Read City of God (Penguin Classics) Online
Authors: Saint Augustine
17.
The nakedness of
the first
human
beings,
and
the
feeling of
shame after their
sin
It is right, therefore, to be ashamed of this lust, and it is right that the members which it moves or fails to move by its own right, so to speak, and not in complete conformity to our decision, should be called
pudenda
(‘parts of shame’), which they were not called before man’s sin; for, as Scripture tells us, ‘they were naked, and yet they felt no embarrassment.’
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This was not because they had not noticed their nakedness, but because nakedness was not yet disgraceful, because lust did not yet arouse those members independently of their decision. The flesh did not yet, in a fashion, give proof of man’s disobedience by a disobedience of its own.
It was not that the first human beings had been created blind, as is commonly believed among the uneducated, since Adam saw the animals to which he gave names,
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while of Eve we are told, ‘The woman saw that the tree was good for food, and was pleasant for the eyes to look at.’
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It follows that their eyes were open, but not wide enough open, that is to say, not attentive enough to recognize what a blessing, they were given in the garment of grace, inasmuch as their members did not know how to rebel against their will. When this grace was taken away, and in consequence their disobedience was chastised by a corresponding punishment, there appeared in the movements of their body a certain indecent novelty, which made nakedness shameful. It made them self-conscious and embarrassed.
That is why Scripture says of them, after they had violated God’s command by an overt transgression, ‘The eyes of both of them were opened and they recognized that they were naked. And they sewed together fig leaves and made aprons for themselves.’
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‘The eyes of both’, it says, ‘were opened’, not to enable them to see (they could see already) but to enable them to distinguish the good which they had lost and the evil into which they had fallen. Hence the tree itself, which was to make this distinction for them if they laid hands on it to eat the fruit in defiance of the prohibition, got its name from that event, and was called ‘the tree of the knowledge of good and evil’. For experience of the distresses of sickness reveals the joys of health in a clearer light.
And so ‘they recognized that they were naked’ – stripped, that is, of the grace that prevented their bodily nakedness from causing them any embarrassment, as it did when the law of sin made war against
their mind.
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Thus they gained a knowledge where ignorance would have been a greater bliss if they had trusted in God and obeyed him and thus had refrained from an action which would force them to learn by experience the harm that disloyalty and disobedience would do. The consequence was that they were embarrassed by the insubordination of their flesh, the punishment which was a kind of evidence of their disobedience, and ‘they sewed together fig leaves and made aprons (
campestria
) for themselves.’ (
Campestria
means ‘loincloths’, and that is the word used in some translations. The Latin word
campestria
is derived from the custom of the young men who covered their pudenda when they stripped for exercise on the playing-field, the
campus
. Hence those who are so girdled are called
campestrati
.)
Thus modesty, from a sense of shame, covered what was excited to disobedience by lust, in defiance of a will which had been condemned for the guilt of disobedience; and from then onwards the practice of concealing the pudenda has become a deep-rooted habit in all peoples, since they all derive from the same stock. Some barbarians even go so far as to refrain from exposing those parts even in the baths, and they keep their covering on when they wash. And in the darkened solitudes of India, those who practise philosophy in nakedness
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(and are hence called ‘gymnosophists’) nevertheless have coverings on their genitals, although they have none on the rest of the body.
18.
The sense of shame in sexual intercourse
The sexual act itself, which is performed with such lust, seeks privacy. This is true not only in respect of the various kinds of debauchery for which secret hiding-places are needed to avoid the sentence of human law courts, but also in the practice of fornication, which the earthly city has made a legalized depravity. This practice is not punishable by any law of that city, and yet this permitted lust, which carries no penalty, shuns the public gaze. A natural sense of shame ensures that even brothels make provision for secrecy; and it was easier for immorality to dispense with the fetters of prohibition than for shamelessness to abolish the furtive dens of this degradation.
Fornication, in fact, is called a depravity even by those who are depraved themselves; and, fond as they are of it, they dare not display it in public. But what of conjugal intercourse, whose purpose is, according to the prescriptions of the marriage contract, the procreation of children? It is lawful and respectable certainly; but does it not require a private room and the absence of witnesses? Does not the
bridegroom, before he begins even to caress the bride, show the door to all the attendants, and even his groomsmen, and all the others who had been permitted to enter because of some tie of kinship? Now, a certain ‘author supreme of Roman eloquence’ asserts that all right actions desire to be set in the full daylight,
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that is to say, they long to get themselves known. So this right action longs to become known; and yet it blushes to be seen. For everyone knows what act is performed by the married pair for the procreation of children. All the ceremony that attends the marriage of wives is designed towards the fulfilment of that act. Nevertheless, when this act is being performed, with a view to the birth of children, not even the children who have already been born as the result of such an act are permitted to witness it. This right action craves for recognition in the light of the mind’s understanding, but it is equally concerned to escape the light of the eyes’s vision. What can be the reason for this, if it is not that something by nature right and proper is effected in such a way as to be accompanied by a feeling of shame, by way of punishment?
19.
Anger and lust were not part of man’s healthy state before his sin
This explains why the Platonists, who approached the truth more nearly than other philosophers, acknowledged that anger and lust are perverted elements in man’s character, or soul, on the ground that they are disturbed and undisciplined emotions, leading to acts which wisdom forbids, and therefore they need the control of intelligence and reason. This third rational division of the soul is located by them in a kind of citadel, to rule the other elements, so that with the rational element in command and the others subordinate, justice may be preserved in the relation between all the parts of man’s soul.
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These philosophers therefore admit that the two divisions of the soul are perverted, even in a wise and disciplined man. Consequently, the mind by repression and restraint bridles them and recalls them from courses they are wrongly moved to follow, while it allows them to follow any line of action permitted by the law of wisdom. Anger, for example, is allowed for the purpose of imposing compulsion, when that is justified, and lust is permitted for the duty of procreation. But in paradise before man’s sin these elements did not exist in their perverted state. For then they were not set in motion, in defiance of a
right will, to pursue any course which made it necessary to hold them back with the guiding reins, so to speak, of reason.
The situation now is that these passions are set in motion in this fashion, and are brought under control by those who live disciplined, just, and devout lives, sometimes with comparative ease, sometimes with difficulty. But this control entails coercion and struggle, and the situation does not represent a state of health in accordance with nature, but an enfeebled condition arising from guilt. Again, we observe that modesty does not hide the acts of anger and of the other emotions in the same way as it conceals the acts of lust, which are performed by the sexual organs; but this is simply because in the effects of other emotions the members of the body are not set in motion by the feelings themselves but by the will, after it has decided to co-operate with them, for the will has sovereign power in the employment of those members. Anyone who utters a word in anger, anyone who goes so far as to strike another person, could not do so if his tongue or hand were not put in motion at the command, as one may say, of his will; and those members are set in motion by the same will even when there is no anger. But the genital organs have become as it were the private property of lust, which has brought them so completely under its sway that they have no power of movement if this passion fails, if it has not arisen spontaneously or in response to a stimulus. It is this that arouses shame; it is this that makes us shun the eyes of beholders in embarrassment. A man would be less put out by a crowd of spectators watching him visiting his anger unjustly upon another man than by one person observing him when he is having lawful intercourse with his wife.
20.
The ridiculous indecency
of the
cynics
The Cynics,
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those canine philosophers, failed to observe this fact
when they put forward an opinion directly opposed to human modesty, an opinion truly canine, that is to say, filthy and indecent. They hold that since the sexual act is lawful between husband and wife, one should not be ashamed to engage in it in public and to have marital intercourse in any street or square. However, a natural sense of decency has prevailed over this mistaken idea. It is true that there is a story that Diogenes once made an exhibition of himself by putting this theory into practice,
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because he imagined that his school of philosophy would gain more publicity if its indecency were more start-lingly impressed on the memory of mankind. However, the Cynics did not continue this practice, and modesty, which makes men feel shame before their fellows, prevailed over error – the mistaken idea that men should make it their ambition to resemble dogs.
Hence I am inclined to think that even Diogenes himself, and the others about whom this story is told, merely went through the motions of lying together before the eyes of men who had no means of knowing what was really going on under the philosopher’s cloak. I doubt whether the pleasure of that act could have been successfully achieved with spectators crowding round, for those philosophers did not blush to appear willing to he together in a place where lust itself would have blushed to put in an appearance. Even now we see that there are still Cynic philosophers about They are the people who not only wear the philosopher’s cloak but also carry a club.
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However, none of them dares to act like Diogenes. If any of them were to venture to do so they would be overwhelmed, if not with a hail of stones, at any rate with a shower of spittle from the disgusted public.
Human nature then is, without any doubt, ashamed about lust, and rightly ashamed. For in its disobedience, which subjected the sexual organs solely to its own impulses and snatched them from the will’s authority, we see a proof of the retribution imposed on man for that first disobedience. And it was entirely fitting that this retribution should show itself in that part which effects the procreation of the very nature that was changed for the worse through that first great sin. This offence was committed when all mankind existed in one man, and it brought universal ruin on mankind; and no one can be rescued from the toils of that offence, which was punished by God’s justice, unless the sin is expiated in each man singly by the grace of God.
21.
The blessing of fertility not forfeited by sin, but associated with morbid lust
We must never allow ourselves to believe that God’s blessing, ‘Increase and multiply and fill the earth’
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would have been fulfilled through this lust by the pair who were set in paradise. It was, in fact, after the sin that this lust arose. It was after the sin that man’s nature felt, noticed, blushed at, and concealed this Just; for man’s nature retained a sense of decency, although it had lost the authority to which the body had been subordinate in every part. But the nuptial blessing, bidding the married couple to increase and multiply and fill the earth, still stood, although they were offenders; yet it had been given before the offence, so that it might be realized that the procreation of children belonged to the glory of marriage and not to the punishment of sin.
There are, however, men at the present time who are evidently unaware of the bliss that existed in paradise. They suppose that children could not have been begotten except by the means with which they are familiar, namely, by means of lust, which, as we observe, brings a sense of shame even in the honourable state of matrimony. Some of them
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utterly reject the holy Scriptures, and even scoff at them in their unbelief, in the passage where we are told that after their sin our first parents were ashamed of their nakedness and that they covered their parts of shame – their pudenda. Others of them, in contrast, accept and honour the Scriptures; but while so doing they maintain that the words ‘increase and multiply’ should not be interpreted as referring to carnal fertility, on the grounds that a somewhat similar remark is made with reference to the soul, ‘You will multiply me with strength (or virtue) in my soul.’
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And so they interpret the words that follow in Genesis, ‘Fill the earth and hold sway over it’, in this way: ‘earth’ they take to mean the flesh, which the soul ‘fills’ with its own presence and over which it ‘holds sway’ when it is ‘multiplied in strength (virtue)’. Carnal offspring, in their opinion, could not then have been born, any more than they can be born now, without the lust which arose after sin, the lust which was noticed, caused embarrassment, and was concealed. They assert that children would not have been born in paradise, but outside it, which is what in fact happened. For it was after the pair had been sent away from paradise that they came together to beget children, and did beget them.