some measure, and if this is ruined to the extent that a lethal disease is already
Book IX 385
It is not to be supposed that the bodies of those two were like that; but though they were only embodiments of soul, not yet of spirit, they were not for all that dead, that is, under the necessity of dying; this only happened to them, that they became dead, on the day when they touched the tree in spite of the prohibition.
17. Take our bodies here and now; we talk about a kind of health they have in some measure, and if this is ruined to the extent that a lethal disease is already gnawing at our vitals, and the doctors after examining us declare that death is imminent, then of course the body is also said in that case to be mortal, but rather differently from when it was in good health, although undoubtedly due to die some time or other. In somewhat the same way, those first human beings did indeed have merely "ensouled" bodies, but ones that were not going to die unless they sinned, being due instead to receive an angelic form and a heavenly quality; but as soon as they transgressed the commandment, they contracted death itself in their members, like some lethal illness which altered that quality by which they so dominated their bodies that they would not have to say, l see another law in my membersfighting back against the law of my mind. Even if their bodies, you see, were not yet "enspirited," only "ensouled," they were for all that not yet "the body of this death" from which and with which we have been born.
What else, after all, did we start on—l won't say when we were born, but quite simply when we were conceived—but a kind of illness of which we are of necessity going to die? l mean, a person suffering from dropsy or tuberculosis or elephantiasis is not as certainly and necessarily going to die of that disease, as any person is certainly going to die who begins to have this body by which all human beings are by nature children of wrath (Eph 2:3), because what has brought this about is nothing but the penalty of sin.
1 8. This being so, why should we not suppose that before sin those two human beings were able to control and command their genital organs for the procreation ofchildren in the same way as their other limbs, which the soul moves for all kinds of action without any trouble or any sort of prurient itch for pleasure? Look at how the almighty creator, after all, who is to be praised more than words can express, and who is great even in the smallest of his works, allows bees to go about the producing ofchildren in the same way as they do the making ofelegant wax combs and the honey dripping from them. I8 So why should it seem incredible that he made bodies for the first human beings of such a kind, that if they had not sinned and straightaway contracted a sort of disease of which they would die, just as they commanded the feet when they went walking, so they could have commanded at will the organs that bring the fetus into being, so that it would have been neither sown in palpitating heat nor brought forth in piteous pain?
18.1 take it his chief"authority" for this was Virgil; see his Georgics 1V, which is devoted entirely to bees—and a little to bee-keeping. On the particular point of their freedom from both sordid lust and the pangs of childbirth, see lines 197-202.