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The history of the medieval Church has been characterized by the progressive materialization of the spiritual. The ornamentation of church buildings and its spiritual exegesis, the official recognition of the transitive value of hand-made images, the justification of the possession of land rents and properties, and the transformation of the Church into a judicial and hierarchical institution testify to this process. Most of them occured between the ninth and the thirteenth centuries, but we can observe the materialization of the Church since the time of Constantine and follow its progression right up to the Church reform of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The present paper suggests that the work of Saint Augustine was the turning point of a new understanding of the dialectic between carnal (caro) and spiritual (spiritus). By relating the two ethical principles in a non-dualist way, the bishop of Hippo proposed a new conception of the human being and of human society, which submitted the carnal to the spiritual, as well as considering an eschatological progression, which intended to spiritualize the carnal. Thus, he gave to the human being a new sense (that is, a new understanding and a new direction), which assumed the tension between body and soul, as well as the edification of a Christian society rooted in space and time. Through a detailed analysis of Augustine’s works written in the first two decades of the fifth century (Homilies on the Gospel of John, De Genesi ad litteram, De Trinitate, De civitate Dei), we wish to determine his principal anthropological and sociological concepts (sensus, corpus, cor, visio, caro, spiritus, iter, homo viator, civitas, visio Dei). These can be seen as the foundations of the social structure upon which the medieval Church grew up and changed. Thus, we try to offer explanations for the two processes that occurred throughout the long medieval millennium: the materialization of the spiritual and the spiritualization of the carnal.