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When the human race, in the exercise of this freedom of will,
increased and advanced, there arose a mixture and confusion of the two
cities by their participation in a common iniquity. And this
calamity, as well as the first, was occasioned by woman, though not
in the same way; for these women were not themselves betrayed, neither
did they persuade the men to sin, but having belonged to the earthly
city and society of the earthly, they had been of corrupt manners from
the first, and were loved for their bodily beauty by the sons of God,
or the citizens of the other city which sojourns in this world. Beauty
is indeed a good gift of God; but that the good may not think it a
great good, God dispenses it even to the wicked. And thus, when the
good that is great and proper to the good was abandoned by the sons of
God, they fell to a paltry good which is not peculiar to the good,
but common to the good and the evil; and when they were captivated by
the daughters of men, they adopted the manners of the earthly to win
them as their brides, and forsook the godly ways they had followed in
their own holy society. And thus beauty, which is indeed God's
handiwork, but only a temporal, carnal, and lower kind of good, is
not filly loved in preference to God, the eternal, spiritual, and
unchangeable good. When the miser prefers his gold to justice, it is
through no fault of the gold, but of the man; and so with every
created thing. For though it be good, it may be loved with an evil as
well as with a good love: it is loved rightly when it is loved
ordinately; evilly, when inordinately, It is this which some one has
briefly said in these verses in praise of the Creator: "These are
Thine, they are good, because Thou art good who didst create them.
There is in them nothing of ours, unless the sin we coimmit when we
forget the order of things, and instead of Thee love that which Thou
hast made."
But if the Creator is truly loved, that is, if He Himself is loved
and not another thing in His stead, He cannot be evilly loved; for
love itself is to be ordinately loved, because we do well to love that
which, when we love it, makes us live well and virtuously. So that
it seems to me that it is a brief but true definition of virtue to say,
it is the order of love; and on this account, in the Canticles, the
bride of Christ, the city of God, sings, "Order love within
me." It was the order of this love, then, this charity or
attachment, which the sons of God disturbed when they forsook God,
and were enamored of the daughters of men. And by these two names
(sons of God and daughters of men) the two cities are sufficiently
distinguished. For though the former were by nature children of men,
they had come into possession of another name by grace. For in the
same Scripture in which the sons of God are said to have loved the
daughters of men, they are also called angels of God; whence many
suppose that they were not men but angels.
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