Annotatio LI
”I will put enmities between thy seed and her seed,” etc. — Genesis 3:15
Francesco Giorgio, in the first Tome of the Problems, problem 54, inquiring what the seed of the devil is — which here is called by Moses “the seed of the serpent” — decides, rather violently, that the seed of the devil, hostile to the whole human race, was the giants, begotten from the coupling of demons with women.1 For demons (as he himself explains in the sixth Tome, problem 330) are corporeal animals apt for generation, emitting seed: which, approaching women, condense their bodies, so that they may more easily unite with the women for the generation of giants; whom, in the first Tome, problems 74 and 75, he constantly asserts could in no way have been begotten from the intercourse of man and woman, but from the seed of demons — because it is not consonant that such huge monsters, of the kind the giants are read to have been in the sacred letters, could be produced by a natural way. And hence (he says in problem 331 of the sixth Tome) it came about that, after the coming of Christ, the giants entirely ceased to be: because, after the demons were conquered by the death of Christ, they no longer had power to enter into women and to sow giants in their wombs. You have here, excellent reader, five things foreign to the common opinions of the Theologians.2 The first is: that demons are corporeal animals endowed with the faculty of begetting. The second, that the giants were the sons of demons. The third, that giants cannot be begotten naturally from the human intercourse of man and woman. The fourth, that demons cannot, after the coming of Christ, be mingled with women. The fifth, that the giants were, after Christ, entirely done away. All these things St. Augustine refutes in order, in book 15 On the City of God, chapter 23. Consult Annotations 8, 70, 71, 73, 74, 76, and 77 of this book.