incoherent, the question of how God makes souls (a question Augustine never succeeded in
386 The Literal Meaning ofGenesis
Now however, as the just deserts of their transgressing the commandment, they found the movement of that law fighting back against the law of the mind in the members of the body of that death they had contracted, a movement which marriage regulates, continence subdues and curbs, in order that just as the sin was turned into punishment, so the punishment might be turned into merit.
To doubt that the woman was madefor the man to effect the peopling of the earth, is to call in question everything we believe
11,19. And so the woman.being made for the man, from the man, in that sex and shape and distinction of parts by which females are known, gave birth to Cain and Abel and all their brothers and sisters, from whom all human beings would be bom. Among them she also gave birth to Seth, through whom we come to Abraham and the people of Israel and the nation now so widely known among all the nations, and to all nations through the sons of Noah. To doubt this is to undermine the foundations of everything we believe, something therefore the faithful should put entirely out of their minds. So then, when you ask what help that sex was made to provide the man with, the only thing that occurs to me after carefully considering everything to the best of my ability is that it was for the sake of having children, so that the earth might be filled from their stock; and a stock not engendered, what is more, in the way human beings are engendered nowadays, when the law of sin is in their members fighting back against the law of the mind, even when by God's grace they virtuously overcome it. We have to believe, after all, that this could not have been the case except in "the body of this death," the body that "is dead because of sin."
And what juster penalty could there be than that the body, the soul's henchman, should fail to serve it at its every beck and call, just as the soul itself declined to serve its own Lord and master? But whether God creates each from the parents, body from body, soul from soul, or whether he makes souls in some other way, it is certainly not for a task that is impossible or for a paltry reward; it is in order that the soul, religiously subjecting itself to God, may itself conquer through grace this law of sin which is in the members of the body of this death, and so receive a heavenly reward with all the greater glory, thus demonstrating what praise is due to the obedience of one who has been able virtuously to over come the penalty of another's disobedience.19
19. The second half of this section is very loosely written. Not only is the syntax somewhat incoherent, the question of how God makes souls (a question Augustine never succeeded in answering to his own satisfaction) is not immediately relevant to what he is concerned with here. 1t is, to be sure, very relevant to the question of how original sin is transmitted, and that question, no doubt, was at the back of his mind.