series) and indeed practically constructs the rest of that book on the idea. Our passage here
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The opinion that Genesis 1:27 refers to the creation of the human spirit, 2:7 to the creation of the body
22, 34. There are some people, however, who have even put forward this conjecture: that at this time it was the interior man who was made, while the body of the man was made later on, when scripture says, And Godfashioned the man from the slime of the earth (Gn 2:7); so that the word used here, made, applies to the spirit, the wordfashioned to the body. They have disregarded the fact that man can only have been made male and female with respect to the body. There may be the most subtle arguments, to be sure, about the actual mind of man, in which he was made to the image of God, that its activity as a kind of rational life is divided between the contemplation of eternal truth and the management of temporal affairs; and that in this way it was made, as it were, male and female, with the former function directing, the latter conforming.33 With this division ofroles however, that part alone is rightly said to be the image of God which clings in contemplation to the unchangeable Truth. It was as symbolically representing this that the apostle Paul says the man alone is the image and glory of God, while the woman, he goes on, is the glory of the man ( 1 Cor 11:7).
And so, although this external diversity of sex in the bodies of two human beings symbolizes what is to be understood internally in the one mind of a single human being, still the female too, because it is simply in the body that she is female, is also being renewed in the spirit of her mind in the recognition of God according to the image of him who created that in which there is no male and female.34 Now just as women are not cut off from this grace of the renewal and reshaping of the image of God, although their bodily sex has a different symbolic signification, according to which the man alone is called "the image and glory of God;" by the same token too in that original creation of man in terms of which "man" included woman as well, the woman of course also had her
33. He himself propounds such subtle arguments in The Trinity X11, 1,1 -4 (Volume H1/1 in this series) and indeed practically constructs the rest of that book on the idea. Our passage here rather implies that he got the idea from some other author or authors. He returns to the point later on in Book V1 .7 . 1 2. and in note 6 on that passage 1 suggest that the author he was indebted to may well have been the Donatist scholar Tychonius. 34. See Col 3: 10, Eph 4:23, Gal 3:28. See note 27 on Book X11 of The Trinity in this series, for a defense of Augustine against his feminist critics, some ofwhom insist on maintaining that this theory of his shows he denied that women are also made to the image of God. Here in our text he will in a moment or two go on to repudiate this charge quite expressly. What he is in fact doing is defending the apostle from such a charge because of his words in 1 Cor 1 1 :7. There Augustine is at pains precisely to interpret the apostle figuratively and not literally. Origen was the most notable Christian exegete to maintain that Gen 1 :26-28 tells of the creation of the human spirit or soul, while 2:7 tells of the fashioning of the body. He maintained this in the extreme form of presenting the creation of the body as a punishment for some primal sin of the human soul, the body being provided for it as a penal prison.