On Genesis

"There are relatively few figures who make a huge intervening difference in the transmission and reception of the story, and Augustine is one of these in a crucial way. The reason I chose this particular edition is that it brings together Augustine’s mature and profoundly influential attempt to read the story in a literal way with his earlier, relatively Manichean account, which allegorises the most disturbing elements. Augustine went back to the Adam and Eve story over the course of his lifetime and changed his views. The book follows his development through to the moment he repudiated the allegorical interpretation and embraced the literal interpretation. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter As so often in the history of religion, what appears to us to be a cruder and coarser account trumped what looks like a more sophisticated account. Allegory allows you to avoid all kinds of problems with it, whereas a literal reading of the story is an unbelievable headache. Augustine, who knew the allegorical tradition inside and out, made the decision to bequeath to western Christianity an insistence on the literal truth. In my book, I speculate that a key factor was Augustine’s experience of his own body, and I focus on the scene in the Confessions in which, as a sixteen-year-old with his father in the bathhouse in Thagaste, he has an erection. But I don’t suggest that’s the only factor. “Augustine concluded that if you think that Adam is an allegorical figure, eventually you’ll wind up thinking that Jesus is an allegorical figure, too” From a theological point of view, Augustine thought that if you believe that Adam is an allegorical figure and not real, eventually you’ll wind up believing that Jesus is an allegorical figure, too. Paul said, after all, that Jesus is the new Adam. Augustine felt this was a slippery slope toward the allegorising of everything: that the bread would be allegorical and not the body of Christ; that salvation, redemption and the afterlife would be allegorical. Did it actually? Probably not. But Augustine seemed to think so. In the long tradition, there were plenty of Christians and Jews who resisted literalisation. But Augustine is the single most important theologian in the entire Christian tradition and he decided, ‘Yes, this is where I’m going to plant my stake—on taking this story literally.’ “Determining what counts as a metaphor is a huge psychological, anthropological and moral challenge” He took 15 years trying to write his literal interpretation, and he couldn’t finish it. The trouble is, you can’t actually interpret the Book of Genesis literally, any more than you can when Jesus says, ‘I am the door; I am the vine.’ Is he a door? Is he a vine? Of course not. It’s a metaphor. There are plenty of moments in the story of Adam and Eve when you bump your head against what seems to be a metaphor. To take a single example: “their eyes were opened and they were ashamed”—after they’ve eaten the fruit. There were people who asked, ‘Hey, does that mean they were blind before? And stumbling around, and just happened not even to know what tree they were picking from?’ No! They had to have been sighted.’ So, ‘Opened their eyes’ must not mean that they literally opened their eyes; it must be a metaphor. But the challenge of determining what counts as a metaphor and what doesn’t—essentially a literary critical challenge—turns out to be a huge psychological, anthropological and moral challenge, too. He certainly does add original sin. That turns out to be his poisoned apple, so to speak, though of course it was a brilliant one. From our perspective—living in Oxford or the Upper East Side or in Cambridge, Massachusetts—many of us think that the British-born Pelagius had the right idea. Infants are not born wicked. We don’t inherit some kind of evil from something that was done by our remotest ancestors. Sin is not a sexually transmitted disease—all of which seemed to be Augustine’s positions. But Augustine effectively knocked Pelagius out by saying, ‘Look around. It can’t be that human beings behave this way just because they follow bad examples or make mistakes. There must be something fundamentally, doctrinally wrong with us from the beginning as creatures, in the way we have been made and reproduced.’ It’s a little hard looking around, at least at the present moment in my country, not to conclude that he was right. There’s something seriously wrong with us as a species. It’s fascinating, isn’t it? By a rich tradition of interpretation, Adam and Eve saw themselves for the first time not simply as vulnerable and without clothing, but as sexual beings—hence, nakedness refers to genitals. In Augustine’s account, nakedness particularly shows what it means to be aroused if you’re a male. It’s visible, and you’re not in control of it. What’s in the story? Nothing and everything. In some sense, the story gives you so little, but by giving you so little, it invites you to wonder. That’s part of its brilliance."