intercourse would be unnecessary in a "non-lapsarian society" and that all births would be
236 The Literal Meaning of Genesis
Difficulty about thefood providedfor man, in connection with his conditional immortality
21, 33. How, though, the man was made immortal, and at the same time received for his food with the other animals "grasses for fodder-bearing seed and fruit-bearing trees and green herbs," it is difficult to say. If, after all, it was through sin that he was rendered mortal, then surely before sin he would not have needed such nourishment. Nor, what is more, could that body have faded away out of hunger.
As regards what they are told, lncrease and multiply and fill the earth, although it hardly seems that this could have been done without the intercourse of male and female—and here too we have a clear indication that our bodies are mortal—still it can be said that with immortal bodies there could have been another way, so that children would be born solely through family affection without any disfigurement of lust; born neither to take the place of deceased parents nor to die themselves, until the earth was filled with immortal human beings; and that with a just and holy people being thus set in place, such as we believe will exist after the resurrection, a final limit would also be put to the whole business of birth. Yes, this can indeed be said, and how it may be said is matter for further consideration.32 But surely nobody will have the face to say this too, that any but mortal bodies could be in want of nourishment to keep them going.
32. What he is suggesting by this qualification, 1 think, is that he would not agree that sexual intercourse would be unnecessary in a "non-lapsarian society" and that all births would be virginal, brought about purely by "family affection," pietatis affectu. For him this pietatis affectus would take the place of the "disfigurement oflust," corruptions concupiscentia, in the generative sexual act. The whole passage is based on the assumption, common to all Augustine's contemporary exegetes, that Genesis 1 and 2 formed a single narrative; also that our first parents, before their sin, were superhuman human beings, both in mind and in body. No modern exegetes would take such a line; but the point is worth making that it is a necessary Christian belief (that is, a necessary pre-supposition to more central Christian beliefs) that if there had been no sin, human beings would not have died; thai// was through the envy of the devil that death entered the world (Wis 2:24). Without it, we cannot do justice to the central Christian notion of life, and of eternal life, the fullness of life, consisting in communion with God, being that for which God created mankind in the beginning. As it says in the same book (Wis 1:13), God did not make death, and he does not delight in the death of the living. Yes, death is a natural event, and is frequently so treated in scripture; but to see it as purely and simply such would be to devaluate the redemptive death of Christ, whose death gave death an expiatory value, precisely because it also has a dimension as the punishment of sin, as the self-inflicted punishment of sin, death as the inner consequence, almost the inner meaning of sin, seeing that sin is essentially a deliberate turning away from the living God, the God of life. May 1 refer the reader to a book of mine; Being Human: a Biblical Perspective (Geoffrey Chapman, London 1984; see in particular chapters 5A and 12A).