Augustine Changes the Emphasis

Augustine reads the sons of God as the human line associated with the heavenly city. Their desire draws them toward the earthly city. Genesis 6 becomes a scene in the history of disordered love within humanity.

The reading belongs to his larger account of the two cities. It connects the passage to preceding genealogies and to the spread of corruption, while avoiding the problem of spiritual beings generating children through natural bodies.

Augustine also attends to the wording and the interpretive traditions available to him. His position should therefore be understood as a developed theological reading, rather than dismissed as a wish to make the story less strange.

Its influence helped redirect the Latin West. That history explains much about later Christian familiarity with a human reading. It does not erase the earlier heavenly interpretation or decide the lexical question by influence alone. We are left to weigh Augustine's explanatory strengths against the evidence for the alternative.