"sacrament"; but since by "sacrament" he meant any sacred sign, or sign of the sacred (like the
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Church people are commonly barred from the visible sacraments57 of the altar by Church discipline.
55. And he threw Adam out and set him down over against the paradise of pleasure (Gn 3:24). This too was done in order to signify something, but still it was done, so that the sinner might pitch up living, wretchedly of course, over against the paradise, by which the blessed life was also signified, Andhe ordered the cherubim and theflaming sword which turns to guard the way to the tree of life (Gn 3:24). We are of course to believe that this was done by heavenly powers even in the visible paradise, in order to mount a fiery guard there ofangelic senti nels. lt is not to be doubted however that it was not done pointlessly, even if it did not also signify something about the spiritual paradise.
Some other opinions about the story
41, 56. 1 am not unaware, however, that some people have thought those first human beings were in too much of a hurry in their desire for the knowledge of good and evil, and so wanted to grab before the time was ripe what was being kept back for them at a more opportune moment; and so the tempter induced them to offend God by picking too soon what they were not yet ready for. In this way they deprived themselves of the benefit of a thing which they would have been able to enjoy with profit to their health if they had approached it at the right time, as God wished; and so they were expelled and condemned as being now at variance with what God had intended. lf by any chance these people mean to take that tree in a figurative sense, and not as a real one with real apples, this opinion may possibly lead to ideas that are agreeable to right faith and the truth.
57. There are also others who think that those two first human beings pre-empted their marriage and slept together before the one who had created themjoined them together; this, they maintain, is what was signified by the name of the tree, and what was forbidden them before they should bejoined together in holy matrimony at the appropriate time. As if, forsooth, we are to believe they were made at the age in which mature puberty is still to come, or as if that were not then lawful when it could first be done—which obviously would not be done before it could be; or perhaps the bride still had to be given away by her father and the vows officially pronounced and the wedding breakfast celebrated, and the dowry agreed upon and the register of marriages duly filled in and signed! The whole idea is ridiculous; besides which, it departs from the actual account of
57. Not that Augustine thought of the eucharist as two sacraments in the strict modern sense of "sacrament"; but since by "sacrament" he meant any sacred sign, or sign of the sacred (like the tree of life being a sacrament of divine Wisdom), and the bread and wine of the eucharist are both such signs, he often talked in this way of the "sacraments of the altar."