4. Book 1X.3.5— 11,19.
430 The Literal Meaning ofGenesis figuratively in order to signify something more profound. That it was said, though, it is in no way lawful to doubt. This, after all, is required of us by the trustworthiness of the author and the commitment of the expositor.
3.So then, they were both naked. lt is true, the bodies of the two human beings living together in Paradise were stark naked. And they were not ashamed (Gn 2:25). What should they be ashamed of after all, when they were aware of no law in their members fighting back against the law of their minds (Rom 7:23)? This punishment of the sin dogged their steps after their deviation from the due direc tion,3 with disobedience daring to do what had been forbidden, and justice punishing what had been committed. Before this happened they were naked, as has been said, and were not embarrassed; there was no movement in their bodies ofwhich to be shy; they did not think anything needed to be covered up, because they had not experienced anything needing to be held in check. How they were going to breed children has already been discussed earlier on;4 but in any case it is not to be supposed that it would have been in the same manner as they did after the retribution just mentioned had followed the commission of the offense; from that moment on, though, before they died, death already conceived would whip up the disorderly behavior of disobedient members in the bodies of disobedient human beings as an eminently just tit for tat. Adam and Eve were not yet persons of that sort, when they were both naked and not embarrassed.
The serpent's cleverness; the relation of the serpent to the devil
2, 4. Now the serpent was the cleverest—there, yes indeed; but—of all the wild beasts that were upon the earth which the Lord God had made (Gn 3: 1 ). It was called "the cleverest," you see, by straining the word's meaning a little; several Latin manuscripts have "the wisest," not in its proper meaning, in which wisdom is usually taken as being something good whether in God or angels or in the rational soul; it's as though we were also to call bees and ants wise because of their constructions which seem to reflect wisdom. Though this serpent could be called the wisest of all wild beasts not in its own non-rational soul, but with an alien spirit, the devil's, that is. However much, after all, the rebellious angels deserved to be cast down from their heavenly thrones for their forwardness and pride, they are still by nature superior to all wild beasts in virtue of their supreme intelligence. So what is so surprising about the devil now filling the serpent with his own inspiration, joining his own spirit to it in the way the oracles of demons
3. An attempt, a little forced, perhaps, to convey the rather startling, and 1 think deliberate, alliteration in the Latin: Quae illospoena peccatipostperpetrationem praevaricationis secuta est. The word perpetrationem seems entirely superfluous to the sense, and so looks as if it were introduced simply to hammer the alliteration home. 4. Book 1X.3.5— 11,19.
Book XI 431 are usually inspired, and rendering it indeed the wisest of all wild beasts in its living non-rational soul?
"Wisdom" is here being used improperly in a bad sense, like "cunning" in a good sense, when properly and more usually, in Latin at least, people are called wise by way of praise, while the cunning are understood to be clever in a bad way. Hence some translators, as we find in several manuscripts, have rendered not the word but rather the meaning to fit the Latin idiom, preferring to call this serpent not wiser but more cunning5 than all the wild beasts. What the usage is in Hebrew, whether people there can properly, and not improperly, be called wise in a bad sense, let us leave to those who have a thorough knowledge of that language. We do, however, read in another place of the holy scriptures of people being wise for evil not for good purposes;6 and the Lord says that the sons of this world are wiser than the sons of light (Lk 16:8) in making provision for their future, though they do it by fraud, not by legal means.
Only with God's permission could the devil use the serpent in this way
3, 5. We certainly should not suppose that the choice of the serpent as the means by which to tempt them and persuade them to sin wasjust the devil's own; but while his eagerness to deceive was all his own because of his twisted and jealous will, the only animal he was able to use for the purpose was the one he was permitted to be able to use. Any spirit, you see, can of itself have the crooked will to do harm; but the power to do so only comes from God, and this in accor dance with some hidden and loftyjustice, since there is no iniquity with God.7
Why God permitted the man to be tempted
4, 6. So then, if you ask why God allowed the man to be tempted, knowing beforehand that he was going to consent to the temptation, I have to confess that l. Astutiorem in the Latin. This is closer, in fact, to the Hebrew word, arum, which is more often used in an uncomplimentary sense, though occasionally more positively, like the English "cunning," or "wily." But the word Augustine is referring to as the original they are translating is the Greek word of the Septuagint, phronimotatos.
Jer 4:22, reading in the Authorized Version "they are wise to do evil," in the Latin Vulgate, sapientes sunt utfaciant mala. Here the Hebrew and the Greek have the more usual words for "wise," hakam and sophos respectively.
. This, of course, is a general principle of moral theology, that an evil will is entirely the sinner' s responsibility, but that the actual exercise of it is only possible as and ifpermitted by God. Why he allowed the devil to choose the serpent as his instrument will emerge clearly in 36,49 below, where Augustine follows up a suggestion he had made in 12,16 that the curse of the serpent must be interpreted figuratively, even though God's addressing the serpent is to be treated as an actual historical event; that is to say, the serpent is seen as a much more convincing symbol of evil and representative of the devil than, say, a lion or a bird of prey or a rat, or any other creature generally regarded as "nasty."
432 The Literal Meaning ofGenesis am quite unable to plumb the depths of his purpose and plan, and that it is far and away beyond my powers. So then, there is very possibly some more secret cause, reserved for better and holier people to discover, by his grace rather than by their own merits. But all the same, insofar as he grants me the capacity to form some idea or allows me to say what I think, it does not seem to me that it would have been greatly to the man's credit in the future, if the reason he was able to lead a good life was that nobody was prompting him to lead a bad one, since he had in his nature the power, and in his power the will not to consent to such promptings, with the help, however, of the one who opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble (Jas 4:6).
And so why should he not allow him to be tempted, even while knowing beforehand that he was going to consent? After all, he was going to do this of his own free will, and was due to be set to rights through an equitable penalty imposed by God. So God in this way would also demonstrate to the proud soul, for the instruction of the saints of future generations, how fairly and squarely he himself makes use of even the bad wills of souls, when they make perverse and crooked use of natures that are good.
Thefirst sin, before the act ofdisobedience, was pride
5, 7. Nor is it to be supposed that this tempter was going to succeed in throwing the man, unless there was first in the man's soul a certain self-aggrandizement that needed to be stamped on, so that, humiliated by sin, he might learn how false and unjustified was his presumptuous opinion of himself. True indeed is the saying: The heart is exalted before ruin and humbled before glory (Prv 18:12); and perhaps it is this man whose voice is heard in the psalm: / myselfsaid in my abundance: l shall not be shakenfor ever, and who after expe riencing what evil follows on proud self-reliance on his own powers, and what good on the assistance of God's grace, Lord, he says, by your will you have bestowedpower on my comeliness; butyou turnedaway yourface and l became troubled (Ps 30:6-7). But whether that was said about this man or about another, the soul at any rate that exalted itself and was excessively over-confident, for instance, in its own powers, had to be given a demonstration by experiencing punishment of precisely how not well a nature fares that has been made, if it draws away from the one that made it.
This also brings home to us most effectively what sort of good it is that God must be, when nobody fares well who draws away from him. Those, you see, who wallow in the enjoyment ofdeath-dealing pleasures, cannot escape the fear of the contrary pains; while as for those whose pride renders them even more insensitive, so that they fail totally to perceive what is so evil about their deser tion of God, they do strike others, who have the discernment to note these things, as being indeed more wretched still. And so, even if they refuse to take the
Book XI 433 medicine of shunning such things, they are of use as an example of why such things should be shunned.
This, after all, is like what the apostle James has to say: Each one is tempted on being dragged along and inveigled by his own concupiscence. Next, when concupiscence conceives she gives birth to sin; while sin, when he has matured, begets death (Jas 1:14-15). From this one can rise again when the tumor of pride has been healed if, where before the experience the will was lacking to remain with God, at least after the experience the will is there to go back to God.
More reflections on why God allows us to be tempted
6. 8. Some people, though, are bothered about God's permitting the first man to be tempted in this way, without apparently noticing that the whole human race is incessantly being tempted by the devil's snares. Why does God permit this too? ls it because it is an effective test and exercise of virtue, and because the palm for not having given in when tempted is more glorious than for having been beyond the possibility of temptation? Even those, you see, who forsake the creator and go offbehind the tempter, also put more and more temptations in the way ofthose who abide by the word of God, and present them with a good reason against any hankering after going astray, and hammer into them a godly fear of pride. lt is in this connection that the apostle says: looking to yourself lest you also be tempted (Gal 6: 1).
It is, in fact, astonishing with what continuous care all the divine scriptures commend to us the humility of subjecting ourselves to the creator, in order to stop us from relying on our own spiritual resources, as though we had no need of his help. So then, considering that it is by means of the unjust that the just make progress, and the godly by means of the ungodly, it is pointless to say, "God should not have created people he knew beforehand were going to be bad." Why indeed should he not create people he knew were going to profit the good, so that they would first be born to act as useful warnings to the good and to be the means of training their wills in virtue, and then be punished for their own bad will?
7. 9. "He should have made man," they say, "such that he would have had no will to sin at all." Look, we for our part happily concede that a nature which cannot sin at all is the better one; let them concede in turn that a nature is not bad which has been so made that it would be able not to sin if it did not wish to, and that the sentence ofpunishment on it is ajust one when it has sinned deliberately, not by any necessity. So then, just as true reason teaches that the creature which finds absolutely no joy in anything unlawful is the better one, so too nonetheless does true reason teach that that creature is also good which has it in its power to check unlawful enjoyment, and in such a way that it not only rejoices in other lawful ones and in things rightly done, but also in the checks it imposes on crooked, perverse joys.
434 The Literal Meaning ofGenesis
So then, since this nature is good, that one better, why should God only make that one, and not rather make them both?
And accordingly those who were all set to praise God for that one alone ought to praise him all the more exuberantly for each of them: that one as it is found in the holy angels, this one in holy human beings while as for those who have chosen to join forces with iniquity and have distorted an admirable nature by means of a reprehensible will, the fact that God had foreknowledge of them is no reason at all why he should not have created them. They too, you see, have their place to fill in the scheme of things for the benefit of the saints. God, l mean to say, stands in no need even ofthejustice of any upright person; how much less of any person's iniquity!
The same, with the emphasis on the way in which bad people can be of service to the good
8, 10. Is there anybody, though, who would say on sober second thoughts: "He would have done better not to create one he foreknew could be reformed by means of another's wickedness, than also to create one he foreknew would earn damnation for his wickedness"? This after all amounts to saying: "It would have been better for one person not to exist who would have been mercifully granted a heavenly crown for making good use of another's evil behavior, than for the evil person also to exist who would be justly punished for his deserts." When reason clearly presents us with two unequal goods, one superior, the other inferior, the dull-witted do not understand that when they say, "Each should have been like the better one," what they are really saying is, "There should only have been the better one." When they want to give equal value to different kinds of good, they just cut down the number, and by inordinately rating one of them too high, they merely eliminate the other. Who, though, would listen to them, if they said, "Since the sense of sight is better than that of hearing, it would have been better to have four eyes and no ears"?
Thus the rational creature is indeed the more excellent which without any punishment to make comparisons with, without any pride, submits itselfto God; but still there is also one that has been created among human beings which could not appreciate God's goodness to itself without observing the punishment inflicted on another, warning it not to be high-minded, but tofear (Rom 1 1 :20), that is, not to be overconfidently reliant on self, but to rely on God. Could anybody with a proper understanding say, "This one should have been like that one," and fail to see that this amounts to saying, "This one should not have existed, but only that one"?
But if this is in fact said by the illiterate and the foolish, the answer is: So why then should God not have created those he foreknew were going to be bad,