This is a 2008 book long on my wishlist, partly due to comments by Scot McKnight on his old blog and in Adam and the Genome. I finally got it and read it. My review tends negative, but the book is well-written and enjoyable to read.
Augustine’s theory with its heart ripped out
A review of Alan Jacobs, Original Sin: A Cultural History
A somewhat tardy list in the Afterword gives five necessary beliefs for the form of original sin this book commends:
[1] You must believe that everyone behaves in ways that we usually describe as selfish, cruel, arrogant, and so on. [2] You must believe that we are hard-wired to behave in those ways and do not do so simply because of the bad examples of others. [3] You must believe that such behavior is properly called wrong or sinful, whether it’s evolutionarily adaptive or not. [4] You must believe that it was not originally in our nature to behave in such a way, but that we have fallen from a primal innocence. [5] And you must believe that only supernatural intervention, in the form of what Christians call grace, is sufficient to drag us up out of this pit we’ve dug for ourselves.
You may spot a tension between points 2 and 5. The “pit we’ve dug for ourselves” seems at odds with being “hard-wired to behave in those ways.” But no, this is instead the bullet Alan Jacobs implores us to bite: God holds us responsible for digging a pit that someone else (Adam? Satan? God?) hard-wired us to dig. You don’t face this bullet from points 1–3 alone. It’s triggered by 4 and the reframing of responsibility in 5. It’s tough to swallow responsibility shorn of ability, but Jacobs aims to try.
But not try too hard, it seems, since the book largely sticks to demonstrating points 1–3 as if this forced 4 be true and hopefully 5 as well. Jacobs exhibits all sorts of people acting badly, whether learned eugenicists, slaveholders, Indigenous tribes or the infamous Stanford college students. He draws our attention to all sorts of writers who discern evil in these acts and the hearts they sprang from. The stories are lively, varied, witty and surely well researched. Evil is shown to be, if not universal, at least pervasive – and perhaps other circumstances would have drawn it even from those who seem free of it.
The case for pervasive bad behaviour is so conclusive that point 4 seems like nonsense. Surely Adam and Eve shared this fault with us. Even before tasting the fruit, they scorned the words of their Creator and preferred the self-stroking logic of another creature. Circumstantial evidence convicts them of being tainted by original sin as surely as all the evidence Jacobs summons against everyone since. He shows Milton’s limp wrestling with this puzzle, yet offers no fix that salvages a human starting point for evil. But if humans behaved badly even before the fall, is original sin the right term?
Older takes on the Genesis stories used a different term: humanity’s “evil inclination.” The Eden story doesn’t divulge where that inclination comes from. Perhaps it wasn’t written to tell us who to blame, but to show us ourselves. This take explains the copious evidence for points 1–3 just as well, but it transforms point 4 so we dodge the bullet.
I may seem to have left off reviewing to yammer on, but this idea, or one quite like it, happens to be central to Augustine’s formation of original sin. Given that Jacobs’ favourite adjective for his view is “Augustinian,” it’s perplexing to never find this idea in his book, aside from a brief mention that offloads it to those un-Augustinian Greek fathers of the East.
Jacobs mentions some of Augustine’s hard views, smirking at his weird take on male arousal being always sinful and shuddering at his insistence that unbaptized infants face damnation for having original sin. But he leaves out Augustine’s Realism: his belief that every human being was really, truly, physically present in Adam when he sinned.
I can see why someone who claims to follow Augustine’s anthropology might want to leave this out. Augustine located us all in Adam’s loins in seed form, tying his doctrine to a sexist view of procreation that aged … poorly. But our real presence, sinning in Adam, is one leg of Augustine’s formulation alongside being conceived in sin (the male arousal bit) and inheriting from Adam. Jacobs reduces Augustine’s view to inheritance alone without recognizing that the amputated Realism leg served a purpose.
For Augustine, it made the bullet a blank. Because we were there and even participated in some mysterious way as Adam sinned, we were all in the room when it happened, when humanity was rewired. Even if one doesn’t buy that we could possibly participate, we were at least present to be damaged by Adam when he sinned. His sin corrupted his whole body, including us in his loins. This removes the need for separate vindictive acts of God to pass Adam’s corruption on to each new person, each new soul.
Of course Augustine’s view is nonsense biology. But he used that nonsense to craft an original sin that didn’t uncouple ability from responsibility – that didn’t hold us accountable for doing what someone else forced us to do. His science hasn’t held up, but his theological instincts were more sound than his heirs who claim his doctrine while gutting its heart.
Surely there are better ways to appropriate Augustine into our own age. Jacobs’ account of how we can be ruled by our amygdala hints that sin didn’t start fresh with Adam. We could catalogue the horrors done by chimps as well, or spiders, or any creature that passed on its urge to live and/or mate at all costs. Perhaps we have an inheritance there too, explaining why “noble savages” and Rousseau’s rosy view of nature fall short, and perhaps why Adam and Eve could fall too.
With a longer view of inheritance, it becomes easier to see plausible views of real presence. We really are like Adam and Eve, facing serpents of temptation both beastly and devilish. We really do, like them, seem to have a bent for bad. We really do, like them, blame others for our wrongs. Maybe it’s not for nothing that ‘adam’ is a Hebrew word for humanity.
In one sermon, Augustine affirmed the long tradition that “Adam was one man, and is yet the whole human race.” While he came to imagine that in a literal way, it’s possible to leave off the tiny humans in Adam’s privates and see the bigger picture. Like David confronted by Nathan we can catch the twist as we hear about the exalted, bumbling humans in Eden.
Them’s us.
It’s a more nuanced point 4, but perhaps a surer road to point 5.