white blazes

            It is hard to underestimate or overstate Saint Augustine’s influence on Christian thinking from the late 3^rd century onward. That is to say, he is highly shaping in Reformation thinking as well as in Roman Catholicism. One can see his influence in Reformed Doctrine, such as: total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, and well, we can just say the whole system of Calvinism. Luther was an Augustinian monk and his announcement that salvation is God’s free gift (no work of depraved humanity necessary—besides faith in Jesus, of course) is an Augustinian feature. It is unlikely that Augustine would have been a follower of these leaders, but they were certainly his followers begotten long after he.            

  Augustine took a firm line as it related to the beginning, and more specifically, the fall narrative of the Christian Scriptures. British monk and opponent of Augustine, Pelagius, disagreed with Augustinian views on sin being an original feature to all human existence post the Garden event. Pelagius spoke of the “possibility” humans have to not sin as a praise of the possibility that God has made.[1] He, and his disciples, saw that humans had the free will to choose to sin (or not) and this was interestingly cause for debate after The City of God was written. It is clear that this engagement, and ultimately Pelagius himself, drew out the inner loyalty of the Western church, which came down on Augustine’s side of the issue. This judgment may have highlighted and enlivened the idea of original sin to a degree that made Trinitarian debate and reasoned engagement with the humanity of Christ a touchy topic even to the present day. We are, that is, often inclined to emphasize the divine and extreme forms of depravity in polarizing form since Pelagianism received its damning nail by the currents of the tradition. One might ask why this is, and further, what implications this has for Augustine’s view of humanity? Also, for our concern here, how do these implications situation Augustine’s understanding of women?

SINGULARITY & THE UNNAMED WOMAN

            One could begin with what a Neo-Platonic thinker, like Augustine, might deem good and evil, and how, this informs his understanding of not only the fall of Rome but also the fall of humanity.[2] It is clear that Augustine sees God as a neat and clean god who “had caused all men to be derived from one, for the sake of showing how highly He prizes unity in a multitude.”[3] This passage is taken just after he levels a critique of Pelagius through a description of human will being further fallen that that of the animals because “lions or dragons have never waged with their kind such wars as men have waged with one another.”[4] Evil, for Augustine, is a privation of good and so he sees the evil of human nature in the consent, which the will gives to evil and therefore prior to human beginnings since it is conceived in thought.[5] So it is that the will can delight in evil, pre-fall even. The pressure and force of Augustine’s thinking here is assuming that when one reads that account in Genesis, a similar thing is happening, while the multitude is collected into one representative couple—or in Augustine one man. The diverse forms of both humanity and ecological existence are silenced for a more deterministic view of creation and human singularity—one God ultimately determines.[6] This thinking insinuates something about women, as we will see, but also supposes that evil is a derivative of singularity rather than multiplicity.

            Perhaps the implication in Augustinian thinking is to emphasis the idea that humanity is marked in singularity—the singular beginnings and telos in this case become male. And so, the rhetoric of redemption becomes single in its outlook. This is a problem that Augustine picks up near the end of The City of God because those who have listened to him have concluded that women with simply be male in the fulfillment of the ages.[7] These are questions that Augustine helpfully does not answer in simply metaphysical terms but rather assumes a conforming of the person to the image and likeness of the Son of God is to happen in varying degrees. The impulse is again toward an atomistic singularity—so the question results in Augustine having to condition former statements, likening Adam and Jesus such that women are omitted, as if they were in the first place. One has to wonder if this is a characteristic of the culture, and so seasons Augustine and his contemporaries, such that, to think of the diversity in creation and humanity being the indicative will of a more abundant God: Father, Son and Spirit, is to question their poor reading of Genesis in the first place. Perhaps, to read Genesis well one must use the name “Eve”, which Augustine does only a few times in the City of God and omits in passage talking about the “fall.”

ALLEGORICAL, NATURAL THEOLOGY & THE IMPLICATIONS

            Augustine’s mode of reading is so allegorical that often bends the descriptions and stories toward inferences that can be situation next to each other to indicate the a priori that is assumed by a male reading of texts. For instance, to explain the blood and water that falls from Jesus’ side, Augustine likens it to the Sacraments that constitute the Church, and therefore, the woman that came from the side of man.[8] This is cute and could even fit oddly with some words of Paul, but, what is confusing about this interpretive move is whether it is a result of forgetting Eve and then finding convenient opportunities to make the body of Christ female, or, choosing to omit half the “city of God” in an autobiography of the Church.[9] Certainly, it is clear that the mode I am reading Augustine is similar to the way Augustine was reading Scripture, coming with certain questions or issues that the text, in this case The City of God doesn’t seem to entertain. It is ironic really.

            Now, it might be helpful to glimpse from a different angle what I am getting at with Augustine’s thought as it relates to women. Because the story of Genesis’ Paradise is relegated to another dimension, Augustine assumes that the only relevance (or primary relevance) is the post-Edenic existence.  What is derived from this is a frustrated view of sexuality that privileges an unclear natural theology in place of an unfolding story (Scripture) that the cosmos is caught up in. This would insinuate the “fall” happens and happened, however, Augustine is limited in his systematic rendering, such that, he can only say that the “fall” happened. So, he begins his instruction with words that confuse the shame Adam and Eve experienced with the secrecy that marks sexual activity between couples.[10] That is to say that procreation and childbirth are ultimately shame-filled acts in which the participants are giving into deeply depraved forms of lust. He speaks then of an external wisdom within the human that governs action of this sort. It becomes clear, as he sites Plato’s Rebublic that he is barrowing language that is foreign to the biblical text and charged with a dualistic view of self.[11] The negative variables (lust) are caught up in a different sphere or mode of existence (shadow world or pre-Eden memory) and that is what we come in contact with in right action. Augustine’s  former way of life has clearly brought much to bear on this conversation.

            What subtly happens here is that the emotion, lust, anger and other helpful parts of a human are separated. As he describes lust for a lover, he lands in negative intonation to say that this unexplainable event of emotion must be evil, and even represent the “fall” itself (Eve’s lust for the apricot). One can see how this makes Eve (and oddly not Adam) the point of temptation to lust and sin. Augustine plays right into the ancient stories that render women this way.[12] Also, Augustine’s natural theology comes out in this way. He asked why it is that the consummation of married is to be done without witness of others, and concludes, that it “seeks to be known, but yet dreads to be seen.”[13] I would venture to say that Augustine has no real way of knowing if this was true from the first humans, since, as they consummated their union there was not witnesses to witness—besides God, who is, welcomed into participated in a Jewish ceremony. All this to say, that Augustine has made the emotional, and sexual part of people—women being the cause and focus of it all—to be something unhelpful and even harmful to human identity.

THE MARGINAL VOICES REMEMBERED

            If a young woman were to grow up in a context were she was shamed for curious questions related to her sexuality, assured that the story of the “fall” was about her mother Eve tempting men into anger and lust, told that when she went to heaven she didn’t have to worry about all that because she might be male anyway, and finally told (to some effect) that this is what it is to be Christian, when she got to college I wonder what her thoughts on the whole thing would be. Augustine, read critically, is not the best resource for Christian discipleship as it relates to gender, and specifically a full view of a woman’s role in the unfolding story of God. Surely this does not discount The City of God and its aims on engaging the fall of the Rome Empire, however, it does mean that women looking for solace in the Christian tradition will find themselves identifying with marginal voices. Augustine’s influence is widespread and even dominant as it relates to these topics[14] and others. These voices are gaining a hearing, not without struggle, and are helpful in telling a counter-narrative to the dominant (often helpful, destructive and lacking) story of Christian existence.