76 in six days the world was created: There is no order without number, and “six is the first perfect number.” It is equal to (the product of) its parts and is also formed by their sum, namely the three as its half and the two as its third and the unit as its sixth. It is also, so to speak, both male and female by nature, forming a harmonic union out of the product of each of them, for among existing things the odd is male and the female is even. The first of the odd numbers is the three, of the even numbers it is the two, and the product of both is the six. So it was right that the cosmos, as the most perfect of the things that have come into existence, be built in accordance with the perfect number six (Philo, ibid., 49).
76 and the actual garden: “With the garden of delights he hints at the ruling part of the soul, which is filled with countless opinions just like plants, while with the tree of life he hints at the most important of the virtues, reverence for God, through which the soul is immortalized, and with the tree which makes known good and evil things at intermediate practical insight, through which things which are opposite by nature are discriminated” (Philo, ibid., 88).
77 the course of Jewish exegesis: This exegetical technique reached its high point in the great Sephardic philosopher Maimonides (1135–1204 CE). Maimonides, who remains today at the center of Orthodox Judaism, interpreted the verses in Genesis with profound learning and precision, but he had no commitment to reading them as the straightforward reporting of actual events. On the contrary, drawing on Greek philosophy as well as on the utterances of the Hebrew sages, he viewed Adam and Eve not as if they were characters in a novel but rather as the allegory of a single human in whom form and substance, intellect and passion, are conjoined.
To expound this idea, Maimonides cited one of those midrashic comments that might have seemed to a sophisticated reader the epitome of wrongheaded narrative elaboration. “The serpent had a rider,” an ancient Sage had remarked, “the rider was as big as a camel, and it was the rider that enticed Eve: this rider was Samael.” The passage, Maimonides acknowledges, is “most absurd in its literal sense; but as an allegory it contains wonderful wisdom, and fully agrees with real facts.” Samael, he explains, was the name for Satan, and it makes perfect sense that Satan spoke not to the intellect, but to desire and imagination, that is, to the part of the human that in the allegory is called “Eve.” Absurd in its literal sense but wonderfully wise as allegory. (Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, pp. 154–56.) On Maimonides’ intellectual method and aims, see Moshe Halbertal, Maimonides: Life and Thought.
The allegorical interpretation of Adam and Eve was not a strategy of religious dissent or skepticism. On the contrary, it generated a wide spectrum of deeply pious thought. If it influenced the hyperintellectual, highly rational Maimonides, it also inspired the esoteric extravagances of the mystical kabbalists. In the foundational works of Jewish mysticism, the thirteenth-century Zohar and the sixteenth-century Lurianic Kabbalah, Adam in chapter 1 of Genesis was created in the likeness of Adam Kadmon, the primordial or heavenly Adam from whose head radiated streams of light. This purely spiritual higher Adam—associated in some strains of this tradition with the Messiah—is distinguished from a lower Adam, Adam Ha-rishon, who is the Adam we encounter in the scriptural narrative and who included within himself all future souls. The continuing vitality of the notion of the two Adams and of the allegorical method launched by Philo two thousand years ago can be seen in Joseph Soloveitchik’s Lonely Man of Faith, published in the mid-1960s. For Soloveitchik, Adam in chapter 1 of Genesis is an allegory of “majestic man,” dominating the universe through his knowledge and technology, while the Adam of chapter 2 is “covenantal man,” saved from his existential loneliness by companionship and by his observance of the revealed law of God.
78 “incredible and insipid”: The Jews “wove together some most incredible and insipid stories, viz., that a certain man was formed by the hands of God, and had breathed into him the breath of life, and that a woman was taken from his side, and that God issued certain commands, and that a serpent opposed these, and gained a victory over the commandments of God; thus relating certain old wives’ fables, and most impiously representing God as weak at the very beginning (of things), and unable to convince even a single human being whom He Himself had formed” (Origen, Contra Celsum in The Anti-Nicene Fathers, 44:36).
79 subtle philosophical problems: Just as modern Jewish thought on Adam and Eve reflects the inheritance from Philo, so too among modern Christians there are many heirs to the allegorical method launched in the third century by Origen. The greatest philosopher of the European Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant, had no patience for theological obscurantism or scriptural literalism. Of all the ways of understanding the origin of moral evil and representing its spread through the members of our entire species, he wrote, “the most inappropriate is surely to imagine it as having come to us by way of inheritance from our first parents.” We cannot possibly inherit our sinfulness; “every evil action must be so considered whenever we seek its rational origin, as if the human being had fallen into it directly from the state of innocence.” The problem, Kant recognized, is that if we thus begin in a state of innocence, there is no way to explain how moral evil should have come into us. Faced with this dilemma, he turned back, in a way that Origen might have recognized and approved, to the story of the Garden and the snake: “Scripture,” Kant wrote, “expresses this incomprehensibility in a historical narrative” (Immanuel Kant, Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, p. 65). The irrationality of the biblical account is a brilliant allegory for a philosophical problem that reason cannot solve. A succession of distinguished philosophers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, both Protestant and Catholic—Friedrich Schleirmacher, Søren Kierkegaard, Reinhold Niebuhr, Hans Urs von Balthasar—followed suit. But—unlike the case in modern Judaism—these modern instances of Christian allegorization are not the continuation of an unbroken line of thought. Instead, they constitute a revival in the wake of a very long eclipse.
Chapter 5: In the Bathhouse
81 unchanged to the present: It can be found more or less intact in the Rudas Baths in Budapest, the Al Pasha in Amman, the Suleymaniye Hamami in Istanbul, or, for that matter, on First Avenue in New York at the Russian and Turkish Baths.
82 “saw the signs of active virility”: Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine, 2:3, p. 45. The phrase “me ille pater in balneis vidit pubescentem et inquieta indutum adulescentia” leaves open the possibility that it was only his son’s pubic hair that the father noticed, not an erection. I am inclined to think that the words inquieta adulescentia imply something more than hair. Erection—and above all the involuntary experience of erection—turns out, in any case, to be crucial in Augustine’s interpretation of the story of Adam and Eve and his understanding of the human condition after the Fall. All citations of the Confessions in English are to this translation. Citations of the Latin are to Augustine, Confessions, Loeb Classical Library.
84 one brother: The brother, Navigius, makes the briefest of appearance in the Confessions, in Ostia at the bedside of his dying mother. He expresses the thought that he wishes that his mother might die not in a strange land but in her own country, where she could be buried by the side of her husband. “See how he talks!” she exclaims, reproaching him for his worldly thoughts, and says that she does not care where her body is laid to rest. For Augustine’s biography, I have relied principally on Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo, and Robin Lane Fox, Augustine: Conversions to Confessions.
86 grazes the skin: “I did not seek the kind of sorrow which would wound me deeply, for I had no wish to endure the sufferings which I saw on stage; but I enjoyed fables and fictions, which could only graze the skin” (Confessions, 3.2. p. 57).
88 indifferent to good and evil?: Epicurus had argued that the universe as we know it emerged from the random and spontaneous collision of atoms and that the gods were indifferent to human behavior and deaf to human appeals.
r /> 91 the Bible was accessible: “Its plain language and simple style make it accessible to everyone, and yet it absorbs the attention of the learned” (Confessions, 6:5, p. 117).
94 True, a grandson: The child, Adeodatus, was baptized alongside his father and his father’s friend, Alypius. Augustine marveled at his son’s piety and intelligence, both entirely the gifts, he writes, of God, “for there was nothing of mine in that boy except my sin” (Confessions, 9:6, p. 190). Adeodatus died in his teens.
96 “Come and share”: The final words are a quotation from Matthew 25:21. Confessions, 9:10, p. 198.
96 “the most intense experience”: Rebecca West, St. Augustine, p. 91.
Chapter 6: Original Freedom, Original Sin
98 he heard Ambrose proclaim: Quoted in Augustine, “De Gratia Christi, Et De Peccato Originali,” Augustin: Anti-Pelagian Writings, p. 214.
100 a whole litany of sins: See chapter 45 in On the Holy Trinity in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, First Series, vol. 3, St. Augustin: On the Holy Trinity, Doctrinal Treatises, Moral Treatises. Augustine began to write On the Holy Trinity, or De trinitate, around 400, three years after the Confessions.
101 they, the humans, must bear the responsibility: “… the reason for these evils must be either the injustice or impotence of God, or the punishment for the first and ancient sin. Since God is neither unjust nor impotent, there is only what you are forced unwillingly to confess: that the heavy yoke upon the children of Adam from the day of their coming out of their mother’s womb until the day of their burial within the mother of all would not have existed if the offense by way of origin had not come first to deserve it” (Augustine, Saint Augustine Against Julian, p. 240).
103 the outrage that still lingered: “Will any common sense observer agree that I was rightly punished as a boy for playing ball—just because this hindered me from learning more quickly those lessons by means of which, as a man, I could play at more shameful games?” (Confessions, 1:9:15).
105 the innate stain of vice: “Nothing that is good and evil, on account of which we are either praiseworthy or blameworthy, is born with us—it is rather done by us, for we are born with capacity for either” (cited in “St. Augustine on Original Sin” in St. Caesarius of Arles Sermons, p. 442). “Before the action of his own proper will, that only is in man which God made” (cited in Benjamin B. Warfield, “Introductory Essay on Augustin and the Pelagian Controversy” in St. Augustin: Anti-Pelagian Writings, p. 15). “As we are procreated without virtue, so also without vice.”
105 “The long custom of sins”: Cited in John M. Rist, Augustine: Ancient Thought Baptized. This Pelagian position was attacked from the beginning as hopelessly weak—how could “imitation” and “habit” explain the virtual universality of human sinfulness?—and continues to be an object of contempt or at least condescension. See, for example, Bonnie Kent, “Augustine’s Ethics” in The Cambridge Companion to Augustine, p. 223, who remarks dismissively that “the works of Pelagius and his followers declare it absurd to suggest that Adam’s sin damaged anyone but himself, except in the trivial sense that Adam set a bad example.” In what sense is example, if properly understood, trivial? “Example” for Pelagius in effect means the whole glacial weight of human culture.
106 To die is not a punishment: This is early Pelagian doctrine; later Pelagians were willing to concede that death was introduced by Adam.
106 accused of heresy: James Wetzel, “Predestination, Pelagianism, and Foreknowledge,” in The Cambridge Companion to Augustine: “It was his [Pelagius’s] disciple, Caelestius, a Roman aristocrat, who first aroused the ire of the North African bishops. While in Carthage, Caelestius raised questions about the practice of infant baptism, suggesting it could be supported (as he in fact did support it) without having to appeal to an original sin that tainted every human birth. For the Africans, this was to question a hard-won dogma, and they denounced him in synod. Pelagius briefly escaped guilt by association when he was cleared of heresy at the synod of Diospolis, presided over by a council of bishops from Palestine in December 415. But in the years following his acquittal, the Africans, now led by Augustine, rallied their forces and eventually persuaded Pope Zosimus to condemn the heresy of Pelagius.”
107 torture infants: Julian had argued, “There cannot be offense in infants, because there can be no offense without will, which they do not possess.” (Saint Augustine Against Julian, p. 216). Augustine countered, “This assertion may be correctly made about a personal sin, but not about the contagion by way of origin of the first sin. If there were no such sin, then infants, bound by no evil, would suffer nothing evil in body or in soul under the great power of the just God” (ibid., 116).
107 all sinners, all damned: “Whatever good is done by man, yet is not done for the purpose for which true wisdom commands it be done, may seem good from its function, but, because the end is not right, it is sin” (Saint Augustine Against Julian, 187). Augustine cited as proof the words of Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews—“Without faith it is impossible to please God” (ibid., 195) (Heb. 11:6). The outraged Julian argued that these words were being put to a use for which they were never intended.
108 What the gloomy bishop of Hippo condemned: “You divide, you define, you give a kind of clinical dissertation on the genus, the species, the mode, and the excess of concupiscence, asserting that ‘Its genus is in the vital fire; its species is in the genital action; its mode is in the conjugal act; its excess is in the intemperance of fornication.’ Yet, after all this supposedly subtle and truly prolix disputation, when I ask you briefly and openly why this vital fire plants the root of warfare in man, so that his flesh lust against his spirit, and it becomes necessary for his spirit to lust against his flesh—why he who wills to consent with the vital fire receives a mortal wound—I think the black ink in your book must turn red with blushing” (Saint Augustine Against Julian, 130). In the struggle against the Pelagians, Augustine had an advantage: though he had been married, Julian made clear that he was now chaste, as had been the ascetic Pelagius himself. What was the point of electing chastity, Augustine wryly asked, if there was nothing wrong with sex?
108 “not performed without evil”: Concupiscence, he wrote, “acting now slackly, now with great violence, never ceases to urge marriage to the unlawful, even when the marriage makes good use of the evil of concupiscence in the propagation of offspring.” (Saint Augustine Against Julian, 134.)
108 pleasurable stirring: Yes, that stirring is pleasurable; sexual intercourse as we know it—as Augustine knew it from long experience with his mistress and others—is “the greatest of all bodily pleasures.” But that intensity of pleasure is precisely its dangerous allure. It would be better to beget children without this sweet poison. “What friend of wisdom and holy joys … would not prefer, if this were possible, to beget children without this lust?” (Augustine, The City of God in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, vol. 2, St. Augustin: The City of God, and Christian Doctrine, pp. 275–76). See, likewise, “What lover of the spiritual good, who has married only for the sake of offspring, would not prefer if he could to propagate children without it or without its very great impulsion?” (Saint Augustine Against Julian, p. 228).
109 Original Sin: According to N. P. Williams, Augustine came up with the term in his treatise “ad Simplicianum.” Cf. Williams, The Ideas of the Fall and of Original Sin, a Historical and Critical Study. In my sampling of the overwhelmingly vast literature on Original Sin, I found Williams’s venerable book helpful, along with the still more venerable H. Wheeler Robinson, The Christian Doctrine of Man (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark: 1913), and Frederick Robert Tennant, The Sources of the Doctrines of the Fall and Original Sin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903).
109 the vast body of rabbinical writing … the comparably vast Islamic tradition: Of course, their vastness means that one can easily find exceptions. And, if pious Jews and Muslims did not embrace a full-blown concept of Original
Sin, they did quite often dwell on the taint that Adam and Eve brought upon themselves and their descendants by their disobedience. “The waste that is excreted by us is a result of what we inherited because of the tree,” a seventeenth-century Muslim traveler in France explained to a Christian interlocutor:
It brought about uncleanness in the body, as a result of which man has to wash those unclean parts of the body. He washes his hands because our father Adam, peace be upon him, stretched out his hand to the fruit which God had prohibited; he washes his mouth because he ate of it, and his nose because he smelled the fruit, and his face because he turned toward it.
Ahmad bin Qasim, Kitab Nasir al-Din ala al-Qawm al-Kafirin (The Book of the Protector of Religion against the Unbelievers), in In the Land of the Christians: Arabic Travel Writing in the Seventeenth Century, pp. 26–27.
109 “of a virgin”: See chapter 18 in Augustine, On the Holy Trinity in On the Holy Trinity, Doctrinal Treatises, Moral Treatises. “Nor did that concupiscence of the flesh intervene, by which the rest of men, who derive original sin, are propagated and conceived; but holy virginity became pregnant, not by conjugal intercourse, but by faith—lust being utterly absent—so that that which was born from the root of the first man might derive only the origin of race, not also of guilt” (On the Holy Trinity).
110 subtle allegory: The words Augustine uses for his method of interpretation include not only allegoria, but also figura, aenigma, imago, similitudo, mysterium, sacramentum, signum, and velum [veil]. Cf. Augustine, A Refutation of the Manachees in On Genesis: A Refutation of the Manachees, Unfinished Literal Commentary on Genesis, The Literal Meaning of Genesis, p. 30. For “soulish,” see Augustine, On Genesis, p. 78. In A Refutation of the Manachees: Eve was not in Paradise “in a local sense, but rather as regards her blissful feeling of Paradise” (Augustine, On Genesis, 2.41.20, p. 85). Cf. John M. Rist, Augustine: Ancient Thought Baptized, p. 98.