Annotatio XXI
”Increase and multiply.” — Genesis 1:28
Augustine, in the first book On Genesis Allegorically, chapter 19, on these words says that the first parents would not have had children as men [by human generation] unless they had sinned.1 To which opinion he wrote a not-dissimilar one in the first book On the Lord’s Sermon on the Mount, where, expounding that “Whosoever shall put away his wife, save for the cause of fornication,” etc.,2 he said that consanguinities and the bonds of blood and kinships came about from the sin and death of the first parents. Which opinion Guido, Bishop of Elne, in the book he wrote against heresies, numbers among the profane dogmas of the Armenians. But Augustine openly disapproves [it] in the first book of the Retractations, chapters 10 and 19; because, as he himself says in the 8th book On Genesis to the Letter, chapter 10: “Men before sin could command their generative members for procreation, without the foul itch of pleasure; and there could have been in paradise honorable marriages, and an undefiled marriage-bed, without the ardor of lust and without the labor of childbearing.”