Augustine knew that he would have a difficult time making this case, if not perhaps within the church then at least among the laity. Then, as now, most people regarded their sexual pleasure as legitimate and good. Julian argued that by Augustine’s mad logic, all parents were murderers, since the very act that brought forth their children also doomed them to destruction. What the gloomy bishop of Hippo condemned as a sin is simply the “vital fire” that is, by God’s own design, our natural way of reproducing.
Augustine countered that our way of reproducing was corrupted by Adam and Eve and has remained corrupted ever since. It is impossible, even for the most pious married couple determined to restrain their sexual intercourse within the narrowest approved boundaries, to get anywhere at all “without the ardor of lust” (On Marriage). And this ardor, to which Augustine gives the technical name “concupiscence,” was not simply a natural endowment or a divine blessing; it was a curse, a mark of punishment, a touch of evil. The action of a married man and woman who intend to beget a child is not evil, Augustine insisted; it is good. “But the action is not performed without evil” (Against Julian). How much better it would be if there were no need for sexual desire, if it were possible to bring children into the world in some other way than through the pleasurable stirring of the genitals by lust.
In the world as we know it, this pious wish is not possible. Augustine’s obsessive and tormented recognition of the fact—of the inescapable presence of arousal not only in conjugal love-making but also in what he calls the “very movements which it causes, to our sorrow, even in sleep, and even in the bodies of chaste men”—shaped his most influential idea, one that weighed down the centuries that followed and from which we his heirs have only partially freed ourselves: originale peccatum, Original Sin.
We are all marked from the beginning with evil. It is not a matter of particular acts of cruelty or violence, specific forms of social pathology, or this or that person who has made a disastrous choice. It is hopelessly shallow and naïve to think, as the Pelagians do, that we start with a blank slate or that most of us are reasonably decent or that we have it in our power to choose good. Look around. There is something deeply, structurally, essentially wrong with us. Our whole species is what Augustine called a massa peccati, a lump of sin.
No trace of this idea is found in the reported words of Jesus, nor does it exist as a significant theme in the vast body of rabbinical writing that flowed into the Midrash Rabbah and the Talmud or in the comparably vast Islamic tradition. Some anticipations of it can be found—in the strange Hebrew Book of Jubilees from the late second century BCE, for example, and in the writings of the bishop of Lyons Irenaeus (c. 130–c. 202 CE), among others—but no one had given it the power and the doctrinal importance it assumed in the works of Augustine. And no one before Augustine had ventured to offer such proof, the proof that makes itself felt in the stirrings of sexual arousal and in our knowledge that all of us come into the world only through this arousal. We originate in sin, and sin never ceases to manifest its hold over us.
Julian and the other Pelagians cried foul: Augustine, they said, was simply reverting to the old Manichaean belief that the flesh was the creation and the possession of a wicked god. Surely this was a betrayal of Christianity, with its faith in a messiah who became flesh. Not so, Augustine responded. God chose to become man, but he did this “of a virgin, whose conception, not flesh but spirit, not lust but faith, preceded.” Jesus’s existence did not depend upon the minutest touch of that ardor through which all other human beings are generated. And we could all have been like Jesus; that is, we could have entered the world and survived in the world and reproduced in the world untouched by lust. That we are not untouched by lust is our fault, the consequence of something that we have done.
It is here, when Augustine had to produce evidence of our individual and collective perfidy, that he called in witness Adam and Eve. For the Original Sin that stains every one of us is not only a sin that inheres in our individual origins—that is, in the sexual arousal that enabled our parents to conceive us—but also a sin that may be traced back to the couple in whom our whole race originates. It is the moral equivalent of a disease, a genetic flaw, that we have inherited from our most distant ancestors. And though it is our inescapable inheritance, we bear the guilt for it, a guilt that attaches to our species.
In order to protect God from the charge that He was responsible for the innate defects in His creation, Augustine had to show that in Paradise it could all have been otherwise, that our progenitors Adam and Eve were not originally designed to reproduce as we now reproduce, that they perversely made the wrong choice, and that we inescapably reiterate their crime. For proof he burrowed into the enigmatic words of Genesis more deeply than anyone had done before. He was determined to reconstruct the lost lives of our remote ancestors, to find his way back to the Garden of Eden and watch our first parents making love.
Long before his encounter with the Pelagians, before he had even been ordained as a priest, Augustine had attempted to crack the ancient code. At the end of August in the year 388, in one of the first works he wrote after his conversion, his On Genesis: A Refutation of the Manichees treated the opening chapters of Genesis as a subtle allegory. It was not in reference to the physical body that man was made in God’s image; indeed, Adam was originally endowed with a spiritual body, if not yet pure soul then at least “soulish.” Eden is less a place than a spiritual experience. Eve is a figure for the soul that each human should love. The commandment to be fruitful and multiply did not originally refer to the flesh but to “a spiritual brood of intellectual and immortal joys filling the earth.” The trees likewise were symbols of spiritual joys. And as for the disturbing verse, “lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever: therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the Garden of Eden” (Gen. 3:22–23), the words properly understood mean the very opposite of what they seem to say on the surface: “The reason the man was sent away to the wearisome labors of this life was in order that at some time or other he might indeed stretch out his hand to the tree of life and live for ever. The stretching out of the hand surely is an excellent symbol of the cross, through which eternal life is regained.”
Augustine came to feel that this clever early exercise in allegorical interpretation, in the manner of Origen, was a mistake. It barely concealed a certain embarrassment about the verses it pretended to embrace. It conceded, in its aversion to the body, a great deal to the very Manichaeism it hoped to refute. By treating Adam and Eve not as recognizable humans but as symbolic figures, it risked opening the way to treating Jesus too as a mythic symbol rather than as the living Savior. And it completely failed to find in its emblematic reading of the story any basis for Original Sin.
By the year 400, in the wake of the completion of the Confessions, Augustine’s approach had begun to change. The way forward, he became convinced, was first and foremost to take the words of Genesis as literally true: as literally true as his own life and that of his parents, his former lovers, and his friends. The story of the naked man and woman, talking snake, and magical trees might seem like a folktale of the sort he had looked down upon when he was a young man. But the task of the true believer was not to try to save it by treating it as the naïve covering of a sophisticated philosophical mystery. The task rather was to take it as the unvarnished representation of historical reality and to convince others to take it that way as well.
Plunging into the project, Augustine studied hard and wrote feverishly. He embarked on a work entitled The Literal Meaning of Genesis, whose goal was to talk “about the scriptures according to their proper meaning of what actually happened, not according to their riddling, enigmatic reference to future events.” For about fifteen years he continued to labor on this work, resisting the urgings of his friends to complete it and make it public. Of all of his many books it was probably the one to which he devoted the most prolonged and sustained attention.
/> In the end it defeated him, and he knew it. He struggled to take literally the Hebrew account of the creation of the cosmos, but he could not bring himself to think that the days in which God formed the universe were anything like our days, or that the light brought forth on the first day (before the creation of the sun) bore any resemblance to our light, or that God actually rested on the seventh day, in the way that tired humans rest after labor. He knew that the Bible said that God formed man from the dust of the ground, but “that God molded the man from mud with actual material hands,” he admitted, “is an excessively childish notion.” God spoke to Adam, but it was foolish to think that God had divine vocal cords. Everywhere he turned, there were comparable problems. Toward the close of his life, looking back on what he had written in The Literal Meaning of Genesis, he acknowledged that “it is a work in which more questions were asked than answers found; and of those that were found only a few were assured, while the rest were so stated as still to require further investigation.”
And yet … he returned again and again to the insistence that the story—if not every element then at least its core elements—must be taken literally. Overcoming his resistance, he affirmed that Adam was an actual person formed from mud as an adult male. There was a real tree whose real fruit he was commanded not to eat, lest he die. God spoke to Adam not mystically but “with such vocal signs as he would be able to understand.” All of the animals were actually brought before Adam, not rounded up by God Himself “in the way hunters and fowlers track down and drive into the nets whatever animals they catch,” but impelled by angels to appear in the right place at the right time. Why should we doubt that God literally fashioned the woman from the man’s rib—“we who could not know about a tree being made from the shoot of a tree in the trunk of another one, if we were likewise ignorant of how farmers serve God in his act of creating these things?”
Woe to the person who does not hold on, whenever possible, to the literal sense of the Bible’s words. Eve disobeyed the divine warning—“if you take a bite of it, you shall die the death”—because she assumed disastrously that God’s words were not to be taken literally. She preferred to believe that God, being merciful, could easily forgive any transgression. “That is why she took some of its fruit and had a bite, and also gave it to her husband.” Far better had she clung to the harshest, most literal-minded understanding of God’s injunction.
The problem is that, however much one tries, not every word can be taken literally, and Augustine could find no simple, reliable rule for the appropriate degree of literal-mindedness. The Bible tells us that after Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, “the eyes of both of them were opened” (Gen. 3.7). Does this mean that they had been made with eyes sealed shut “and left to wander about blind in the paradise of delights, feeling their way, and so to reach and touch all unawares the forbidden tree too, and on feeling the prohibited fruits to pick some without knowing it?” No, it cannot possibly mean this, for we have already learned that the animals were brought to Adam, who must have seen them before he named them; and we have been told that Eve saw that the fatal tree was good for eating “and pleasing to the eye.” All the same, because one word or phrase is used metaphorically did not mean that the entire passage should be taken as an allegory. It was imperative to discover the literal core.
Small wonder that Augustine struggled for fifteen years to write The Literal Meaning of Genesis. It is not as if the stakes were low: it was a matter of life or death, not only for the first parents but also for all of their descendants. Whenever he could put his hands on it, Augustine clung for dear life to the literal sense. Adam and Eve were not literally blind, he granted, before they ate the fruit. But there had to be some way to understand the words “Your eyes shall be opened” other than as a figure of speech. There had to have been something, he insisted, that the couple actually saw for the first time after their transgression, something not merely metaphorical. But what could that possibly have been? The answer came to him: “They turned their eyes on their own genitals, and lusted after them with that stirring movement they had not previously known.”
The key to this understanding had been hidden in Augustine’s experience at the age of sixteen in the bathhouse, that is, in the signs of inquieta adulescentia that his father had observed. The stirring movement that delighted the adolescent’s father and horrified his mother could now be traced all the way back to the original moment in which Adam and Eve felt both lust and shame. They saw for the first time what they had never seen before, and if the sight aroused them, it also filled them with shame and impelled them to reach for the fig leaves to cover as with a veil “that which was put into motion without the will of those who wished it.” Until this moment, they had possessed—for the only time, Augustine thought, in the whole history of the human race—perfect freedom. Now, because they had spontaneously, inexplicably, and proudly chosen to live not for God but for themselves, they had lost their freedom. And with them we lost our freedom as well.
Augustine came to believe that the sign of this loss, both his own and that of the first humans, was not arousal but rather its involuntary character. More than fifty years later, he was still brooding on its underlying significance. If we are healthy, he wrote, we are free to move other parts of the body—eyes, lips and tongue, hands and feet—as we wish. “But when it must come to man’s great function of the procreation of children, the members which were expressly created for this purpose will not obey the direction of the will, but lust has to be waited for to set these members in motion, as if it had legal right over them.”
How weird it is, Augustine thought, that we cannot simply command this crucial part of the body. We become aroused, and the arousal is within us—it is in this sense fully ours—and yet it is not within the executive power of our will. The stiffening of the penis or its refusal to stiffen depends on the vagaries of a libido that seems to be a law unto itself. It was characteristic of Augustine and indeed of his whole age to think about sex in male terms, but he was certain that women must have some equivalent experience to male sexual arousal. That is why in Genesis, in the wake of the first transgression, the woman as well as the man felt shame and covered herself. “It was not a visible movement the woman covered, when, in the same members, she sensed something hidden but comparable to what the man sensed, and they blushed at the mutual attraction.”
Augustine’s experience of sexual arousal, so intense and insistent and deeply mysterious, returned him again and again to the same set of questions: Whose body is this, anyway? Where does desire come from? Why am I not in command of my flesh? “Sometimes it refuses to act when the mind wills, while often it acts against its will!” The teenaged boy confronted a weird split between his will and his body. So too, Augustine acknowledged, did the aged monk, tormented in his cell by the irruption of “voluptuous thought,” “disquieting memories associated with base pleasures,” “a certain uproar of sordid interruptions.” There are other bodily appetites as well, of course, which even the most pious and disciplined person inevitably experiences. But with eating and drinking, Augustine wrote, it is possible to retain some control and, in the midst of satisfying appetite, to continue to think about things of the mind and the spirit. Sexual desire is different: “Does it not engage the whole soul and body?”
But what was the alternative that Adam and Eve—and we—lost forever? How, specifically, were they meant to reproduce, if it was not in the way that all humans do and have done for as long as anyone can remember? The Pelagians had argued that human sexuality was a natural, happy part of God’s design. The first man and the first woman were human, in exactly the way that we are human, and they would have reproduced just as we do. Did Augustine think, Julian asked, that Adam and Eve were not of our species?
Augustine could not evade the question, as he had once tried to do, by arguing that Adam and Eve were “soulish” spirits rather than bodily beings. Having committed himself to a literal understanding, he had com
e to believe that the first humans had material bodies, just as we do. They were not giants, as some had speculated, nor were they endowed with superpowers. They were no doubt perfect versions of what we so inadequately and partially embody, but they were still our kind.
But there was—or there would have been, had they continued to dwell in Paradise—a crucially important difference. Adam and Eve were meant to reproduce, Augustine insisted, without involuntary arousal. “They would not have had the activity of turbulent lust in their flesh, … but only the movement of peaceful will by which we command the other members of the body.” Untroubled self-command—arousal only when you will yourself to be aroused; no arousal when you do not—was for Augustine the heart of what it meant to be free.
To those of us accustomed to think of freedom in political or social terms, this conception of freedom as unruffled inward tranquility and bodily control seems very strange. But to someone deeply troubled by the problem of involuntary arousal, it made sense. And Augustine was certain that he was not alone. He drew upon a long tradition of moral philosophy, pagan as well as Christian, that centered on the achievement of a control over the self that nothing, not even excruciating pain or exquisite pleasure, could disturb. In Paradise, he wrote in The City of God, Adam and Eve—with no pain, no fear of death, no inner disturbance—would have known perfect serenity, a serenity that was meant to extend to sexual intercourse. The coming together of male and female in the reproductive process was designed to be utterly calm. Without feeling any passion—without sensing that strange goad, as if something were driving you forward—“the husband would have relaxed on his wife’s bosom in tranquility of mind.”