Unfortunately, it must be said, St. Augustine—­another North African, but of Roman Carthage and not of Greek Alexandria—­thought that he had a convincing answer to the kind of argument which Clement presented, and so great was the force of his passionate and potent genius that he was able in the end to make his answer prevail.  For Augustine sin was hereditary, and sin had its special seat and symbol in the sexual organs; the fact of sin has modified the original divine act of creation, and we cannot treat sex and its organs as though there had been no inherited sin.  Our sexual organs, he declares, have become shameful because, through sin, they are now moved by lust.  At the same time Augustine by no means takes up the mediaeval ascetic position of contemptuous hatred towards the body.  Nothing can be further from Odo of Cluny than Augustine’s enthusiasm about the body, even about the exquisite harmony of the parts beneath the skin.  “I believe it may be concluded,” he even says, “that in the creation of the human body beauty was more regarded than necessity.  In truth, necessity is a transitory thing, and the time is coming when we shall be able to enjoy one another’s beauty without any lust."[54] Even in the sphere of sex he would be willing to admit purity and beauty, apart from the inherited influence of Adam’s sin.  In Paradise, he says, had Paradise continued, the act of generation would have been as simple and free from shame as the act of the hand in scattering seed on to the earth.  “Sexual conjugation would have been under the control of the will without any sexual desire.  The semen would be injected into the vagina in as simple a manner as the menstrual fluid is now ejected.  There would not have been any words which could be called obscene, but all that might be said of these members would have been as pure as what is said of the other parts of the body."[55] That, however, for Augustine, is what might have been in Paradise where, as he believed, sexual desire had no existence.  As things are, he held, we are right to be ashamed, we do well to blush.  And it was natural that, as Clement of Alexandria mentions, many heretics should have gone further on this road and believed that while God made man down to the navel, the rest was made by another power; such heretics have their descendants among us even to-day.

Alike in the Eastern and Western Churches, however, both before and after Augustine, though not so often after, great Fathers and teachers have uttered opinions which recall those of Clement rather than of Augustine.  We cannot lay very much weight on the utterance of the extravagant and often contradictory Tertullian, but it is worth noting that, while he declared that woman is the gate of hell, he also said that we must approach Nature with reverence and not with blushes.  “Natura veneranda est, non erubescenda.”  “No Christian author,” it has indeed been said, “has so energetically spoken against the heretical contempt of the body as Tertullian.