Annotatio XLIII

”In whatever day you eat of it, you shall die the death.” — Genesis 2:17

Philo the Jew, at the end of the second book of the Allegories of the Law, asserts that God, in the proposed words, did not threaten the first parent with the death of the body, but only with the death of the soul.¹ For he writes in this manner: “God says, ‘In whatever day you shall eat of it, you shall die the death.’ But after eating they not only do not die, but even beget children, and become to others authors of living. What, then, must be said? That there is a twofold death: one proper to man, the other to the soul. The death of man is the separation of the soul from the body; but the death of the soul is the corruption of virtue and the assumption of vice. And therefore, not content to say ‘about to die,’ he says, ‘By death you shall die’ — indicating not this common [death], but that eternal one which by excellence is called death, which is [death] as often as the soul is buried in the affections and in all vices. When, therefore, he says, ‘By death you shall die,’ it must be observed that a penal death, not a natural one, is signified. Natural [death], moreover, is that by which the soul is separated from the body; but penal, when the soul dies out of the life of virtue.”

Eucherius, in the first book of the commentaries on Genesis, following Philo’s opinion, expounds this passage similarly,² saying: “He speaks, therefore, of the death of the soul, not of the body — because they did not die at that time when they ate. Therefore this death which God now threatened, we must not take [as] that by which the flesh is separated from the soul, but this, by which it [the soul] is alienated from God, who is its life — as if he should say, ‘On the day you forsake me by disobedience, I will forsake you by justice.’ For just as the body lives from the soul, so the soul, that it may live blessedly, lives from God; therefore the soul forsaken by God is rightly called dead.” Augustine, refuting this opinion in the 13th book The City of God, chapter 12, speaks thus:³ “When, therefore, it is asked with what death God threatened the first men, if they should transgress the commandment received from him and not keep obedience — whether [the death] of the soul, or of the body, or of the whole man, or that which is called the second [death] — it must be answered: all. For the first consists of two, but the second is whole, [made] of all. For just as the whole earth [consists] of many lands, and the whole Church consists of many churches, so the whole death [consists] of all — since the first consists of two: one of the soul, the other of the body; so that the first death is [the death] of the whole man, when the soul, without God [and] without body, pays penalties for a time; but the second [is that] where the soul, without God, with the body, shall pay eternal penalties. When, therefore, God said to that first man, whom he had established in Paradise, concerning the forbidden food, ‘In whatever day you eat of it, you shall die the death,’ [he threatened] not only the prior part of the first death, where the soul is deprived [of God] [that threat comprehended] not only the prior part of the first death, where the soul is deprived of God, nor only the posterior, where the body is deprived of the soul, nor only that whole first [death], where the soul, separated both from God and from the body, is punished: but whatever of death there is, up to the very last — which is called the second, and than which there is none later — that threat comprehended [it all].