Watering the Dust
James Wood
- Saint Augustine by Gary Wills
Weidenfeld, 153 pp, £12.99, August 1999, ISBN 0 297 84281 1
When I was 16 or so, my parents moved to Weardale, a farming area where little villages and farms flock between Durham on the east and Northumberland on the west. The church in the village we lived in was Late Victorian, devoutly ugly, its furnishings as decent and sparse as its congregation, who regularly comprised an ancient churchwarden (the only man) and five or six elderly ladies. I often played the organ, which was a tinny wheezer. It was not a rich village; there were people in it who had never left County Durham, and one set of brothers who had never been on a train. One of the women in the congregation was so tone-deaf that she seemed to speak the hymns rather than sing them; another always mispronounced the word ‘apostolic’ during the recitation of the Creed (‘Holy, catholic and apostolic church’), landing heavily on the second rather than the third syllable. Since there were so few congregants, her stumble tended to put everyone else out, like a lame pall-bearer.
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Letters
Vol. 21 No. 21 · 28 October 1999
From William Myers
James Wood's review of Garry Wills's Saint Augustine (LRB, 30 September) gets some things wrong. First, what Wood calls the 'wicked idea' that 'all humans are sinners at birth because of something Adam did in Eden' is not Augustinian in origin. In the Second Book of Esdras (a first-century Jewish text), Ezra complains to God: 'You … laid … one commandment' on Adam 'but he transgressed it, and immediately you appointed death for him and for his descendants … Thus the disease became permanent; and the law was in the hearts of the people; but what was good departed, and the evil remained.'
Second, the sin of Adam, as both Esdras and Augustine represent it, is not 'physically transmitted to all his descendants through sex', but through heredity. Human beings 'sinned' in Adam in just the same way that Levi 'gave tithes' to Melchisedek, 'while he was still in the loins' of Abraham 'his ancestor'. Disordered concupiscence was a result, but not the medium, of original sin.
Third, Newman was not 'devoured by his apprehension of hereditary evil'. Christians do indeed have great difficulty in explaining what Newman calls the 'defeat of good, the success of evil, physical pain, mental anguish, the prevalence and intensity of sin', but atheists cannot deal with them at all. ('There is no forgiveness of sins' – George Eliot.) The doctrine of the fall was a relief to Newman: it explained evil and opened the way to the Atonement. 'Man had rebelled against his Maker,' he wrote in Apologia. 'It was this that caused the divine interposition: and the first act of the divinely accredited messenger must be to proclaim it.'
Finally – the lady penitents of Wood's Durham childhood: if you deny that we are all sinners, you are in danger of dividing people into sheep and goats, publicans and pharisees, maiden-ladies and militias. The alternative is to claim that we are not really free at all (in spite of what Wood says, free will cannot be rationed), which does away with the problem of judging others, but also makes it impossible for anyone to see God.
William Myers
Leicester University
Vol. 21 No. 23 · 25 November 1999
From James Wood
William Myers objects to my gloomy view of Augustine and original sin (Letters, 28 October) and suggests that my review 'gets some things wrong'. Alas, he gets more things wrong. He corrects me for claiming that original sin is Augustinian in origin. Actually, I never claimed this in my review of Garry Wills's book; but if I had, Myers would still be wrong, because Augustine can certainly be said to be the originator of a particular emphasis on Adam's sin. Augustine's belief is particular in three ways: in its insistence that Adam's fall corrupted the whole of human nature; that this corruption is transmitted through the sexual act; and that this corruption cannot be lifted by our own free will but only by God's gratuitous grace.
Myers suggests that theologians who preceded Augustine were similarly preoccupied. Yes, softer versions of Augustinian doctrine can be found among early Church Fathers such as Tertullian and Origen. But they generally stress, as Augustine generally does not, our free capacity to escape that taint. Tertullian wrote, in very non-Augustinian fashion, that 'God's justice should then judge individuals and not the whole race,' and goes so far as to suggest that the soul is Christian by nature, something Augustine would never have hazarded. And the Gnostics, of course, often explicitly rejected pre-Augustinian ideas of inherited sin.
Myers then corrects me because I wrote that, according to Augustine, Adam's sin is 'physically transmitted to all his descendants through sex'. Not so, says Myers, it is transmitted through heredity. But by heredity Augustine means sex, and says so on numerous occasions. Augustine believed that Adam's sin had tainted sex itself, that this was one of the punishments of the Fall, and that sex was both distorted by, and the vehicle of, original sin. 'The very root of sin lies in carnal generation,' Augustine wrote in De peccatorum meritis. Henry Chadwick puts it like this in his book on Augustine: 'the physical act was, he urged, the vehicle for the transmission of the flawed human nature subsequent to the Fall.' Augustine's belief in transmission through sex enabled him to argue in the Enchiridion that Jesus was not tainted in this way, because the Virgin Mary had not had sex in order to conceive him.
Myers is clearly on something of a crusade to defend the notion of original sin, and takes issue with my assertion that Cardinal Newman was 'devoured by his apprehension of hereditary evil'. I'm sure Myers likes Newman more than I do, but it is hard to read Newman's Apologia and not recoil from its consuming and consumed obsession with sin and evil, an obsession that bulks so large that Newman comes very close to defining the Church solely as an institutional response to evil: 'a power as tremendous as the giant evil that has called for it … it is because of the intensity of the evil which has possession of mankind that a suitable antagonist has been provided against it'. So the great Church has been shrunk to a 'suitable antagonist' of evil! It is this apprehension that sanctions Newman's truly repulsive declamation: 'The Catholic Church holds it better for the sun and moon to drop from heaven, for the earth to fail, and for all the many millions on it to die of starvation in extremest agony, as far as temporal affliction goes, than that one soul … would commit one single venial act, would tell one wilful untruth, or would steal one poor farthing without excuse.' Christianity has written no greater self-condemnation than this sentence of Newman's, unless it is Augustine's equally cruel comment in the Enchiridion that 'infants are involved in the guilt of the sin not only of the first pair' ' Adam and Eve ' 'but of their own immediate parents'.
James Wood
Washington DC
Vol. 22 No. 1 · 6 January 2000
From Dominic Kirkham
After nearly 25 years as a member of an Augustinian Order of Canons Regular I would like to endorse everything James Wood writes about Augustine (Letters, 25 November 1999). Over those years, to a background of the eulogising of 'our father Augustine', I slowly moved from seeing this man as an anguished spiritual genius of theological profundity to a pervert who has had a more malign effect on Western culture than probably any other individual. I still find breathtaking his ability to distort scripture – also noted by his contemporary St Jerome – as well as the persuasive rationality with which he twists reality. But it is when one has to deal with people who have been traumatised by the crass application of his teachings (bereaved mothers who were told that their unbaptised children would be eternally damned) that the time comes to say enough is enough.
Dominic Kirkham
Manchester
