City of God (Penguin Classics) (93 page)

It is, however, arbitrary to suppose that there could not have been a material paradise, just because it can be understood also in a spiritual significance; it is like the assumption that there were not two wives of Abraham, named Hagar and Sarah, who bore two sons, one a slave’s son, the other the son of a free woman, just because the Apostle finds in them the prefiguration of the two covenants;
⁶¹
or that there was no rock from which water flowed when Moses struck it, just because it can be interpreted in a symbolic sense, as prefiguring Christ; which is how the same Apostle takes it when he says, ‘Now the rock was Christ.’
⁶²

And so no one can stop us from interpreting paradise symbolically as the life of the blessed; its four rivers as the four virtues, prudence, courage, temperance, and justice; its trees as all the beneficial disciplines; the fruit of the trees as the character of the righteous; the tree of life as wisdom, the mother of all good things; and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil as the experience of disobedience to a commandment. For it was certainly a good thing, because it was just, that God should have imposed a punishment for sinners; but it is not a good thing for man himself that he experiences it.

We can also interpret the details of paradise with reference to the Church, which gives them a better significance as prophetic indications of things to come in the future. Thus paradise stands for the Church itself, as described in the
Song
of
Songs
,
⁶³
the four rivers represent the four Gospels; the fruit trees, the saints; and the fruit, their achievements; the tree of life, the Holy of Holies, must be Christ himself; while the tree of knowledge of good and evil symbolizes the personal decision of man’s free will.

For it is certain that if man ignores God’s will he can only employ his own powers to his own destruction; and thus he learns what a difference it makes whether he gives his adherence to the good that is shared by all, or finds pleasure only in his own selfish good. In fact, if he loves himself, a man is given over to himself so that when as a result he has had his fill of fears and griefs he may use the words of the psalm (if, that is, he is aware of his evil plight) and sing, ‘My soul is troubled within me’,
⁶⁴
and then, when he is set right, he may then say, ‘I shall keep watch for you, my strength.’
⁶⁵

This is the kind of thing that can be said by way of allegorical interpretation of paradise; and there may be other more valuable lines of interpretation. There is no prohibition against such exegesis, provided that we also believe in the truth of the story as a faithful record of historical fact.

Well, it is possible that a more credible suggestion might be put forward on the subject of the angels. However that may be, the Christian faith has no doubts about the Saviour himself. Christians believe that even after his resurrection, when he was now appearing in spiritual, though still real, flesh, he took food and drink in the company of his disciples.
⁶⁸
For it is not the ability, it is the need to eat and drink that will be taken away from bodies like this. They will be spiritual, not by ceasing to be bodies, but by being supported in their existence by a life-giving spirit.
⁶⁹

The first man, however, was ‘of the earth, earthly’, and he was made as a ‘living soul’, not a ‘life-giving spirit’;
⁷⁰
that condition was
reserved for him after he had merited it by obedience. There is no doubt that his body was animal, not spiritual; this is shown by the fact that it needed food and drink to prevent its suffering from hunger and thirst; and it was preserved from the inevitability of death and kept in the flower of youth, not by that ultimate immortality, which is absolute and indissoluble, but by the tree of life. Yet that first man would certainly not have died had he not, by his offence, fallen under the sentence of God who had given him ample warning in advance. Then, though he was not denied nourishment, outside paradise, he was banned from the tree of life and handed over to time and old age, for them to make an end of him, in respect of that life, at least, which he might have enjoyed perpetually in paradise, had he not sinned, though he would have been in an animal body, until that body became spiritual as a reward for obedience.

Therefore, even if we were to suppose that when God said, ‘On the day you eat of it, you will die by the death.’
⁷¹
he referred to that obvious death in which the soul is separated from the body; still we need not see any inconsistency in the fact that the offenders were not immediately severed from the body on the actual day when they took the forbidden and mortal food. It was in fact on that day that their natural condition changed for the worse; there was a taint on that nature, and they were barred from the tree of life as the just punishment of their offence. The result was that they became subject to the inevitable death of the body; and we are born under the same necessity. That is why the Apostle does not say, ‘The body will die because of sin.’ but, ‘The body is dead because of sin: but the spirit is life because of righteousness.’ And then he adds, ‘Then, if the Spirit of him who raised up Christ from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will bring to life your mortal bodies also, through the indwelling of his Spirit in you.’
⁷²

The body will thus be related to the life-giving spirit as it is now to the living soul. Nevertheless, the Apostle calls it dead because it is in the grip of inevitable death. Yet originally it was related to a living soul, though not to a life-giving spirit, in such a way that it could not rightly be called dead, since it could not be faced with death, as an inevitability, except in consequence of a sin committed.

But when God asked, ‘Where are you, Adam?’
⁷³
he signified the death of the soul, which came about when he forsook it; and when he said, ‘You are earth, and into earth you will go.’
⁷⁴
he signified the
death of the body, which comes about when the soul forsakes it. We must believe that he said nothing about the second death because he wished to keep it from men’s knowledge with a view to the revelation of his purpose in the New Testament, where the second death is proclaimed in unmistakable terms.
⁷⁵
Thus it would first be made clear that the first death, which is the common lot of mankind, resulted from that sin which in one man became an act in which all mankind shared. Whereas the second death is certainly not the common lot of all men because those are exempt ‘who have been called in fulfilment of his purpose’, those whom he previously ‘foreknew and predestined’, as the Apostle says, ‘to be fashioned in the likeness of his Son, so that he might be the first-born in a family of many brothers’.
⁷⁶
They have been rescued from the second death by God’s grace, through the action of the Mediator.

Thus it was in an animal body, the Apostle says, that the first man was created. For when he is concerned to distinguish the present animal body from the spiritual body which is to come at the resurrection, the Apostle says, ‘It is sown in corruption: it will rise in incorruption; it is sown in humiliation: it will rise in glory; it is sown in weakness: it will rise in power; it is sown as an animal body: it will rise as a spiritual body.’ Then he adds, to support this, ‘If there is such a thing as an animal body, there is also a spiritual body.’ And to show what is meant by an animal body, he says, ‘This is the sense in which Scripture says: “The first man was made into a living soul.” ‘
⁷⁷
His intention in speaking in this way was to show what an animal body is, although in the account of the first man, named Adam, and the creation of his soul by the breath of God, the Scripture does not say, ‘And man was made in an animal body’, but, ‘Man was made into a living soul.’
⁷⁸
Thus in this scriptural statement, ‘The first man was made into a living soul’, the Apostle intended us to understand a reference to man’s animal body.

On the other hand, he shows how the spiritual body is to be understood by adding, ‘The last Adam was made into a life-giving spirit.’
⁷⁹
Here undoubtedly he means Christ, who has already risen from the dead so as to be thereafter utterly insusceptible of death. He then goes on to say, ‘But the spiritual does not come first: first comes the animal body, and the spiritual afterwards.’ Here he makes it much clearer that he finds a reference to the animal body in the scriptural statement that the first man was made into a living soul, and intends a
reference to the spiritual body in his own statement that ‘the last Adam was made into a life-giving spirit.’

For the animal body comes first, a body like that of the first Adam, although that would not have died, if Adam had not sinned. Such is the body that we also have, with its nature as much changed and marred as it was in Adam, after his sin, with the result that death became inevitable for him. Christ also condescended to take such a body at first, not of necessity, but as an act of power. But afterwards will come the spiritual body, like that which has gone ahead of us in the person of Christ, who is our head;
⁸⁰
this spiritual body will follow, in the person of those who are ‘members of Christ’
⁸¹
at the final resurrection of the dead.

The Apostle then adds a very striking difference between those two men. He says, ‘The first man is from the earth, earthly: the second man is from heaven. Those who are earthly are like the man of earth; those who are heavenly are like the man of heaven. And as we have put on the likeness of the man of earth, let us also put on the likeness of the man who is from heaven.’
⁸²
The Apostle put it in this way so that the sacrament of rebirth may even now have its effect in us; as he says in another place, ‘All of you who have been baptized in Christ have put on Christ.’
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although this process will not be completed in reality until what is animal in us, because of our birth, has become spiritual because of our resurrection. For, to use his own words again, ‘It is
in hope
that we have been saved.’
⁸⁴

Now we
have
put on the likeness of the man of earth by the physical inheritance of sin and death, conveyed to us by birth; but we
shall
put on the likeness of the heavenly man, by the gracious gift of pardon and of perpetual life. This gift we receive by rebirth, but it comes only through ‘the mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus’.
⁸⁵
It is Christ whom the Apostle means to be understood by ‘the heavenly man’, because he came from heaven to be clothed in a body of earthly mortality, so that he might clothe it in heavenly immortality. The reason why he uses the epithet ‘heavenly’ of the others also is that they become, through grace, ‘members of Christ’, so that with them Christ forms a unity like that of head and body.
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The Apostle puts this in more striking terms in the same letter: ‘It was by a man that death came; and by a man came the resurrection of
the dead. For as it is in Adam that all die, so also it is in Christ that all will be brought to life’
⁸⁷
– ‘brought to life’, undoubtedly, in a spiritual body which will exist in relation to a life-giving spirit. But it does not mean that all who die in Adam will be members of Christ, for the great majority of them will be punished with the second death, which is for ever. What the Apostle means by using ‘all’ in both parts of the statement is that no one dies in his animal body except ‘in Adam’; and in the same way no one is brought to life in a spiritual body except ‘in Christ’.

It follows then that we must certainly not suppose that at the resurrection we shall have the kind of body that the first man possessed before his sin. And the saying, ‘Those who are earthly are like the man of earth’, should not be taken as referring to the condition that resulted from his sin. We are not to imagine that the first man had a spiritual body before he sinned, and that it was changed into an animal body as the reward of that sin. To suppose this is to pay too little attention to the actual words of the great teacher. Paul says, ‘If there is such a thing as an animal body, there is also a spiritual body. As the Scripture also says, “The first man, Adam, was made into a living soul.”’ We cannot think that this happened after Adam had sinned, since it is the original condition of man; for the blessed Paul quotes this evidence from the Law
⁸⁸
about that condition, to show what is meant by the animal body.