Augustine’s Mythology of Sin

Cornell Colloquium in Medieval Philosophy, Summer of 2003

When I refer to Augustine’s mythology of sin, I mean to

refer to his attempt to square his account of sin and more

particularly of sin’s origin with what he takes to be the

biblical story of the Fall, Genesis 2:4b to 3:24. At a

crucial point in that narrative, the original man, Adam, is

faced with a desperately difficult choice: his partner, the

original woman, has offered him a taste of the forbidden

fruit of the tree of knowledge, good and evil; he can either

accept her offering and alienate himself from Yahweh, the

god whose very breath animates his clay, or he can refuse

and lose his connection to the one who is flesh of his

flesh, bone of his bone. The Yahwist wastes no words on the

outcome (Gen. 3:7): “She gave to her man, and he ate.”

Augustine, for his part, will be very concerned to offer

what the Yahwist does not: some account of what moved the

man to eat in defiance of his god’s desire.

There are two aspects of Augustine’s offering that will

especially concern me in this essay. One is his decision to

use the man’s disobedience, and not the woman’s, as his

paradigm case of sin—even though it is the woman’s

disposition to transgress, and not the man’s, that the

Yahwist chooses to elaborate (Gen. 3:6): “The woman saw that

the tree was good for eating and that it was lust to the

eyes and the tree was lovely to look at.” These words

suggest that the woman is drawn to a vision of sensual

beauty, a wedding of flesh to knowledge. In Augustine’s

reckoning, she may be the first human being ever to have

sinned, but it is her partner, the man, who sins in a more

unambiguous and paradigmatic manner, recalling the sin of

the angels who fell. The woman’s sin is original, in that it

has no human precedent. The man’s sin is primal, in that it

discloses the root motive of all sin.

And this brings me to the other aspect of Augustine’s

offering that is of particular concern for me. At the end of

the chain of motivation, Augustine will associate sin with a

deficient motive. Whatever the good is that renders sin

appealing to the sinner, it will not, upon his analysis, be

sufficient to rationalize the sin and make it choice-worthy.

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In the specific case of the first man’s sin, it is the woman

who makes the man’s sin appealing to him, but it is equally

true that the man is missing something important about his

reasons for acting. Not only does he not have sufficient

reason to favor the woman over Yahweh, he does not have any

good reason to conclude that the woman is offering him

something that Yahweh cannot. The primary principle of

interpretation that Augustine brings to his reading of

Genesis is what I will call the principle of plenitude. According

to this principle, obedience to the will of God is the means

by which a human life comes to full fruition. There is no

good, in other words, that is ultimately lacking to the

obedient soul, and so there is no profit in disobedience,

all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding. The

principle of plenitude demands that sin’s psychology be one

of deficient motive; otherwise there can be some good that

stands opposed to the will of God—a broadly Manichean

position.

Students of Augustine have read his account of

deficient motivation to pose a problem in the metaphysics of

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morals, one that can be framed independently of theological

commitments. Suppose we say, with Augustine, that evil is

essentially a privation of the good (privatio boni). As such,

evil cannot directly be the motive of an intelligible

action, where intelligibility means the ability to make out

the good that is moving an agent to act. If, say, I were to

act for evil, the motive that makes senses of my action—a

desire for fame, wealth, sensual pleasure or some such good—

would not be the motive that renders my act evil. It is the

deficiency of that motive that would render my act evil.

Since I won’t ever directly want the evil of my action, but

only the good whose deficiency is not readily apparent to

me, why is having an evil will my responsibility? Can I be

held accountable for what I miss by inadvertence? As a

general rule, of course I can. In courts of laws and classes

of philosophy, we regularly blame people for negligently not

noticing what they ought to have noticed, had they been

thinking more clearly or with better focus.

In his essay, “Primal Sin,” Scott MacDonald has argued

that a basic carelessness in practical reasoning—a failure

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to attend to reasons one would have for choosing otherwise—

can be deemed culpable quite independently of whether that

carelessness has a prior motive.1 To take one of his

examples, suppose that Scott accepts an impromptu late-

afternoon invitation from a colleague to have coffee and

discuss some departmental business; as a result he neglects

to keep his promise to his daughter to watch her play soccer

after school. If he were to hold himself accountable for

this neglect, would he need to attribute to himself either a

disposition to neglect his promises or some weak-willed

inability to put family over career? Scott wants to say on

the contrary that carelessness can be original—or to use his

word, “primal”—and so have no motivation other than

momentary distraction. He doesn’t go to his daughter’s game

because he is distracted by the opportunity to parley with a

colleague. The man neglects Yahweh’s desire because he is

distracted by his desire for the woman. If carelessness in

practical reasoning can be both spontaneous and culpable,

then Augustine’s account of sin’s deficient motive need not 1 In The Augustinian Tradition, ed. Gareth B. Matthews (Berkeley:University of California Press, 1999), pp. 110-139.

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vex the matter of moral accountability. We can be held to

account for courses of actions we had some, but not

sufficient, motive to adopt.

I agree with Scott that it is unreasonable to demand of

Augustine that he find a motive for a deficiency in motive.

But I also think that the preoccupation of Augustine’s

interpreters with his moral psychology has been myopically

psychological (and I include myself in this indictment). As

I have mentioned above, it is Augustine’s principle of

plenitude—a theological principle—that leads him to his

psychology of deficient motive. The cast of his psychology

is theologically set; if the theology is amorphous, then so

will be the psychology that derives from it. It may be

possible, of course, to recast the psychology so that it has

no essential connection to its theology of origins. But I

want to resist that move here, partly because I am skeptical

about the worth and interest of the recast psychology. I

propose instead to look at Augustine’s attempt to apply his

principle of plenitude to his reading of Genesis. His will

turn out to be a problematic attempt, even if we accept the

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truth of his principle and the validity of his psychology of

deficient motive.

I. The Exegetical Landscape

Augustine explicitly takes on the task of explicating

the biblical story of the Fall in three of his writings: the

second book of De Genesi contra Manichaeos (Genesis—the anti-

Manichean commentary), the eleventh book of De Genesi ad

Litteram (the literal commentary), and depending on how the

angels are taken to figure into the story, either books

eleven through fourteen of De civitate Dei (City of God) or

principally books thirteen and fourteen, where the focus is

on the human portion of the drama. I will have something to

say about a peculiar emphasis or concern of each commentary,

taken individually, but I want to begin with Augustine’s

common thread.

On the face of it, the Yahwist seems in chapters two

and three of Genesis to be dramatizing the ambiguity of

knowledge. The fruit of knowledge can be good or evil to a

human being, perhaps both. Yahweh suggests to the man that a

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taste of knowledge is a touch of death, an initiation into

mortality; the serpent suggests to the woman that this same

taste is an enhancement of life, an initiation into a god’s

way of seeing. It will fall to the man to determine whether

these two perspectives on knowledge are absolutely in

conflict or whether they symbolize a higher synthesis, one

that returns the fruit of two trees—knowledge and life—to a

common root. I say that it falls to the man, and not to

woman, because he is the one character who is expressly

offered both perspectives on knowing. The woman is not yet

on the scene when Yahweh tells Adam that knowledge brings

death in its wake; when she arrives on the scene, in what

strikes me as a parody of a birthing, she quickly ties her

life to a touch and taste of knowledge and offers that

knowledge back to the man, in the form of sensuality. I am

inclined to read into her offer a question about

incarnation: is it possible to express a divine way of

knowing in a partnership of flesh and bone, a mortal life of

love? I don’t see what choice the man has but to taste the

knowledge offered him and see.

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Augustine resists my reading mightily, however, in all

of his efforts at exegesis. He insists on the view that the

man would have suffered no deficit of knowledge or life had

he abandoned the woman to her own, separate fate and waited

patiently for Yahweh to crown his manly obedience with

wisdom. In Augustine’s strained interpretation of the

symbolism of the two trees, the fruit of life symbolizes the

wisdom of obedience and the life that is perfected and

preserved in perfect obedience. The fruit of knowledge, by

contrast, anticipates the evil of imperfect obedience and

outright disobedience. Once the man falters in his

obedience, he will lose his direct access to the tree of

life, whose fruit, Augustine assumes, is reserved for those

of perfect will.

The common thread of Augustine’s various takes on the

first man’s sin spins from his conviction that the man had

nothing to lose by losing the woman. Augustine makes little,

then, of Yahweh’s declaration that it is not good for Adam

to be alone, and he has to work hard to ignore the ambiguity

of original knowledge. The Yahwist tells us that this

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knowledge is both good and evil; in Augustine’s reading it

cannot really be either. If the knowledge were good, this

would mean that Adam had been denied something good

originally. He would have been created as lacking. If the

knowledge were evil, this would mean that some element of

the created order—in this case a seed or fruit of knowing—

had been created evil. Each scenario implies a violation of

the principle of plenitude. If Adam is being denied a good

by his obedience, his obedience to God can never be

completely fulfilling; if he is being kept from an evil by

obeying, his obedience alienates him from a part of

creation, most dramatically from the woman.

In De Genesi contra Manichaeos, where we will find

Augustine’s least subtle reading of the first woman,

Augustine makes her out to be sensuality incarnate, a

personification of animal appetite. She is the unthinking

part of the soul, the part that seeks to fill felt lacks and

be at one with beauty, but never in a way that raises a

question about the good. It is the man who carries in his

person the responsibilities of reason. No doubt he is

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strongly drawn to the woman and to the animal part of his

own soul, but he does not have to identify himself with

either. He is drawn to his animal soul and to the woman

because they suggest to them the natural, unreflective

direction of his desire for wholeness, the way to the flesh

that is his flesh. When he is apart from her or alienated

from his own animal soul, he knows privation. Although his

is a privation that seems to have its remedy in a union of

flesh, a marriage of male to female, in fact it does not—

not, at least, as Augustine has established the respective

roles of the man and woman in an ideal marriage. In De Genesi

contra Manichaeos, the ideal marriage of man and woman awaits

the perfect subordination of unthinking flesh to reasoning

spirit. Somehow the perfecting of reason’s rule will end any

impetus of the flesh to be other than perfectly reasonable.

The flesh, in effect, will cease to be flesh. “There is

need,” writes Augustine, “of perfect wisdom if anyone is

correctly to rule this part of himself, and preside over the

marriage in himself so that the flesh does not lust against

the spirit, but is subject to the spirit, that is, so that

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carnal desire is not opposed to reason, but rather ceases,

by obeying, to be carnal” (Gen. c. Man. 2.12.16).

If I am following correctly the logic of Augustine’s

kind of perfection, in a good but less-than-ideal marriage,

the woman wants something different from what the man wants,

but his will wins out over hers; in a bad marriage, she

wins; in a perfect marriage, she never wants anything that

he doesn’t want, and the result is that his will and her

desire coincide perfectly. That perfect coincidence would be

desire’s discarnation, its loss of its native carnality.

Applying Augustine’s logic more mythologically, it is

perfection of this sort that writes the woman out of the

Genesis story. In the revised non-standard version of the

story—the one where the man remains obedient and avoids

privation—he lets go of his flesh-and-bone other and

idealizes the animal soul in himself. He finds the woman of

his dreams in his own, perfectly contained mind.

This is of course not how the story actually goes, but

Augustine maintains a remarkable interest in the story’s

counterfactual possibilities, even as he resolves to stick

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close to the letter of the tale. In De Genesi ad litteram, he

resumes his meditation on the symbolism of the tree of

knowledge, this time with an eye towards discerning the

goodness of its fruit. The good here is the goodness of what

would have happened had the man not acted contrary to his

god’s desire. He would have known the good of a perfectly

obedient life—a life free of the touch of death and

perpetually secure in its future. As it turns out, the man

gets an imperfect sense of this yet-to-be-lived life lost,

from the privation that comes of disobedience. “The tree,”

writes Augustine, “was not evil, but it was called the tree

of the knowledge of good and evil because, on the

supposition that man would eat of its fruit after the

prohibition, there was within it the future violation of the

command, and because of this transgression man would learn

by undergoing punishment the difference between the good of

obedience and the evil of disobedience” (Gen. ad litt. 8.6.12).

One clear implication of Augustine’s reading is that the man

must originally have had some need for the knowledge of good

and evil; otherwise he would have had no motive to leave the

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security of an obedient life and pursue a good he already

had.

Augustine has to assume that knowledge learned through

pain and want could have been learned in another, more

perfect way; so he looks for a way of knowing good and evil

that would not have required the man to follow the woman

into disobedience and the hard labor of a mortal life. He

finds his answer in the mind’s power to abstract. The man

could have come to understand evil by abstracting himself

from the good he was experiencing and imagining the void

that would result. This is not the sort abstraction that

would have required the man to remove himself bodily from the

good and register the privation in his own flesh. It is not

necessary, Augustine thinks, to experience evil in order to

understand what evil means. To those who are inclined to

doubt the truth of this, Augustine has this to say (Gen. ad

litt. 8.15.33):

Those who think this way do not notice how most unknown

things are understood from their contraries which are

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known, so that even the names of nonexistent things can

be used in conversation without puzzling the hearer.

For instance, what is entirely nonexistent we call

nihil; and anyone who understands and speaks Latin

comprehends these two syllables. How does this happen

except that when the mind sees what is, it recognizes

by its privation what is not?

I am not quite sure whether I would fall into the class of

people who think in the way that Augustine hopes to amend.

Sometimes it enough to understand a privation to be able to

imagine it, but I have trouble thinking that this could be

true in every case. There has to be some touchstone of

feeling, some felt privation, that keeps a mind from getting

too caught up in its own imaginings. In the Genesis story,

the man doesn’t have to imagine being deprived of the woman;

he gets his sense of that when she crosses the line into a

new knowledge and leaves his flesh bereft of her. His pain

likely takes the form of an erotic longing. The woman’s

experience of her desired object—“lust to the eyes, lovely

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to look at”—is certainly cast in the language of an erotic

awakening; does the Yahwist really have to tell us what the

transformed woman looked like to the man?

In De civitate Dei, Augustine tries out a starkly de-

eroticized reading of the man’s sin. The man binds himself

to his transgressive partner not because his flesh longs to

know as she knows, but because he takes pity on her weakness

and resolves to lend her his strength, even if that means

disobeying God. His sin is rooted in his mind’s arrogance

and presumption, and not in the weakness of his flesh and

its inability to endure privation. In advancing this

interpretation, Augustine takes himself to be following the

inspiration of Paul, who writes at 1 Timothy 2:14: “It was

not Adam, but Eve, who was seduced.” If we take ‘seduction’

to imply becoming slavishly subject to the desire of

another, then Paul is suggesting that Eve surrenders herself

to the serpent, who speaks on Satan’s authority, whereas

Adam is beholden to no point of view but his own. That is

basically Augustine’s take on Paul here, and it continues a

trajectory of exegesis that runs through both De Genesi contra

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Manichaeos and De Genesi ad litteram. In the former work,

Augustine so closely identifies the woman with carnal

desire, or the body’s unreflective disposition to be

relieved of want, that she is, strictly considered,

incapable of being tempted. She lacks the inner complexity

that makes temptation a possibility. For what good would get

her to doubt the good of following her body’s lead? Perhaps

only the cathartic good of being with the man, who returns

her carnal affection with rational discipline and affords

her the vicarious benefit of his mind’s autonomy. When she

loses that benefit and falls prey to an unchecked carnality,

he fears that her desires will do her in. Augustine

describes the man’s sublime condescension to her near of the

end of book eleven of De Genesi ad Litteram (11.42.59): “After

the woman had been seduced and had eaten of the forbidden

fruit and had given Adam some to eat with her, he did not

wish to make her unhappy, fearing she would waste away

without his support, alienated from his affections, and that

this dissension would be her death.”

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Augustine’s description in De Genesi ad litteram of Adam’s

original disposition to sin lends his sin an unintended

nobility. Adam seems to have sacrificed his happiness for

Eve’s sake. Augustine corrects this impression in De civitate

Dei, where he associates the psychology of the man’s fall

with the same pride that brought a host of angels, led by

Satan, into eternal disfavor. Satan had no woman or animal

soul to draw his mind into carnal entanglements; when he

turned from God to seek self-rule, he and the angels he

inspired retreated into an illusion of separate selves and

approached the nihilum of all beginnings. “When we ask the

cause of the evil angels’ misery,” writes Augustine, “we

find that it is the just result of their turning away from

him who supremely is, and their turning towards themselves,

who do not exist in that supreme degree. What other name is

there for this fault than pride?” (De civ. Dei 12.6).

Pride in Augustine’s analysis comes down to a peculiar,

extreme, and ultimately self-defeating desire for privacy,

for being free of being beholden to the love of others. It

is a form of ingratitude that masquerades as a desire for

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perfection. Applied to Adam’s case, his pride drains his

desire for the woman of its love and leaves his mind’s tie

to her flesh a matter of mere curiosity. He cares for her no

more than he cares for the God he has abandoned. The first

words of his after transgression betray his state of mind.

He disavows his responsibility to the woman, the supposed

flesh of his flesh, and returns her in thought to God (Gen.

3:13): “The woman whom you gave by me, she gave me from the

tree, and I ate.” Read in the register of pride, Adam’s sin

is heartless, not noble.

II. Missed Ambiguities

Now that I have surveyed a few of Augustine’s attempts

to make sense of Genesis as a story about the origins of

sin, I want to return to the issue of the fit between myth

and logos. Does Augustine’s account of sin square with the

story he takes to have inspired his account? His account of

sin is an account of a deficiently motivated desire for the

good, whose willed expression results in privation—the

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privatio boni that supplies Augustine with his basic conception

of evil. I have earlier invoked Scott’s philosophical gloss

on the nature of deficiency at issue: carelessness in

practical reasoning. “Creatures like us,” Scott writes, “are

capable of choosing and acting rationally or irrationally

not just by virtue of our having or acting on the basis of

practical reasons but by virtue of our ability to attend or

fail to attend to the reasons we have.”2 Adam presumably has

good reason not to join his partner, the woman, in

disobedience, but let’s say that out of carelessness he

fails to attend to it. What could that reason conceivably

have been? Augustine’s suggestion—based on what I have been

calling his principle of plenitude—is that Adam had good

reason to believe that his continued obedience to God would

supply him with all the good he would ever need. Adam’s

culpability for not having attended to this reason is not

diminished by there being no particular reason for his

inattention. It is not his inattention that motives his

disobedience, but his desire to be with the woman.

2 Matthews, ed. (1999), p. 135.

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My aim in this essay has not been to cast doubt on

either the truth of Augustine’s principle of plenitude or

the psychology of deficient move that goes along with the

principle, as a rider about sin. Instead I have tried to

issue a caveat about making the psychology too independent

of the principle that motivates it. If we get too

comfortable applying the independently formulated psychology

to the Genesis story—which then becomes a mythic case study

in moral responsibility—we will be less likely to notice

just how prejudicially Augustine applies his principle to

the Yahwist’s representation of divinity. Let’s grant for

the moment that the character of Yahweh exhausts the

Yahwist’s representation of God and that it is incumbent

upon Adam to follow Yahweh’s will in all things. There are

in fact two representations of Yahweh’s desire in the

Yahwist’s story of creation, the so-called story of the

Fall, and the desires conflict: Yahweh doesn’t want Adam to

taste knowledge, and Yahweh doesn’t want Adam to be without

a partner. Nothing about the psychology of deficient motive

is going to help resolve that conflict, for the Yahwist’s

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story is finally not about the morality of disobedience, but

the human presumption, good and bad, to know what humanity

is to God. There is a presumption about this knowledge, a

bad one I think, in Augustine’s very attempt to make the

story about moral culpability. He locks his God into a will

to transcend flesh, and then he condemns Adam for refusing

to sacrifice the flesh of his flesh to God.

I have tried to indicate some of the ways in which

Augustine’s exegetical habits have inclined him either to

diminish or overlook the role of the woman in the Yahwist’s

representation of divinity. In her difference from the man,

she represents for Augustine the flesh that a holy will must

overcome; in her likeness, she represents nothing at all,

for Augustine leaves her with no will of her own. It never

occurs to Augustine that ‘Adam’ in Genesis is not at first,

and perhaps never is, the name of a man, but a reference to

a humanity that has yet to know the image of itself—male and

female—in God.

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