Genesis (First Chapter of the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible)

Masaccio’s “The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden,” ca. 1426.

Few stories are as familiar in the West as the story of Adam and Eve as told in the second and third chapters of The Book of Genesis. Adam and then Eve are created by God and placed in the Garden of Eden, a paradise where every need is given care. To live eternally in this paradise, they have only to obey one rule: not to eat the fruit of the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil.”

Tempted by the serpent, Eve succumbs and eats the forbidden fruit. She then offers it to Adam, who also eats. Angry at their disobedience, God expels the couple from paradise, and they (and humanity) are forever condemned to lives of toil and hardship.

This story of “the Fall” has provided Western Civilization with its most influential and enduring set of ideas and images about human nature and the meaning of human life. It depicts human nature as willful, self-destructive, and forever torn between its own desires and a higher good as represented by God. It provides a foundation for sexism, reinforcing negative stereotypes of women.

This “original sin” is intimately connected to the acquisition of moral awareness and knowledge that requires the loss of innocence and the experience of nakedness and shame. This narrative conveys that the purpose of human life is first and foremost a spiritual quest for reconciliation with God. The story captures a poignant longing to return to childlike innocence and the original harmony of The Garden. This theme of exile and return recurs throughout the remainder of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament and expresses humankind’s struggle with self-alienation and our attempts to overcome it through repentance (literally turning around) and coming back to God through faithfulness.

(Saint) Augustine

This longing is famously expressed by Augustine in his Confessions in his opening remark, “Our heart is restless until it rests in you” (Augustinus & Chadwick, 1992). Although the doctrine of original sin is most often attributed to Saint Paul, St. Augustine’s (354–430) book Confessions provided the early Christian Church with a compelling personal account of the destructive effects of sin in his life before his dramatic conversion as a young man. It is a very unusual writing at the time because of its reflective and self-disclosing nature (Augustinus & Chadwick, 1992).

In Confessions, Augustine makes it clear that sin is not simply a matter of bad acts but of the inner motives and intentions that prompt them. Thus, it is not only his admitted addiction to sex that he deems reprehensible but even more his boasting about his sexual exploits to win his friends’ admiration and envy. Similarly, in his famous account of stealing pears with his friends as an adolescent (Book Two), it is not just the theft itself that he regards as contemptible but also his delight in being bad and, again, his desire to gain his friends admiration and acceptance (Augustinus & Chadwick, 1992).

The Burial of the Sardine (Spanish: El entierro de la sardina) is an oil-on-panel painting by Spanish artist Francisco Goya, usually dated to the 1810s. The painting depicts an exuberant crowd carousing on the first day of Lent while other Spanish Catholics worship at church. Such festivals as the “Burial of the Sardine” originated with themes of mortality: masks were worn to ward off the spirits of criminals and those who had died violently.

The second most famous line from Confessions occurs in Book Eight shortly before his conversion to Christianity when he exclaims, “Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.” In his mind, he knows what is right, but nonetheless, remains reluctant to give up sexual pleasure for a life with God (Augustinus & Chadwick, 1992). He is torn, conflicted in just the way that Saint Paul describes in Romans 7:15 (RSV): “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. . . . I can will what is right but I cannot do it.” This battle between the higher spiritual self and the lower animal self has continued to be a central theme not only in the history of Christianity but in Western thought and culture more generally.

Pelagius – Augustine’s Counterpoint

Pelagius (354–420/40), a contemporary of Augustine’s, argued that Augustine’s writings on original sin were too fatalistic and overly influenced by the dualistic Manichean beliefs that Augustine had embraced prior to his conversion. The Manicheans, gnostic followers of the Iranian prophet Mani, believed that good and evil reflected two spiritual realms of equal strength that were locked in perennial conflict. Pelagius, taking issue with Augustine’s notion of original sin, held that human beings are born neither good nor bad but possess a God-given free will to choose good and therefore avoid sin and error (Sproul, n.d.).

Although Pelagius and his ideas gained a large following during Augustine’s own lifetime, Augustine wrote four separate tracts denouncing Pelagius’s views leading to Pelagian views as eventually being declared heretical by the Catholic Church, with ruthless persecution of those believers. The almost unchallenged power of the Church in the West and its active suppression of various heresies guaranteed that Augustine’s views would remain influential as church doctrine until the power of the church itself was challenged during the Protestant Reformation. Although there were signs of dissent at earlier times, they did not have a strong public statement until 1517 CE when Martin Luther nailed his famous 95 Theses to the church door in Wittenburg (now Germany).

M3 – Some Implications of Augustine’s Influence

Interestingly, Augustine’s views on sin and redemption—that salvation cannot be earned by good works but comes in the form of “grace,” a free gift from God—would become a major tenet of many of the new Protestant sects and denominations that emerged with the Protestant Reformation.

A new element of Protestant theology and religious practice was its emphasis on the individual’s personal and unmediated relationship with God. While the Catholic Church had emphasized the importance of the priesthood and the Holy Sacraments as the indispensable intermediaries between God and His people, this Protestant view of man’s direct relationship with God brought with it a heightened sense of accountability to God and moral conscience. To such groups as the English Puritans, who would later colonize America, the sole purpose of human life was personal salvation, and anything that might distract the faithful or put too much emphasis on earthly pursuits and pleasures was frowned on. These beliefs lay a heavy responsibility on parents not only for their own salvation but for the salvation of their children. This resulted in intense attention to child rearing, with a vigilant focus on their obedience and Godly behavior. From this preoccupation with the moral and religious instruction of the young, a general concern about molding young minds and spirits emerged that continues into our present culture (Durston & Eales, 1996).

Another consequence of this intense focus on personal salvation was the emergence of a new level of awareness of the individual self and the formation of its identity through inner exploration and the conscious exercise of will and moral choice. The awareness of a separate self who is alone with, and strictly accountable to, an all seeing God, increased both the sense of personal freedom but also of the split between the inner and outer self, the private and public realms of human experience and functioning. This heightened potential for alienation and even tormented conflict between the inner and outer self is later dramatically portrayed by Nathaniel Hawthorne (2006) in his short masterpiece The Scarlet Letter in which the Reverend Roger Dimsdale’s secret sin tragically consumes him.

Anticipating aspects of the Darwinian conception of human nature, Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) book Leviathan (1651) argued that without the controls imposed by human government with its laws and police powers, that human selfishness would create a “war of all against all” in which human life would be “nasty, brutish, and short.” His view of the underlying selfishness of human behavior and the need for adequate civil restraints and controls was later echoed in Edmund Burke’s (1729-1797) Reflections on the Revolution in France (2018/1790) in which Burke argues that the cruelty and excesses of the Jacobin reign of terror was the result of destructive human nature set loose by the sudden revolutionary overthrow of traditional authority and institutions. Burke is regarded as one of the major influences in the emergence of the modern conservative movement in politics (Sorell, 2009).

As Christianity lost its previous control of Western cultural and intellectual life, more secular views of human nature have emerged. The new ideas have not necessarily replaced the old, however; for example, though framed in scientific language, Sigmund Freud’s vision of human nature is strikingly reminiscent of Augustine’s. Like Augustine, Freud saw human development as defined by intense conflict between sexual and other self-centered urges and conscience or, in his language, the superego (Lear, 2015). Charles Darwin’s (1808–1882) theory of evolution with his notion of “survival of the fittest” spawned a new view of the cosmos and, more particularly, a new field of evolutionary psychology, which posits both aggressive and altruistic aspects of human nature driven by the evolutionary imperatives of survival and reproduction.