Sin, The Apple, And The Miss Of The Myth

March 12, 1989
Port Charlotte

March 19, 1989
Lakeland

Theology is hardly a prime-time favorite, and I am going to deal with differing theological proposals. (Incidentally, there is a saying current in seminaries, “One does theology” or “I do theology.” I find that a deplorable use of language. I don’t “do” a book, I read a book. I don’t “do” lunch, I eat lunch. But then many of you know how grumpy I am getting to be.)

I shall try to stimulate your theological thinking. Do not be unnecessarily alarmed. There was a 17th century literary figure who commented, “From time to time I try to be a philosopher, but cheerfulness keeps breaking in.” My paraphrase of that is, “from time to time I try to be a theologian, but cheerfulness keeps breaking in.”

My presentation divides this way:

1.The sin and the apple.
2.The miss of the myth – that is, a double use of “miss” - Eve is the Miss of the myth. But the miss of the myth is to blame Eve.
3.How recent scholarly research demonstrates the controversial debates of early Christian thinkers, and how as a political as well as theological consequence, the view prevailed that sex was sin.
4.There are tendencies in human urges, motives, and actions that might make us face up [to] the human enterprise with more stark realism and more unflinching appraisal. And that may be another level of the myth.

First, the sin and the apple. The Adam and Eve story is a myth. The story is not history with a moral, but a myth with a meaning. A myth is not history, but a story, usually with parallels in other religions, that attempts to explain why we are what we are, what “makes us tick.” Myths are “why” stories – why the serpent crawls on its belly, why women must give birth in pain and suffering, why men must toil and sweat to earn their bread, and why and how death came into the world.

“Original sin” is a keystone in the Christian architecture of salvation. Because Adam sinned, we have inherited depravity, and death came into the world. We are all sinners and cannot save ourselves. But God, in his mercy, incarnated himself as Jesus Christ, who atoned for the sins of humankind by his sacrificial death on the cross. Only Jesus could do this because he, and he alone, had no human father, and therefore did not inherit Adam’s sin.

What is “sin?” If one checks out various theological interpretations, one encounters increasing ambiguity rather than greater clarity. A theological word book of the Bible uses three or four column pages discussing the meanings and cultural contexts of the word “sin” when used in Jewish scripture.

Jewish theology has held that sin is disobedience to God (Yahveh), rather than limiting sin to Adam and Eve’s discovery and practice of sexual intercourse. Yehezkel Kaufmann, an eminent Jewish scholar, described the Adam and Eve story as an ancient myth from a non-Israeli source, a myth from older cultures.

Kaufmann and many others recognized the problem of reconciling the origin of evil when one worships an all-powerful creator – one God, monotheism. Was Yahveh then the creator of evil? How [can we] reconcile the problem of evil with a just, merciful Creator? (Theodicy)

The Judaic solution hinged on human freedom. Men and women had to recognize that theirs was the choice between good and evil. Freedom has no meaning if persons do not have choices within the power and range of human effort and experience. B. D. Napier wrote eloquently,

“... Lord, it is our nature
(you ought to know who mixed the hot ingredients)
to spurn the docile role of subjugation;
to be not merely creature but creator;
to stand alone: to cherish in ourselves
all requisite resources for renewal;
to mount with wings as eagles
to run and not be weary
to walk and not faint.”

My own view is that in the biological transition, whether you call it evolution or some other name, humans developed mental capacities of reflection, hope, guilt, and acute awareness that we live and we die. In what we call animal instinct, there seems to be no division between external perceptions and internal feelings and judgments. Humans have principles, goals, and rules. When we miss the mark (another definition of “sin”), when we fail, we are conscious of it. We are not congenitively depraved; but by nature and nurture we are humanly sensitive.

What of the apple? Why not an orange, lemon, pear, or tomato? If the apple was such an embodiment of the act of sinning, why have I heard from childhood that “an apple a day keeps the doctor away”? True, there has been a scare this week about apples sprayed with “Alar”. Although the case may not be fully resolved, the weight of opinion seems to be that the danger, if any, was exaggerated when the news first broke. There is a citation I tried to find, unsuccessfully, but I have a memory of a lecturer pointing out that the Hebrew word translated “apple” can also translate “evil” with minor change in vowel and context.

The apple persisted as the fruit which caused sin. There is a story about Angelo Cardinal Roncalli, who later became Pope John XXIII, “good Pope John”. When he was Papal Legate in Paris, he attended a fashionable dinner and was seated opposite a lady whose gown was low-cut in front. When dessert was served, the Cardinal offered a shiny apple to the lady. She declined, but he persisted and finally she asked him, “why?” He answered, “It wasn’t until Eve ate the apple that she realized how little she had on.”

This leads to the second point, “the Miss of the myth.” Eve is the Miss of the myth because the Genesis account does not report any clergy or Justice of the Peace on hand to perform a legal wedding service. Eve has been blamed for tempting Adam. Blame the woman! French detective stories had a cliché, “cherchez la femme” - find the woman. Recall all the put-downs of Eliza by Professor Higgins in “My Fair Lady.” Consider all the roving husbands whose “pass” was prefaced by “my wife doesn’t understand me.” Remember all the years of strife and pain women had to endure in our own country to acquire the right to vote. Any woman among you could extend the list on and on. Remember Adam’s alibi, “the woman Thou gavest me, SHE gave me of the fruit of the tree and I ate it.”

The causes of ages of discrimination are complex. That, too, is the miss of the myth – miss in the order of meaning: error, mistake, shortcoming. The ancient and frequently prehistoric myths and stories were altered and eventually written down by men. God was a father-god. The older dominance of religion by female gods was suppressed, written out by patriarchal religion, particularly in the monotheistic religions – Judaism, Islam, and Christianity.

But ancient undercurrents still flowed, although many times obscured. The elementary, prehistoric female gods had many names in the lands we call the near-East: Ishtar in Mesopotamia, Ashtoreth in Syria and Palestine, Astarte in Babylon, Isis in Egypt and Rome. She was often worshiped as the “Queen of Heaven.”

Jeremiah, that stern Hebrew patriarchal prophet (44/2) complained that Hebrew women were baking cakes for the Queen of Heaven. Is it coincidence, or the undercurrent surfacing again and again, that Mary, the mother of Jesus, is dearly beloved by Roman Catholics, and she, too, is sometimes prayed to as the Queen of Heaven? And as the Mother of God?

This brings the third point: how recent scholarly research demonstrates that in the early Christian centuries, there was much controversy before the authoritarian church proclaimed that sexual intercourse was the sin of Adam and Eve.

ADAM, EVE, AND THE SERPENT, by Elaine Pagels (Random House, 1988) is a most illuminating study illustrating how the nature of original sin was controversial for nearly 400 years in Christian church history. Dr. Elaine Pagels is a faculty member at Princeton University Seminary, a theological school in the Presbyterian tradition. Her book of a few years ago, THE GNOSTIC GOSPELS, attracted much praise and respect for her scholarship. Some of you may have recently seen her on Bill Moyers’ PBS interview program.

As she writes in the introduction, “If any of us could come to our own culture as a foreign anthropologist and observe traditional Christian attitudes toward sexuality and gender and how we view human nature in relation to politics, philosophy, and psychology, we might well be astonished at the attitudes we take for granted. Augustine, one of the greatest teachers of Western Christianity, derived many of these attitudes from the story of Adam and Eve: that sexual desire is sinful; that infants are infected from the moment of conception with the disease of original sin; and that Adam’s sin corrupted the whole of nature itself. Even those who think of Genesis as literature, and those who are not Christian, live in a culture indelibly shaped by such interpretations as these.” (XIX)

The early centuries of Christian history were marked by struggle, internal conflicts, making converts, persecuted at times by the Roman Empire (although times of persecution were more scattered than popularly believed). Eventually, under Emperor Constantine, Christianity became the official state religion.

Up to that time, the Garden of Eden story had not been interpreted as the sin of sexual desire and sexual intercourse. As Pagels writes, “Christians regarded freedom as the primary message of Genesis 1-3 – freedom in its many forms, including free will, freedom from demonic powers, freedom from tyrannical government and from fate, and self-mastery as the source of such freedom.” (XXV) There were many sources for such an appraisal but, because of time limitations, we must leap forward to Augustine and his principal opponents, Pelagius and Julian of Eclanum.

Pelagius, a pious monk from Britain, argued that death did not come to the human race as a consequence of Adam’s fall, but that death was in the nature of things. As against Augustine’s position, Pelagius asserted that “ ‘our will cannot affect the course of nature. Christians are free to make moral choices and moral decisions.’ ... God being just would not have punished anyone but Adam for what Adam had done; certainly he would not condemn the whole race for one man’s transgression.” (Pagels, pp. 129, 131)

Julian of Eclanum, bishop of a small town in southern Italy, pursued similar arguments, e.g., “As for original sin, the merit of one single person is not such that it would change the structure of the universe itself.” (Pagels, p. 133)

Augustine’s arguments seem both unsound and awkward. He denies any human capacity for free will. Not only that, Augustine had neurotic sexual hangups, in my opinion (read his CONFESSIONS). He had only contempt for those who regarded sexual desire as natural energy, calling it “diabolical excitement of the genitals.” (Pagels, p. 140) Today, some of his arguments are astonishing, to say the least. “... male semen itself already shackled by the bond of death transmits the damage incurred by sin.” (Pagels, p. 109) Hence, Augustine concludes every human being ever conceived though male semen is already contaminated with sin.

I do not want to sell-short the power of sexuality, particularly in our time when sexuality is erotically flamboyant in TV, girlie magazines, underwear ads, just for a short list. A poll in 1958 revealed that Patrick Henry’s “give me liberty or give me death” had become the second-best known quote in American history. Only Mae West’s “come up and see me sometime” was more famous (see AMERICAN AGE, Walter LaFeber, p. 54).

Why did Augustine prevail? Why did his arguments on original sin become official doctrine? Both the church (by this time authoritarian) and the imperial Empire were linked. Both wanted obedient citizens. If the people were taught officially they were pre-destined sinners, that they did not possess the capacity for choice, religious or political, they were not apt to be rebellious. The doctrine of original sin made persons more accepting, less questioning, of church authority or state authority. Thus, Augustine prevailed, the church prevailed, the state prevailed. Freedom of choice, the right to make moral choices, was squashed for centuries.

Why was it easy for such a hopeless doctrine to prevail? Pagels offers a proposition that should interest psychologists and analysts, “people would rather feel guilty than helpless.” (p. 146) How many times in the face of accident, disaster, or misfortune, have you heard a person say, or perhaps said this yourself, “What did I ever do to deserve this?” Searching for a reason to feel guilty rather than powerless? “Why me?” To the sufferer, Augustine said, you personally are not to blame for what has come upon you; the blame goes back to our father, Adam, and our mother, Eve. Nevertheless you are guilty of their sin because you inherited their depravity. How about it, professionals in the field, would we rather feel guilty or powerless?

There has been a vast volume of Christian literature on original sin. In our Unitarian and Universalist traditions, it was revolt against this Augustinian doctrine of sin-diseased humanity that largely created our movements. Our positions were that human nature was basically good, or had the power to do good. All souls were of worth, not depraved, and would be saved.

Psychoanalysts and psychologists have interpreted the myth of Eden in their own disciplines according to varying appraisals of human nature. Freud, Theodore Reik, Karl Abraham, Roheim, Rank, and others have explored the myth. I have little competence and no time to study and appraise their assumptions and conclusions. But the important point is that so many have felt this myth of Eden to be of substantial importance in our understanding of ourselves.

But in the time I have left, I want to look at the old myth as confronting us with the disasters created by power gone awry.

[Editor’s note: At this point, page 9 (of 11) is missing. In its place is a second copy of page 10]

... political power never seem to quote:

“The care of the public must oversway ALL private respects.”

“We should be willing to abridge ourselves of superfluities for the supply of others’ necessities.”

Now I trust I am not hopelessly naïve. Any candidate who ran on a platform of [John] Winthrop’s last two proposals couldn’t be elected dog-catcher, as they say. Would you vote for him/her? Would I? All groups want some variety of dominion; a myth not of “original” sin, but persisting sin. Much more than individuals usually, groups in power will not only resist yielding power but also will hunger and plea for more and more power.

A medieval monk, shocked by the corruption of many monasteries, formulated his “law of the monastic cycle”: “Discipline begets abundance; and abundance, unless we take the utmost care, destroys discipline; and discipline in its fall pulls down abundance.” That is a process that extends beyond monastic cycles. It is the process by which nations, empires, and economic systems rise, become corrupted, and fall. To quote Henry Adams, “power is poison.”

“Salvation by character” was a Unitarian principle in the 19th and early 20th centuries. To put it another way, you were saved by the kind of person you were, the principles to which you were faithful, the way you behaved toward others. With the huge size of governments, communications media, corporations and their economic systems, the constantly growing world population, individual salvation by character, however fulfilling for an individual, cannot suffice to mitigate the centralities of corrupt power.

To quote Niebuhr from another of his books (THE CHILDREN OF LIGHT AND THE CHILDREN OF DARKNESS), “Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.”

The philosopher Karl Jaspers and a Swiss jurist were discussing democracy. Both agreed that it was beyond doubt the best form of government. The jurist commented, “thus we must worship the state.” Jaspers rejoined, “What! Must I worship the monster, too?” Institutions, particularly governments and all their extensions of grasping power, are not idols to be worshiped, but agreements to be audited, checked, monitored, and constantly reformed. Otherwise, history instructs us that there will be revolution. Revolutions for the most part just change the names and faces of those in power who hold and abuse excess power with a different set of slogans.

I have much over-used my time. You may ask, am I completely overwhelmed by the poor prospect of most humankind? I take hope in a sentence by religious writer and teacher, Martin Marty, “We do not know enough about the future to be absolutely pessimistic.”