Saint Augustine (354-430)

Of Marriage and Concupiscence

Translated by Peter Holmes

Book II

Chapter 14

Now to this lengthy statement of his we have to say in answer, that, in the passages which he has quoted from the sacred writings, there is nothing said about that shameful lust, which we say did not exist in the body of our first parents in their blessedness, when they were naked and were not ashamed. The first passage from the apostle was spoken of the seeds of corn, which first die in order to be quickened. For some reason or other, he was unwilling to complete the verse for his quotation. All he adduces from it is: “Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened”; but the apostle adds, “except it die.” This writer, however, so far as I can judge, wished this passage, which treats only of corn seeds, to be understood of human seed, by such as read it without either understanding the Holy Scriptures or recollecting them. Indeed, he not merely curtailed this particular sentence, by omitting the clause, “except it die,” but he omitted the following words, in which the apostle explained of what seeds he was speaking; for the apostle adds: “And that which thou sowest, thou sowest not that body which shall be, but the bare grain, it may chance of wheat, or of some other grain.” This he omitted, and closed up his context with what the apostle then writes: “But God giveth it a body as it hath pleased Him, and to every seed its own body”; just as if the apostle spoke of man in cohabitation when he said, “Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened,” with a view to our understanding of human seed, that it is quickened by God, not by man in cohabitation begetting children. For he had previously said: “Sexual pleasure does not complete the entire process of man’s making, but rather presents to God, out of the treasures of nature, material with which He vouchsafes to make the human being.” He then added the quotation, as if the apostle affirmed as follows: Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened,—quickened, that is, by thyself; but God forms the human being out of thy seed. As if the apostle had not said the intermediate words, which this writer chose to pass over; and as if the apostle’s aim was to speak of human seed thus: “Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened; but God giveth to the seed a body such as pleaseth Him, and to every seed its own body.” Indeed, after the apostle’s words, he introduces remarks of his own to this effect: “If, therefore, God has assigned to human seed, as to everything else, its own proper body, which no wise or pious man will deny”; quite as if the apostle in the passage in question spoke of human seed.

Though I have given special attention to the point, I have failed to discover what assistance he could obtain from this deceitful use of Scripture, except that he wanted to produce the apostle as a witness, and by him to prove, what we also assert, that God forms man of human seed. And inasmuch as no passage directly occurred to him, he deceitfully manipulated this particular one; fearing no doubt that, if the apostle should chance to seem to have spoken of corn seeds, and not of human, in this passage, we should have suggested to us at once by such procedure of his, how to refute him: not indeed as the pure-minded advocate of a chastened will, but as the impudent proclaimer of a profligate voluptuousness. But from the very seeds, forsooth, which the farmers sow in their fields he can be refuted. For why can we not suppose that God could have granted to man in his happy state in paradise, the same course with regard to his own seed which we see granted to the seeds of corn, in such wise that the former might be sown without any shameful lust, the members of generation simply obeying the inclination of the will; just as the latter is sown without any shameful lust, the hands of the husbandman merely moving in obedience to his will? There being, indeed, this difference, that the desire of begetting children in the parent is a nobler one than that which characterizes the farmer, of filling his barns. Then, again, why might not the almighty Creator, with His incontaminable ubiquity, and his power of creating from human seed just what it pleased Him, have operated in women, with respect to what He even now makes, in the self-same manner as He operates in the ground with corn seeds according to His will, making blessed mothers conceive without lustful passion, and bring forth children without parturient pains, inasmuch as there was not (in that state of happiness, and in the body which was not as yet the body of this death, but rather of that life) in woman when receiving seed anything to produce shame, as there was nothing when giving birth to offspring to cause pain? Whoever refuses to believe this, or is unwilling to have it supposed that, while men previous to any sin lived in that happy state of paradise, such a condition as that which we have sketched could not have been permitted in God’s will and kindness, must be regarded as the lover of shameful pleasure, rather than the encomiast of desirable fecundity.

Book II Chapter 13

Book II Chapter 15