The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve

by Stephen Greenblatt

  Augustine knew that he was throwing himself into a problem whose final resolution had eluded the great theological minds of the Christian faith. What could he bring to the attempt that his remarkable predecessors had not already brought? He had grown up with a confident sense of his brilliance, but it would not be enough to invent another sophisticated allegorical interpretation. He was convinced that the only way he could truly understand his relation to Adam was to look into himself. There was no other way back to the beginning of time. All recorded traces of those first crucial moments, apart from the enigmatic words of Scripture, were gone. But he could find a key in the hidden places of his own inner life.

  Reflecting on his agony of irresolution in the garden in Milan, before he was able to bring himself to accept baptism, Augustine struggled to analyze his tormented inner state. “I was at odds with myself,” he wrote:

  When I was trying to reach a decision about serving the Lord my God, as I had long intended to do, it was I who willed to take this course and again it was I who willed not to take it… . It was part of the punishment of a sin freely committed by Adam, my first father. (8:10)

  His self-analysis led him back to the sinfulness of his father, not Patricius but rather his “first father.” Adam’s sin was still alive in Augustine, as was the punishment that an angry God justly visited upon it, and conversely Augustine was still “in Adam.”

  Looking back into his childhood, Augustine thought he could even identify a particular moment in his life that replicated Adam’s original crime. The moment occurred during his unhappy return to Thagaste, while his father scrambled for money. The sixteen-year-old boy, out after dark with some of his friends, went to a neighbor’s pear tree and shook down the fruit. The tree was not theirs, and they were not hungry. They threw the pears—which were good neither to look at nor to eat—at the pigs. Why did they do something that they knew was wrong? “Our real pleasure,” Augustine wrote, “consisted in doing something that was forbidden” (2:4).

  The fact that the act had no point—that it was inexplicable and gratuitous—was precisely the point: if there had been a grand motive, a terrible compulsion, it might have seemed that there really was an independent force of evil in the world, as the Manichees said. But Augustine had renounced Manichaeism. An orthodox Catholic Christian, he now believed that in all the universe there was a single God, all-knowing, all-powerful, perfectly good. Evil, in such a scheme, could only be empty and derivative, a mere parody of the good.

  Though it was not always easy to work out exactly which of God’s powers a particular sinful action was parodying, this notion of evil as mere imitation helped solve the Manichaean challenge with which Augustine had long been grappling. But the solution did not diminish the magnitude of human viciousness and human suffering, and in fact much of the time Augustine wrote as if evil were anything but a pale imitation of something good. In the case of rowdy teenaged boys taking some fruit that did not belong to them, the transgression might seem negligible, but if understood rightly, it contained all you needed to know about human sinfulness. A few years after he wrote the Confessions, Augustine managed to find in Adam’s eating of the forbidden fruit a whole litany of sins: pride, blasphemy, fornication, theft, avarice, even murder (“for he brought death upon himself”). What seemed like nothing turned out to be everything.

  Then as now, the world was full of unspeakable crimes. Adults abused defenseless children; gangs conspired to attack and mutilate their enemies; rapists preyed on unprotected women. How could Augustine, so subtle and intelligent, actually claim to see fornication and murder in the eating of a piece of fruit and to attribute all subsequent criminality and misery to that single distant act? He had, of course, inherited the Genesis story, and with it St. Paul’s claim that Jesus had come to undo the catastrophic consequences of Adam’s disobedience. But how could that primal disobedience in Eden possibly explain human wickedness and the sheer weight of human suffering? These were easy enough to account for if the body was part of the dark side of a universe divided between an evil god and a good one. But if there was only one God—the Creator who made everything and saw that it was very good—why was life so appallingly difficult? Why did so many infants die, often along with the mothers who bore them? Why were there starving or abused children? Why did some people go blind or deaf or mad?

  Some of those who suffered were clearly guilty of evil actions, but with the great bulk of human wretchedness, it was not so obvious. Augustine was determined to save the divine creation from any imputation of injustice. Yet, if God was not either unjust or impotent, then they, the humans, must bear the responsibility. Condemned to exhausting labor, pain, and death, the human race got what it deserved. God is good, but He is also just, and justice demanded the punishment of crime.

  As Augustine knew perfectly well, the Manichaean belief that there was an evil as well as a good god was not the only alternative to the ethical monotheism that orthodox Christianity espoused. The followers of the Greek philosopher Epicurus believed that the moral order was not, as it were, hard-wired in the universe. Morality was what human themselves managed to create and maintain. Humans might wish to claim that their codes of behavior were issued by a divine lawgiver, but such claims were superstitious fantasies. Laws were an entirely secular, contingent work-in-progress. Moral judgments have meaning in this life only, for there is no afterlife. The soul, Epicureans held, is made up of atoms, just like the body, and when the body dies, so too does the soul. Hence no postmortem punishments, and no rewards.

  Augustine understood the allure of this account, which he talked over with his friends when they were struggling to understand the nature of good and evil. “In my judgement,” he recalled in the Confessions, “Epicurus would have won all the honours, were it not that I believed that the soul lived on after death and received the reward or punishment which it deserved” (6:16). Augustine did not want to live in a universe in which the moral reckoning would be left unpaid, in which human suffering meant nothing but the vulnerability of matter, in which wickedness would not be punished or exceptional piety receive an eternal reward. It was better to believe that accounts were being kept to the last scruple by an all-seeing God, even one who was murderously angry at humanity, rather than to believe that God was indifferent or absent.

  Given the magnitude of human wretchedness, what this meant, Augustine reasoned, is that appalling criminality must lie hidden in seemingly innocuous actions. Otherwise the goodness of God—His patience and forbearance and loving-kindness—would be called into question. The world as God made it was good, perfectly so, and it would have remained good, had it not been for the original, terrible act of human perversity. All the miseries that have followed—the endless succession of ghastly crimes, the horrors of tyranny and war, the seemingly natural disasters of earthquake, fire, and flood, and what Hamlet calls the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to—are just punishments meted out by a just God. Such is the meaning of being “in” Adam.

  On the face of things, this seems insane. Was it really possible to insist that all suffering was the consequence of a crime committed by a distant ancestor, a crime one could not possibly remember and whose reported nature seemed too minor to justify any serious penalty? Could anyone actually claim that a sweet child dying of wasting illness was only getting what she deserved?

  Augustine saw quite clearly what was difficult and indeed repellent in such claims. But the alternative seemed to him far worse. He refused to believe with the Epicureans that human behavior, good and ill, was a matter of divine indifference. There was, he insisted, a single, omniscient, omnipotent, and benevolent creator-god. And yet how to account for the sufferings of those who seemed innocent?

  Augustine started characteristically at home, that is, with memories of his own childhood sufferings. As a schoolboy, he hated being beaten, which was then, as for centuries afterward, the principal pedagogical technique for encouraging diligent learning. He earnestly prayed to Go
d that he might be spared the whip. But his prayers were to no avail: if he were idle, he was flogged. It seemed grotesquely unfair, since the adults who did the flogging were themselves guilty of idleness and worse, and the Confessions registers, with subdued passion, the outrage that still lingered in his breast. Yet this outrage did not lead him to condemn the beating of schoolboys. Quite the contrary. For though the beatings were unfair, Augustine reflected, they did the child good, by driving him to learn against his inclination to play. I deserved to be punished, Augustine wrote, “for I was a great sinner for so small a boy” (1:12).

  “A great sinner.” Young children deserve to be beaten, even though those who beat them are doing so for the wrong reason and are still worse than those they beat. The deeper Augustine ventured back into his own infancy—and he did so with a sympathetic intelligence unrivaled in the entire ancient world—the more disturbing were the things he perceived:

  I began to smile as well, first in my sleep, and then when I was awake. Others told me this about myself, and I believe what they said, because we see other babies do the same. But I cannot remember it myself. Little by little I began to realize where I was and to want to make my wishes known to others, who might satisfy them. But this I could not do, because my wishes were inside me, while other people were outside, and they had no faculty which could penetrate my mind. So I would toss my arms and legs about and make noises, hoping that such few signs as I could make would show my meaning, though they were quite unlike what they were meant to mime. And if my wishes were not carried out, either because they had not been understood or because what I wanted would have harmed me, I would get cross with my elders, who were not at my beck and call, and with people who were not my servants, simply because they did not attend to my wishes; and I would take my revenge by bursting into tears. (1:6)

  Anyone who has ever watched a small baby, and still more anyone who has ever tried in vain to satisfy a wailing baby’s needs, will grasp the acuteness of Augustine’s observations, observations that probably take us into a room where he sat with his mistress and intently watched their infant Adeodatus.

  It is here, when we seem to be approaching familiar and reassuring territory, that we encounter Augustine’s theological purposes. For it turns out that what he observed—wishes, indignation, revenge—marked for him the full presence in the infant of the moral catastrophe of adult life. It is all there already in the nursery: the violence, the will to enslave others, the urgency of capricious desires. The fact that the infant is impotent—that he can merely fling his arms about and cry—does not alter what for Augustine is the hard truth: there is something morally wrong with us from birth.

  The baby who cries for the breast and makes his imperious demands for attention, Augustine wrote, deserves to be rebuked, even though custom and common sense do not permit us to do so. Custom and common sense are good enough in their way; they keep us from being laughed at or regarded as strange by our neighbors. But they prevent us from seeing the truth of things. In God’s sight, “no man is free from sin, not even a child who has lived only one day on earth” (1:7).

  What might seem cruel in human suffering then was only fair. And though He had every reason to hate sinners, God was merciful: He gave His only son to satisfy the strict claims of justice and to redeem errant humanity. Those who embraced this revealed truth—and who embraced it in the way that the church authorized—would ultimately be saved. All others would be damned. It was no excuse if you happened to be born before the coming of Christ or if you lived in some corner of the world where the news could not have reached you. And if you were unbaptized it made no difference whether or not you lived a life of moral rectitude. You would spend eternity in hell, and justly so, because of the taint you had inherited from the sin of Adam and Eve.

  This position became one of the cornerstones of Christian orthodoxy. But, from its inception, it did not reign undisputed. Chief among those of Augustine’s contemporaries who found it both absurd and repulsive was a British-born monk, Pelagius. Arriving in Rome around 390 CE, Pelagius impressed everyone with the breadth of his learning, the eloquence of his speech, and the ascetic simplicity of his life. Almost exactly Augustine’s age, he was in a certain sense his secret sharer: an upstart from the margins of the Roman world who by force of intellect, charisma, and ambition made his way to the great capital and had a significant impact upon the empire’s spiritual life.

  Pelagius and his followers were moral optimists. They believed that all human beings were born innocent. Infants do not enter the world with a special endowment of virtue, but neither do they carry the innate stain of vice. We possess in ourselves the possibility of choosing good over evil. True, we are all descendants of Adam and Eve, and we live in a world rife with the consequences of their primordial act of disobedience. But that act in the distant past does not condemn us inescapably to sinfulness. How could it? What would be the mechanism of infection? Why would a benevolent God permit something so monstrous? No: we are at liberty to shape our own lives, whether to serve God or to serve Satan.

  Why is it then that the great mass of men and women are so sinful? The answer, Pelagius thought, was essentially social: we become whoever we are largely through imitation, and we develop in the course of a lifetime habits that are extremely difficult to break. “The long custom of sins” that begins in childhood gradually brings us more and more under its power “until it seems to have in some degree the force of nature (vim naturae).” But it is important to grasp that it is not in fact our nature that compels us to sin.

  We have not inherited a disposition to sin from our first parents; we have inherited a cumulative history. But history is a nightmare from which we can awaken. “We say,” Pelagius affirmed, “that man is always able both to sin and not to sin.” Why? “We have free will.” It is in defense of this freedom that Pelagians rejected the belief in innate sinfulness and insisted on the innocence of newborns. Adam’s sin has no determining effect on his posterity, and it is possible at least in principle for all individuals to be perfectly good. As for death—which Augustine and others viewed as the direct consequence of that sin, not only for Adam and Eve themselves but for all mankind—Pelagius argued that it was simply a condition of the physical nature of humans. Adam would have died anyway, whether he had sinned or remained sinless. To die is not a punishment; it is part of what it means to be alive.

  When these views reached North Africa, Augustine was horrified. His whole conception of the human condition, corrupted from birth and doomed to death by the fall of Adam and Eve, seemed under attack. Pelagius had found favor among several aristocratic Roman families, but Augustine too had powerful friends in Rome to whom he now wrote, urging them to launch a counterattack. Pelagius was accused of heresy and brought to trial. Augustine and his allies penned long, bitter theological treatises and sent them off to Rome as witnesses for the prosecution. (The writings of the defense—the losing side—were all destroyed, but the positions may be reconstructed from the quotations included in the attacks.) Fearing that treatises alone might not secure the condemnation of his doctrinal enemy, Augustine was careful to send, through an ally, a magnificent gift of eighty Numidian stallions to the papal court. Pelagius was condemned, excommunicated, and exiled to Egypt.

  By around 420, Pelagius was dead, but the fight was by no means over. Julian of Eclanum, an Italian aristocrat extremely well connected both in the church and at court, quickly emerged to raise the Pelagian standard. Augustine’s hardline position on divine punishment, Julian argued, was at once sinister and grotesque, an attempt to impose upon the community of Christians an unnatural and singularly cruel doctrine. The church was at risk, he thought, of being poisoned by a set of weird, uncivilized beliefs concocted by a domineering, psychologically twisted African demagogue. Should Christians, Julian asked, really think that a merciful, loving God would torture infants just because they were not baptized? If a Gentile—that is, a non-Christian—clothes a naked man, “is it a s
in because it is not by faith”? Is the chastity of a pagan woman not chastity? And what of the non-Christian who delivers someone from danger, binds up an injured man’s wounds, or refuses to bear false witness even when tortured? Could such a person be hated by an angry God simply because he is not a Christian? Are all the virtuous heroes of the world before Christ doomed for eternity? Augustine answered implacably that yes, they are all sinners, all damned.

  Julian tried ridicule: “If it be maintained that the chastity of unbelievers is not chastity, then for the same reason it must be said that the body of pagans is not a true body, and the eyes of pagans have not the sense of sight, and the crops growing in pagans’ fields are not true crops, and many other consequences so absurd they could move an intelligent man to laughter.” But Augustine was not to be budged. It was, he insisted, the Pelagian’s position that was absurd: “Your laughter will move intelligent men, not to laughter, but to tears, as the laughter of the insane moves their sane friends to weeping.” There was no room for compromise.

  The core of the problem, Julian argued, was Augustine’s view of sex, and for once Augustine completely agreed. Julian believed that the human experience of sexual intercourse was natural and healthy, an essential part of God’s design reaching back to the moment when He commanded the first humans to be fruitful and multiply. It was here, Augustine contended, that Pelagians made their crucial mistake. For sex as we know it is not natural and not healthy. The problem is not merely with sex outside of marriage, with practices and positions not focused on procreation, and with homosexuality—though Augustine, along with many others, assailed these all as abominations. The problem is that even the most legitimate form of sexual intercourse—between a husband and wife mutually bent on engendering a child—is also corrupt. The current of sinfulness that courses through it is precisely the mechanism that carries the stain of evil from one generation to the next and infects the dreams of those most determined to keep themselves pure and chaste. Human sinfulness is a sexually transmitted disease.