As regular readers know well, I am a constant critic of ignorance embracing fundamentalist and evangelical Christians. Much of this celebration of ignorance stems from a blind belief in the Bible as a literally true work of historical fact rather than the myth nature of much of the Old Testament. The Book of Genesis and its mythical figures, Adam and Eve provide a base for this willful rejection of science and knowledge as do Leviticus and other "books" authored by unknown, uneducated Bronze Age individuals. A new book, The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve, looks at these fictional figures and the efforts to legitimize them by an array of individuals, including St. Augustine who bears much of the blame for Christianity's bizarre views on sex and sexuality and the Catholic Church's fossilized and wrong headed "natural law" that has been used for centuries to demonize gays and subjugate women. A piece in The Guardian looks at the book. A piece in the New Yorker looks at St. Augustine's role in creating neurotic views on sex and sexuality. Here are highlights from The Guardian piece (it goes without saying that the book will NOT be popular with Southern Baptists):
We may be a godless lot, but our world remains hopelessly religious. As Stephen Greenblatt demonstrates in his enthralling, thrilling book about Genesis and its afterlife, myths that once compelled belief have dwindled into make-believe, but in the “post-truth” era fiction and fantasy still determine the lives of many – Islamic fanatics, members of the Jedi church, Trump loyalists – and make them bow down before false gods. Greenblatt . . . . here picks apart the most invidious and onerous of myths. Genesis devised a story that told us where we are, why we are here, and established rules for our conduct. Human history in the Christian west has been a long battle to come to terms with that tale, whose inflictions include a drastic ban on acquiring knowledge and a baleful sexual morality, with the pain of childbirth and inevitable death imposed by God as penalties for disobedience. Greenblatt follows Adam and Eve out of the garden and shows how they were loaded with an extra burden of guilt by St Augustine, who invented the vile notion of original sin to make us all take the blame for an impromptu erection that embarrassed him in the public baths. Along the way, there is an often hilarious account of scholastic efforts to rationalise the myth’s illogic, and an array of entertaining heresies. From the evidence of fossils, a 16th-century French mathematician estimated that Adam was 123ft tall; another addled expert calculated that he lived to be precisely 930 years old. In the Talmud, a rabbi speculated that – before asking God to create a female partner for him – Adam tried sex with all the other animals. Iconographers worried whether he should be painted with a navel, since he had no mother. He is torn, as Milton and Darwin were, between respect for clear-eyed knowledge and reverence for the grand fabulations with which we redesign the messy, cheerless world. The more Milton humanised Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost – writing for them a quarrel which, Greenblatt says, will ring true to anyone with a spouse – the more he challenged God’s insistence that we should “know to know no more”. Though Greenblatt knows that the biblical story is the source of our abiding unhappiness and self-dislike, he still wants to cling, as he says, to “the peculiar satisfaction that the ancient story provides”. His book, however, is written not to glorify God but to extol the defiant endeavours of human thinkers, and more generally to admire the self-help of a species that, rather than being created fully fashioned and set down in a fruitful garden, spent arduous aeons slowly acquiring “the fathomless complexities of toolmaking, art-making, language, and the capacity to reason”.
Here are a few excerpts from the piece in The New Yorker that looks at Augustine's obsession with sex and the price Christianity and the world paid for one man's bizarre psyche:
Augustine’s tortured recognition that involuntary [sexual] arousal was an inescapable presence—not only in conjugal lovemaking but also in what he calls the “very movements which it causes, to our sorrow, even in sleep, and even in the bodies of chaste men”—shaped his most influential idea, one that transformed the story of Adam and Eve and weighed down the centuries that followed: originale peccatum, original sin. This idea became one of the cornerstones of Christian orthodoxy—but not before decades of dispute. Chief among those who found it both absurd and repulsive was a British-born monk, Pelagius. . . . . Pelagius and his followers were moral optimists. They believed that human beings were born innocent. Infants do not enter the world with a special endowment of virtue, but neither do they carry the innate stain of vice. Augustine countered that we are all marked, in our very origins, with evil. It is not a matter of particular acts of cruelty or violence, specific forms of social pathology, or this or that person who has made a disastrous choice. . . . There is something deeply, essentially wrong with us. Our whole species is what Augustine called a massa peccati, a mass of sin. It is here, when Augustine must produce evidence of our individual and collective perfidy, that he called in witness Adam and Eve. For the original sin that stains every one of us is not only a sin that inheres in our individual origins—that is, in the sexual arousal that enabled our parents to conceive us—but also a sin that may be traced back to the couple in whom our whole race originates.
Augustine and many of the early "church fathers" by modern standards likely suffered from mental illness. What made their warped views attractive to the Church was that they offered a means to instill guilty and thereby exert control over the sheep like followers.
