After the Fall
Adam, Eve, and the Serpent.
by Elaine Pagels.
Random House. 189 pp. $17.95.
Elaine Pagels has devoted much of her career as a scholar of religion to a single proposition: that formative Christianity developed the way it did not because its doctrines best represented religious truth, but because those doctrines were the most expedient to the growing institutionalization of the Church. In The Gnostic Gospels (1979), her first book to receive wide popular attention, Mrs. Pagels argued that the defeat of gnostic Christianity at the hands of orthodoxy resulted from the fact that orthodox ideas—for example, that Christ’s resurrection was a historical event and not merely a spiritual symbol—served the aims of those determined to build an empire-spanning institution out of a dispersed and unruly collection of sects and congregations.
In Adam, Eve, and the Serpent, Mrs. Pagels’s latest book, the point is essentially the same. Classical Christian ideas concerning the inherent sinfulness of sexual desire, the irremediable moral depravity of mankind, and the relationship between human guilt and human suffering, all developed at a specific time in history. These new ideas were radical departures from the beliefs of earlier Christians. And they took hold in the Church because they were institutionally more convenient than their predecessors.
What Mrs. Pagels is after, in other words, is the politics of religious ideas and attitudes, and she has an avowedly contemporary motive for her investigations. “Abrupt changes in social attitudes,” she notes in her introduction with implicit approval, “have recently become commonplace, especially with respect to sexuality.” How, she wonders, did “traditional patterns of gender and sexual relationship” develop in the first place? This book is her attempt to get at an answer through the history of early Christian views on human nature (other influences on “traditional patterns of gender and sexual relationship,” such as the Greek and the Jewish, are effectively excluded).
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As Mrs. Pagels tells the story, before the year 312, when the emperor Constantine converted to Christianity, the Jesus movement limped along as a weak and persecuted sect. As a kind of shield against the uncertainty of their daily lives, the earliest Christians believed, as Jesus had promised, that the Kingdom of God was very near at hand—that many of them “would not taste death before they had seen the Kingdom of God.” Accordingly, they set about packing their moral bags—most notably by adopting a life of severe austerity, particularly sexual austerity. While finding nothing inherently sinful in marriage or sexual intercourse, they regarded these practices as clear impediments to a single-minded devotion to God and His kingdom.
Meanwhile, these first Christians engaged in a kind of spiritual rebellion against their Roman oppressors by declaring, unilaterally, their own freedom from Roman rule. Because no man, even an emperor, could justly rule over any other, Christians therefore had no worldly political obligations—no obligations, for example, to sacrifice to the Roman gods: “Our refusal [to sacrifice] is not an admission of fear,” declared the African Minucius Felix, “but an assertion of our true liberty!” The right to defy the Roman empire, Christians believed, rested on the principle of moral freedom deriving ultimately from Genesis 1-3, the story of Adam and Eve: like Adam, Christians could choose between good and evil.
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The consensus on these issues was shattered during the 4th century by Augustine, bishop of Hippo. Having embraced in his maturity a Christianity different in many ways from the faith of the early apologists, Augustine came to reject, most famously, the orthodox belief in moral freedom. According to Augustine, Adam fell for the sin of having rebelled against God’s authority, and all mankind thereby lost the freedom to act on its own will. For Augustine, the emblem of man’s moral enslavement was his inability to keep his “disobedient members,” his sexual organs, in check: sexual desire was not merely impractical, as it was for Augustine’s forebears, but symbolic of moral degradation. Furthermore, as Augustine argued in City of God, with the loss of the ability to choose good over evil man had also necessarily forfeited the right to self-government; human society, owing to its inherent depravity, required order, authority, control from above.
By the end of the 5th century, Augustine’s decidedly unorthodox vision had come to represent orthodoxy, while that of the Church’s earlier apologists was approaching the boundaries of heresy. Why? Citing Michel Foucault’s notion of “the politics of truth,” Mrs. Pagels argues that Augustine’s theology prevailed because it better explained to ordinary Christians the difficulties and contradictions they encountered living under a very imperfect Christian empire and worshipping in a vast, state-sponsored Church. Unwittingly, orthodoxy became a co-conspirator in Christian Rome’s efforts to keep its Christian subjects happy. As Mrs. Pagels puts it, “Augustine’s theory of original sin could make theologically intelligible not only the state’s imperfections but the Church’s imperfections as well.” If even a baptized Christian could never erase the stain of Adam’s sin, it was no surprise that the emperor and the bishop of Rome himself hardly seemed model agents of God. On similar grounds, Augustine’s acceptance of human government as a necessary evil helped Christians understand the Church’s willingness to use its growing power to persecute heretics.
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A great deal of evidence has gone into this slim book, along with some well-supported speculation. Provocative as it is, however, much of Mrs. Pagels’s argument has been heard before. Her lengthy discussion of Christian asceticism as it developed in 3rd- and 4th-century Egypt, for example, will be familiar to readers of Peter Brown’s marvelous The Making of Late Antiquity. In general terms, her historical scheme of Christianity’s evolution—theological purity and adherence to Christ’s message, followed by decline and growing neglect of Christ’s message, followed in turn by the rise of the Roman Catholic Church—is straight out of the traditional Protestant version of the Church’s early history.
Likewise, Mrs. Pagels’s genealogical approach has its own, rather distinguished family tree. In On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche attempted to discredit what he considered the Christian morality of weakness and resentment by exposing its roots. Analogously, Mrs. Pagels subtly discredits Augustinian Christianity by exposing its roots—by proving that, in important ways, what has become modern Western Christianity represents a rejection of earliest Christianity, the Christianity closest, presumably, to the faith Jesus taught.
No doubt Mrs. Pagels, as a historian, would object that Adam, Eve, and the Serpent has no polemical strategy, no axe to grind. If she spends two hundred pages showing how Christianity abandoned many of its original doctrines, that does not necessarily mean that she believes Christianity has fallen, only that it has changed. In her epilogue, indeed, Mrs. Pagels protests that she most definitely does not prefer pre-Augustinian Christianity to post-Augustinian Christianity. In William James’s formulation, she claims to offer only an “existential judgment,” a judgment of a historical phenomenon’s importance or meaning and not a “spiritual judgment,” that is, a judgment of value.
Unfortunately, Elaine Pagels the polemicist gives Elaine Pagels the historian away. Her language, for one thing, is transparent. Repeatedly she notes her “astonishment” at the willingness of the early Church to embrace Augustinian theology. “Why,” she wonders, “did Catholic Christianity adopt Augustine’s paradoxical—some would say preposterous—views?” Her epilogue notwithstanding, Mrs. Pagels makes little attempt throughout the book to hide her distaste for much of Augustinian Christianity. Her discomfort with Augustine’s attitude toward women, and specifically his belief that “a husband is meant to rule over his wife as the spirit rules the flesh,” is severe. She has much pleasanter things to say about Augustine’s great opponent Julian, the Pelagian “heretic,” who conceded that “male domination, like labor pain, while originating in God’s ‘good’ creation, may become, through sin, both painful and oppressive.” She also roots enthusiastically for the “liberal, urbane, and sophisticated” Clement, who, unlike the anti-egalitarian Augustine, declared that “divinity now ‘pervades all humankind equally . . . deifying humanity,’ the slave equally with the master.” In Mrs. Pagels’s hands, the early apologists sound suspiciously modern, like so many disciples of William Sloane Coffin.
Mrs. Pagels concludes that “even his admirers would do well to reassess and qualify Augustine’s singular dominance in much of Western Christian history.” Unfortunately, knowing that Augustine was less liberal than his predecessors helps us little in forming a spiritual judgment of the Christianity he left behind—unless we happen to think, as Mrs. Pagels seems to do, that religious ideas lose some or all of their validity once they can be shown to have a human genealogy.
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