Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Vol. II:
City of God: Chapter 3

Chapter 3.—Whether Death, Which by the Sin of Our First Parents Has Passed Upon All Men, is the Punishment of Sin, Even to the Good.

But a question not to be shirked arises:  Whether in very truth death, which separates soul and body, is good to the good? 579   For if it be, how has it come to pass that such a thing should be the punishment of sin?  For the first men would not have suffered death had they not sinned.  How, then, can that be good to the good, which could not have happened except to the evil?  Then, again, if it could only happen to the evil, to the good it ought not to be good, but non-existent.  For why should there be any punishment where there is nothing to punish?  Wherefore we must say that the first men were indeed so created, that if they had not sinned, they would not have experienced any kind of death; but that, having become sinners, they were so punished with death, that whatsoever sprang from their stock should also be punished with the same death.  For nothing else could be born of them than that which they themselves had been.  Their nature was deteriorated in proportion to the greatness of the condemnation of their sin, so that what existed as punishment in those who first sinned, became a natural consequence in their children.  For man is not produced by man, as he was from the dust.  For dust was the material out of which man was made:  man is the parent by whom man is begotten.  Wherefore earth and flesh are not the same thing, though flesh be made of earth.  But as man the parent is, such is man the offspring.  In the first man, therefore, there existed the whole human nature, which was to be transmitted by the woman to posterity, when that conjugal union received the divine sentence of its own condemnation; and what man was made, not when created, but when he sinned and was punished, this he propagated, so far as the origin of sin and death are concerned.  For neither by sin nor its punishment was he himself reduced to that infantine and helpless infirmity of body and mind which we see in children.  For God ordained that infants should begin the world as the young of beasts begin it, since their parents had fallen to the level of the beasts in the fashion of their life and of their death; as it is written, “Man when he was in honor understood not; he became like the beasts that have no understanding.” 580   Nay more, infants, we see, are even feebler in the use and movement of their limbs, and more infirm to choose and refuse, than the most tender offspring of other animals; as if the force that dwells in human nature were destined to surpass all other living things so much the more eminently, as its energy has been longer restrained, and the time of its exercise delayed, just as an arrow flies the higher the further back it has been drawn.  To this infantine imbecility 581 the first man did not fall by his lawless presumption and just sentence; but human nature was in his person vitiated and altered to such an extent, that he suffered in his members the warring of disobedient lust, and became subject to the necessity of dying.  And what he himself had become by sin and punishment, such he generated those whom he begot; that is to say, subject to sin and death.  And if infants are delivered from this bondage of sin by the Redeemer’s grace, they can suffer only this death which separates soul and body; but being redeemed from the obligation of sin, they do not pass to that second endless and penal death.

Footnotes

On this question compare the 24th and 25th epistles of Jerome, de obitu Leæ, and de obitu Blesillæ filiæ.  Coquæus.

Ps. 49.12.

On which see further in de Peccat. Mer. i. 67, et seq.