Adam's Sin

Saint Augustine's Sin
by Garry Wills

(Page 2 of 6)

Just when, in The Testimony, Augustine has reached the age of sixteen and begun his active sexual life, he disappoints those who want the lurid details by devoting half of the book to a theft he and his fellow delinquents committed in a mangy orchard. Some try to ease their letdown by teasing some covert sexual meaning out of the pears. But that runs up against Augustine's claim that the whole basis for his bewilderment was the lack of sensual or other incitement to the crime [10-13]. If he were trying to enjoy something so obvious as sexual pleasure, there would be no mystery to the matter. Augustine is as emphatic as he can be on the lack of allurement in the pears or in the act of taking them. That is what bothers him. Why perform a malicious act, something harmful to others and not helpful to oneself, for the pure mischief of it? "Pure" mischief is the realm of Satan, not of sex-befuddled human beings. Augustine eliminates the obvious explanations in a very systematic way, like a detective crossing off suspects one by one.

In [10], he crosses off any direct appeal the theft might have made to the senses, or to a desire for worldly power. In [11], he distinguishes the motive for the act from motives for other crimes: sexual jealousy, desire for wealth or for the bare necessities of life, fear, revenge. In [12], the act is denied any form of beauty - he goes through the entire scale of beings, eliminating moral beauty, human or animal beauty, inanimate beauty (including that involving any of the four elements). In [13], he says that this theft did not even put up a pretense of right, as many crimes do - he lists fourteen of these virtue-pretending vices: pride, desire for glory, aggression, sensual indulgence, transgressive knowledge, willful ignorance, sloth, self-pampering, wastefulness, stinginess, envy, anger, cowardice, and melancholy. The robbery dispenses even with these masks. It is nakedly, unapologetically, wrong.

Then what can explain his own act to his own self? As usual, Augustine resorts to reflection on classical thought and scriptural imagery. The classical thought is contained in Catiline's War by Sallust and Friendship by Cicero. The scriptural text is that of Adam's fall in Genesis.

The story of Catiline's attempted coup d'état, thwarted by Cicero during his year as consul (63 b.c.e.), was famous not only from Cicero's four orations against the conspiracy, but from a historical monograph on the subject published by Sallust (Gaius Sallustius Crispus) two decades after the conspiracy was put down. (On Augustine's admiration for Sallust see, comm. [9].) Catiline is supposed to have augmented his revolutionary forces with youth gangs recruited on the streets to perform mischievous acts. These bands offer an obvious comparison with Augustine's raiders on the pear orchard, and he is thinking of them even before he expressly refers to Catiline in [11]. In [2], he says his sole delight was in "loving and being loved" (amare et amari). Cicero in his second speech against Catiline (2.23), says of the man's young rioters: "These smooth pretty-boys were versed not only in loving and being loved [amare et amari], or singing and dancing, but in lunging with rapiers and dosing with poisons." Referring to himself and his cronies in [9], Augustine uses the dismissive diminutive adulescentuli ("young-menlings"). That there is a sneer in the term is seen from the Catilinarian invective Augustine refers to. It is not enough to translate the word, in those places, by a neutral English diminutive like "lads" or "striplings." It means "young punks." Here is the vituperative Cicero: "Is there any young punk [adulescentulo], provoked by your enticements [inlecebris] of the gutter, whom you [Catiline] have not marshaled with your sword toward aggression or with your torch toward dissipation?" (Against Catiline 1.13). Cato, in Sallust's account of Catiline's conspiracy, demands the death penalty for Catiline's young followers, dismissing calls for clemency: "Pardon them, indeed, as if the young punks [adulescentuli] were just led astray by ambition!" (Catiline's War 52.26).4 That Augustine had Cicero's passage in mind, as well as that of Sallust, probably explains the use in the preceding sentence of inlecebrosis (not-enticing).

Sallust was useful to Augustine not just for the general comparison with young troublemakers but because Sallust expressly says that they acted without motive, as Augustine thinks for a while that he has done. "If no motive were at hand for doing wrong, he [Catiline] had his gang attack and murder innocent as well as guilty passersby ..." (Catiline's War 16.3). But this, too, must be crossed off as an explanation for Augustine's act, since Sallust goes on immediately to give a motive even while repeating that there was none: "to keep their hands or hearts from losing edge for lack of practice, he was bad and brutal without motive." Catiline was toughening his little criminals to bigger tasks by getting them to indulge in minor gestures of aggression. Since Augustine and his fellow punks were not put up to their action by a mastermind plotting to overthrow the state, the Catiline parallel seems to have its limits. Cicero and Scripture will be more useful.

Having stripped away all apparent motive for the theft, Augustine tries to isolate its peculiar character by noting that he would not have robbed the orchard if he had been acting on his own. His itch to do the deed "required friction with colluding fellows to make it catch fire" [16]. So there was an apparent (deceptive) good in the act - the good of companionship. However hollow this claim to a good, it was enough to make the difference between solitary inaction and joint action. This was a crucially important point to Augustine, since he had taken years to escape the Manichaean claim that one can act on a directly evil motive. For that sect, there was a coordinate principle of evil operating in the world, along with and against God. Augustine rejected that notion when he reached the conclusion that there is no positive evil thing that can oppose God, the creator of everything that exists. Sin is an introduction of non-being into the created order by the will's abandonment of greater goods to slide down toward lesser ones, those with less existence where there should have been more. This is exemplified in the sin of the fallen angels. Their being remains a good thing, to the extent that they remain in existence; but that residue of good becomes itself a torture for the angels, precisely because it is a trace of the far greater good they lost when they abandoned God.

Companionship in evil is treated as a distortion and denial of real friendship in Cicero's dialogue, Friendship. Political friendship is the principal concern of Cicero, and he remarks of conspiracies against the state: "Without associates no one undertakes such things" (42). This is remarkably like Augustine's statement that he would not have raided the orchard all alone. And Cicero warns against the communal friction that ignites a desire for wrong: "Thus it is a maxim for the good that they must not consider themselves so implicated [alligatos] with friends that they cannot disengage from them when they are doing their country some great wrong" (42).

Let this be the mandate of true friendship, that we neither request of another that they perform an unworthy act, nor accede to another issuing such a request. For it is an unworthy defense, and by no means admissible, to say that we performed any evil act to please a friend, much less one against our own country (40).

Cicero repeatedly drives home the point that companionship in evil is no alleviation of the evil: "Nature grants friendship as a minister to the better, not a crony in the baser, conduct" (82). He makes the same point in the book of advice to his son (Duty 3.43): "If we were obliged to do anything [even wrong] that a friend wanted us to do, that would not be a friendship but a criminal cabal."

Useful as Cicero was to Augustine in helping him find a meaning in his "meaningless" act, a higher authority gave him the theological insight that was essential to his own tale of grace rejected and then restored. For him the greatest sin caused by a false ideal of companionship was Adam's. It is a vulgar misconception that Augustine traced the first man's original sin to sex. Adam's fall was due to a misplaced chivalry. Eve was misled by the serpent, supposing the godlike powers he offered to be real, but Augustine considered the First Letter to Timothy an authentically Pauline text, and it said (2.14): "Adam was not misled, though his wife was misled by the lie." Adam made a deliberate choice, out of his solidarity with Eve. In First Meanings in Genesis (11.59), which he began while working on The Testimony, Augustine wrote:

After Eve had been deceived into eating of the forbidden tree, and offered him its fruit to eat along with her, Adam did not want to dismay her, since he thought she might be crushed, without him to support her, if she were banished from his heart, to die from that separation. He was not overcome by disordered desire of the flesh, which he had not yet experienced as a disposition in his members at odds with his mind, but by a kind of friendly well-wishing [amicalis quadam benevolentia], which often makes us sin against God rather than turn a friend into a foe.

Later, in The City of God (14.11), Augustine gave the same interpretation to Adam's fall, even using the same parallel (how Solomon had joined in idol worship rather than offend his wives, 3 Kings 11.4):

© 2003 Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam, used by permission.

About the Author

Garry Wills is one of the most respected writers on religion today. He is the author of Saint Augustine's Childhood, Saint Augustine's Memory, and Saint Augustine's Sin, the first three volumes in this series, as well as the Penguin Lives biography Saint Augustine. His other books include "Negro President": Jefferson and the Slave Power, Why I Am a Catholic, Papal Sin, and Lincoln at Gettysburg, which won the Pulitzer Prize.