Adam's Sin, Part 2

Saint Augustine's Sin
by Garry Wills

(Page 3 of 6)

Adam yielded to Eve in breaking God's law, not because he believed she was telling the truth, but out of a compulsion to solidarity [with her], as male to female, lone existing man to lone existing woman, human being to fellow human being, husband to wife.... [H]e refused to be rent from this special partnership [unicum consortium], even at the cost of joining her in sin.... In one way, however, he may have been misled: since he had no prior experience of God's rigor, he may have made light of the offense and, without being misled precisely as his wife had been, he too was fooled, by himself, when he expected his plea to work, that 'The wife you gave me was the one who gave me the fruit that I ate.' We need nothing more to conclude that, though they were not misled together by the same error, they were convicted together in sin, tangled up together in the devil's net.

In Paradise Lost (9.938-40, 952-59), Milton took Adam's fall straight from Augustine:

Nor can I think that God, Creator wise,
Though threat'ning, will in earnest so destroy
Us, his prime creatures, dignified so high ...
However, I with thee have fix'd my lot,
Certain to undergo like doom - if death
Consort with thee, death is to me as life,
So forcible within my heart I feel
The bond of nature draw me to my own,
My own in thee. For what thou art is mine,
Our state cannot be severed. We are one,
One flesh, to lose thee were to lose myself.

Milton's "bond of nature" is Augustine's "compulsion to solidarity" (socialis necessitudo).

The sentimental modern reader may admire Adam's love and think "the world well lost" for such a primal loyalty. But the parallel here is Cicero's citizen committing treason for a friend. Adam had a political duty to the fate of mankind. It is not only his own death that is at stake but the blighted heritage he will leave behind. Because, in the scheme Augustine inherited, sin descends from the man, Adam cannot rescue Eve from her death but he can condemn everyone else to it. Since human solidarity is with Adam in the sexist theology Augustine shared with Paul and others, mankind would not have become mortal if Adam had not eaten the fruit. Because he would not struggle with the compulsion to solidarity, nor trust God and consult him, he proved a traitor to his duty - just as Solomon was when he imported the political evil of idolatry into his nation for the sake of another socialis necessitudo.

Why does Augustine find a deadly meaning in anything so trivial as the pear theft? Eating the fruit in Eden looked trivial, too. The gravity is not measured by the pettiness of the thing prohibited but by the immensity of the God who prohibits. "Robbery is undeniably punished by your law, but also by the law written in men's hearts, which not even their own evil can efface - for what robber will calmly submit to being robbed?" [9]. Was Augustine thinking of Adam's sin as he reflected on his own sin? How could he not be? Both involve a theft of fruit; both are performed because of an associative tie. Adam refused to be detached from his "special partnership" (unicum consortium). Augustine "must have loved a partnership [consortium] with my fellows in the theft.... [W]hat I wanted was to commit the crime in partnership [consortium] with those sharing my sin" [16]. To underline the parallel with Adam's sin, Augustine refers to "the pear tree" (singular), though he and his fellows took huge loads (onera ingentia) of fruit from the orchard [9].

The sin of the theft fascinates Augustine because it is so striking a reenactment of Adam's sin. He was not driven to it by mere sensual urges or conventional utility. Though there is no such thing as pure evil, this was as close to a purely evil choice as he was likely to reach. And perhaps it was not, after all, very far from the crimes of Catiline's gang. The punks of Rome were put up to minor mischief by their leader, who had larger conspiratorial aims. With the pears Augustine, like Adam, was falling into the devil's trap of thinking a minor rebellion against God trivial because the stolen things were inconsiderable. But God is not inconsiderable. By treating him as such, Adam made a calculated choice, not a mere blind lunge of lust. Of course, the sin of Adam can never be replicated - he made a sinful choice without already having suffered the consequences of sin. That is what gives his sin a certain clarity. For men and women after him, each sin is also and already a punishment for sin, made under the hobbling circumstances of mankind's fallen condition.

[But] Adam, when he sinned, had absolutely nothing evil in him pressuring him, against his own resistance, to do wrong, nothing to make him say [with Paul] "I do not the good I would; rather, the evil I would not, I do" (Romans 7.19).... From this you can distinguish three different things, and identify them as: sin, the punishment for sin, and the combination of the two (Unfinished Answer to Julian 2.47).

Adam's sin was what might be called pure sin, uncontaminated with the effects of prior sin. Death and ignorance are examples of sin's punishment that are not sins in themselves. And all our own sins are the product of the third condition, the combination of actual sin and the punishment of earlier sin affecting the new one. The pear theft was, then, an example of this third or combined condition.

It is striking, for all that, how close Augustine came, even in his fallen condition, to replicating Adam's fall. The points of similarity are (a) an apparently trivial matter, which nonetheless (b) was clearly forbidden by God, and with (c) none of the more obvious passions driving him or clear rewards drawing him - with, in fact, nothing but (d) the associative tie with others as a motive. Now we can see why Augustine took such an exhaustive approach to the refining process by which he boiled down motives and rewards, eliminating all "impurities," to reach the minimum remaining reason for his act, the socialis necessitudo. Only by that process could he study, as in a laboratory experiment, the nature of sin in itself, somewhat as Adam experienced it.

And it is essential to his purpose that his sin, like Adam's, have no hint of sexual hedonism in its motivation. In First Meanings in Genesis, Augustine says Adam did not make his choice "overcome by disordered desire of the flesh, which he had not yet experienced as a disposition in his members at odds with his mind." This is a quotation from Romans 7.23: "I see another disposition in my members, at odds with my mind's disposition." Paul is describing the result of Adam's sin, not its cause. Lack of sexual control became a sign of the loss of integrity that followed on Adam's rebellion against God. Sexual intercourse, Augustine taught, would have occurred in Eden, but without the drivenness of the postlapsarian disposition. There would have been sex, but no rape. All intercourse would have been fully consensual and without shame. The woman would not have the impediment of a hymen, and parturition would have been unobstructed:

Of course there would have been conjugal relations, even if original sin had not been committed - otherwise why was Adam given a woman as his helper, instead of man? God's command, 'Increase and multiply,' was not a forecast of sins deserving damnation but a blessing upon married fertility.... But there would have been no pain or blood on a virgin's first experience of sex, and there would have been no shriek of a woman in childbirth (Christ's Grace and Original Sin 2.40).

Natural and innocent intercourse of sexual partners would have occurred in Eden, even without commission of any sin, for children can be born in no other way, to fulfill God's blessing ["Increase ..."].... But the sexual drive would not have put man to the test against his own will, nor have compelled the chastity of a woman if she resisted (Unfinished Answer to Julian 5.16).

Adam forfeited perfect freedom of choice, in this as in other areas, by his choice of the less-existent good in Eden. As his will rebelled against God, his body now rebels against his will. There is a disconnect between human components, the body not submitting to the will. This is shown as much by impotence as by concupiscence:

At times, unsignaled by the will, the body stirs on its own, insistent; while at other times it will not respond to a lover's grunts. In the mind, all is flaming - all freezing in the body; so that, odd as it may seem, even where sex for pleasure and not for procreation is concerned, lust can leave lust in the lurch [libidini libido non servit]. Though lust normally fights the mind's controls, sometimes it is in civil strife with itself, and even after provoking a riot in the mind, it cannot maintain itself by making riot in the body (The City of God 14.15).

Augustine the satirist makes fun of the impotent lover's plight. The mind-body inconcinnity is rhetorically marked by chiasmus (the a-b-b-a order): "Mind-flaming//freezing-body" (in animo ferveat, friget in corpore). The last sentence above has a sunken political imagery - the story of a fizzled coup d'état, as of a Catiline unable to keep his own troops stirred up.

So Augustine, in order to understand the nature of sin, goes back before the consequence of sin to find the way he came closest to sharing the sin of Adam. Only by understanding his solidarity with Adam can he appreciate his redemption in solidarity with Christ. While others want him to provide them with a psychology of sex, he is more interested in the theology of sin.

© 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.