The One Christ: St. Augustine's Theology of Deification
58 Made to be Godly
They knew neither sadness nor frivolity, but only gaudium uerum.59 This unalloyed bliss which comes from human sinlessness, Augustine stresses, comes from God and could have accompanied the first humans throughout all of their days.
Adam and Eve's fourth prelapsarian perfection was their bodily integrity. Against what Augustine sees as a standard tenet of Platonism, lesser gods did not fashion the body and humanity's bodily dwelling is not a punishment for some pre-incarnational transgression.60 But what about the infirmities and limitations now experienced in and by the body? The conditions that horrify us about the body after human sin were not there in the beginning: for then it caused no trouble, experienced no craving, no corruption. The body, instead, was destined to know neither decay nor fragility.61 Finally, the body was perfectly pliable and governed by the rational soul. This condition was perhaps nowhere more obvious than in the reproductive organs, originally void of all lust and the lack of control which follows.62
As Augustine studies Genesis, he sees how these four manifestations of divine similitude would have continued, but even a sinless and obedient Adam and Eve would have had to await true and final perfection. That is, although receiving a perfectly blessed life, the first humans had received only the command of perfection while awaiting its consummation.63 None of the
59. ciu. Dei 14.26: "Summa in carne sanitas, in animo tota tranquilitas. . . . Nihil omnino triste, nihil erat inaniter laetum. Gaudium uerum perpetuabatur ex Deo"; CCL 47.449.
60. Cf. ciu. Dei 12.27. 61. Gn. adu. Man. 2.7.8: "ut nulla molestia, nulla indigentia cruciaret hominem ante peccatum et nulla corruptione tabesceret? Dicimus enim tabidum et fragile et morti destinatum corpus humanum post peccatum esse coepisse. Non enim in nostro corpore isti exhorrescunt nisi mortalitatem, quam damnatione meruimus"; CSEL 91.128. 62. Cf. ciu. Dei 14.16; c. ep. Pel. 1.17.34–35. 63. Gn. adu. Man. 2.8.10: "Tunc enim spiritalis effectus est, cum in paradiso, hoc est in beata uita, constitutus praeceptum etiam perfectionis accepit, ut uerbo dei consummaretur"; CSEL 91.129.