CHAPTER SEVEN

The Myth of the Fall
and the Doctrine of Original Sin

The Christian separation of matter and spirit, of the dynamism of life and the realm of the spirit, of natural grace and supernatural grace, has really castrated nature…The true spirituality, which would have come from the union of matter and spirit, has been killed.

                                                                   — Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth (1)

In the light of the solar myth explored in the last chapter, I could now understand that the Myth of the Fall of Man is the most dramatic and influential myth or meta-narrative of the solar phase of Separation. In the Book of Genesis we find the story of our expulsion from a divine world and our Fall into this world, a Fall that was brought about by a woman, Eve, who disobeyed the command of God and brought death, sin and suffering into being. From this myth there developed the belief that the whole human race was tainted by original sin, yet this was never more than a belief, although it was presented and accepted as divinely revealed truth.
          If we look at it from the perspective of the evolution of consciousness, the whole myth, telling the story of Eve’s temptation by the serpent, the disobedience of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden, can be read as a metaphor that describes the painful stage of our separation from the matrix of nature—the ‘Garden of Eden’ out of which we have evolved. Expulsion from the Garden is an accurate metaphor for the birth of the capacity for reflection and self-awareness, so leaving the more unconscious state of living purely instinctively. Inevitably, just as with our separation at birth from our mother, a sense of duality came into being as we lost the sense of participation in a primordial Sacred Order.
          Unfortunately, even tragically, the myth was taken as literally true as well as divinely revealed and the Christian psyche was imprinted with the belief that human nature was fallen, cut off from God as a result of the ‘sin’ of Adam and Eve eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, and condemned to exile on earth. For nearly two thousand years Christians have been taught and have believed that their only chance of redemption was the doctrines and rituals of the Church and the saving grace of the sacrificial death of the Son of God. There was no salvation for those who were not Christians.
          A second meta-narrative, developing out of the Myth of the Fall of Man, was the Christian doctrine of Original Sin, promulgated by St. Augustine in the late fourth century. A disastrous obsession with sin and guilt, a distrust of sexuality and the body and the fear of God’s punishment took root in the soul. There was a radical shift of focus as spirit was projected upon a distant deity in the sky and no longer experienced as the invisible ground of the phenomenal world. Was it the emphasis given to these two beliefs that caused the Christian Church to change, in the course of the first four centuries, from being a medium of transmission for the teaching of Christ, to being an imperial power with absolute control over millions of its subjects?
          “What is the origin of evil, of death, of suffering?” This question perplexed the authors of the Book of Genesis. It perplexed the formulators of Christian doctrine centuries later and perplexes us still today. This chapter and the next will explore the influence of the two meta-narratives mentioned above which attempted to answer this question. They are a critical exploration of what may be called the ‘shadow’ aspect of Christianity for, in giving them such emphasis, the Christian Church may have presented a negative, not to say a distorted view of life to its believers.
          The Myth of the Fall originates with the Book of Genesis but its influence continued to be diffused throughout Jewish, Christian and even Islamic culture. For a very long time, it has been the primary myth which has guided religious teaching in the West. To focus on only one religion, there are over two billion Christians in the world today – nearly a third of the world’s population – who will have absorbed from it the idea that a woman, Eve, was responsible for bringing death, sin and suffering into the world and that humanity carries the bitter legacy of the Fall. I believe that these two immensely powerful beliefs, so entwined with each other, have deeply wounded the Christian soul; they have wounded woman as well as man’s image of woman and man’s image of the feminine aspect of his own nature. Indeed, I wonder whether it is possible to exaggerate the wounding effect they have had on the Western psyche and Western civilization as a whole. I cannot listen to the harsh, condemnatory words attributed to God in the Book of Genesis (Gen. 3: 8-19) without a sense of revulsion as well as deep compassion for the souls — particularly the souls of children — who have been or will be burdened by its oppressive message.
          In the Book of Genesis, God says to Eve. “I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception, in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children and thy desire shall be to thy husband and he shall rule over thee.” And God says to Adam, “Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life” (Gen: 3:6–17). For nearly two thousand years, countless millions have assimilated the message of this cruel, rejecting and judgemental image of God and the heavy burden of original sin. These verses are often read out at Christmas, at the beginning of the story of the birth of Jesus, as if to explain why the human race needed to be redeemed by the birth of a Saviour and His sacrificial death.

The Literal Interpretation of the Myth
The literal interpretation of the myth and the belief that it was divinely revealed bequeathed to generations of Christians a legacy of sexual guilt, misogyny and fear of God’s anger. The more I read the documents of the Catholic and Protestant churches which reflected this literal interpretation, the more I could see the immense harm that was done to the relationship between men and women in Western civilization. Further, it was a major cause of a profoundly negative view of life and with it, a rejection of the world and a widening of the solar split between spirit and nature, mind and body. I could see that its influence has ultimately contributed to our growing alienation from nature and our ruthless exploitation of the earth’s resources. Since, in this myth, earth was designated a place of exile, punishment and suffering why should we respect it? Since we had been banished to this place of suffering, sorrow, toil and death it was inevitable that we should feel justified in exploiting it for our own benefit and that, in the domain of our relationship with other people, other religions, we should seek to offload our own sense of guilt by punishing, attacking or blaming others, projecting onto them the intolerable hair-shirt of guilt..
          I think that it is not too much to say that the greatest sickness in Christian culture has been the fear of sexuality, the denigration and denial of the sensuous and the ecstatic, and the oppression and enforced subservience of woman. It could be said that the first mistake in Christian teaching was to dissociate the body and matter from spirit and from soul. The second was the belief that in order to gain the approval of God and ward off his anger and further punishment, we had to deny the sexual instinct, reject the body and even inflict pain and suffering on it. In the name of the spiritual life, the body was made to endure every kind of mortification, including such sado-masochistic practices as starvation, flagellation and the wearing of hair shirts and other instruments of pain. I can understand why this whole train of ideas arose but I wonder whether, in splitting nature from spirit, emptying nature of soul and contaminating the instincts with guilt and fear, Christian teaching – like Marduk in the Babylonian myth – hasn’t split the wholeness of life and our wholeness in two.
          Taking this further, it seems to have ascribed all goodness to God and all evil to man, placing an intolerable burden of guilt on our shoulders. Following the paradigm of solar mythology, which conceived of a great cosmic battle between good and evil, the next step was to ascribe all good to the institution of the Church and all evil to the pagan gods or any group which offered a challenge to the Church’s power, formulating the concept of the ‘saved’ and the ‘damned’ and reserving hell and damnation for heretics and ‘unbelievers’. As St. Augustine said, laying the foundation for the Inquisition, “Error has no rights.”
          How, I wondered, was it possible for the soul and the values of the heart to survive and flourish in the face of a belief system which did such violence to them? The actual teaching of Christ was neglected through the centuries of hair-splitting doctrinal disputes. Did Christianity take a wrong turning when it built the whole edifice of its doctrine of salvation through the sacrificial death of the Son of God on the foundation of the Myth of the Fall and the Doctrine of Original Sin? Was this what Christ would have wanted or would he have been appalled by what was taught and done in His name? Joseph Campbell comments:

Our story of the Fall in the Garden sees nature as corrupt; and that myth corrupts the whole world for us. Because nature is thought of as corrupt, every spontaneous act is sinful and must not be yielded to. You get a totally different civilization and a totally different way of living according to whether your myth presents nature as fallen or whether nature is in itself a manifestation of divinity, and the spirit is the revelation of the divinity that is inherent in nature. (2)

Because these myths or meta-narratives stand at the beginning of our cultural inheritance, it is very difficult to become aware of the assumptions derived from them, let alone disempower them. Their relevance to ourselves today is that the deeper layers of the soul which, for tens of thousands of years had known a life of participation in the life of the earth and the cosmos through an instinctual awareness of the unity and sacredness of life, were now abruptly deprived of that experience. The older lunar mythology where all life was imagined as the creation of the Great Mother, born from her cosmic womb in a great web of relationships and connections, was suppressed. The various mystery religions which had flourished under the Greek and Roman Empires were suddenly declared anathema. By the end of the fourth century, by order of the Emperor Theodosius, pagan temples like the magnificent temple of Artemis at Ephesus, and the temple of Demeter at Eleusis had been destroyed and pagan rites prohibited. In the sixth century, on the orders of the Emperor Justinian, the Platonic Academy in Athens that had survived for a thousand years was closed down. Although elements of the older rituals were preserved and integrated into the new rituals, the Christian Church became the major instrument which delivered the coup de grâce to the old order. Even now, incredibly, there are echoes of this old prejudice in the belief held by certain Christian priests that yoga should not be practised by Christians because it is ‘pagan’.
          The Myth of the Fall which was given prominence in the teaching of St. Paul and disastrous new importance by St. Augustine and the Early Christian Fathers, was deeply rooted in Jewish culture. It perfectly illustrates the change of state from lunar to solar culture, from unconscious participatory unity to separation, guilt, estrangement and exile. The wholeness of the Sacred Order was, so to speak, broken by the development of the self-awareness that separated us from nature and this evoked an unconscious sense of guilt. As a myth, it movingly describes our sense of isolation, exile and abandonment as we lost touch with the older way of experiencing life and embarked on a new phase in the evolution of consciousness. There is no more striking image of the sense of exile and loss than our expulsion from the Garden of Eden at whose entrance an angel stands with a fiery sword, barring our re-entry. It is worth listening to D.H. Lawrence and how he saw this tremendous change:

Isn't ‘fall’ and ‘redemption’ quite a late and new departure in religion and in myth: about Homer's time? Aren't the great heavens of the true pagans...clean of the ‘Salvation’ ideas, though they have the re-birth idea? And aren't they clean of the ‘fall’, although they have the descent of the soul? The two things are quite different. In my opinion the great pagan religions of the Aegean, and Egypt and Babylon, must have conceived the ‘descent’ as a great triumph, and each Easter of the clothing in flesh as a supreme glory, and the Mother Moon who gives us our body as the supreme giver of the great gift, hence the very ancient Magna Mater in the East. This ‘fall’ into Matter...this ‘entombment’ in the ‘envelope of flesh’ is a new and pernicious idea arising about 500 B.C. into distinct cult-consciousness and destined to kill the grandeur of the heavens altogether at last. (3)

This can be contrasted with another passage from his Last Poems, where he describes the still living participatory consciousness of the Etruscan way of life:

Behind all the Etruscan liveliness was a religion of life…Behind all the dancing was a vision, and even a science of life, a conception of the universe and man’s place in the universe which made men live to the best of their capacity. To the Etruscan all was alive; the whole universe lived; and the business of man was himself to live amid it all. He had to draw life into himself, out of the wandering huge vitalities of the world. The cosmos was alive, like a vast creature…The whole thing was alive, and had a great soul, or anima: and in spite of one great soul, there were myriad roving, lesser souls; every man, every creature and tree and lake and mountain and stream, was animate, and had its own peculiar consciousness. (4)

As we move into Christian culture, this lunar vision of life and the participatory consciousness which gave rise to it are lost to the European cultural tradition. It still survived in the peasant communities where the older traditions and rituals connected people with the cycles of nature and where the ancient worship of the Great Mother was transferred to the Virgin Mary. But in the sphere of Christian theology, the repudiation of the image of the goddess and with it the significance and influence of a feminine dimension of the divine was devastating because a vital thread of connection to the past was severed. Whereas the Egyptian, Sumerian, Greek and Roman Goddesses had given both men and women clearly defined images of different aspects of the Feminine to which they could relate, Christian culture after the fourth century offered only three role models of the Feminine: the Virgin Mary, Eve, and Mary Magdalene. The image of the soul was carried by the Virgin Mary, the dangerous desirousness of the instinct by Eve and sinful sexuality by Mary Magdalene. There is a fundamental split between the soul personified by the immaculately conceiving and – from the declaration in the Papal Edict of 1854 – the immaculately conceived Virgin Mary, and the body, represented by the carnal Eve and Mary Magdalene, the ‘fallen’ woman. It was through the far-reaching influence of this myth that we lost the wholeness of our being and the awareness that the concept of the soul must include instinct and the life of the body.

The Myth of the Fall: (put in sidebar box)
· describes the experience of the birth of consciousness or self-awareness
as a fall from unity and harmony.
· names Eve as the primary cause of original sin and explains the presence of suffering, death and evil in the world as due to her disobedience to God and leading Adam into sin through responding to the temptation of the serpent, Satan.
· provides the scriptural foundation for the misogyny of the patriarchal view of woman.
· reflects and reinforces the dualistic split between spirit and nature, mind and body and between this fallen world and an original ‘perfect’ world untainted by sin that we once inhabited and from which we were expelled by God.
· associates sexuality with sin, shame and guilt, seeing the body in St. Augustine’s words, as a “hissing cauldron of lust”. (Confessions)

The Demythologising of the Goddess
The Myth of the Fall of Man originates with the Book of Genesis. The date of its appearance is not precisely known but is thought to be around the eighth century BC. It may be that it was first formulated after some dire catastrophe had happened to the Jewish people — possibly the ethnic cleansing by the Assyrians of the entire population of Samaria, the northern province of Israel ca. 720 BC. Or it may have been an attempt on the part of the priesthood of Yahweh, to discredit and even eliminate the Canaanite religion where the worship of the goddess Asherah played an important part in the life of women, who appealed to her in the ordeal of childbirth. The serpent in Canaanite mythology was inseparable from the cult of the goddess. This myth subtly demoted the goddess who was blamed for the catastrophe that had befallen Samaria. Since we know that in the child, a deep conviction of guilt may be formed when some trauma has been experienced in early life, we can apply this understanding to a group of people living at a specific historical time who had experienced a great catastrophe. According to the beliefs of the time, they interpreted this in terms of a punishment visited on them by God for the sin of disobedience and the worship of false gods. The myth can be read as the story of the deliberate and effective demythologizing of the hated goddess by the priesthood of that time and her demotion from a goddess to a woman, Eve, who was blamed for bringing suffering, death and sin into the world.
          The title that Adam gives to Eve in this myth is actually the former title of the Great Mother –“Mother of All Living”– a title also held by the Shekinah of Kabbalah. It is strange and surely significant that the Genesis myth takes the life-affirming images of the Garden, the Tree of Life and the Serpent, all inseparable from the Goddess in the mythology of the lunar era, and weaves them into a story about disobedience, fear, guilt, punishment and blame. The Great Mother, giver of life and death, who once contained both the living and the dead within her being, now, astonishingly, as Eve, becomes the cause of death coming into the world. And the serpent, once present with the Goddess in the Temple as the great Brazen Serpent, is now cursed by God, condemned to crawl on its belly and eat dust. (Gen.3:14)
          Whatever its origins and the reasons for the appearance of this myth, what we are listening to as we decode the imagery, is a complete reversal of the lunar mythology of the Goddess culture. We need look no further than this myth and the interpretation given to it by generations of theologians, priests and rabbis, not only for the ideas which led to the loss of soul and the sense of living within a Sacred Order but also for the misogyny which spread like a contagious virus through the three Abrahamic religions. As Jack Holland writes in his masterly analysis of the historical roots of misogyny:

The hatred of women affects us in ways that no other hatred does because it strikes at our innermost selves. It is located where the private and public worlds intersect. The history of that hatred may dwell on its public consequences, but at the same time it allows us to speculate on why, at the personal level, man’s complex relationship to woman has permitted misogyny to thrive. Ultimately, such speculation should allow us to see how equality between the sexes will eventually be able to banish misogyny and put an end to the world’s oldest prejudice. (5)

An Alternative Interpretation
The myth says that Eve and Adam made the wrong choice, which brought disastrous consequences upon the human race and that we have been punished for that primal act of disobedience to God. The myth was interpreted literally and negatively yet we, in a later age, can understand it differently. The important idea that we have freewill as well as responsibility for the choices we make is intrinsic to this myth. So, while the myth does describe an abrupt loss of participatory consciousness or, in the Platonic sense, a fall from a higher state of being, it also can be understood as describing the dawning of a new phase in the evolution of human consciousness, the birth of the conscious ego and all that this difficult separation from the matrix of instinct entailed.
          As the story is currently interpreted, it is Eve’s response to the serpent which initiates the change from unity and harmony in the divine world to a state of separation and estrangement in this one. Yet her actions could be understood as a story about responding to the prompting of instinct – of which the serpent is a primary representation – to move into a new phase in our evolution, losing touch with the participatory consciousness of the earlier time. From my experience as a Jungian analyst, I know that the appearance of snakes in dreams can signify regeneration, renewal and the birth of a new phase of life or a new attitude, as a previous unconscious state is relinquished. Yet, as a result of the traditional interpretation given to the myth, people who, over the centuries, have dreamed of snakes may have interpreted them as an image of seduction, temptation and evil—even associating them with Satan and the Devil.
          The birth of self-awareness entails the loss of unconscious and instinctive participation in an original state of unity. The separation from nature necessarily creates duality: awareness of ourselves as separate from our surrounding environment; awareness of duality reflected in all the pairs of opposite—most importantly, the opposites of life and death. The loss of the participatory consciousness of the older state creates feelings of guilt and disorientation which this myth brilliantly describes, carried in the idea that we made the wrong choice. But, in reality, there is no primordial sin, no ongoing moral guilt. We did not make the wrong choice. There is, however, a tragic burden in the sense of our having been made to carry the guilt engendered by this myth without comprehending how and why it arose nor of being able to recognize it as a metaphor which describes, in the act of eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, the birth of self-awareness and the separation of ego from instinct. Whether it was necessary for such a radical split to develop is debatable. It may be that the myth itself contributed to the split and became the foundation on which many later errors arose.

The Projection of Unconscious Guilt
In the deep unconscious of the modern psyche, however secular our society, we may still be influenced by this Christian meta-narrative since, at the unconscious level, old beliefs and habits persist long after they are thought to have been discarded. If, over many centuries, people are indoctrinated with the idea that they are flawed or are born into a state of sin, they will try to get rid of this intolerable burden by projecting their unconscious feelings of guilt onto other groups or individuals. These are then named and attacked as something bad or evil who need to be punished or eliminated. Since both the guilt and the projection are held at a deeply unconscious level, whether in the individual or the collective psyche, the end result will be disconnected from the memory of the original imprinting. Applying this reasoning to the collective Christian psyche, it could be argued that the ‘shadow’ aspect of Christianity with its persecution of Jews, Muslims, Pagans and heretics perceived as threatening to the power of the Church and its teaching could be connected with the need to offload the unconscious guilt imprinted on the psyche by the Myth of the Fall. The need to punish is deeply tied into guilt.
          Added to this burden of guilt was the inwardly-directed attack on the ‘appetites of the flesh’ practised by so many ascetics who, thinking that suffering and pain inflicted on the body would bring them closer to God, tried to suppress their sexual instincts and ward off the attacks of the Devil – often in the form of women tempting them to fornication – with horrendous deprivation and self-inflicted austerities. A typical passage in Colossians 3:5 urges people to “Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, which is idolatry.” It would never have occurred to those practicing the severe austerities enjoined on them by such texts, that the instincts they had repressed would return to attack them in the form of the obsessive fantasies that so plagued the Desert Fathers of early Christianity. To name these as ‘assaults of the Devil’ only led to further acts of repression and greater austerities. If evil is an element in the cosmic order, its power was immeasurably increased by the repression of sexuality and all that resulted from it. I was struck by this passage in a book called Beyond Geography: The Western Spirit Against the Wilderness by Frederick Turner, which sensitively explores how the pathology of the Western Christian psyche, with its disastrous focus on conquest and conversion, developed:

It seems to me that aggression against the body, against the natural world, against primitives, heretics, all unbelievers; and the vain, tragic, pathetically maintained hope of thus winning a lost belief or paradise: this is the terrific burden Christian history has to bear. It is the classic reaction of those who have lost true belief (or have been robbed of it) that they must insist with mounting strenuousness that they do believe and that all others must as well. For as social psychologists have shown, if the bereft can thus succeed in harmonizing the world with themselves, then the inward gnawing doubt might be stopped and the intolerable condition of spiritual inanition alleviated. (6)

Even now we can see how easily negative shadow projections can be activated in our modern society against anyone designated an enemy and demonized as evil and a threat. We can see this scenario re-animated in the present polarization between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ on the political stage, where the conviction of moral superiority has been claimed by one group and the blame for evil fixed on another. We can see it in Fundamentalist Christianity as well as Fundamentalist Islam. We can see it in the aggressive and polarizing behaviour of rival political parties. We can see it in our compulsive addiction to develop ever more lethal weapons in order to deter a potential adversary or a future attack, without any apparent awareness of our own contribution to the proliferation of evil through the projection onto others of our unconscious aggression. Thousands of young men are sent to their deaths or carry lifelong trauma because of these unconscious projections.
          They are also reflected in the determined effort of the evangelical branch of Christianity to demonize homosexuality, (because in the Old Testament it is named a sin) reflected in the comment of a woman on the possibility of a gay priest being ordained a bishop in 2004, “That man is a beast.”
          Understanding the myth in this sense could help to remove the guilt and the need to project that guilt onto others which has been imprinted on the Christian psyche by the interpretation given to the myth by Christian theologians, both Catholic and Protestant. It was their literal interpretation of the myth as well as the myth itself which deprived us of a life of participation in the deeper layers of the soul and cut us off from our instincts as well as from the recognition of the sacredness of the life of nature. To me, this is a prime symptom of the pathology of the solar age which has led man to treat nature, woman and body as something unregenerate, far removed from himself — objects to be feared that he must control and dominate.

The Early Christian Fathers: the Obsession with Sexuality, Sin and Guilt
I was astonished to discover the effect of this myth on the early Christian Fathers — Origen, Tertullian, Clement, Chrysostom, Jerome, Athanasius, Augustine and others. What leaps out from their writings in the early documents of the church up to the fourth century is their absolute obsession with the sin of the Fall and with sexual guilt. As I read with mounting incredulity what they had written about this myth, I said to myself “What on earth was the matter with them that they were more concerned with sexual guilt than with the teaching of Christ? Whence came their sexual neurosis?” All were brilliantly gifted men in an intellectual sense. All were convinced that the sexual instinct was the main impediment to spirituality and that their sexuality had to be sacrificed in order for them to become acceptable to God. All had a phobic terror of what they called the “dark hole between faeces and urine,” the “uncleanliness of the womb” and “the parts of shame”. All, like Plato, regarded the body as the prison of the soul and identified men with spirituality rationality and women with carnality and the irrational animal instincts. Origen (3rd century AD), perhaps the most remarkable and prolific writer of them all, is said to have castrated himself. Nowhere is the pathological dissociation between soul and body in the religions of the solar age more clearly revealed than in their writings and the endless theological debates about the nature of God.
          St. Augustine (AD 354–430), a most sensitive and outstandingly gifted man as well as one who was strongly attracted to women, repudiated his partner of fifteen years, whom he dearly loved and by whom he had had a son, because of a socially desirable marriage arranged by his Christian mother: “My mistress was torn from my side, as an impediment to my marriage, and my heart, which clung to her, was torn and wounded till it bled.”7 We don’t hear what happened to her heart or that of their son, Adeodonatus (Given from God), who tragically died at the age of sixteen, shortly after his parents’ parting. St. Augustine lost both his partner and his son within a year. This moving and revealing passage was written by him after his son’s death:

God effects some good in correcting adults when they are chastised by the sufferings and deaths of the children who are dear to them. Why should this not happen, since, when the pain is past, it is as nothing to those to whom it happened? While those on whose account it happened will either be better men if they are corrected by their temporal disasters and decide to live better lives; or else they will have no excuse when they are punished at the future judgement, if they refuse to direct their longing towards eternal life under the stress of this life’s pain. (8)

Within two years of his separation from his mistress, Augustine had converted to Christianity and, after discarding another mistress, had taken a vow of chastity because he believed this state would be more pleasing to God than his arranged marriage. No doubt influenced by his Christian mother, who was delighted by his conversion, he identified sexuality with sin. Converting to Christianity necessitated for him the renunciation of his sexuality. From then on, for the Christian soul as for the body, since the soul could take no trust or delight in the sexual expression of its life, the situation deteriorated still further: St. Augustine’s theory of original sin became a standard doctrine of the Catholic Church from the Council of Carthage in AD 418.
          St. Augustine, Jack Holland writes, “established the philosophical edifice that propped up the Christian view of the world, including its misogynistic vision.”

Augustine is one of the watershed personalities of history. He stands between the world of Classical Antiquity (which had endured for about a 1000 years) and that of Christian civilization. He is the first person from antiquity who revealed to us the turmoil of his interior world as recorded in his remarkable work, Confessions….At the centre of the turmoil of Augustine’s search for God is the struggle between the desire of the flesh and striving of the will, the profound dualism that Augustine will incorporate into the very heart of Catholicism using Plato’s philosophical apparatus. His cry of anguish echoes that of St. Paul, but with a power and complexity the Apostle could not match. (9)

Augustine’s moving Confessions, begun around the year 400 AD when he was forty-six, are saturated with a profound rejection and distrust of his body. In psychological terms, the will of his conscious mind – dedicated to God – was forcibly imposed on his instincts, with disastrous consequences for himself as well as for generations of Christians. Influenced by Greek and also, perhaps unconsciously, Manichean ideas he, like Plato, associated his body with the irrational ‘lower’ instincts, believing that sexuality itself was a mortal sin. Projecting his own profound sense of sinfulness onto the hapless body of the whole of humanity, he believed it was a mass of sin, a ‘massa peccati’, and that the state of original sin meant that not only do we arrive in a state of sin when we are born, but that we are incapable of refraining from sinning. He saw the whole human race as “the multitude of the damned” because of original sin. From this miserable state we can only be rescued by the grace of God and then only those who were predestined to be so rescued. He struggled desperately to understand where evil came from and, because he believed that God must be wholly good and ‘incorruptible’, he concluded that evil must come from man, principally from his ‘corruptible’ body that was subject to death.
          St. Augustine was not the originator of the theory of original sin. It had existed in the Jewish religion and was taught by St. Paul. Augustine refers to earlier Christian theologians who had expounded on it. However, the basic concept of the Augustinian version of the theory is that Adam was the originator of the fall of the human race and, as its progenitor – who carried within himself all future generations – the transmitter of the contaminated seed of sinfulness to those generations. He believed that every child who was born into the world through sexual intercourse arrived in a state of sin that was carried forward as an inheritance from its primordial ancestor. “By a kind of divine justice the human race was handed over to the devil’s power, since the sin of the first man passed at birth to all who were born by intercourse of the two sexes, and the debt of the first parents bound all their posterity.”(10)
          Sexual desire was thus transmitted like a genetic disease through the sexual act. Adam’s sin had corrupted the whole of nature and made it subject to death but the entire sorry story was initiated by Eve. In The City of God, he wrote that from the moment of the Fall, “The flesh began to lust against the spirit. With this rebellion we are born, just as we are doomed to die and because of the first sin, to bear, in our members and vitiated nature, either the battle with or defeat by the flesh.”(11) This is solar mythology at its most extreme whose polarizing effect was enormously amplified by the identification of the body with sin and Augustine’s own inner battle with his sexuality.
          The formulation of the Doctrine of Original Sin arose out of St. Augustine’s profound conviction of his own sexual sin and guilt. Through this doctrine, the love of God and obedience to Him were placed in opposition to the life of the body. The act of procreation perpetuated the transmission of original sin. Celibacy or sexual abstinence could restore the lost sense of primordial unity. “Truly by continence are we bound together and brought back into that unity from which we were dissipated into a plurality.”(12)
          It is not difficult to imagine the effect of this Christian belief on the sexual relations between men and women. Even a man’s passionate embrace of his wife was deemed to be sinful because it transmitted original sin. Nor is it difficult to understand that it was Augustine’s savage crucifixion of his own sexual instinct and his passionate nature which gave rise to his distorted view of human nature and his interpretation of the origin of death, sin and evil. The repudiation of his sexuality was echoed in his cruel repudiation of his mistress. It evidently did not occur to him that the devastating wound he inflicted on her and on their son might be by far the greater sin.
          St. Augustine immeasurably compounded a tragic situation that was already well established by earlier Fathers of the Church. His theory of original sin became a foundation stone of Christian doctrine and has endured to this day. However, he gave this theory a new gloss: Grace is necessary for salvation since without it we are condemned to remain irredeemably mired in a state of sin.
          St. Augustine’s theory of original sin, predestination and the need for grace did not go unchallenged. It was condemned by Pelagius (AD 354–418) and others. Pelagius was originally a priest in the Celtic church and later a respected theologian and teacher who lived in Rome and then Jerusalem. He wanted to lift the burden of original sin from the human race and took issue with St. Augustine over his interpretation, insisting that only Adam was affected by the sin that led to the Fall. His beliefs may be stated briefly as follows:

· Original sin does not exist
· Infants are born in the same state of innocence as Adam before the Fall
· Man is not dependent on Christ for redemption nor is divine grace essential for redemption
· Redemption is earned through following Christ’s example, not given through His sacrificial death
· The human race has free will and the capacity for choice and moral responsibility
· Man has the potential to realize the divine element within his nature, to become Christ-like.

He insisted that human nature was innately good because it was created by God and denied that salvation could only come about through belonging to the Church.
          Pelagius is like a breath of fresh air in the midst of Augustine’s morbid obsession with sin. The great doctrinal struggle between them gives us the image of two powerful stags locking antlers. Pelagius was declared a heretic in 417 and died a year later and Augustine's pessimistic and guilt-laden doctrine passed into church law in 418.
          Another man, Julian, bishop of Eclanum in Italy, sided with Pelagius against Augustine and, writing in a letter to Augustine himself of his strong objection to his conviction that original sin affects infants, said,

Babies, you say, carry the burden of another’s sin, not any of their own...Explain to me then, who this person is who sends the innocent to punishment. You answer, God... God, you say, the very one who commends his love to us, who has loved us and not spared his son but handed him over to us, he judges us in this way; he persecutes new born children; he hands over babies to eternal flames.... It would show a just and reasonable sense of propriety to treat you as beneath argument: you have come so far from religious feeling, from civilized standards, so far indeed from common sense, that you think your Lord capable of committing kinds of crime which are hardly found among barbarian tribes. (13)

Strong words indeed. Had Pelagius and the group of dissenting bishops led by Julian won the fiercely debated doctrinal battle with St. Augustine, the history of Christianity might have been very different. We may, centuries later, regret that this could not be. We might have been spared the virulent theological struggles for power and the neurotic preoccupation with sin and sexuality and the mistrust of women that bedevil the Christian Church to this day. We might also have been spared the Manichean polarization of humanity into the saved and the damned – carried right through to our times in Christian Fundamentalist beliefs about the Rapture in the End Times – when God takes to heaven those who are predestined to be saved and leaves the rest to perish. Further, we might have been spared the tortures and executions that went with the belief that it was God’s will that the Church should seek out and extirpate sin and heresy wherever it could be found since heresy, as a disruption of the divine order, could bring down God’s wrath on the whole community. This perceptive passage from a recent book by Charles Freeman called AD 381: Heretics, Pagans and the Christian State, is worth quoting at length:

Augustine’s lasting contribution to political thought lies in his justification of authoritarian regimes that see virtue in order per se, rather than in any abstract ideal such as justice or the defence of human rights, or even in the teachings of Jesus themselves. At a stroke Augustine supplants centuries of Greek thought…which viewed the government of the city primarily in terms of the well-being of its citizens. Moreover, when Church and state become mutually supportive in the upholding of order, then the punishment of heretics becomes a matter of state policy. This would be the norm in medieval Europe… Augustine’s underlying premise – that there is a single truth that can only be grasped through faith; that human beings are helpless; that God is essentially punitive, ready to send even babies into eternal hell fire; and that one has a right, even a duty, to burn heretics – challenges the whole ethos of the Greek intellectual tradition, where competition between rival philosophies was intrinsic to progress…The freedom to speculate freely as an individual had no place in his system: he was terrified by the idea that all might contribute to the finding of truth. Augustine bequeathed a tradition of fear to Christianity, fear that one’s speculations might be heretical and fear that, even if they were not, one might still go to hell as punishment for the sin of Adam. (14)

Such was the effect of the repression (not the control) of his sexual instinct in a very brilliant, passionate and sensitive man that it was able to manifest in a complex strong enough to direct a Church for centuries and to lead to the deaths of thousands of individuals whose only ‘sin’ was to be accused of heresy.
          The idea of heresy was first introduced by the Emperor Theodosius in AD 381 when anyone who did not comply with his edict that all must believe in the doctrine that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit were of one and the same substance would be declared a heretic. The end result of Theodosius’ policy was the persecution not only of heretics but of the pagan religions and the destruction of their shrines and magnificent temples. It was at this time that the idea entered Christianity that hell and eternal punishment awaited heretics and unbelievers. Augustine himself later sanctioned the burning alive of heretics as an appropriate punishment for their sin. From this time on, the idea developed that the Catholic Church, backed by the Emperor, should have absolute authority and control of the lives of its members. The Church took over the model of absolutism that had been presented to it by the Emperor, ever since it became associated with the imperial policy of the Roman state in the reign of Constantine (ca. AD 272–ca.337). Where, in all this reign of terror, was the compassion that Christ emphasized in His teaching?
          It is in the crucially important fourth century that the Catholic Church appears to have been deflected from the path to God as taught by Christ and the early Church and become contaminated by the pursuit of ‘Caesar’s power’. The concept of original sin and the belief that the Catholic Church was the only path to salvation gave it immense power over the lives of millions of believers in whom it instilled a fear of hellfire and purgatory. Vivid scenes painted on the walls of churches during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance showed the fate that awaited sinners if they transgressed the rules laid down by the Church.
          It could be argued that the pursuit of power and the growing authoritarianism of the Catholic Church from the thirteenth to the eighteenth centuries when the power of the Inquisition was at its height, led directly to the horrors of the totalitarian states of the last century. The behaviour of the Church created a precedent for these horrors, a precedent made more powerful because it was practised by the highest religious authority. Through its five-hundred-year pursuit of heretics through this office, the Church demonstrated how a carefully thought out and minutely organized policy using intimidation, censorship, torture and terror as its tools of power could offer a model of ensuring conformity of belief among vast numbers of people. Nothing reflects the pathology that had such an iron grip on the Christian psyche more than these sacrificial rituals executed in the name of God.

The Negative Legacy of St. Augustine
The Doctrine of Original Sin inflicted a deep wound on the Western psyche. It was a catastrophe not only for sexuality in general but for woman who was held to be the prime carrier of the ‘lower’ animal instincts. As Karen Armstrong writes in her history of misogyny in the Christian Church, The End of Silence: Women and the Priesthood, “Sin, sex and woman were bound together in an unholy Trinity in the Western Christian imagination by the powerful theology of St. Augustine.”(15)
          Sexual intercourse was declared to be only for the purpose of procreation, never for pleasure. Woman was not to be regarded as the beloved companion of man but only as a kind of useful functionary—the bearer of his seed and provider of his meals. If possible, couples were to live in chastity within marriage. In the view of the Church Fathers, the only way a woman could gain men’s respect was to remain a virgin. If men chose the spiritual life, they could not allow themselves to be ‘defiled’ by intercourse with women. In the fourth and fifth centuries, “Virginity was the Christian virtue par excellence.”(16)
          Because infants were contaminated from the moment of their conception by the transmission of original sin from their parents, if they died without being baptized, their souls could not be saved and were consigned to limbo. One can imagine the effects of this doctrine on parents who had lost a child. From this twisted belief, the Catholic Church developed the idea which survived until very recently, that if it came to a choice of saving one or the other in childbirth, it was more important to save the life of the un-baptized infant than the life of its mother in order that the infant should receive baptism. The suffering generated by this belief is unimaginable and indefensible.
          The belief about the sinfulness of sexuality also led to the idea that a priest or deacon who serves God must be celibate and to many attempts by the Church to enforce celibacy on its clergy—most of them unsuccessful. The underlying fear was that sexual contact with a woman would defile the holy sacraments. The earliest attempts date to a Council held in Spain in the fourth century when married priests were enjoined to avoid intercourse with their wives. Pope Gregory the Great (d. 604) decreed that a priest, once ordained, should “love his wife like a sister and shun her like an enemy.” Pope Gregory VII in the eleventh century called for “severing intercourse between priests and women by means of everlasting anathema.” Finally, in 1139, Pope Innocent II proclaimed that ordained priests could not marry. A few centuries later, the Council of Trent (1545–63) forbade men who were already married from becoming priests. (17)
          A sombre reflection on the legacy of St. Augustine is offered by the late Philip Sherrard in his perceptive book The Rape of Man and Nature. I am quoting Sherrard at some length because he shows how differently we might have perceived ourselves:

It is one of the paradoxes, and also one of the tragedies, of the Western Christian tradition that the man who affirmed so strongly the presence of God in the depths of his own self…should as a dogmatic theologian have been responsible more perhaps than any other Christian writer for ‘consecrating’ within the Christian world the idea of man’s slavery and impotence due to the radical perversion of human nature through original sin. It has been St. Augustine’s theology which in the West has veiled down to the present day the full radiance of the Christian revelation of divine sonship – the full revelation of who man essentially is…He deprives the element of manhood in the God-manhood reality of any genuine positive quality, and to do this is to empty the concept of divine sonship of its effective significance.

Through the Fall man and the natural order are deprived of even that extrinsic participation in grace which they possessed in their pre-fallen state. Their original and true nature is now vitiated, totally corrupt and doomed to destruction…As for the communication of grace, through which alone man and the world may be redeemed from depravity, this...was confined to the visible church and depended on the performance of certain rites, like baptism, confirmation, ordination and so on, which it was the privilege of the ecclesiastical hierarchy to administer to a submissive and obedient laity.

The magnificent scope of the Logos doctrine with its whole “cosmic” dimension – the idea of God incarnate in all human and created existence – was tacitly and radically constricted in Western thinking…The Church became the unique sphere of the Spirit’s manifestation…Everything outside the limits of the Church was secular, deprived of grace, incurably corrupt and doomed to disintegration.(18)

The Logos doctrine outlined above, which derived from Plato, could have kept alive the participatory consciousness of the lunar era and taken it to a new and conscious level of relationship with the cosmos and the recognition that the whole earthly order of reality was intrinsically divine because it existed within the Being of God. It seems a tragedy for Western Christianity that this insight was lost.
          St. Augustine can be described as a world-denying contemplative rather than a world-embracing one. The stance he took against his own desires was agonizing for him and for generations of Christians. Yet, his struggle with himself must be seen in the context of the world of his time and the widening split between the conscious mind and the instinctive soul. In spite of my recognition of the deep wound he inflicted on the Christian psyche, I am always deeply moved by these words in one of the most exquisite passages to come from the heart of a lover of God: “Too late I came to love thee, O thou Beauty both so ancient and so fresh, yea too late came I to love thee. And behold, thou wert within me, and I out of myself, where I made search for thee.”(19)
          The core Christian belief is that humanity is so steeped in depravity and sin that only the sacrifice of the Son of God could redeem it. Six centuries after St. Augustine, St. Anselm (AD 1033–1109), an Italian priest who became Archbishop of Canterbury, wrote in his Meditation on Human Redemption: “A man appended to a cross suspends the eternal death impending over the human race; a man fastened to a cross unfastens a world affixed to endless death.” Those who did not belong to the Church were thought to be consigned to this endless death.
          With the Reformation, when some change might have been expected, both Luther and Calvin continued to base their teaching on the Doctrine of Original Sin and the need of redemption by Christ’s sacrificial death because of it. Both saw woman’s role as confined to child-bearing and obeying her husband. The phrase “A woman’s place is in the home” originated with Luther. If anything, the sense of guilt and sin was augmented by Luther and Calvin and the subjection of sinful humanity to the will of a fearful, ever-vigilant and punishing God perpetuated. Calvin sent to the stake the brilliant Spanish scientist, doctor and theologian, Michael Servetus, who was the first European scientist to discover the pulmonary circulation of the blood. Servetus had dared to challenge Calvin’s Institutes and reject his teaching on original sin and human depravity. It seems that men like Calvin were so saturated by these beliefs that it was impossible to separate themselves from them. As D.H. Lawrence was to write so powerfully in Lady Chatterly’s Lover, “The Christian religion lost, in Protestantism finally, the togetherness with the universe, the togetherness of the body, the sex, the emotions, the passions, with the earth and sun and stars.”
          In their literal belief in the myth of the Fall, generations of theologians and priests taught men and women that this world was a fallen one that could only be redeemed by the sacrificial death of the Son of God. Secondly they warned men not to trust women and women not to trust themselves or each other. Matthew Fox observes in his book Original Blessing that the doctrine of original sin can itself give rise to sin and, above all, to distrust of life:

A devastating corollary of the fall/redemption tradition is that religion with original sin as its starting point and religion built exclusively around sin and redemption does not teach trust. Such a religion does not teach trust of existence or of body or of society or of creativity or of cosmos. It teaches both consciously and unconsciously, verbally and non-verbally, fear. Fear of damnation, fear of nature – beginning with one’s own; fear of others; fear of the cosmos. In fact, it teaches distrust beginning with distrusting of one’s own existence, one’s own originality, and one’s own glorious entrance into this word of glory and of pain. (20)

Through my work as a therapist, I found that the belief in original sin and the profound rejection of woman, the body and sexuality as well as the deep sense of self-rejection that is intrinsic to it are still carried in the unconscious psyche of Western men and women, no matter how much they may have adapted to a secular culture. From a Jungian perspective, man’s anima – the unconscious internalized image of woman that he carries in his psyche – has been imprinted with the image of Eve and the Christian teaching on original sin. This may cause him to fall back on old beliefs about woman’s inferiority and subservience whenever he feels threatened in his relationships with women. It may also be responsible for the negative view of themselves that many women hold, and the difficulty they still have in establishing themselves in professions hitherto open only to men or in leaving abusive relationships. These old beliefs persist in the debasement and abuse of women displayed in pornography and in rap lyrics, as well as in the revolting trade of trafficking women and the devastating and widespread use of rape as a weapon of war.
          The current obsession with sex, promiscuity and pornography that is now so much a part of modern Western culture does nothing to transform the underlying stratum of misogynistic beliefs inherited from the past. If anything, it perpetuates and reinforces them. Woman is still demeaned by being presented in the tabloid press as a sexual object for the gratification of man’s sexual desire and, in situations where neither her family nor society offer her any protection, may become the victim of predatory males. We now have to deal with the additional problem of organized paedophilia which also points to the presence of an unconscious sexual compulsion. All this has inflicted a devastating wound on the Christian psyche. It is a powerful thought form or complex that has not been recognized and addressed and, therefore, cannot be transformed.
          Wherever evangelical Christianity is taken, the teaching about original sin and fall/redemption theology goes with it, wounding the souls of all who are converted to Christianity. Just when it seemed as if modern Christians might be emerging from the stranglehold of this complex, Fundamentalist branches of Christianity in America and in Africa are regressing into it, activating the old belief in the inferior and subservient nature of woman. A recent statement by President Carter (July 2009) explains why he decided to leave his Baptist Church. This is an extract from his statement:

I have been a practising Christian all my life and a deacon and Bible teacher for many years. My faith is a source of strength and comfort to me, as religious beliefs are to hundreds of millions of people around the world. So my decision to sever my ties with the Southern Baptist Convention, after six decades, was painful and difficult. It was, however, an unavoidable decision when the convention’s leaders, quoting a few carefully selected Bible verses and claiming that Eve was created second to Adam and was responsible for original sin, ordained that women must be “subservient” to their husbands and prohibited from serving as deacons, pastors or chaplains in the military service…This view that women are somehow inferior to men is not restricted to one religion or belief. Women are prevented from playing a full and equal role in many faiths. Nor, tragically, does its influence stop at the walls of the church, mosque, synagogue or temple. This discrimination, unjustifiably attributed to a Higher Authority, has provided a reason or excuse for the deprivation of women’s equal rights across the world for centuries.

It is hardly surprising that so many people have rejected the dogmatic excesses of religion and turned with relief to science and a secular society.

Notes:
1. Campbell, Joseph (1988) The Power of Myth, Doubleday, New York, p.197
2. ibid, p. 99
3. Letter to Frederick Carter 29 October 1929 in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, vol. VII, eds. Keith Sagar and James T. Boulton, CUP 1993, pp. 544-5.
4. Lawrence, D. H. Last Poems, The Complete Poems of D.H. Lawrence, Vol 1, p. 17
5. Holland, Jack (2006) Misogyny, The World’s Oldest Prejudice, Constable and Robinson Ltd. London, p.11
6. Turner, Frederick (1992) Beyond Geography: The Western Spirit against the Wilderness, fourth edition, Rutgers University Press, New Jersey, p. 73
7. St. Augustine, Confessions, Book VI.15
8. Bettenson, Henry ed. & trs., The Later Christian Fathers, OUP 1970 p. 202-3 from de lib. arb. 3. 23
9. Holland, p. 91
10. Bettenson, p. 220, de trin.16
11. The City of God, Image Books, 1958
12. Confessions, Book X. 40
13. Freeman, Charles (2003) The Closing of the Western Mind, Pimlico, London, 2003, p. 299, quoting from Christopher Kirwan, Augustine, 1989, p.134
14. Freeman (2008) AD 381: Heretics, Pagans and the Christian State, Pimlico, London, pp.171-172
15. Armstrong, Karen (1993) The End of Silence, Women and the Priesthood, Fourth Estate, London, p. 107
16. Ranke-Heinemann, Uta (1990) Eunuchs for Heaven, English translation André Deutsch Ltd., London, p. 45
17. ibid, pp. 85-89
18. Sherrard, Philip (1987) The Rape of Man and Nature, Golgonooza Press, Ipswich, Suffolk. The late Philip Sherrard, born in 1922, is the author of many books on metaphysical and literary themes. He translated, with G.E. H. Palmer and Kallistos Ware, the Philokalia in 3 volumes, 1979, 1981 and 1984.
19. Confessions, Book X. 27
20. Fox, Matthew (1983) Original Blessing, Bear & Co. Santa Fe, p.82

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