from the tree of life, not from the constitution of his nature; it was given to man by the wondrous grace of God. The body of the first man was animal and mortal,” etc. He also shapes some arguments from the Scholastics: “Because the nature of man consists of contrary elements and humors, consequently it has an intrinsic corruption, and immortality belongs to him outside of his nature. Because man was generative in his state of innocence, therefore he was corruptible. Also, because man needed food and drink before the fall, consequently he was mortal by his nature.” All these statements can be understood correctly and explained easily, if the following hypotheses be observed:
(1) The immortality of man before the fall was one thing, but that which will exist after the resurrection in eternal life is going to be something else. Augustine (De Gen. ad lit., bk. 6, ch. 25): “To be able to die is one thing; to be unable to die is another.”
(2) The body of Adam was composite; consequently, it was capable of being dissolved again and therefore surely was mortal, too, namely, not with a near potentiality but a remote potentiality.1 At the same time, the soul, which is an immortal spirit, gave the body its form (in the sense that it would not have been separated from the body because of its natural dependency on the body if fault had not intervened). Therefore we say that man was immortal by his nature, because man’s death should not be weighed so much on the basis of the indissolubility of the elements of his composite body (so to speak) as on the basis of the pain and misery of the soul which has been forced to leave its seat beyond and contrary to the order of its nature.
(3) Therefore let it be carefully observed that the question here refers not to the nature of the human body separately but to the condition of the whole man before the fall. Man’s body was animate, composite, and capable of being dissolved; and yet, because it had been compounded most precisely and because it was the dwelling place of the immortal soul, therefore the whole man is correctly called immortal by nature.
(4) God had created the soul and had brought it into the dwelling place of the body to the end that it would dwell therein without the intervention of death and would exercise its different operations in and through it according to the diverse state of its animal and spiritual life. Consequently, it would have been natural for the soul to keep the body free of every stain of corruption as long as the soul would have been subject to God; for the body itself was endowed with an equitable and perfectly arranged constitution.
(5) In addition, use of the tree of life was involved. This tree was an excellent preventative and remedy for all damages. Pererius concludes correctly from the testimonies of the Old Testament Scriptures that this was the natural power of the tree of life (In Gen., bk. 3, p. 415). Therefore we invert Bellarmine’s argument. Whatever is kept sound and immortal by natural means is certainly sound and immortal by nature. The body of Adam in his state of wholeness would have been kept in its concreated immortality through natural means, that, is, through the tree of life. Therefore it was surely immortal by nature.
1 See above, p. 283 n. 7.