Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers: Series I/Volume II/City of God/Book XIII/Chapter 13

Chapter 13.—What Was the First Punishment of the Transgression of Our First Parents.

For, as soon as our first parents had transgressed the commandment, divine grace forsook them, and they were confounded at their own wickedness; and therefore they took fig-leaves (which were possibly the first that came to hand in their troubled state of mind), and covered their shame; for though their members remained the same, they had shame now where they had none before.&#160; They experienced a new motion of their flesh, which had become disobedient to them, in strict retribution of their own disobedience to God.&#160; For the soul, revelling in its own liberty, and scorning to serve God, was itself deprived of the command it had formerly maintained over the body.&#160; And because it had willfully deserted its superior Lord, it no longer held its own inferior servant; neither could it hold the flesh subject, as it would always have been able to do had it remained itself subject to God.&#160; Then began the flesh to lust against the Spirit, in which strife we are born, deriving from the first transgression a seed of death, and bearing in our members, and in our vitiated nature, the contest or even victory of the flesh.