The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve

by Stephen Greenblatt

  Such were the convictions that Augustine carried with him, along with his mistress and his son, from Carthage to Thagaste, when he decided to return there to take up a post as a teacher of literature. They still remained his convictions when he went back to Carthage, where he began to give courses on public speaking, and then when he moved on to Rome and Milan. These were years of impressive, even spectacular, professional advancement, of the kind his father had dreamed for him. Augustine won a poetry prize; he dazzled everyone with an interpretation of Aristotle; he published his first book, a treatise on aesthetics; he surrounded himself with impressive friends; he obtained the support of an influential patron. Carthage was a significant step up from Thagaste; Rome, the glittering object of everyone’s fantasies, a huge leap, both in prestige and salary. And, though compared with Rome, Milan might seem less alluring, it was in fact the city where the imperial court resided, and Augustine had been named there to a hugely prestigious professorship of rhetoric.

  In this decade-long ascent from one rung in the career ladder to the next, there was only one major problem, and her name was Monica. When he went from Carthage to Thagaste for his first teaching position, Augustine’s mother initially refused to share the same house with him, not because of his mistress and child—Monica, still focused on making a socially advantageous marriage for her son, regarded the mistress as an irrelevance—but rather because of his Manichaean beliefs. Those beliefs were loathsome to her, and she made a conspicuous show of weeping bitterly, as if her son had died. Augustine recalled that it was only when an angel assured her in a dream that “if she looked carefully, she would see that where she was, there also was I” that his mother consented to inhabit the same house and share meals. Even then, he added, “she gave no rest to her sighs and her tears” (3:11).

  As anyone who has survived the overbearing love of an anxious mother can testify, the emotional satisfactions of being the object of so much concentrated attention and concern must be weighed against its considerable costs. At some point in his young life Augustine may have wished to supersede his father and his siblings in his mother’s love. If so, he had clearly got his wish and then some. But there is every sign that he now wanted to escape.

  Since Augustine had refused to abandon his Manichaeism, we may be certain that his mother’s sighs and tears, along with her emotional claims upon him, continued unabated. And they were redoubled when he prepared to leave Carthage for Rome: “She wept bitterly to see me go and followed me to the water’s edge, clinging to me with all her strength in the hope that I would either come home or take her with me” (5:8). Unable to tell her directly that he was leaving, he lied and, saying that he was only seeing off a friend, persuaded her to spend the night at a shrine near the harbor. “During the night, secretly, I sailed away.”

  Augustine must have been aware that he was reenacting in his own life the scene in Virgil’s Aeneid that had once so moved him: the scene in which Aeneas, treacherously abandoning his lover Dido, secretly sails off from Carthage to become the founder of Rome. That literary moment had implanted itself deep within him. He clearly used it to make sense of what he had done, to represent himself as an epic hero, acting under divine mandate, while at the same time acknowledging the intensity of the suffering that his departure caused, as if he had witnessed it for himself: “The next morning she was wild with grief, pouring her signs and sorrows in your ear,” he told God, “because she thought you had not listened to her prayer.”

  He must have felt some guilt. And yet, in remembering this moment, he allowed himself for once to express some of the anger toward his mother that must have long been building up within him: “You used her too jealous love [carnale desiderium] for her son as a scourge of sorrow for her just punishment.” The phrase Augustine uses for her love—“carnal desire”—would seem more appropriate for a lover than a mother. Monica had taken whatever was blocked or unsatisfied in her relationship with her husband and transferred it to her son. Her son, suffocating, had to flee. And the suffering that his escape had visited upon her was her due, Augustine reflected, as a woman: “the torments which she suffered were proof that she had inherited the legacy of Eve, seeking in sorrow what with sorrow she had brought into the world.”

  In Genesis, Eve’s legacy is twofold: women are condemned to bring forth children in pain and to yearn for the husbands who dominate them. As Augustine looked back at his relation to his mother, he cast himself in his imagination as both her child and her husband: she brought him with sorrow into the world and she sought him with sorrow through the world. For his grieving mother’s search for her son did not end at the harbor in Carthage. A few years later, when Augustine had taken up his post in Milan, Monica sailed from North Africa to join him.

  This time he did not continue to flee. He told her that he had become increasingly disenchanted with Manichaeism. Though he was not ready to embrace Catholicism and be baptized in the faith, he had been impressed by the Catholic bishop of Milan, Ambrose. Ambrose’s approach to the Scriptures was in the tradition of Philo and Origen. Discovering allegories hidden in seemingly naïve stories, his intellectually compelling sermons helped to undermine Augustine’s erstwhile contempt for the Hebrew Bible. What had struck him as mere absurdities, when taken in a literal sense, began to seem like profound mysteries. As a Manichee, he had been drawn to an esoteric system that only a small number of adepts could fully grasp. Now he found himself drawn in the opposite direction: in its apparent simplicity, the Bible was accessible to everyone, but it addressed the deepest questions anyone could ask.

  All the while, his career continued on its course. He met his students in the morning; he spent his afternoons with his close friends discussing philosophy. His mother, settled in his household along with his longtime mistress and their son, busied herself with arranging the advantageous marriage that had long been her goal and had likely become his as well. He was thirty years old. A suitable Catholic heiress was found whose parents consented to the match. But the girl, probably only ten or eleven years old, was some two years shy of marriageable age, so the wedding, though agreed upon, had to be delayed.

  In the meantime, Monica was able to engineer a second related change in her son’s life. “The woman with whom I had been living was torn from my side as an obstacle to my marriage,” Augustine wrote, “and this was a blow which crushed my heart to bleeding, because I loved her dearly” (6:15). There is no reason to doubt the reality of this pain: the couple had been living with each other for thirteen years and had raised a child together. But though he sensitively represented his own acute suffering—“At first the pain was sharp and searing, but then the wound began to fester, and though the pain was duller there was all the less hope of a cure”—Augustine left us barely a glimpse of his nameless mistress’s feelings. He wrote only, “She went back to Africa, vowing never to give herself to any other man, and left me with the son whom she had borne me.” And then she is gone from his account, expunged as if she no longer mattered, as if her fate meant nothing to him. All that was left was the gnawing sexual appetite that she had served to appease. With almost two years to wait, he related, he quickly took another mistress.

  Augustine had long compared himself with his intimate friend, Alypius. Though in his early adolescence, Alypius admitted, he had some experience of sexual intercourse, “it had not become habitual” with him (6:12). Now, he said, he found the act degrading, and he lived a life of utmost chastity. For Augustine, by contrast, sexual desire was a constant presence, and intercourse had indeed become habitual. He could not imagine life without this intense bodily pleasure. Ambrose’s sermons, with their ardent praise of virginity, their urging of sexual continence, and their dream of an escape from the body, only seemed to mark out the abyss separating Augustine from the highest aspirations of Christian piety. Spiritually ambitious, he longed to fulfill these aspirations himself, but he knew that it was impossible.

  Yet, as he would soon come to testify, God’s grace w
orks in strange ways. In little more than a year’s time, Augustine had converted to the Catholic faith. Shortly thereafter, now baptized, he had broken off his engagement to marry, resigned his professorship, vowed himself to perpetual chastity, and determined to return to Africa and found a monastic community. By running away from his mother, he had without realizing it embarked on a course that would fulfill and surpass her utmost dreams.

  Augustine described the process of his conversion, the most important event in his life, in loving detail. Two moments stand out. The first took place in a garden attached to the house in Milan in which he, his mother, and his friend Alypius were living. Augustine was still struggling with whether or not to accept baptism, for he knew that this decision would mark a decisive, irrevocable transformation of his whole existence. He felt torn in opposite directions, as if there were within him two distinct wills, bitterly at war with one another and yet both aspects of his own single self. He wanted desperately to convert, once and for all. He envisaged the chaste beauty of Continence—the renunciation forever of sexual relations—beckoning to him, urging him to close his ears to the unclean whispers of his body. But those whispers, his old desires, refused to be silent. His inner conflict growing more and more unbearable, he flung himself down beneath a fig tree and began to weep, crying out “How long shall I go on saying ‘tomorrow, tomorrow’? Why not now?” (8:12).

  As he was obsessively asking himself these questions, he heard a child in a neighboring house, repeating again and again in a singsong voice the words tolle lege, tolle lege, “Take it and read, take it and read.” Understanding this as a divine command, Augustine rushed to his copy of the Holy Scriptures, opened it, and read the first passage that met his eyes. They were words from St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans: “Not in reveling and drunkenness, not in lust and wantonness, not in quarrels and rivalries. Rather, arm yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ; spend no more thought on nature and nature’s appetites.” The conflict was over. Augustine had converted.

  He went inside to tell his mother. At his announcement—“I no longer desired a wife or placed any hope in this world but stood firmly upon the rule of faith”—Monica was jubilant, having received more than she had dared even to pray for. The joy she felt, Augustine wrote, was “far sweeter and more chaste than any she had hoped to find in children begotten of my flesh.”

  Monica had triumphed in the conflict that had arisen so many years earlier when Patricius, reporting what he had seen at the bathhouse, chuckled in anticipation of grandchildren. True, a grandson had been born, the outcome of the relationship Augustine had renounced, but there would be no legitimate offspring and no further sexual relations. Though all Christians were not under an obligation to renounce intercourse—“Better to marry than to burn,” Paul had written—Augustine’s own conversion in the garden in Milan was marked precisely by such a renunciation, one that deeply shaped his interpretation of the Garden of Eden.

  “Therefore,” Genesis tells us, when Adam and Eve are brought together, “does a man leave his father and his mother and cling to his wife and they become one flesh.” In his own life Augustine managed to undo this trajectory. For many years, to be sure, he left his parents and clung to his mistress. To his father at least he never returned. But, though he had once slipped away from her at Carthage, his mother was the love of his life on this earth, as he was of hers, and shortly after his vow of perpetual continence they shared together a remarkable mystical experience.

  Together with the family and friends who had decided to return with him to Africa to found a monastic community, Augustine was in the Roman port of Ostia, from whence the small company planned shortly to set sail. Looking out from a window at the garden of the house where they were staying, Augustine and his mother were standing alone and talking. Their conversation, serene and joyful, led them to the conclusion that no bodily pleasure, however great, could ever match or even remotely approach the happiness of the saints. And then, “as the flame of love burned stronger in us,” something happened: they felt themselves climbing higher and higher, through all the degrees of matter and through the heavenly spheres and, higher still, to the region of their own souls and up toward the eternity that lies beyond time itself. “And while we spoke of the eternal Wisdom, longing for it and straining for it with all the strength of our hearts, for one fleeting instant we reached out and touched it” (9:10). It is difficult to convey in translation the breathless power of this account and of what it meant for the two of them, the thirty-two-year-old son and the fifty-five-year-old mother, to reach this instant together. And then it was over: suspiravimus. “We sighed,” Augustine recalled, and returned to the sound of our speech.

  The two of them looked back and tried to understand what had just happened to them. What they had experienced could only be captured, Augustine thought, in perfect silence, which he then attempted to conjure up in an astonishing, unbroken sentence of 184 words, a sentence of which any English translation is a pale, disjointed reflection:

  Suppose, we said, that the tumult of a man’s flesh were to cease and all his thoughts can conceive, of earth, of water, and of air, should no longer speak to him; suppose that the heavens and even his own soul were silent, no longer thinking of itself but passing beyond; suppose that his dreams and the visions of his imagination spoke no more and that every tongue and every sign and all that is transient grew silent—for all these things have the same message to tell, if only we can hear it, and their message is this: We did not make ourselves, but he who abides for ever made us. Suppose, we said, that after giving us this message and bidding us listen to him who made them, they fell silent and he alone should speak to us, not through them but in his own voice, so that we should hear him speaking, not by any tongue of the flesh or by an angel’s voice, not in the sound of thunder or in some veiled parable, but in his own voice, the voice of the one whom we love in all these created things; suppose that we heard him himself, with none of these things between ourselves and him, just as in that brief moment my mother and I had reached out in thought and touched the eternal Wisdom which abides over all things; suppose that this state were to continue and all other visions of things inferior were to be removed, so that this single vision entranced and absorbed the one who beheld it and enveloped him in inward joys in such a way that for him life was eternally the same as that instant of understanding for which we had longed so much—would not this be what we are to understand by the words Come and share the joy of your Lord?

  The spiritual climax that Augustine and his mother shared was the most intense experience in his life, perhaps even, as Rebecca West remarked, “the most intense experience ever commemorated.” A few days later Monica fell ill and on the ninth day she died. The Confessions does not take the story of Augustine’s life any further. It turns instead to a philosophical meditation on time and the beginning of an interpretation of the book of Genesis.

  In the more than forty years that succeeded his moment of ecstasy—years of endless controversy and the wielding of power and feverish writing—Augustine, priest, leader of a community of monks, and bishop of the North African city of Hippo, spent an extraordinary amount of his time trying to understand the story of Adam and Eve. He thought about it when he sat, book in hand, on his bishop’s chair (his cathedra), when he addressed his clergy and congregation in solemn assembly, when he grappled with complex theological issues, and when he tirelessly dictated letter after letter to his network of friends and allies. He brooded on it all through his bitter polemics against heretics. He continued to ponder its mysteries when he heard the terrible reports in 410 of the three-day sack of Rome by a Visigothic army led by Alaric. Over the decades, he had persuaded himself that it was not a story at all, at least not a story in the sense of a fable or myth. It was the literal truth, and, as such, it was the scientific key to the understanding of everything that happened.

  Through intellectual mastery, institutional cunning, and overpowering spiritual charisma, this o
ne man managed slowly, slowly to steer the whole, vast enterprise of Western Christendom in the same direction. It is to him preeminently that our world owes the peculiarly central role that Adam and Eve came to occupy. There were many dissenters, for then as now the Bible’s account of the first humans in the magical garden seemed at first glance more like fiction than history. But Augustine did not yield. He insisted that the divine plan, and hence the fate of individuals and nations alike, was bound up with the reality of what had occurred in that garden. Nothing shook his faith, and at the end of his long life, with some eighty thousand Vandal warriors besieging Hippo as Roman rule in Africa collapsed, Augustine still looked for the underlying meaning of the disaster befalling his world in what Adam and Eve had done in the beginning of time.

  6

  Original Freedom, Original Sin

  In the company of pagan and Manichaean intellectuals, the young Augustine had once looked down with contempt on the apparent simplicity of the ancient biblical narrative. Then in Milan, listening with rapt attention to Ambrose’s sermons, the ground shifted. “I fell in Adam, in Adam was I expelled from Paradise, in Adam I died,” he heard Ambrose proclaim; and Christ “does not recall me unless He has found me in Adam.” But the sermon’s stirring words posed an urgent question: just what did it mean to be “in” Adam?