Marriage 2.13.27

The apostle’s authority confirms this too. For when blessed Paul spoke of the resurrection of the dead, he said: “Fool, what you sow is not brought to life” (1 Corinthians 15:36); and below: “But God gives it a body as he wishes, and to each kind of seed its own body” (1 Corinthians 15:38). If, then, God gives human seed its own body, as he does to everything—a thing no wise or godly person denies—how will you prove that anyone is born guilty? I ask you at last to see the snares in which the claim of natural sin is strangled.

But come, I beg you, treat yourself more kindly. Believe me, God made you too; but, as must be confessed, a serious error has infected you. For what could be more irreligious than to say that God did not make the human being, or made the human being for the devil, as you say; or that the devil made God’s image, the human being (Genesis 1:26–27)? That is recognized as no less foolish than ungodly. Is God, then, so poor and so shameless that he had nothing to give holy people as a reward except what the devil poured into those he deceived as a vice?

Do you wish to know that God is shown to have given this power of procreation even to people who are not holy? When Abraham, frightened by a foreign people, called Sarah, his wife, his sister, Abimelech, the king of that region, is reported to have taken her for use at night. But God, concerned for the holy woman’s honor, came to Abimelech in a dream and restrained the king’s boldness, threatening death if he continued to violate the marriage. Then Abimelech said: “Lord, will you destroy an ignorant and righteous nation? Did they not themselves say they were brother and sister?” Abimelech rose in the morning, took a thousand silver double-drachmas, sheep, calves, male servants and female servants, and gave them to Abraham. He sent the woman away from him untouched. Abraham prayed to God for Abimelech, and God healed Abimelech, his wife, and his female servants (Genesis 20:2–7, 14–17).

At Abraham’s prayer God healed, by the power of his hidden providence, what had been removed from the sexual organs of those lowly women, because God had closed every womb in Abimelech’s household (Genesis 20:18). See, then, whether something should be called evil by nature when God sometimes removes it in anger and restores it when appeased. He makes the children of the godly and the ungodly alike. Their becoming parents belongs to nature, which rejoices in God as its Creator; their being ungodly belongs to the wickedness of their pursuits, which comes to each person from free will.