The Literal Meaning of Genesis
BOOK NINE 81 though it was certainly also mortal because it was destined to die. Therefore, although the bodies of our first parents were natural bodies, not spiritual bodies,+? we should not suppose that they were "dead" before they sinned—I mean necessarily destined for death: that is what happened to them on the day on which they touched*s the tree against the prohibition.
17. Our bodies have a normal healthy state proper to them. If this condition so deteriorates that a deadly disease consumes the internal organs, and the physicians, after examining the patient, decide that death is imminent, the body is then said to be dying, but not in the same sense as when it was healthy, although then too it was destined to die some day.
Hence, the first human pair had natural bodies indeed, but bodies destined to die only if they sinned, bodies that would have received an angelic form and heavenly quality.4*4 But when they disobeyed God's command, their bodies contracted, as it were, the deadly disease of death, and this changed the gift by which they had ruled the body so perfectly that they would not say, I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind. For although the body before the fall was not yet spiritual, but rather natural, nevertheless it was not this body of death from which and with which we have been born. What, indeed, is this life from our birth, even from our conception, but the beginning of a sickness by which we must die? Death is no more inevitable for the man with dropsy or consumption*> or elephantiasis than for the infant whose life has just begun in this body in which all men are by nature children of wrath,*® a condition which is a punishment for sin.
18. Why, therefore, may we not assume that the first couple before they sinned could have given a command to their genital organs for the purpose of procreation as they did to the other members which the soul is accustomed to move to perform various tasks without any trouble and without any craving for pleasure? For the almighty Creator, worthy of praise beyond all words, who is great even in the least of His works, has given to the bees the power of reproducing their young just as they produce wax and honey.*7
Why, then, should it seem beyond belief that He made the