Clement of Alexandria, with all the eccentricities of his over-subtle intellect, was yet the most genuinely Greek of all the Fathers, and it is not surprising that the dying ray of classic light reflected from his mind shed some illumination over this question of sex. He protested, for instance, against that prudery which, as the sun of the classic world set, had begun to overshadow life. "We should not be ashamed to name," he declared, "what God has not been ashamed to create."[52] It was a memorable declaration because, while it accepted the old classic feeling of no shame in the presence of nature, it put that feeling on a new and religious basis harmonious to Christianity. Throughout, though not always quite consistently, Clement defends the body and the functions of sex against those who treated them with contempt. And as the cause of sex is the cause of women he always strongly asserts the dignity of women, and also proclaims the holiness of marriage, a state which he sometimes places above that of virginity.[53] 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 mediæval 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]