use in improving the universe as a whole which is analogous to antithesis in rhetoric.
Origen errs in thinking that souls were given bodies as a punishment. If this were so, bad souls
would have bad bodies; but devils, even the worst of them, have airy bodies, which are better
than ours.
The reason the world was created in six days is that six is a perfect number (i.e., equal to the
sum of its factors).
There are good and bad angels, but even the bad angels do not have an essence which is
contrary to God. God's enemies are not so by nature, but by will. The vicious will has no
efficient cause, but only a deficient one; it is not an effect, but a defect.
The world is less than six thousand years old. History is not cyclic, as some philosophers
suppose: "Christ died once for our sins." *
If our first parents had not sinned, they would not have died, but, because they sinned, all their
posterity die. Eating the apple brought not only natural death, but eternal death, i.e., damnation.
Prophyry is wrong in refusing bodies to saints in heaven. They will have better bodies than
Adam's before the fall; their bodies will be spiritual, but not spirits, and will not have weight.
Men will have male bodies, and women female bodies, and those who have died in infancy will
rise again with adult bodies.
Adam's sins would have brought all mankind to eternal death (i.e., damnation), but that God's
grace has freed many from it. Sin came from the soul, not from the flesh. Platonists and
Manichæans both err in ascribing sin to the nature of the flesh, though Platonists are not so bad
as Manichæans. The punishment of all mankind for Adam's sin was just; for, as a result of this
sin, man, that might have been spiritual in body, became carnal in mind. â€
This leads to a long and minute discussion of sexual lust, to which we are subject as part of our
punishment for Adam's sin. This discussion is very important as revealing the psychology of
asceticism; we must therefore go into it, although the Saint confesses that the theme is
immodest. The theory advanced is as follows.
It must be admitted that sexual intercourse in marriage is not sinful, provided the intention is to
beget offspring. Yet even in marriage a virtuous man will wish that he could manage without
lust. Even in
* Romans VI.â
€
The City of God, XIV, 15.