For there are some eunuchs, which were so born from their mother’s womb; and there are some eunuchs, which were made eunuchs of men: and there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake. (Matt. 19:12)
Longing to be one of those who made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake, Origen took a knife and castrated himself.
Though it was not formally condemned as a practice until the fourth century CE, the church took a dim view of self-mutilation. They ruled that Jesus’s words here, like many others that he spoke—“Let the dead bury their dead”; “If thy right hand offend thee, cut it off ”; “Call no man your father on earth”—had to be understood metaphorically. You were not permitted, let alone encouraged, to treat any of this literally.
The irony of Origen’s cruelly literal understanding of heavenly eunuchs is that he became the greatest early Christian advocate for the allegorical interpretation of the Scriptures. He made his position clear in response to a pagan attack written by a Greek philosopher named Celsus. (Celsus’s book, The True Word, has not survived, but substantial parts of it are known through Origen’s reply.) “The Jews then, leading a groveling life in some corner of Palestine, and being a wholly uneducated people,” Celsus had written, wove together some “incredible and insipid” stories such as the creation of Adam and Eve, upon which Christians stake their faith. In the face of this challenge, Origen ran away as fast as he could from the literal sense. The words of scripture should be treated, he wrote, precisely in the way that pagan intellectuals like Celsus treated their own classics. Why interpret Moses’s profound fables with dull literalism, while the comparable fables in Hesiod and Plato are accorded subtle readings? Plato too would sound like a joke if you read his myths flat-footedly and failed to admire the way in which he concealed great philosophic mysteries under the cloak of storytelling.
Thus in Genesis, Origen insisted, Adam must not be conceived as an individual; the Hebrew term signifies the nature of man in general. Paradise refers not to a particular place but to the condition of the soul. And the expulsion of the man and woman from Paradise, and their being clothed by God with tunics of skins, is not some crude folktale; it contains “a certain secret and mystical doctrine (far transcending that of Plato) of the soul’s losing its wings, and being borne downwards to earth, until it can lay hold of some stable resting-place.” Origen’s many followers continued and further refined his interpretive work: “Eden” was Jesus Christ, “Paradise” was the church, the “woman” was sense perception, and the “man” reason. Slowly, as in a painstaking archaeological dig, philosophical treasures were excavated from beneath the stony surface of the Genesis story.
If Origen’s approach had triumphed, Adam and Eve would gradually have faded into arcane symbols, interesting perhaps for the ways in which they pointed to subtle philosophical problems but not otherwise compelling. They would have ceased to lay claim to reality and would have begun the slow march to oblivion. But though allegory seemed to some like the perfect solution to the discomfort and risk of literal readings, soon after Origen’s death treating the story of Adam and Eve as an allegory came under sustained and devastating attack. Contemporary surveys indicate that many millions of people even now, in the wake of so much scientific evidence, still profess to believe in the story of Adam and Eve not allegorically but literally. The reason for this literal belief has little or nothing to do with ignorance. It has everything to do with the history of Christianity, a Christianity stamped by a still more durable philosopher than Origen the Unbreakable: Augustine of Hippo.
5
In the Bathhouse
One day in the year 370 CE, a father and his sixteen-year-old son went to the public baths together in the provincial city of Thagaste, in what is now Algeria. On the face of things, the visit could not have been more routine: Thagaste, resembling hundreds of other Roman cities in the ancient world, had certain predictable municipal features, including some combination of markets, temples, gardens, law courts, schools, housing blocks, theaters, forums, workshops, animal pens, amphitheaters, gymnasia, brothels, barracks, and, of course, bathhouses.
The baths varied widely in size and luxury, from the famously sumptuous Baths of Diocletian in the great capital of the empire to modest provincial facilities of the kind the father and son would have entered, but the basic experience—the soaking, the sweating, the massages, the final cooling down and resting—was everywhere the same and has continued virtually unchanged to the present.
So what could possibly have transpired there more than sixteen hundred years ago that left a trace that has reached our own world? At some point in their visit the father may have glimpsed that the boy had an involuntary erection, or simply remarked on his son’s recently sprouted pubic hair. Hardly a world-historical event, but the boy was named Augustine, and decades later he still remembered what happened. He recalled the moment in his famous autobiography, the Confessions, written around 397, a few years after he had become a bishop in North Africa. That day at the public baths, he wrote, his father “saw the signs of active virility coming to life in me, and this was enough to make him relish the thought of having grandchildren.”
It is easy, even across a vast distance in time and culture, to conjure up a teenager’s exquisite embarrassment. But embarrassment—the intense longing to make his father stop looking or to sink through the floor of the bathhouse—was not what fixed itself in Augustine’s memory. What stayed with him instead is what happened when they got home. His father, he recalled, “was happy to tell my mother about it.” Even here it is not embarrassment that he wanted to share with the God whom the Confessions addresses:
He was happy to tell my mother about it, for his happiness was due to the intoxication which causes the world to forget you, its Creator, and to love the things you have created instead of love you, because the world is drunk with the invisible wine of its own perverted, earthbound will. But in my mother’s heart you had already begun to build your temple and laid the foundations of your holy dwelling… . So, in her piety, she became alarmed and apprehensive. (2:3)
The evidence of the adolescent’s sexual maturity had become the occasion—not the first and certainly not the last—for a serious difference between his parents, Patricius and Monica.
Of the two, though Augustine wrote very little about him, the father seems easier for us to understand. A man of modest means, Patricius had high hopes for his eldest son, whose promise he and the whole family clearly recognized. The young Augustine had already been sent to study for several years in the pleasant town of Madauros. He had done well enough there to merit being sent on to the university at Carthage, from whence he would be launched on a brilliant, potentially lucrative career. The gifts he had already shown—a way with words, a facility in interpretation and declamation—suggested something in teaching, law, or public service. The Roman Empire needed bright young administrators, all the more so in the rich African provinces where so much of its food was grown, packed up, and shipped to Rome and the other great cities on the Italian peninsula. At the bathhouse Patricius allowed himself to leap ahead in his fantasies and to imagine himself surrounded by his grandchildren, the offspring of his successful son.
The fantasies must have been all the sweeter because this was a difficult time for Patricius. The adolescent Augustine was back in Thagaste for a reason: his father did not have the money to send him to Carthage and was scrambling to raise it. He was not poor—he owned some property and slaves—but a university education was extremely costly. Other fathers, even ones far richer, Augustine recognized, would not have gone to the trouble and expense. The effort was no secret in the town. “No one had anything but praise for my father who, despite his slender resources, was ready to provide his son with all that was needed to enable him to travel so far for the purpose of study.” But the beneficiary of all this paternal care did not look back as an adult and join in the chorus of praise. “This same father of mine,??
? he told God, “took no trouble at all to see how I was growing in your sight or whether I was chaste or not.”
We are back then to the scene in the bathhouse and to the abyss that opened up at home between his father and his mother. Under intense, if quiet, pressure from his ardently Christian wife to become baptized, Patricius resisted. Though he had allowed his child at birth to be signed with the Cross and though he himself had recently agreed to listen to Christian instruction (as a so-called “catechumen”), he did not concern himself with his son’s spiritual development in the sight of Jesus, nor did he regard the evidence of his son’s virility with anything but delight. If he had been asked to justify this delight, he might have invoked the goddess Venus whose erotic power knit together the whole universe, or he might simply have said, with Shakespeare’s Benedick, “The world must be peopled.”
Chastity, in any case, was not high among Patricius’s concerns. Though he admired his wife’s virtues, he was, Augustine wrote, unfaithful to her. The Confessions does not say how or when the rumors reached him, but it is clear that the son had talked about his father’s infidelity with his mother, who knew all about it and chose not to make it a cause of quarreling. His father, though kind, had a temper, which his mother was careful not to provoke. Augustine remembered that many of his mother’s friends appeared with bruised and battered faces, complaining of their husbands’ violence, but that his mother would reproach them: by the laws of matrimony, they were, she would remind them, their husbands’ ancillae, slave-girls.
It is all the more telling then that on her son’s behalf, rather than her own, Monica was willing to make a scene. Patricius’s sexual behavior was one thing; her son’s quite another. When her husband beamed at what he had seen at the bath, she began to dread, Augustine wrote, “that I might follow in the crooked path of those who do not keep their eyes on you but turn their backs instead.” It is not difficult to see just whose path Monica feared her son might be following. She set about deliberately and systematically to drive a wedge between son and father. “She did all that she could,” Augustine recalled admiringly, “to see that you, my God, should be a Father to me rather than he” (1:11).
About one thing the father and mother completely agreed: their brilliant son should obtain the education his remarkable gifts deserved. (Augustine was the chosen one. He had at least one brother and sister whose education does not seem to have figured in his parents’ schemes.) It took a year of paternal scrimping and networking to come up with the needed funds, and then he was off to Carthage. When he left Thagaste for the big city, Augustine must have seen his father for the last time, for in the Confessions he casually mentioned that when he was seventeen Patricius died. The mention is a conspicuously cool one.
If, mingled with her mourning, the widowed Monica felt some relief at the disappearance of her husband, so dangerous an influence on her beloved son Augustine, any hopes she might have had that he would embark at once on the straight path of chastity were quickly dashed. “I went to Carthage,” he wrote, “where I found myself in a midst of a hissing cauldron of lust” (3:1). What was brewing in the cauldron? The phrase “I muddied the stream of friendship with the filth of lewdness” sounds like an overheated account of masturbation or homosexuality, while other equally cryptic phrases suggest a succession of unhappy affairs with women. The feverish promiscuity, if that is what it was, resolved itself fairly quickly into something quite stable. Within a year or two of arriving in Carthage, Augustine had settled down into a relationship with a woman with whom he lived and to whom, in his account, he was faithful for more than thirteen years.
Though it would not have made her happy, this concubinage—a conventional arrangement by the standards of the time—would probably have been the best that Monica could envisage at this stage for her son, given his restless sexual energies. It was a hasty marriage that she most feared, a marriage that might hinder his advancement. Merely living with a lower-caste woman posed much less of a threat, even when the woman gave birth to a son, Adeodatus. At least from Augustine’s perspective—and that is the only perspective we have—there was no thought of marrying the woman, whose name the Confessions does not even bother to provide. He understood, and he expected his readers to understand, “the difference between the restraint of the marriage alliance, contracted for the purpose of having children, and a bargain struck for lust, in which the birth of children is begrudged, though, if they come, we cannot help but love them” (4:2).
“A bargain struck for lust”: in Augustine’s memory of these years, his whole life was such a bargain. Sex was only one part of it. Priding himself on his cunning and unscrupulousness, he studied law; he honed his rhetorical skills; he entered dramatic competitions for reciting verse; he consulted astrologers; he spent his time with friends whose moral and intellectual failings he complacently observed.
Already as a boy he had developed a love for literature. At school, he recalled, he had “learned to lament the death of Dido, who killed herself for love, while all the time, in the midst of these things, I was dying, separated from you, my God and my Life, and I shed no tears for my own plight” (1:13). Now in Carthage, he found himself attracted to the theater, where he joined audiences who love feeling sad at spectacles of imaginary misery by which they would be horrified in their own lives. The fictional nature of the distress makes it pleasurable, Augustine thought, because it only grazes the skin.
Fables and fictions, in his view, were the perfect fare for someone who was determined to keep his existence as superficial as possible. Warding off dangerous introspection, avoiding real intimacy, refusing to own up to his own choices, he tried to live life on the surface: a relationship that did not count; a child whose birth he begrudged; the ambitious pursuit of meaningless prizes; a restless search for trivial stimulation.
Still, something in him was not satisfied. He was a profoundly serious young man trying to play at being lighthearted. Once, remembering his mother’s faith and the precepts in which he had been instructed, he picked up the Scriptures to “see what kind of books they were” (3:5). But he was disappointed. Their language—he would have been reading them in the Vetus Latina, the earliest Latin translation—was no match for the stateliness of Cicero’s. To someone whose literary tastes were shaped by Virgil and Ovid, these texts were crude in style, while their content seemed disappointingly humble compared with the sophisticated philosophical treatises to which Augustine and his friends were drawn.
Even in his most determined effort to stay on the surface of things, Augustine’s tastes, as the Confessions makes clear, did not run to comedy and light entertainment. He was drawn to spectacles of suffering, as earlier he had been drawn in his reading to the tragic fate of the abandoned Dido. Why, he repeatedly asked himself, is there so much misery in the world? Why do humans again and again make destructive choices? What is the cause of the cruelty, degradation, and violence that everywhere characterizes the human condition? He found the answers to these difficult questions in a cult that, though illegal, had made significant inroads across the Roman world of the fourth century. He became an adherent of the Manichees, a religious system that had originated in Persia in the previous century.
Though the system’s visionary founder, the prophet Mani, called himself an “apostle of Jesus Christ,” Augustine’s adherence was not the conversion to the Catholic faith for which the pious Monica had been praying. Quite the contrary. For the Manichees, the universe was not ruled by a single omnipotent God who sent His beloved son to save mankind. Rather it was divided between the powers of light and darkness, two warring and irreconcilable worlds. Jesus was one of the avatars of light. In the long history of Manichaeism, which spread along the trade routes through Central Asia and as far as China, Jesus took his place alongside other figures of luminous purity, including the Buddha, Zoroaster, and Krishna.
The divine forces on the good side of the universe tried to help pure souls, lodged in human bodies, to rise up toward the ligh
t. But set against this effort was an evil side, a formidable world of greed, violence, injustice, and fathomless sexual appetite. Like Marcion, the Manichees had little patience with the Hebrew scriptures. They ridiculed as a naïve and ethically incoherent folktale the opening chapters of Genesis. They identified the Hebrews’ Yahweh not as the father of Jesus but as the demonic power that created the dark, fallen world. The struggle between light and darkness was recapitulated at every level of the universe, from the vast reaches of interstellar space to the innermost recesses of the isolated individual.
The true believers at the center of this cult—those who not only mastered its complex, sinuous system of thought but also translated its principles into a way of life—were strict ascetics known as the Elect. This was an exclusive circle to which Augustine would not, or at least not yet, have aspired to join. Comfortably settled into a relationship with his mistress and small son, and just starting to make his way as a teacher, the young man was hardly a prime candidate for Manichaean asceticism. He was rather in the outer circle of believers, one of those who were known as “Hearers.”
As we might expect of someone articulate and philosophically agile, Augustine was an extremely good “Hearer.” A restless intellectual who had escaped from a pious, anxious, overbearing mother in a provincial town, his membership in a sophisticated countercultural secret society must have been thrilling. Perhaps too he was drawn to the esoteric, syncretic nature of the cult, its claim to know the hidden truth that lay behind everything in the universe. But above all, Manichaeism answered a question on which Augustine had been anxiously brooding for some time. It solved the tormenting riddle of where evil—in the world and in himself—came from.
If, as the Jews and Christians claimed, a single, all-powerful, all-knowing God created everything, why should He have made a world with so much wickedness? And why should Augustine, who wished to be pure and good, feel such inner conflicts? Could God will both good and evil? Or, worse, could God, as some people claimed, be indifferent to good and evil? Better to believe that the God of perfect, unblemished goodness was not all-powerful, but that He had to contend with an evil counterpart, a satanic enemy just as clever and resourceful. And better too to believe that the purity, goodness, and light that Augustine found lodged in himself, in the hidden recesses of his innermost being, were set about by the hostile, alien powers of darkness.