The parallels in firstness explain why Augustine struggled to depict a huge Fall, a Fall so big that it would feel like a descent.

At the top, before the Fall, Adam and Eve were in the state of Original Blessedness, where even their sexual organs were at the command of reason.

Of course, this is impossible, given the nested form of “concupiscence”.  I put “no normal context” instead of “Original Sin” because, well, the workings of the sexual organs have a way to avoid contextualization.  This fact made Augustine the butt of jokes by rowdy agnostics for centuries.

Still, Augustine’s logic defying claim served a purpose.  It elevated the perception of height for the start of the Fall.  “Original Blessedness” had to be at least as high as “the Blissfulness of the Platonic Soul before its Descent”.

A literal “descent from Adam and Eve” deepens the pit of the Fall, far deeper than “the Platonic Body that Receives the Soul”, for now the poor babe – that sweet innocent – comes from the reason-less heaving of body parts plus, some sort of flaw in the seed.  That babe comes from concupiscence itself.

Baptism was needed just to get back to innocence.

Today, this makes no sense.

However, it makes sense if Augustine was speaking in a world of Greek and Roman Paganism.  The conversion of the Empire to Christianity did not provide a remedy for the collapse of the Western Roman Civilization.  It gave a shelter for people desperate enough to abandon their ancestral ways.

The parallels in firstness show that Augustine took the Platonic model and re-oriented it.  The axis of descent was no longer set by gravity, but by a Celestial Axis; the Axis between the Father and the Son; the Axis that is the Holy Spirit; plus another Earth-based Axis; between Adam and Jesus; the Transgressor and the Redeemer; the Fallen and the Savior.

Augustine altered the heights and depths of the Platonic model.

The “union of spirit with descent” that allowed the soul to animate the body was thus transformed.  At the same time Augustine spoke to the Platonists and Stoics, he was taking their model from them.

The resulting model was evocative and stunningly superior to more primitive explanations carried into the West by the invading tribes.  Thus Augustine preserved the soul of a dying civilization by drawing it into his own Christian perspective.