source

Extract: Original Sin City of God Book 1 Ch 13.13

13. What was the first punishment of the transgression of our first parents?

For, as soon as our first parents had broken the commandment, divine grace abandoned them, and they were embarrasssed at their own wickedness; and they took fig-leaves, and covered their shame; for though their members remained the same, they had shame now where they had none before. They experienced a new motion of their flesh, which had become disobedient to them, in strict punishment of their own disobedience to God. For the soul, revelling in its own liberty, and scorning to serve God, was itself deprived of the control it had over the body. And because it had wilfully deserted its superior Lord, it no longer held its own inferior servant; neither could it hold the flesh under control, as it would always have been able to do had it remained itself subject to God. Then the flesh started to lust against the Spirit, in which strife we are born, deriving from the first sin a seed of death, and bearing in our members, and in our spoiled nature, the battle or even victory of the flesh.

14. In what state man was made by God, and into what estate he fell by the choice of his own will.

For God, the author of natures, not of vices, created man upright; but man, being of his own will corrupted, and justly condemned, produced corrupted and condemned children. For we all were bound up in that one man, since we all were that one man who fell into sin by the woman who was made from him before the sin. For not yet was the particular form created and distributed to us, in which we as individuals were to live, but already the seminal nature was there from which we were to be propagated; and this being spoiled by sin, and bound by the chain of death, and justly condemned, man could not be born of man in any other state. And thus, from the bad use of free will, there originated the whole train of evil, which, with many miseries, continues the human race from its depraved origin, as from a corrupt root, on to the destruction of the second death, which has no end, those only being excepted who are freed by the grace of God.