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| Of the Nakedness of Our First Parents, Which They Saw After Their Base and Shameful Sin.
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Chapter 17.—Of the Nakedness of
Our First Parents, Which They Saw After Their Base and Shameful
Sin.
Justly is shame very specially
connected with this lust; justly, too, these members themselves,
being moved and restrained not at our will, but by a certain
independent autocracy, so to speak, are called “shameful.”
Their condition was different before sin. For as it is written,
“They were naked and were not ashamed,”742
—not that their nakedness was
unknown to them, but because nakedness was not yet shameful,
because not yet did lust move those members without the will’s
consent; not yet did the flesh by its disobedience testify against
the disobedience of man. For they were not created blind, as the
unenlightened vulgar fancy;743
| 743 An error which arose from the
words, The eyes of them both were opened, Gen. iii. 7.—See De
Genesi ad lit. ii. 40. | for Adam saw the animals to whom he
gave names, and of Eve we read, “The woman saw that the tree was
good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes.”744
Their
eyes, therefore were open, but were not open to this, that is to
say, were not observant so as to recognize what was conferred upon
them by the garment of grace, for they had no consciousness of
their members warring against their will. But when they were
stripped of this grace,745
| 745 This doctrine and phraseology of
Augustin being important in connection with his whole theory of the
fall, we give some parallel passages to show that the words are not
used at random: De Genesi ad lit. xi. 41; De Corrept.
et Gratia, xi. 31; and especially Cont. Julian. iv.
82. | that their disobedience might be
punished by fit retribution, there began in the movement of their
bodily members a shameless novelty which made nakedness indecent:
it at once made them observant and made them ashamed. And
therefore, after they violated God’s command by open
transgression, it is written: “And the eyes of them both were
opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig
leaves together, and made themselves aprons.”746
“The eyes of them both were
opened,” not to see, for already they saw, but to discern between
the good they had lost and the evil into which they had fallen.
And therefore also the tree itself which they were forbidden to
touch was called the tree of the knowledge of good and evil from
this circumstance, that if they ate of it it would impart to them
this knowledge. For the discomfort of sickness reveals the
pleasure of health. “They knew,” therefore, “that they were
naked,”—naked of that grace which prevented them from being
ashamed of bodily nakedness while the law of sin offered no
resistance to their mind. And thus they obtained a knowledge
which they would have lived in blissful ignorance of, had they, in
trustful obedience to God, declined to commit that offence which
involved them in the experience of the hurtful effects of
unfaithfulness and disobedience. And therefore, being ashamed of
the disobedience of their own flesh, which witnessed to their
disobedience while it punished it, “they sewed fig leaves
together, and made themselves aprons,” that is, cinctures for
their privy parts; for some interpreters have rendered the word by
succinctoria. Campestria is, indeed, a Latin word,
but it is used of the drawers or aprons used for a similar purpose
by the young men who stripped for exercise in the campus;
hence those who were so girt were commonly called
campestrati. Shame modestly covered that which lust
disobediently moved in opposition to the will, which was thus
punished for its own disobedience. Consequently all nations,
being propagated from that one stock, have so strong an instinct to
cover the shameful parts, that some barbarians do not uncover them
even in the bath, but wash with their drawers on. In the dark
solitudes of India also, though some philosophers go naked, and are
therefore called gymnosophists, yet they make an exception in the
case of these members and cover them.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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