21. Man, the seal and image of God, in punishment for his pride, becomes earth and ashes through death. — For the Lord made man, whom He fashioned after His own likeness, as it were a certain seal of His own power. Yet this seal shall be restored to clay, because, although through conversion he escapes eternal torments, still, in vengeance for the pride he has committed, he is condemned to the death of the flesh. For man, fashioned from clay and endowed with the gift of reason in his mind, adorned with the likeness of the divine image, swelling up in the elation of his heart, forgot that he had been formed from the lowest things. Whence by the wondrous justice of the Creator it came about that, because he swelled up through the sense which he had received as rational, he should again become earth through death — that earth which he refused humbly to consider himself to be;
and because by sinning he lost the likeness of God, but by dying returns to the matter of his own mire, it is rightly said: The seal shall be restored as clay. And because, when the spirit is called forth from the body, man is stripped as it were of a certain wrapping of his flesh, it is fittingly added concerning the same clay: And it shall stand as a garment. For our clay to stand as a garment is to endure empty and stripped off until the time of the resurrection. But since not even those pass free from this punishment of pride who overcome that same pride by living humbly, he adds, telling what is the special punishment of the proud, saying: