paying attention to the usual way in which nature runs its course after sin and the
Book IX 379 spot or wrinkle (Eph 5:27) in Paradise, God granting this right to them if they lived faithfully injustice and served him obediently in holiness, so that without any restless fever of lust, without any labor and pain in childbirth, offspring would be brought forth from their sowing. This would not be in order that chil dren might take the place of their parents when they died; the parents, rather, would remain in their prime5 and receive bodily vigor from the tree of life which had been planted there, while their offspring would be brought up to the same perfect adult state until some definite number of human beings had been reached. Then, if they all lived lives ofjustice and obedience, the change would be brought about by which their merely "ensouled" animal bodies would be converted without dying into something of a different kind, and be entirely at the beck and call of the spirit governing them, and with only the spirit quickening them would live without having to be sustained by any bodily nourishment; their bodies would in fact be called spiritual.6 This could have happened, if the trans gression of the commandment had not earned the punishment of death.
7. Those, l mean, who do not believe that this could have happened are only paying attention to the usual way in which nature runs its course after sin and the human penalty; we though should not be in the class of those who only believe what they have usually seen. Can you doubt, after all, that what I have said could have been granted the man had he lived an obedient and religious life, if you have no doubts about the garments of the lsraelites having a certain "stay of execution" of their own kind bestowed on them, so that for forty years they did not wear out through age?7
The meaning, 1 take it, of a rather odd phrase: in aliquoformae statu, literally, "in some stay of form/shape/beauty"; there would be no aging for Adam and Eve, nor for their offspring once they had reached perfect manhood or womanhood. . The background text to what he is saying here is 1 Cor 15:42-49, where Paul is answering the question, "How will the dead rise; what sort of bodies will they have?" The point of what Paul says there, and hence of what Augustine is saying here, is missed in nearly all translations, because Paul uses two words which have no real equivalents in modern English. 1n verse 44 he writes (literally): "1t is sown apsychic body, it is raised a pneumatic body;" which translates (literally) into Latin: "1t is sown an animal body, it is raised a spiritual body." He is, in fact, contrasting body as quickened or animated (ensouled) by soul, and body, in the resurrection, as quickened by spirit. 1f 1 may give here my translation of the passage, which 1 did for the English Jerusalem Bible, and which was modified in the second edition, but was still there in the first edition, and survives in the current Breviary in the first alternative reading for the Office of the Dead: "When it is sown it embodies the soul, when it is raised it embodies the spirit. 1f the soul has its own embodiment, so does the spirit have its own embodiment. The first man, Adam, as scripture says, became a living soul (Gn 2:7); but the last Adam has become a life-giving spirit. That is, first the one with the soul, not the spirit, and after that the one with the spirit." For further notes on this crucial linguistic point see Book V1,xix,30, notes 23 and 25 above; and Books X, 12,20, notes 15 and 17; and X1, 1 8,24, note 21 below. See Dt 29:5. "Stay ofexecution" is the translator's slight elaboration of the single v/ordstatus. "stay," which we have had before.