nature from the start, and with which God threatened Adam when he gave the
92 On Genesis: A Refutation of the Manichees vate this interior field, and get our bread even though with much toil, can suffer such toil to the end of this life; but after this life there is no need to suffer it. Those however who perhaps fail to cultivate the field, and allow it to be overrun with thorns and thistles, have the curse of the earth on all their works in this life, and after this life will have to face either the fires ofpurgatory or eternal punishment. Thus nobody escapes this sentence; but one has to take steps to see that at least it is only sensed,43 only experienced, in this life alone.
On Adam giving his wife the name of Life, and on God clothing them with tunics ofskin
21. 31. Can anyone though help being puzzled when reading that after God had passed these judicial sentences, Adam calls his woman Life, because she is the mother of all the living (Gn 3:20), and this after she has earned death and is destined to bear mortal offspring? This surely can only be because Scripture is thinking of how, after she has given birth to her offspring in pain, her turning back to her husband will take place and he will lord it over her. About this offspring we have spoken above.44 That, you see, is how there is life in her, and she is the mother of the living, because the life lived in sins is habitually called death in the scriptures, as when the apostle says that the widow who lives for pleasure is dead(I Tm 5:6); and we also find sin itself signified by a dead man, where it says: Whoever is baptized by a dead man and again touches him, what does he profitfrom his bath? So too the one whofasts over his sins, and walks away again doing the same things (Sir 34:25-26). He put a dead man for sin, you see, while treating restraint and fasting from sin as a kind of baptism, that is, as purification from the dead man, and going back again to sinning as again touching the dead man.
So why then should that "soulish" part of us, which ought to submit to reason as to a husband, not be called Life, when through the reason itself it has conceived the burden of right living by the Word of life; and when, after the pains and groans of the labor of self-restraint with which it has withstood an evil habit, it has given birth to a good habit of acting rightly, why should it not be called the mother of the living, that is, of rightly performed actions, the opposite of which are the sins, which we have just maintained can be signified under the name of dead men?
32. This death, you see, which all of us who are born of Adam have owed to nature from the start, and with which God threatened Adam when he gave the command that the fruit of that tree was not to be eaten, so then this death is
43. Word play on sententiam and sentiatur. The whole sentence runs:/ra nemo evadit istam sententiam; sed agendum est ut saltern in hac tantum vita sentiatur. 44. See above. 19.29.