17. Corpus animale in the Latin. See note 6 above.
384 The Literal Meaning of Genesis
15. You see, it is because the heavenly city of the angels is populated by such countless millions that it would not be right for them to be coupled in marriage if they were not going to die.16 lt was with foreknowledge of the completion of this vast multitude in the resurrection of the saints joining the company of the angels that the Lord said: ln the resurrection they are neither married nor do they take wives;for they will not be going to die, but will be equal to the angels of God (Lk 20:36). Here, however, the earth still had to be filled with human beings; and since for the sake of a close family relationship, and above all for giving the highest commendation to the bond of unity, it was essential to start its being filled from one man, for what other reason was a helper like him sought in the female sex, than that a wife by her very nature should assist him, like fertile soil, in sowing and planting out the human race?
ln Paradise they were not the slaves ofcarnal concupiscence
10, 16. However it would be better, more becoming to believe that the "ensouled" bodies17 of those two established in Paradise, not yet having been condemned by the law of death, were such that they did not have the same lust for carnal pleasure as these bodies of ours do now, derived as they are from the propa gation ofdeath. It was something, you see, not just nothing, that happened in them when they had eaten of the forbidden tree, seeing that God had not said, "Ifyou eat, you shall die the death," but: on the day thatyou all eat, you shall die the death (Gn 2:17). This means that this day produced in them the very result which the apostle describes with groans when he says: / take delight in the law of God according to the inner man; but l see another law in my membersfighting back against the law of my mind, and taking me prisoner under the law of sin, which is in my members.
Unhappy man that lam, who will delivermefrom the body of this death ? The grace of God through Jesus Christ our Lord (Rom 7:22-25). Would it not have been enough, I mean, for him to say, "Who will deliver me from this mortal body? But from the body, he said, of this death. Like that other place too: The body indeed, he said, is dead because of sin (Rom 8: 10); he did not say "mortal" there either, but "dead"—though of course it was also mortal, because it was going to die.
1 6. We nowadays assume that angels do not marry simply because of their angelic nature; that they are not marrying or marriageable beings; and we assume that that is what our Lord meant in his answer to the Sadducees, Lk 20:36 (Augustine is clearly quoting Luke, not the parallel Mt 22:30 which his editors always refer to in this connection), when he said that in the resurrection human beings will not marry but will be equal to the angels. However, he and the Sadducees. and Augustine, would have been aware of the passage in Gn 6: 1 -4. which talks of the sons of God seeing the daughters of men. that they were fair, and taking to wife such of them as they chose, and would have known that the phrase "sons of God" in the Old Testament usually means the angels. So here Augustine at least has in mind a case of angels being coupled in marriage in a way that was by no means right and proper. 17. Corpus animale in the Latin. See note 6 above.