Adam and Eve in Scripture Theology and L PDF

Adam and Eve in Scripture,
Theology, and Literature

Adam and Eve in Scripture,
Theology, and Literature
Sin, Compassion, and Forgiveness
Peter B. Ely
LEXINGTON BOOKS
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Copyright © 2018 by Lexington Books
Chapter one was previously published as “Paul Ricoeur on the Symbolism of Evil: A
Theological Retrieval,” in Ultimate Reality and Meaning: Interdisciplinary Studies in the
Philosophy of Understanding, University of Toronto Press, vol. 24, no. 1, 2001.
Part of chapter three was previously published as “The Adamic Myth in the Christian Idea of
Salvation,” Ultimate Reality and Meaning Journal, vol. 28, no. 2, 2005.
Part of chapter four was previously published as “Forgiveness in Christianity,” Ultimate
Reality and Meaning Journal, vol. 27, no. 2, 2004.
Part of chapter five was previously published as “Chrysostom and Augustine on the Ultimate
Meaning of Human Freedom,” Ultimate Reality and Meaning Journal, vol. 29, no. 3, 2006.
Chapter eleven was previously published as “Detective and Priest: The Paradoxes of
Simenon’s Maigret,” Christianity & Literature, vol. 59, issue 3, June 2010, 453-477.
Unless otherwise noted, scripture texts in this work are taken from the New American Bible,
revised edition © 2010, 1991, 1986, 1970 Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, Washington,
D.C. and are used by permission of the copyright owner. All Rights Reserved. No part of the
New American Bible may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the
copyright owner.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by
any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval
systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who
may quote passages in a review.
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Names: Ely, Peter B., author.
Title: Adam and Eve in scripture, theology, and literature : sin, compassion,
and forgiveness / Peter B. Ely.
Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, 2018. | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017058247 (print) | LCCN 2017054680 (ebook) | ISBN
9781498573900 (Electronic) | ISBN 9781498573894 (cloth : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Adam (Biblical figure) | Eve (Biblical figure)
Classification: LCC BS580.A4 (print) | LCC BS580.A4 E49 2018 (ebook) | DDC
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To my brother, John, and our mother, Janet, who first
taught us compassion, and to my sister in law, Kathy,
who embodies it.
Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction: Adam and Eve, Original Sin, Compassion,

and Forgiveness 1
PART I: SYMBOL, MYTH, AND BIBLICAL NARRATIVE
1 Paul Ricoeur: A Wider Context for the Adamic Myth 25
2 The Adamic Myth in the Hebrew Testament 55
3 The Adamic Myth in the New Testament 83
PART II:
THE SYMBOL GIVES RISE TO THOUGHT:
FROM BIBLICAL NARRATIVE TO
AUTOBIOGRAPHY, THEORY, AND DOCTRINE
4 Augustine: Original Sin and Compassion 107
5 A
dam and Eve and Original Sin: Classical Formulations
and Modern Developments 139
6 Compassion as Prelude to Forgiveness 165
7 René Girard: Original Sin as Covetousness 187
vii
viii Contents
PART III:
THE WORD BECOMES FLESH:
FROM THEORY AND DOCTRINE TO
LITERATURE
8 Perceval: Compassion Awakened through Conversion 209
9 Julian of Norwich: From Blindness to the Vision of Love 233
10 Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure: Compassion in the State 257
11 D
etective and Priest: Georges Simenon’s Compassionate
Commissioner Maigret 283
Conclusion 307
Bibliography 317
Index 329
About the Author 335
Preface
In a notebook written prior to his monumental novel, In Search of Lost Time,

Marcel Proust observed, “The work [of writing] makes us a little like moth-
ers”; he wondered if he would ever be able to bring what was in him to light
(Proust 1988, xix). I now understand his use of this similie. The gestation of
my study has been long indeed. The seeds of my interest in the connection
between the story of Adam and Eve and forgiveness were planted when I first
read Paul Ricoeur’s magisterial 1967 work, The Symbolism of Evil. Ricoeur
compares four myths relating to the origin and end of evil, one of them being
the Adamic myth. I concluded from Ricoeur’s study that only the Adamic
myth—a good God, a good creation, and a disobedient humanity—opened
up any possibility of forgiveness. But what was the connection between the
Adamic myth—along with its offspring, the doctrine of original sin—and
forgiveness? I wrestled with this question, and it is the question this book
attempts to answer.
The crucial moment of awakening came during a month-long retreat at
the Trappist Abbey of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Lafayette, Oregon. In the
contemplative atmosphere of the monastery, thinking about the book I was
about to begin, but had not yet begun to write, I came across an article from
Theological Studies: Boyd Coolman’s “Hugh of St. Victor on ‘Jesus Wept’:
Compassion as Ideal Humanitas.” Coolman’s article explores the contents
of Hugh of St Victor’s (1096–1141) brief work, On the Four Wills of Christ.
In this text, Hugh “offers a carefully nuanced depiction of Jesus’ human
nature that showcases his human capacity for compassion” (Coolman, 528).
But, as Coolman points out, Hugh is eager not only to underscore Jesus’
compassion, “but also to identify such fellow-feeling as the signature attri-
bute of ideal human nature” (Ibid). Hugh of St Victor’s moving treatment,
as interpreted by Coolman, worked in my unconscious mind, what Proust
ix
x Preface
calls the “involuntary imagination,” until, in an unguarded moment, the no-

tion of compassion pushed its way into my consciousness with a startling
impact, as if it were an idea I had never before thought of. Here, at last, was
my answer to the question I feared people would ask, “So what is the con-
nection between sin—the disobedience of Adam and Eve, its consequences
for their descendants, and the individual actual sins of human beings—and
forgiveness?”
Coolman’s article and Hugh’s The Four Wills of Christ opened for me a
pathway to explore possible connections between sin and forgiveness. In the
light of my newly heightened awareness about the centrality of compassion,
I reread texts beginning with the Old and New Testaments and saw with new
clarity the pervasiveness of mercy. With the help of Peter Brown, author of
the compelling biography, Augustine of Hippo, I came to see at the heart of
Augustine’s elaboration of original sin a movement toward compassion. Rec-
ognizing the universal tendency to sin disposed Augustine toward forgive-
ness of sins that were committed, not out of pride, but out of ignorance and
weakness, “and often done by persons weeping and groaning” (Augustine On
Nature and Grace, 29.33). I had found the theme of my book.
Compassion became a heuristic concept that influenced my re-interpre-
tation of familiar texts, but also works I discovered in the course of writ-
ing this book. Such a book was Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine
Love. Julian’s visions showed her a troubling possibility that neither she
nor anyone else could have derived from Church teaching, the possibility
that God’s compassion would mysteriously extend to universal salvation.
Julian’s Revelations of Love is the subject matter of chapter nine. Frederick
Bauerschmidt’s excellent work, Julian of Norwich and the Mystical Body
Politic of Christ, finds in Julian’s visions a way of imagining political life.
“Julian should be read as one who theologically imagines the political”
(Bauerschmidt, 3). And Julian’s imagining of the political, according to Bau-
erschmidt, consists in seeing a society grounded in the compassionate image
of Christ rather than the image of an omnipotent God. After I had finished
my own manuscript, I discovered the compelling work of Cardinal Walter
Kasper, Mercy: The Essence of the Gospel and the Key to Christian Life.
And, of course, the writings of Pope Francis and, indeed, the tenor of his
papacy, have confirmed the insights central to my work. Francis’ work, The
Name of God is Mercy, A Conversation with Andrea Tornielli, beautifully
sets out what is most central to my own work. James Voiss’ 2015 study, Re-
thinking Christian Forgiveness: Theological, Philosophical, and Psychologi-
cal Explorations, a carefully developed account of how Christian forgiveness
differs from other types of forgiveness, offers an important contribution to
the field of forgiveness studies. Though Voiss does not explore an explicit
Preface xi
connection between forgiveness and compassion, his conclusion about the

distinctiveness of Christian forgiveness points in this direction. God forgives
even before we repent, says Voiss, and opens a space for repentance. We
might argue that the open space is precisely compassion. When my manu-
script was already with the publisher, I discovered another book germane to
my subject matter, Stephen Greenblatt’s The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve.
Greenblatt’s exploration of the origins of the Adam and Eve story, its varied
interpretations, and its recurrence as a literary theme attests to the continuing
inspirational power of this small but unforgettable narrative from the begin-
nings of the Judeo-Christian tradition.
I have come to see that compassion stands in a dialectical relationship
with justice. Justice and compassion are two possible responses to sin—I
am referring here to actual sin. Justice responds rationally to an injury done
through sin by weighing the appropriate punishment, given the seriousness
of the event, the intention of the one who did wrong, etc. Justice represents
an advance over a more primitive response to wrong done through another’s
action, namely, vengeance. Vengeance rises up in the injured person as an
immediate, irrational, quasi-physical response to the one who inflicted the
injury. So the first dialectic is between vengeance and justice, but once justice
has triumphed over vengeance, a new dialectic comes to the fore between
justice and compassion. Whereas justice punishes in a rational, balanced, and
appropriate way, compassion responds to the suffering that lies at the root of
sins committed. Compassion opens up a new horizon within which to assess
the harm done. Without excusing the evil done me, I am able to see that the
one who offended me and I are not utterly different beings. The offender is
not just evil, and I am not just good. In this book we will discover the dia-
lectic of justice and compassion played out in a variety of settings; Julian
of Norwich will push compassion, God’s compassion in Christ, to its most
extreme limit, such that God does not even blame the sinner. Other authors,
as will become evident in the “Introduction,” will explore this dialectic in a
variety of ways.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Seattle University for granting me academic leave from the

University in 2008–2009 to pursue this project and also to Santa Clara Uni-
versity for welcoming me and supporting my work with a Bannan Fellow-
ship. Both the welcome and the fellowship provided a favorable environment
for writing. I am particularly grateful to Sonny Manuel, Kevin Quinn, Jerry
McKevitt, David John Pleins, Michael McCarthy, and all of Santa Clara, who
supported my project in a variety of ways.
Four Seattle University professors—David Leigh, Valerie Lesniak, Cyn-
thia Moe-Lobeda, and Jason Wirth read the first version of the manuscript
and offered valuable advice and support. Other readers and scholars have
helped with all or parts of the manuscript: John Topel, Jim Tracy, Karen and
Dan Quinn-Shea, John Ely, Kathy Ely, Monica Horsman, Mike Herzog, and
Matthew Whitlock. I am particularly grateful to Catherine Smith who read
and edited the entire manuscript. Even more valuable than her editing was
Catherine’s enthusiastic support. Finally I acknowledge and thank the edi-
tors of Christianity and Literature for allowing me to reprint chapter eleven
of Ultimate Reality and Meaning, and for permission to reprint portions of
chapters one, three, four, and five. I am, of course, also most grateful to Sarah
Craig, Julia Torres, and Meaghan Menzel of Lexington Books, for their as-
sistance in bringing the manuscript to publication.
xiii
Introduction
Adam and Eve, Original Sin,
Compassion, and Forgiveness
When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were
harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.
—Matthew 9:36, NRSV1
This book considers the story of Adam and Eve, the history of its interpreta-
tions—especially the doctrine of original sin—and forgiveness. The Jahwist
editor who introduced the story of Adam and Eve into the Pentateuch was
giving an account of how hardship and difficulty and contradiction entered
into human life. More important, he was setting out the remedy, a way of
overcoming the consequences of the first couple’s disobedience. The remedy
that emerges in the Hebrew Testament’s description of God’s relation to his
people is compassion. A tiny gesture on God’s part offers an indication of the
response that would characterize God’s relations with sinful humanity. See-
ing their nakedness, God made leather garments for the couple (Gen 3:21).
Admittedly, the gesture is ambiguous. God could have just been providing
a better version of the fig leaves Adam and Eve had sewed together. David
Clines, as we will see in chapter two, notes this gesture as one of several
“mitigations” God devised to soften his punishments. Full forgiveness does
not take place in the Genesis account of Adam and Eve, but compassion does
emerge as a defining characteristic of God’s dealing with his people in the
Hebrew Testament.
The mediating role of compassion between sin and forgiveness forms the
subject matter of this book. I will argue that compassion performs a crucial
mediating role, enabling people, once offended, to move toward forgiveness.
This position addresses a fundamental challenge both for human concep-
tions of God and for human self-understanding. A natural human tendency,
1
2 Introduction
attributed even to God in our anthropomorphic representations, is to hold

on to a hurt rather than let it go, and to contemplate vengeance rather than
forgiveness. How, then, do individuals and groups move toward forgiveness?
Through compassion. This, at least, is the argument the book advances.
This general proposition, however, applies differently to God and human
beings. Compassion as a response to sin comes from the convergence of jus-
tice and mercy in God, who is by nature, as the reluctant prophet Jonah con-
fessed, “a gracious and merciful God, slow to anger, rich in clemency, loathe
to punish” (Jn. 4:2b). Or as Hosea puts it when describing God’s intention
to put an end to Israel’s Exile: “My heart is overwhelmed, my pity is stirred.
I will not give vent to my blazing anger, I will not destroy Ephraim again;
For I am God not man, the Holy One present among you . . .” (Hos. 11:8–9).
But the convergence of justice and mercy natural to God occurs in human
beings only as the result of long effort sustained by grace. Some people seem
by nature more disposed to compassion than others, but generally human be-
ings struggle to be compassionate and thus must follow a different path than
the one indicated by natural inclination. The general theory about the role of
compassion as mediator between sin and forgiveness requires further elabora-
tion, a kind of special theory.
If God moves through compassion toward forgiveness by the perfect
blending of justice and mercy, what moves human beings? Original sin—not
the doctrine, but the awareness of original sin in oneself—I will argue, acts
as a powerful motive toward compassion and forgiveness. The conscious-
ness that I personally participate, not only in the possibilities that belong to
humanity, but also in a general vulnerability of the human will that frustrates
those possibilities and leads to sin, helps me to be compassionate toward
other sinners. Compassion means entering into the weakness, or suffering, or
distress of the other person and seeing it as my own. If I cannot see that the
sinner who did this or that horrible deed against me (or against us) shares a
common human weakness that afflicts all human beings—including me, the
offended—and if I cannot feel that weakness and find myself at home in it as
a fellow traveler who could have done the same thing, or worse, then it is hard
to be forgiving. Or, to put it positively, if I can feel this kind of compassion
for the sinner, I have at least opened a path to forgiveness. If we all participate
in what Alan Jacob calls the “democracy of sin” where no one is simply and
without qualification just and no one completely wicked, we are more likely
to be open to forgiveness. John Paul II has said that there is no peace without
justice and no justice without forgiveness.
Two examples will illustrate the thesis. Everett Worthington, a psychologist
who has written extensively on the dynamics of forgiveness, found himself in
a position that seemed at first to give the lie to his own commitment to em-
Adam and Eve, Original Sin, Compassion, and Forgiveness 3
pathy as an opening to forgiveness. His mother was brutally murdered in her

home by a young man who broke in to burglarize. Worthington found himself
filled with rage and thoughts of vengeance toward the young man. “I’d like to
have that murderer alone in a room with just a baseball bat. I’d beat his brains
out” (Worthington 1999b; Schimmel, 100). This desire made Worthington
wonder if he really believed what he had written about forgiveness, namely
“that empathy was a key to forgiving.” So imagining the scene of the crime,
Worthington reconstructed what he thought must have happened. The young
man, he suspected, had broken in to rob without any intention of harming any-
one, thinking that the occupant of the house was away. Then, confronted with
Worthington’s mother in the doorway, the intruder panicked and killed her.
This reconstruction was already an act of compassion. It meant being willing
to put a more favorable interpretation on a terrible act. “Through empathy, I
understood that he had lashed out in fear, surprise, guilt, and anger.” Not only
did Worthington experience empathy, he was humbled to recognize that his
own wanting to beat the young man’s brains out was equivalent to the crime
committed against his mother; he was like the killer. This combination of em-
pathy and humility allowed Worthington to commit himself to forgiveness.2
A second example comes from a survivor of the Rwandan genocide. In
her book, Left to Tell, Immaculée Ilibagiza vividly describes her three-month
confinement in a tiny bathroom with seven other women, barricaded from
the adjoining room by a wardrobe put in place to cover the door. The eight
women could hear the Hutu soldiers chanting on the other side of the wall:
“Kill the Tutsis big and small . . . kill them one and kill them all. Kill them!”
(Ilibagiza 2006, 92). For hours Immaculée struggled in prayer to move from
thoughts of vengeance to forgiveness. Finally she heard God’s answer “as
clearly as if we’d been sitting in the same room chatting: You are all My
children” (Ibid., 94). This simple answer from God opened Ilibagiza’s heart
to forgiveness. “Yes, they were barbaric creatures who would have to be
punished severely for their actions, but they were still children. . . . For the
first time, I pitied the killers. I asked God to forgive their sins and turn their
souls to His beautiful light” (Ibid., 94).
The movement toward forgiveness does not always display the mediating
role of compassion in such a clear light. Forgiveness comes as a gift and
comes mysteriously. Sometimes it happens spontaneously without manifest-
ing the clear stages I have described. In some people, compassion becomes
so habitual that they move toward forgiveness without noticing the process.
Perhaps we can consider the thesis negatively: without compassion, it is dif-
ficult to forgive. And without a sense that we are, as Ilibagiza came to real-
ize, all God’s children, all capable of evil, and still all loved infinitely, it is
difficult to forgive.
4 Introduction
APOLOGIA
Having briefly laid out the subject matter and theme of the book, I now of-
fer a kind of apologia, a rationale for the writing of this book on original
sin, compassion, and forgiveness and an account of how my thinking has
progressed to the point of moving me to write. I use the Latin word apologia
as John Henry Newman used it in his famous, Apologia Pro Vita Sua where
he describes a very personal account of the process that led him from the
Anglican form of Christianity to the Roman Catholic. He was reluctant to
give this account until he was confronted with a very public challenge stating
that he had no respect for the truth in itself. Newman felt obliged to respond,
not only to defend his own reputation but out of respect for his brothers in
the Catholic priesthood whose reputations were also impugned. The response
was his Apologia Pro Vita Sua: Being a History of His Religious Opinions
(Newman 1924, v–xiii).
Though I use the term apologia in the sense used by Newman, I do not
begin with his same provocation. I am motivated rather by an uncomfortable
tension in me between two opposed views, one my own conviction that the
teaching on original sin makes profound sense and is, in fact, hard to escape
if one looks around at human behavior, and, another view that believes the
teaching about original sin makes no sense and is demeaning to God and
human beings. My apologia then, describes why I think the book might be
important, states what I hope to accomplish, and details how the subject mat-
ter has developed in my thinking for a long time. I will also articulate the
hermeneutic principles that will be at work as I describe my view, and give a
brief account about how each chapter contributes to the whole.
RESISTANCE TO THE NOTION OF ORIGINAL SIN
This book claims for the doctrine of original sin or, more precisely, the per-
sonal awareness of original sin in oneself and in groups, a liberating function.
Yet anyone deciding to write about original sin must be aware of the wide-
spread resistance to the idea. The resistance itself makes the study important.
For if, as I maintain, the consciousness of original sin has a liberating func-
tion, as motive for forgiveness, then the denial of original sin eliminates an
opportunity for liberation. A closer look at the resistance will help clarify the
scope of this study.
Many have found, and many still find, the doctrine of an inherited original
sin unworthy of a loving God. Alan Jacobs of Wheaton College, opens his
2008 book, Original Sin: A Cultural History, with the comment: “All reli-
gious beliefs prompt rejection. . . . But of all the religious teachings I know,
none—not even the belief that some people are eternally damned—generates
as much hostility as the Christian doctrine we call ‘original sin’” (Jacobs
2008, ix). And James Alison, author of The Joy of Being Wrong, says that
“original sin is capable of arousing a huge depth of feeling: some blame it,
and the stage-villain Augustine, its senior brandisher, for the most spectacular
crimes against humanity” (Alison, 1).
I have encountered, even in devoted Christians, this kind of adverse re-
action, most recently as I was preparing to write this book. When people
would ask what I was writing about, I noticed a tendency in myself, as self-
protection, to avoid beginning with the topic of original sin. When I said that
the subject was forgiveness, questioners would look interested and say, “I
would like to read that when you are finished.” When, in my braver moments,
I came right out and admitted I was writing a book on original sin, people
tended to be more reserved, even puzzled, as if on the verge of asking, “Does
anyone believe in that anymore?” Sometimes I would say that I was writing a
book on the connection between original sin and forgiveness. People’s quiz-
zical looks seemed to say, “That could be interesting,” and I was immediately
anxious that they might ask, “So what is the connection?” My answer to that
question has evolved gradually, as I will show.
Adam and Eve’s story, the foundation of the doctrine of original sin in the
Christian tradition, did not lead to the same belief among the Jewish people,
even though the Hebrew Scriptures do, as we will see in chapter one, recog-
nize the universality of sin. The Hebrew Bible does not trace the origin of
universal sin to Adam and Eve. Their story does not even recur in the Hebrew
Testament after its appearance at the beginning of Genesis. Thus, this story
of a couple at the beginning of history disobeying a command of God with
disastrous consequences, does not, as Paul Ricoeur says, form a cornerstone
of Israel’s faith, or even of the Chosen People’s sense of sin. In the Hebrew
Bible, sin is infidelity to God’s covenant, turning away from worship of the
true God to idolatry, reliance on one’s own strength rather than God’s protec-
tive love. The disobedience of Adam and Eve is rooted in these same defects,
but the writers of the Hebrew scriptures do not look back to the Adamic Myth
for an understanding of sin. They look to the exodus from Egypt, the conduct
of life in the Promised Land under the judges and kings, the abominations
that brought about the Babylonian exile. The Hebrew scriptures rarely speak
of a condition that could be called original sin. Psalm 50’s “In sin my mother
conceived me,” offers a rare exception.
The prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible explicitly and forcefully reject
the earlier doctrine of Exodus that teaches a kind of inherited sin: “For I, the
Lord your God, am a jealous God, inflicting punishment for their fathers’
6 Introduction
wickedness on the children of those who hate me, down to the third and
fourth generation” (Exod. 20:5). The prophets Ezekiel and Jeremiah teach
the responsibility of each person for sins committed. The children’s teeth are
not set on edge just because the father has eaten sour grapes: “. . . only the
one who sins shall die” (Ezek. 18:4). Jeremiah repeats the same saying and
comes to the same conclusion: “. . . but through his own fault only shall any-
one die: the teeth of him who eats the unripe grapes shall be set on edge” (Jer.
31:29–30). We do not hold the German people of today responsible for the
horrors inflicted by the Nazis on the Jewish people, homosexuals, gypsies,
and anyone who opposed their practices.
Many who object to the doctrine of original sin, however, imagine it in just
the terms rejected by Israel’s prophets and see in it the same unfairness the
prophets saw. The possibility remains, of course, that the Christian doctrine
of original sin means something quite different from what Exodus taught
about the passing of guilt from one generation to the next, from blaming
present-day Germans, for instance, for the Nazis’ sins.
Understanding the Christian doctrine of original sin is one of the aims of
this study. For the moment, it is probably sufficient to say that the passing
down of guilt connected with actual sins, such as those committed by the
Nazis, is not part of the teaching on original sin. The sin that Christians call
original or originating is a tendency toward sin rather than any particular sin
in itself. Contemporary medical science offers a helpful analogy in the theory
of the immune system. A healthy immune system enables a person to ward
off diseases. When the immune system breaks down, opportunistic diseases
invade the body. Original sin, like a compromised immune system, disposes
us to a variety of actual sins.
Some object even to the idea of a tendency toward sin. Paradoxically, Pela-
gius and his tenacious follower Julian of Eclanum, helped define the doctrine
of original sin through their protracted struggle with Augustine of Hippo. For
both Pelagius and Julian, the idea that the human will is somehow wounded
or compromised from the moment of birth, and thus incapable of consistently
choosing the good without the aid of a special help from God called grace
was unfair to human beings and unworthy of God. They believed that we are
equally inclined toward good and evil, and it is up to us to choose the good
and reject the evil. After all, we have the example of Jesus and the law, and
for Pelagius and Julian of Eclanum these are enough.
Many outside the Christian tradition, most contemporary Jews for instance,
and many Christians too, find the doctrine of original sin abhorrent. To see
young children, to cite one aspect of the doctrine, as being afflicted with some
kind of sin before they are even capable of committing moral faults or taking
responsibility for their lives, goes against our spontaneous inclination to see
children as innocent. Jesus’ setting children as models for those who want to
enter the kingdom of God appears to go against the notion that they might be
contaminated by a disordered inclination prior to any actual sin on their part
that sets them up inevitably for future sins unless they are rescued by the help
of God. It seems to make more sense to see children as heading into life with
an even chance of choosing the good as of choosing the bad. Thinking of the
scales as somehow tilted against them from the start chills the optimism of
our pedagogical efforts, including moral example, enlightened discipline, and
parental love.
Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of the liberal journal Tikkun, in a beautiful
article on the opening of the Jewish feast of Yom Kippur, puts this position
persuasively when he says that at the beginning of life we are “born pure and
with the best of spiritual intentions to be the highest spiritual being we can be,
as though we were an arrow being shot straight toward God to connect more
fully, yet at various points in our lives the arrow gets slightly off track and
misses the mark. Repentance is really about a mid-course adjustment to get
back on trace [sic].” How different this is from the doctrine of original sin that
says we begin life off track and need God’s grace to get back on the right path.
But, James Alison, whose forceful statement of resistance to the idea of
original sin is cited above, is also conscious of a more positive evaluation
of original sin: “. . . others,” he says, “see it as a vital control on the self-
defeating idealism of those who restructure the world as though humans
might one day be good” (Alison, 1). Human beings, Alison suggests, will
never be simply, and without qualification, good. An Old Testament author,
affirming the universality of sin, said the same thing, “Surely there is no one
on earth so righteous as to do good without ever sinning” (Ecclesiastes 7:20).
And if the doctrine of original sin can control naïve idealism, it can also miti-
gate the self-righteousness of those who think of the world as divided into
the good and the bad; that is, themselves, the good, and their opponents, the
bad. Desmond Tutu, champion of the struggle against Apartheid in his own
South Africa, understood in the midst of his outrage against the injustice of
racial oppression, that the black majority was not uniquely good, or free of
fault, purely victimized, never victimizing; nor were the agents of apartheid
simply evil. When he and Nelson Mandela set up the famous Truth and Rec-
onciliation Commission, they began with the conviction that both sides had
committed atrocities against the other and were subject to the radical disorder
Christians call original sin.
The conviction that a radical wounding of the will afflicts every person
coming into the world, a wounding that can be healed only through the re-
demptive grace of Christ, remains a fundamental teaching of the Christian
churches. To borrow a description from Julian of Norwich’s visions, we are
8 Introduction
all the servant who has fallen into a slough and cannot get out through our
own efforts.
In this book I propose to show how the logic of the Adamic Myth, men-
tioned earlier, runs through Christianity’s history, discussing how it helps
make sense of the Christian story of salvation and is, in fact, necessary for
understanding that story. I will argue that the teaching of a solidarity in
sin shared by all humans, once appropriated as a personal conviction, is a
primary motive for the forgiveness at the heart of Christianity. We have all
received forgiveness and so we must all forgive. In a brief essay in Simon
Wiesenthal’s’ The Sunflower: The Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness,
Dennis Prager argues that no doctrine, except the divinity of Jesus itself,
distinguishes Jewish theology from Christian more than the teaching about
forgiveness (Wiesenthal 1997, 216). Perhaps Christianity’s deeper sense of
the democracy of sin helps explain why Christians are more prodigal in for-
giving. Christians repeat every day the Lord’s Prayer with its plea to “forgive
us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.”
THE BASIC AIMS OF THIS STUDY
My approach to the subject of original sin is fourfold: To illustrate the

proposition that compassion opens the path to forgiveness. The connection
might seem obvious until we reflect on how often we find ourselves trying to
forgive someone for whom we have no sympathy, in whom we see nothing
that would provide grounds for our mercy, someone who does not deserve
our forgiveness, and wondering why we cannot overcome our reluctance to
forgive. And we see others, individuals and nations, who regard their enemies
across a chasm without any bridge to the other side, filled with outrage at in-
juries experienced over tens or hundreds of years. Compassion, I will argue,
is the bridge. The second aim is to explore the story of Adam and Eve, its
various interpretations—especially the doctrine of original sin—and some of
the guises under which it has appeared in the history of Christianity. I wish
to show how this story and these interpretations open the way to a liberating
vision of human life. These first two aims converge in the movement toward
compassion implicit in a consciousness of original sin in oneself.
Aim three, implied in what has already been said, is to awaken this con-
sciousness of original sin, not just as a doctrine to be believed, but as a real-
ity to be confronted by individuals and groups. Unconsciousness of original
sin at work in individuals and groups leads to the phenomenon of excusing
oneself or one’s group and blaming others. The recognition of a universally
shared condition that is not sin itself but leads to sin, opens us to recognize
fault in ourselves and mitigates our tendency to blame others. The same suf-
fering in others—for the condition I am describing is something we suffer—
that disposes them to sin, also disposes me to sin. Recognizing the affliction
in myself, allows me to enter into the suffering of others. This ability to enter
into the suffering of others we call compassion. Compassion is a precondition
for authentic forgiveness.
Aim four is meant to clarify the abstract notion of original sin by looking
at its various names. We recognize certain tendencies in ourselves without
connecting them to the notion of original sin; I will make those connections.
For instance, René Girard interprets original sin under its biblical name,
“covetousness,” which he calls “mimetic rivalry,” or desiring what the other
has because the other has it. Such rivalry, when it becomes epidemic, leads
to “the war of all against all.” Girard’s thought is examined in chapter six.
Another name comes from the contemporary awareness of “addiction.” Ger-
ald May, in his book Addiction and Grace, has explored not only the preva-
lence of chemical addiction, but also the universality of addictive behavior
in human beings. According to May, to be human is to be addicted. “We all
suffer from both repression and addiction. Of the two, repression is by far
the milder one” (May, 1991, 2). Reading May’s book helped me understand
the various addictive behaviors that Augustine refers to in his Confessions.
Julian of Norwich, as we will see in chapter eight, names blindness to God’s
love as the structural sin at the root of other sins. The title of Marcel Proust’s
monumental novel, In Search of Lost Time (À la Recherche du Temps Perdu),
suggests another possible name for original sin. The lost time to which Proust
refers in this title is in fact the loss of contact with the creative self amid the
distractions of the social self that plagues the story’s narrator until the very
end of the novel. The lost sheep, the lost coin, the lost son (Lk. 15), lost time,
the lost self—all can be taken as metaphors for a lost paradise. “The true para-
dises,” says Proust, “are the paradises one has lost” (Proust 1989, 177). Loss
of contact with the true self names what Adam and Eve experienced along
with shame at their nakedness after eating the forbidden fruit.
The Belgian novelist, Georges Simenon, who began life as a devout Catho-
lic but renounced his faith at age fifteen, developed a profoundly sympathetic
character in the person of inspector Maigret. In one case, while trying to get to
sleep after a difficult day, in the space between waking and sleep, Maigret ex-
periences an insight into the mystery of a suspect he is struggling to compre-
hend. The insight enables him to understand not only the suspect in this case,
but the irrational behavior of human beings in general. In his waking hours,
he had often discussed this idea with his good friend, Dr. Pardon—this name
itself is suggestive. Without claiming to name original sin, Maigret reflects
on a universal human weakness that does in fact identify the root of much
10 Introduction
irrational behavior in human beings, fear. “At the base was fear,” says Mai-
gret. For Maigret images of fear change form through the various stages of a
human life; we experience fear of water, of fire, of darkness, fear of making
bad life choices, of failing to take hold of our life. For Maigret these became
“the notes of a muffled and tragic symphony: the hidden fears that one drags
behind one, sharp fears that make one cry out in pain, fears that one dismisses
once they have passed, fear of accidents, of sickness, of the police, of people,
what they will say and the looks they give you as they pass” (La Patience de
Maigret, 128). It would be hard to find a more concrete characterization of
original sin. During the course of this study, we will see other names for the
sin that gives rise to sins.
SEVEN HERMENEUTICAL PRINCIPLES
Hermeneutical principles name the processes by which thought develops.

Six such principles inform the development of this study, with different prin-
ciples coming into play in different places. The first principle consists in a
combination of truths that early Christian writers used to guide their search
into the reality of Christ. Only God can forgive sin, and God can heal only if
he takes on what he heals. From the mouth of the Scribes we have the first
half of the principle. In response to Jesus’ healing of a paralytic they say to
themselves—with Jesus reading their hearts—“Who can forgive sins but God
alone?” (Mk. 2:7b). The second half of the principle arose in the controversy
between Gregory of Nazianzen and Apollinarius, who maintained that Jesus
had a human body but not a human mind. Gregory maintained that Jesus
must be human in body and mind, everything that makes us human, “For that
which he has not assumed he has not healed” (Gregory of Nazianzen, 1978,
441, col 2). The whole of our human nature fell in Adam so the whole of
it has to be taken on by the divine Christ who alone can heal us. Christ did
not just “take on” our nature as something external to him; he entered into
it, experienced it in its heights and depths, even death itself. What does this
mean for the doctrine of forgiveness? It means first that to forgive is divine.
When we forgive we participate in the divine. It means also that we can only
forgive what we take on, what we enter into, what we become, what we suffer
with. In other words, we forgive through compassion. This combination of
the divine and the human in forgiving will appear powerfully in the character
of Georges Simenon’s Maigret, which will be treated in chapter eleven. Mar-
tha Nussbaum writes about a parallel process in the ancient world in which
judges—divine figures in a way—enter into the lives of those they are judg-
ing to produce a merciful judgment.3
The second principle is contained in the famous definition of theology,

articulated by both Augustine and Anselm of Canterbury: “faith seeking
understanding.”
Augustine’s version of the principle, “faith seeking understanding,” is
circular: “I believe in order to understand; I understand in order to believe
more fully” (Augustine Sermons, 43, 7, 9, Patrologia Latina, 38, 257–58).
Anselm writes his Proslogion, the work in which he lays out his controversial
ontological proof, “in the person of one who strives to lift up his mind to the
contemplation of God and seeks to understand what he believes” (Anselm
“Preface,” Proslogion, 102). In another place Anselm accuses of laziness
those who do not strive to understand their faith. The force of the principle
depends on one’s understanding of “faith.” If by faith one means an act by
which the mind fastens on some truth it does not understand, but feels obliged
to accept, then it makes little sense to speak of faith seeking understanding.
But if by faith one means the dynamism of the spirit by which it is receptive
to truths it does not fully understand wherever it discovers them and however
they are expressed, the formula “faith seeking understanding” is profoundly
useful. This dynamism is what the Canadian theologian, Bernard Lonergan,
calls “the pure desire to know,” Hegel calls it “the concept” (der Begriff), and
Bergson names it the elan vital.” Understood in this way, faith naturally seeks
understanding, is, in fact, a dynamism toward understanding and, as such, the
beginning of all science, philosophy, and human wisdom.
The third principle, that liberating truths are revealed to the heart through
conversion, is suggested, if not explicitly formulated, by Paul’s prayer in
Ephesians: “May the eyes of your hearts be enlightened, that you may know
what is the hope that belongs to the call . . . “ (Eph. 1:18). Paul’s own conver-
sion was an instance of such enlightenment, as was Augustine’s. A less likely
source for illustrating this principle, since he does not claim to be religious at
all, is Marcel Proust who speaks of aesthetic rather than religious enlighten-
ment. At stake for the narrator of Proust’s novel was the reality of his own
literary gifts, even the reality of literature itself as a human project. Deep
moods of discouragement led him to doubt both. But periodically during his
adult life, the narrator experiences profoundly liberating moments that restore
his confidence in his own gifts and his belief in literature itself. In the con-
text of this study, the principle of conversion means that the truth about sin
is revealed only through grace. Sometime grace comes through the dramatic
conversion of a Paul or an Augustine. More often it comes through the small
conversions that mark the daily turning from sin to the source of healing.
Awakening the consciousness of original sin can be dangerous. Julian
of Norwich realized that we can face sin in ourselves without being over-
whelmed only if God reveals our sin through the gift of grace. Fundamental
12 Introduction
to the argument of this book is the conviction that only through God’s healing
grace can we recognize the existence of original sin in ourselves and begin to
contend with its effects. And the deepest work of grace is to show us the fun-
damental goodness in ourselves that original sin obscures. We are not worse
than we think, but better. Paul Ricoeur calls this goodness of human beings
“primordial.” He calls the evil in us “radical,” which means that for him evil
is rooted in our existential condition but not the deepest level of our being.
Julian of Norwich, in her medieval retelling of the fall, which she calls “the
parable of the Lord and the Servant,” tells us that when the servant (Adam)
falls, he is blinded and “he neither sees clearly his loving lord, who is so meek
and mild to him, nor does he truly see what he himself is in the sight of his
loving lord” (Revelations Long Text, 51, par. 8).
A fourth hermeneutical principle is that truth is revealed historically. Bernard
Lonergan refers to this as historical consciousness which looks for the truth of
things in their gradual unfolding over time. For Lonergan, historical conscious-
ness is opposed to classical consciousness, which sees truths as extra-temporal
and absolute, existing in a realm above the changes of human history. Hegel
saw the revelation of truth in history as a dialectical process in which one-sided
truths give rise to their opposites and then to a reconciling process in which the
opposing claims yield to a higher reconciling truth. Proust, a novelist rather
than a theologian or philosopher, describes a process in which first impressions
give way to deeper insight, thereby gradually revealing the truth of his charac-
ters. In Proust’s monumental novel, In Search of Lost Time, character develop-
ment unfolds in over three thousand pages. I will be briefer, but I do invite the
readers of this book to regard its principal characters, not as fixed doctrines, but
as ideas whose truth has been revealed only over time in the various manifesta-
tions cited as well as many more that this study does not encompass.
The fifth, sixth, and seventh principles underlie the structure of the entire
book. The fifth principle is that the truth is first articulated in myths and
symbols before it is expressed in thought. The story of Adam and Eve, for
instance, is mythical, by which I do not mean that it is false or merely imagi-
nary, but that it expresses the truth in a symbolic narrative. This principle
forms the basis of Paul Ricoeur’s, The Symbolism of Evil, which we will
examine in detail in the next chapter. This principle underlies the first part of
the present study. The sixth principle also comes from Ricoeur, “the symbol
gives rise to thought” (“le symbole donne à penser” (Ricoeur The Symbolism
of Evil, 347–357). The myth of Adam and Eve has given rise to a vast quan-
tity of speculation that will provide much of the content of this book. When
Jesus says, “I am the vine and you are the branches,” he is using symbol, im-
age, and metaphor. Such language is suggestive; it makes us think, gives rise
to thought. The movement from symbol to thought provides the underlying
aim of the second part of this study. The seventh principle, which undergirds
the third part of the present study, completes a circle that begins in symbol,
moves to thought, and then returns from thought into symbol and narrative.
Archetypal symbols give rise to thought, thought seeks to clothe its cold ab-
stractness in literature, poetry, and narrative.
The challenge in applying these principles is to keep the integrity of each
phase of the circle without submerging it in that to which it gives rise. The
Adamic Myth, for instance, has given rise to thought in a variety of forms in
the Christian tradition. The danger is that one or other of the theoretical frame-
works into which the myth gets sublimated takes away the generative power
of the myth itself. The dogmatic structure that has formed around the Adamic
Myth has kept people from looking at the biblical narrative itself and allowing
it to give rise to new thoughts that might break through the theoretical frame-
works that dogma has imposed. One of the purposes of this study is to examine
how the generative power of the myth of Adam and Eve has given rise both to
thought and to literary forms.
The appropriateness of the three divisions of this study—symbol giving
rise to thought, thought returning to metaphor and narrative—receives confir-
mation from an unlikely source, a study of the brain’s division into unequal
but related hemispheres, right brain and left brain, by Iain McGilchrist in his
magisterial work, The Master and His Emissaries: The Divided Brain and the
Making of Western Culture. McGilchrist’s work, twenty years in the making,
affirms a circular character to conscious activity. The right brain provides
the imprecise, implicit, originating insights that give rise to the left brain’s
work of conceptualizing, explicitizing, and elaborating. For thinking to be in
contact with the real world, the work of the left brain must yield to the source
at its origin. McGilchrist expresses the idea succinctly in his Yale University
e-book summary of the larger work: “So the meaning of the utterance begins
in the right hemisphere, is made explicit (literally folded out or unfolded) in
the left, and then the whole utterance needs to be ‘returned to the right hemi-
sphere, where it is reintegrated with all that is implicit—tone, irony, metaphor,
humour, and so on, as a feel of the context in which the utterance is to be un-
derstood” (“The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning,” Loc 350 of 476).
A PREVIEW OF WHAT IS TO COME
Proust uses a striking image that can serve as an introduction to my preview

of the chapters that follow. The image occurs in Proust’s response to a critic
of Swann’s Way, the first published volume of the seven that would become
In Search of Lost Time. Too many characters appear in this volume, said the
14 Introduction
critic, and none of them has a developed profile. Proust responds that the full
development of his characters will require the passage of time in which the
various dimensions of the personalities introduced in his first volume will
appear (Proust 1988, 458–459). In his first volume Proust has, he says, lined
them up “like horses at the gate” about to run their course. Only the running
of the course will tell us who the horses are. It is not only works of art that
need to “mature slowly” through the course of time but all ideas (460).
Because of the variety of texts, and even genres of text included in this
book—like so many horses at the gate—one may ask why I have chosen the
writings I have, how the horses have qualified to run the race. I can best an-
swer this question first by restating the fundamental aims of my study, then
by exploring the historical development of the Adamic Myth, and finally by
relating the texts to the three parts into which I have divided the material of
the book .
My fundamental aim, through all the texts I have chosen, is to seek the
truth of the Adamic Myth. This truth, something more than doctrinal defini-
tions, reveals itself only to those willing to sort through a mixture of true and
false interpretations, following some leads, rejecting others, like a detective. I
find myself, in fact, learning from Georges Simenon’s famous police inspec-
tor, Maigret (see chapter eleven) who says of himself at the beginning of a
case where the witnesses refuse to cooperate,” “My profession (mon métier)
is to look for the truth, and I am looking for it” (M. and the Recalcitrant Wit-
nesses, 50). The texts examined in my study are my witnesses to the truth of
the Adamic Myth. After questioning all these witnesses and sifting through
the results of others’ investigations, I have concluded that the truth of the
Adamic Myth lies in the common vulnerability, darkness, confusion, and
helplessness in which all human beings participate and which have, from
the beginning, evoked the grace of divine compassion and forgiveness. This
compassion and forgiveness in God we call Redemption.
Julian of Norwich dramatically illustrated the intimate connection between
human sin and divine redemption in her retelling of the story of Adam’s fall.
Adam, out of inadvertence rather than as an act of disobedience, fell into a
hole from which he could not get out by himself. Adam’s fall, says Julian
was identical with the fall of the Word of God into the womb of Mary and
the beginning of our redemption. Julian simply disregards the temporal lapse
between the event of the fall and the event of the Incarnation. No sooner had
Adam fallen, we might say, than God set about with a plan for getting him out
of the hole (chapter nine on Julian of Norwich). Even the account of Genesis 3
seems to proclaim this intimate connection between fall and redemption when
God, in cursing the serpent, promises to “put enmity between your offspring
and hers; he will strike at your head while you strike at his heel” (Gen 3: 15).
The last book of the Bible, Revelation, recalls this divine promise in its ac-
count of the woman and the dragon (Rev. 12—see chapter three of this study).
In human beings the connection between our fallen state—being in a
hole—takes a circuitous path. The study I am introducing here is my attempt
to trace that journey. The consciousness of original sin in oneself ought to
lead to compassion for others similarly afflicted—everyone that is—and
through compassion to forgiveness. You would think it would. We would ex-
pect, for instance, that Angelo in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, having
felt the dark stirrings of lust in himself, would be sympathetic to his subject
Claudio against whom he has initiated a process for improper sexual activity.
Not so (see chapter ten). We cannot assume that all are conscious of original
sin at work in themselves. Original sin for many hangs over their conscience
as a dark, abstract, and incomprehensible doctrine. And not all those who are
conscious of original sin as something real in themselves move toward com-
passion and forgiveness. To become conscious of original sin in oneself in
such a way as to move toward compassion requires a conversion. This study
invites its readers to a meditation rooted in symbol, theory, and literature in-
tended to awaken such consciousness—leaving conversion to the Holy Spirit.
My argument in favor of a connection between original sin and compassion
will probably surprise some readers. Many people, as I have already noted,
even committed Christians who have grown up in the tradition that proclaims
original sin as a fundamental doctrine, find in the Adamic Myth and in the
doctrine it has spawned only an incentive for self-loathing. For them the
doctrine of original sin means that all of us are fundamentally bad. Such a
conclusion, I will argue, comes from going down a false path in the investi-
gation. The Adamic Myth in fact teaches that we humans are fundamentally
good, that we have strayed from our original goodness, and that the way back
is through compassion and forgiveness. The medieval mystic Walter Hilton
describes accurately the path of true self knowledge. “. . . There is one useful
and deserving task on which to labor, and (as I think) a plain highway to con-
templation . . . and that is for a person to go into himself to know his own soul
and its powers, its fairness and its foulness. Through looking inward you will
be able to see the honor and dignity it ought to have from the nature of its first
makings: and you will see too the wretchedness and misery into which you
have fallen through sin . . . .” (Hilton, The Scale of Perfection, par 41, 112).
Our first beginning—historically and existentially—is the honor and dignity
of paradise. But paradise is lost through sin and regained by compassion and
forgiveness. This inner logic of the Adamic Myth, its truth, will thread its way
through the chapters of this book and the writings they investigate.
I can also find the warrant for the texts I have chosen in the history of the
Adamic Myth. The Adamic Myth has a history that extends far beyond the
16 Introduction
story in Genesis 3. The full truth of the myth lies in this history. Each of the
texts I have chosen is a turning point, or a moment, or a stage in that history.
The history begins even before the account of Adam and Eve in the Hebrew
Bible, but for our purpose the story of Genesis 3 is the beginning. From the
point of view of Christian theology we are dealing with the development of
doctrine. The culmination of that development comes in the doctrinal defini-
tions of the church councils from Orange to Trent. But if I had to rest my case
for the truth of the Adamic Myth on those definitions, I would be in trouble.
Those very definitions, in fact, with their dry formulations, their anathemas
against those who hold other views, and their categorical quality provide fuel
for those who find this teaching inhuman. The definitions, of course, have
their own validity. I am not arguing against them. Their clarity about the fact
of original sin and the necessity of redemption by Christ and the ongoing need
for God’s grace opens a sure path for those who accept them. But definitions
do not aim to touch the heart. The history of the myth of Adam and Eve is
deeper, longer, and richer than the formal definitions. Though in one sense the
definitions clarify the history, in another sense, they obscure it and, by their
very incompleteness, impel us to find other richer expressions. This book aims
to do that by exploring a variety of types of expression, symbolic, theoretical,
and literary that extends from the story in Genesis to modern literature.
These three types of expression in which the history has unfolded, sym-
bolic, theoretical, and literary, provide the basis for three divisions in the text
under which I have gathered the various texts and arguments that mark the
progress of my study. These divisions mark both a historical progression and
a circular development between different modes of expression. In general, the
major division of the book and the chapters follow one another chronologi-
cally. After setting the stage with Paul Ricoeur’s comparison of four ancient
myths of the origin and end of evil, I turn to the symbolic narrative of Adam
and Eve in the Pentateuch and Paul’s transformation of the myth in Romans
and I Corinthians. These first three chapters belong to a symbolic, narrative
mode of expression. The next four chapters, which begin with Augustine and
move chronologically through various doctrinal and theological formulations
of original sin, constitute a second, theoretical mode of expression. This sec-
ond part of the study illustrates Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutical principle, “the
symbol gives rise to thought,” which I have mentioned above. The third part
of the study, moves from theory back into the realm of literature and consists
of four chapters exploring, in chronological order, different literary genres.
These three phases of the book consist of different ways of speaking about
the truth, interpreting the truth, and appropriating it. They represent a range
of expressions that together provide evidence of the truth of the Adamic Myth
that I have taken as the aim of this study. My claim is that the Adamic Myth
is true, not principally because its implications have been defined doctrinally
but because those implications prove to be inescapable. They keep recurring,
expressed in a wide variety of linguistic modes over a long period of time,
continuing up to the present. And the different modes of expression invite
readers to confront the evidence of their own consciousness where the real
truth of the Adamic Myth, the reality of human weakness and the promise of
divine grace are revealed. Ultimately readers of this book must verify, in the
courtroom of their own consciousness, the claims I make.
Finally, I conclude this preliminary exposition of the logic that lies under
the development that will follow by relating the individual chapters to the
three major divisions of the book in which they occur. Part One, Adam and
Eve: Symbol, Myth, and Biblical Narrative includes chapters one, two, and
three. These chapters follow a historical sequence and also introduce the
reader into the symbolic mode of expression. I begin Part One with Paul
Ricoeur’s Symbolism of Evil because this text first awakened my interest
in the connection between Adam and Eve and forgiveness, and even more
important for my study, because Ricoeur here explores the role of symbol
and myth in the articulation of human consciousness. Ricoeur begins his
study by examining the symbols in which human beings, before they de-
velop any philosophy or theology of evil, first articulate the dark impulses
they find in themselves and in nature. The aspect of Ricoeur’s analysis that
interests me most in the study I have undertaken is his comparison of the
myth of Adam and Eve to three other ancient mythical accounts of the origin
and end of evil, Ricoeur shows how the Adamic Myth alone opens the door
to forgiveness.
Following my treatment of Ricoeur’s situation of the Adamic Myth in the
cycle of myths of the origin and end of evil, I turn to Adam and Eve in the
context within the Old Testament where their story occurs in its complete-
ness in a form available to us today, namely, the Pentateuch. The elements
that make up the subject matter of this book—the disobedience of Adam and
Eve, its consequences, and the reversal of those consequences through God’s
compassion and forgiveness—occur in a fundamentally important way in
this first part of the Hebrew Bible. But the story does not become thematic
in the Old Testament the way the Exodus narrative does. The Old Testament
contains few references to Adam and Eve. Adam and Eve enter the biblical
narrative again only in the New Testament with Paul’s comparison of Christ
and Adam. Paul’s treatment forms the core of chapter three, “The Adamic
Myth in the New Testament.” In Paul’s treatment of Christ as the second
Adam, we have already begun the ascent from a symbolical, mythical form of
expression into the realm of thought. Paul still works with symbols but in ty-
ing symbols together begins to speculate and to elaborate a biblical theology.
18 Introduction
Paul’s move into speculation brings us to Part Two of this study, The
Symbol Gives Rise to Thought: From Biblical Narrative to Autobiogra-
phy, Theory, and Doctrine. Part Two includes chapters four through seven.
Chapter four, “Augustine: Original Sin and Compassion,” traces Augustine’s
development of St. Paul’s theology into a full doctrine of Original Sin. Chap-
ter five, “Classical Formulations and Modern Developments,” shows how
Augustine’s formulations gave rise to the doctrines of the Christian churches,
and a variety of speculative interpretations from the middle ages, the time of
the Reformation, and modern times. Chapter six, “Compassion as Prelude
to Forgiveness,” contains my own elaboration of the central thesis of the
book that compassion is an integral ingredient of forgiveness. Chapter seven,
“René Girard: Original Sin as Covetousness,” explores the contribution of
René Girard to the theory of original sin.
The chapter on Augustine, then, initiates the movement of Part Two from
symbol to thought. I begin this chapter, not with Augustine’s elaboration
of the doctrine of original sin, which comes in the last period of his life in
his controversy with Pelagius, but with his autobiographical exploration of
original sin in his own experience. Augustine’s best-known, most-loved, and
most often read work, The Confessions, probes, in the author’s own life, the
evidence of St. Paul’s famous lament, “The things I want to do, I do not do
and the things I do not want to do, I do” (Romans 7). This autobiographical
step is crucial and grounds in Augustine’s own life, his later theoretical devel-
opment of original sin. Augustine does not, in other words, leap from biblical
narrative to theory but rather passes from biblical narrative through interiority
into theory. Or, more precisely, the biblical narrative helps Augustine make
sense of his own life story.
If we can discern the elements of Augustine’s theology of original sin in his
Confessions, we must wait for the writings that came out of his controversy
with Pelagius for the fully developed teaching. Augustine’s connection with
the doctrine of original sin is well known, a doctrine that has earned him
friends and enemies. Less well recognized is the connection Augustine makes
between original sin and compassion. Since this connection lies at the heart of
my argument in this book, the chapter on Augustine is crucial. A reader will
find the argument of the whole book compactly summarized in the pages of
the chapter on Augustine. Compassion is, of course, the work of grace, God’s
grace working in the sinner first to forgive and heal, and then working in the
healed sinner to forgive others. For this reason an understanding of Augus-
tine’s teaching must include both his consciousness of sin and his deep aware-
ness of the absolute necessity of grace. For Augustine, grace was primary.
Chapter five presents an exposition of successive steps in the doctrinal and
theoretical interpretation of the myth of Adam and Eve. Doctrine expresses
the Church’s definitive teaching about the meaning of original sin for the
Christian. Early councils following Augustine set down the basic framework
that successive definitions would follow. Theoretical interpretation reformu-
lates the doctrine in the light of philosophical or other systematic frameworks.
Thomas Aquinas provides a striking example of such speculation in his ap-
plication of Aristotle’s four causes to the subject of original sin. Original sin
will, in Aquinas analysis, have a material cause, a formal cause, an efficient
cause, and a final cause. I lay this out in chapter five. This chapter also con-
tains an account of the dispute between Catholics and Lutherans over how
deeply sin enters into the nature of human beings. I look, too, at attempts
since the 1960s to reconcile the notion of original sin with evolutionary
theory and feminist perspectives.
Chapter six contains my own best effort to express systematically the ele-
ments of this study. Of particular importance for the subsequent development
of my investigation is what I call “the wounding of the four intimacies,”
intimacy with self, with God, with the neighbor, and with nature. These
four wounds correspond with indications in the text of Genesis 3 itself. The
shame Adam and Eve felt at their nakedness after disobeying God’s com-
mand, correlates with the loss of intimacy with the self. Their hiding from
God when he walked in the Garden indicates the wound in our relation with
God. The desire of the woman for man and his lording it over her express
a fundamental disorder in human relations, beginning with the fundamental
relation between the sexes. And the woman’s difficulty in childbearing and
the man’s frustrating labor in cultivating the earth for crops signal the loss of
intimacy with nature.
Chapter seven explores the thought of René Girard as a contribution to
the theory of original sin. First, it is important to note that the trajectory
of Girard’s own thought led him from literature to anthropological theory.
So his work recapitulates within the scope of one author’s work, the whole
movement of Part Two of the present study. Girard first discovered the funda-
mental themes of his lifework in his study of literature. His first work, Deceit,
Desire, and the Novel (English translation, 1966), revealed the pervasiveness
of the phenomenon of mimetic desire. Later works in the area of anthropol-
ogy would lead Girard to the discovery of the scapegoat mechanism and his
study of the Bible led him to the final stage of his development, the realiza-
tion that myth disguises the reality of scapegoating in human life whereas the
Bible reveals it.
Several other elements in Girard’s work support the fundamental aims of
my study. First, Girard provides an impressive version of the inner dynamic
structure of original sin. He calls the original sin “mimetic rivalry” or, to use
the biblical term, “covetousness.” People desire what belongs to another;
20 Introduction
the desire becomes universalized and turns into the war of all against all.
The resolution of the war of all against all takes place through the scapegoat
mechanism. Myth disguises this mechanism, scripture reveals it. Girard’s
exploration of the dynamics of original sin gets at the heart of what I am
trying to do in this book. Girard also explores other themes central to my
work. Most important, he finds that the only way to reverse the cycle of
violence is forgiveness, a central theme of my argument. Moreover, making
the disposition to forgiveness habitual requires a conversion through which
one recognizes the operation of original sin—in Girard’s language, “mimetic
rivalry”—in oneself before one can forgive it in others. One of the six her-
meneutical principles I present above is that “liberating truths are revealed to
the heart through conversion” (18).
At the same time, the account of Girard’s development in this chapter
serves as a transition into Part Three, in which I show how thought, once de-
veloped out of symbol into the form of theory, returns once again to metaphor
and symbol in the form of literature, poetry, and other symbolic and narrative
forms. Having begun in the study of the modern novel where he discovered
the patterns of covetousness or “mimetic rivalry,” Girard later returns to the
literature of Greek myth and biblical narrative to rediscover those patterns
again. Girard has helped me see a kind of hermeneutic circle in which sym-
bol gives rise to thought, and thought returns to an intentional use of symbol
and narrative by authors who have already become familiar with theory and
doctrines, a circle expressed, as we have seen above, in Iain McGilchrist’s
study of the divided brain.
So Girard’s work provides a pivot by which I turn from the more theoreti-
cal treatments of Part Two to the analysis of literature and autobiography that
makes up Part Three, The Word Becomes Flesh: From Theory and Doctrine
to Literature and Autobiography. Part Three consists of four chapters: chapter
eight, “Perceval: Compassion Awakened through Conversion,” chapter nine,
“Julian of Norwich: From Blindness to the Vision of Love;” chapter ten,
“Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure: Compassion in the State;” and chapter
eleven, “Detective and Priest: Georges Simenon’s Campassionate Commis-
sioner Maigret.”
So, from the medieval period I have chosen two literary-mystical works.
The epic poem Perceval by Chrétien de Troyes (chapter eight) tells the story
of a young aspiring knight who, without even knowing it, breaks his mother’s
heart as he is leaving home. Perceval’s failure of compassion, we find out
later, causes the young knight who has begun a strikingly successful career,
to miss the opportunity to heal the wounded Fisher King and restore his
kingdom. The opportunity was stunningly simple; if Perceval has just asked
certain questions at a crucial point, the king would have been healed. A fail-
ure of compassion, Perceval shows us, can block the ability to ask a liberating
question. If Perceval is about the consequences of a defect of compassion, the
fifteenth century mystic, Julian of Norwich (chapter nine), pushes the pos-
sibility of compassion to its limits. Julian recounts the sixteen visions given
to her as a personal revelation in which the compassion of God reaches well
beyond anything taught by the Church. When Julian repeats her often-quoted
refrain, “All will be will, and all manner of things will be well,” she means
it quite literally. Even the most egregious sinners will ultimately find divine
forgiveness. Julian begins the account of her revelations with a dramatic
retelling of the story of Adam and Eve that fuses the “fall” of the servant
(Adam) with the “fall” of God’s Word into the womb of the Virgin Mary.
Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure (chapter ten), from the period of the
Renaissance, dramatizes the conflict between legalism and compassion in the
politics of the state. The play ends in a kind of truth and reconciliation pro-
cedure in which a just ruler metes out appropriate healing remedies for those
who have sinned against compassion. I then move into modern literature with
Simenon’s Inspector Maigret (chapter eleven), a man who like his inventor
had lost his Catholic faith but retained a profound sense of original sin and
a deeply moving compassion that led him to ambition being a “mender of
destinies.”
I can say in summary that I have chosen these works because I have found
in them lively illustrations of the fundamental themes of my study. My crite-
rion for choosing them has been simply their power to illuminate. I trust that
my choices will call to readers’ minds other works that exemplify, perhaps
even better than the ones I have chosen, the themes I am presenting. They
might even ask, “Why did he not choose this or that work of literature that
makes the very points the author wants to make?” I would be happy to know
that others find the basic themes I have developed present in a wide variety
of texts.
I invite the reader to think of this work as an extended meditation, in a vari-
ety of settings, on the mystery of iniquity and grace. The chapters do not have
to be read in order. Each illustrates the basic thesis in a way that can stand on
its own. That original sin provides the ground of grace is paradoxical. And
the notion that grace is more abundant than sin stretches our understanding
even further. The superabundance of grace enables the Church in its Easter
liturgy to call Adam’s sin “a happy fault.” The Adamic Myth is more than
a simple story. It can illuminate our experience if we allow it into our con-
sciousness. The dynamism of its logic flows through the Christian tradition,
finding expression in the Gospels, the letters of Paul, and in Christian and
non-Christian writers from the Fathers of the Church, with their various in-
terpretations, to contemporary writers and thinkers who interpret it in diverse
22 Introduction
ways, dismissing it as insignificant, rejecting it as harmful, embracing it, or

even manifesting its logic in their works without acknowledging the doctrine
formally. I do not presume to give a comprehensive account of interpretations
of the Adamic Myth. I do aim to illuminate this rich story through an exami-
nation of some of its interpreters and, most of all to illustrate the workings of
compassion in the divine and human project of forgiveness.
NOTES
1. This scriptural quotation is from the New Revised Standard Version Bible:
Catholic Edition, copyright © 1989, 1993 National Council of the Churches of Christ
in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
2. I discovered Worthington’s theory about forgiveness as I was completing the
manuscript for this book. His approach from the perspective of psychology confirms
the theological position I have presented. Worthington talks about the “primacy of
emotion in forgiveness.” Rational conviction is not enough, he says. The model
Worthington develops in his writings consists of three steps, empathy, humility, and
commitment. Worthington’s treatment of empathy coincides with the role I assign to
compassion; these are two words for the same thing. Worthington assigns to humil-
ity the same role I assign to awareness of original sin in oneself. Commitment in
his thought adds the step of actually choosing to forgive. Worthington’s own brief
summary of his position shows how closely it parallels my own: “I see my offender’s
motivation and understand his or her point of view. I feel what he or she might have
been feeling. Further, I have similar feelings. I see that I have done things or wanted
to do things as wicked as the other person. In those instances of weakness, I would
like to have forgiveness extended to me” (Worthington 1998, 63).
3. In her excellent article, “Equity and Mercy,” Martha Nussbaum explores the
development of a doctrine of mercy in the ancient world from the strict Greek notion
of justice (dike), through the Aristotle’s treatment of equity (epikeia) to Seneca’s ap-
peal to mercy (clementia) as an antidote to retributive justice. The exercise of mercy
entails entering into the life of the accused: “The merciful judge will not fail to judge
the guilt of the offender, but she will also see the many obstacles this offerder faced
as a member of culture, a gender, a city or country, and, above all, as a member of the
human species, facing the obstacles characteristic of human life in a world of scarcity
and accident” (Nussbaum 1993, 103).
Part I
SYMBOL, MYTH,
AND BIBLICAL NARRATIVE
Chapter One
Paul Ricoeur
A Wider Context
for the Adamic Myth
The presupposition of my undertaking is that the place where one can best
listen to, hear, and understand what all the myths together have to teach us
is the place where the pre-eminence of one of those myths is proclaimed
still today—namely, the Adamic Myth.
—Paul Ricoeur, Symbolism of Evil
In his 1967 work, The Symbolism of Evil, the French phenomenologist

Paul Ricoeur compares the myth of Adam and Eve with three other ancient
mythical accounts of the origin and end of evil. Ricoeur’s comparison not
only helps us see what is most characteristic in this story that has become
foundational for the Christian tradition and to appreciate its inner logic, but
also how aspects of the other myths can complement the logic of the Adamic
Myth. Christians, like followers of any received tradition, are likely to lose
a critical sense of the value as well as of the limitations of their own found-
ing myths. A study like Ricoeur’s helps us re-gain perspective. In particular,
Ricoeur illuminates the inner logic of this dynamic narrative—a logic that
has deeply influenced the Christian tradition and continues to affect the way
Christians view sin and salvation—and compares it with the logic of other
myths. Comparison provides a basis for interpretation and moves us one step
from the naiveté by which we are likely to look at our tradition. Consideration
of Ricoeur’s work is a first and foundational step in the interpretation of the
Adamic Myth. Interpretation is everything. Wrongly interpreted, the logic
of the founding myth becomes perverse. Interpreted with insight, it becomes
liberating.
A word about language is in order. I have, following Paul Ricoeur, been
speaking of Adam and Eve’s story as myth. Some contemporary scriptural
scholars call it folklore. The crucial point is to free ourselves from the notion
25
26 Chapter One
that the story describes a historical event situated at a certain point in time con-
tinuous with our time and in a place locatable on a map. Interpreting the story
as a historical event introduces a distorting ingredient and precisely opens the
text to the objections that have occurred over the centuries. The notion of a deed
carried out one afternoon at some point in time continuous with our own time
is hard to distinguish from the early Jewish doctrine found in Exodus that the
sins of the fathers are visited on the children to the thousandth generation. As
we saw above, the later prophetic writers of Israel, Jeremiah (31), and Ezekiel
(18), rejected this doctrine as unworthy of God. Even if we say that it is only a
sinful condition and not the guilt attached to actual sinful deeds that is passed
down, the question of divine injustice still rears its head. But if we look for the
truth of myth rather than the truth of history, then we find that we are looking at
the existential origin of sin and its metaphysical structure rather than its histori-
cal origins. Adam and Eve’s distrust of God and their consequent disobedience
names the origin of all sin, and it is fair to say that we do not know a time when
this original sin was not at work among human beings. Certainly, the Jewish
scripture writers recognized the universal presence of sin even though they did
not speak of original sin or refer to the story of Adam and Eve.
Ricoeur also insists that his project is pre-philosophical and pre-theological.
Ricoeur believes that philosophy begins, not in some kind of intellectual
vacuum but in the relations expressed by symbolic and mythical narratives,
such as the story of Adam and Eve. My aim in this chapter is to retrieve for
theology the essential insights of Ricoeur’s study by transposing his pre-
philosophical and pre-theological reflection into a theological framework on
which I can base the development of this study. In particular, I offer a theo-
logical justification of Ricoeur’s choice of the Adamic Myth as the privileged
standpoint from which to view the other myths. This procedure helps to show
how the Adamic Myth, even though it was never a cornerstone of Israel’s
faith, has become such a foundation for Christianity. The symbols and myths
that Ricoeur studies constitute a complex language already articulated before
philosophy and theology come on the scene, a language that is available for
systematic reflection.
A third key point is that the myths Ricoeur treats represent mythical types.
Mythical accounts about the origin of religious traditions abound, but each
does not represent a different type. Ricoeur himself addresses the problems
presented by the multiplicity of the myths to be studied. The solution to the
problem, he says, lies in the notion of typology. The types that Ricoeur pro-
poses give him a key to deciphering multiple myths, while leaving him open
to expand his typology (Ricoeur 1967, 171–172).
Ricoeur’s Symbolism of Evil is divided into two parts. The first part, “The
Primary Symbols: Defilement, Sin, and Guilt,” concludes with a “Recapitu-
Paul Ricoeur 27
lation of the Symbolism of Evil in the Concept of the Servile Will,” a key
notion to which I will return at the end of this chapter. In the second part
Ricoeur treats “The ‘Myths’ of the Beginning and the End,” concluding
with a chapter on the hermeneutical principle, “The Symbol Gives Rise to
Thought.” This principle means that theology and philosophy begin, not in
some speculative vacuum, but out of the rich system of relations embodied
in symbolic narratives.
This chapter focuses on the second part of The Symbolism of Evil,
Ricoeur’s treatment of the myths of the beginning and the end. Ricoeur calls
these accounts “myths,” not because he considers them false, but because
their truth lies in the realm of the meanings that ground human activity rather
than in historically verifiable narratives. “Myth,” says Ricoeur, “will here
be taken to mean what the history of religions now finds in it: not a false
explanation by means of images and fables, but a traditional narration which
relates to events that happened at the beginning of time and which has the
purpose of providing grounds for the ritual actions of people of today and, in
a general manner, establishing all the forms of action and thought by which
people understand themselves in their world” (Ricoeur 1967, 5). Below the
myths, at a still more basic level, are the symbols of defilement, sin, and
guilt, already mentioned, in which the religious consciousness first expresses
fault. Myth takes up these symbols into a narrative form that accounts for
or explains the origin and end of evil. Ricoeur treats four myths, which he
names: “The Creation Myth,” “The Tragic Myth,” “The Adamic Myth,” and
“The Orphic Myth.”
Each of these myths contains an image and conception of the divine being,
God, the gods, fate; and an account of the origin of things, including both
man and woman. More specifically, each myth tells us something about how
the divine Being or beings are related to evil: whether they are subject to
evil or above it, whether they in any way cause evil or stand utterly opposed
to it, whether we can look to them for help in our struggle against evil. The
myths also answer the question about how the human being is related to evil,
as cause, as victim, or both and whether human beings need divine help in
the struggle against evil, or can save themselves by their own efforts. The
answers to these questions lie in the account that each myth gives of the origin
of evil, not just this or that specific evil, but evil itself, and in the idea of sal-
vation or redemption each proposes. Also, the idea of salvation expressed in
each myth is congruent with its account of the origin of evil; so, for instance,
the Orphic myth accounts for evil by describing the process through which
the spiritual gets trapped in matter and presents salvation as the reverse pro-
cess by which the true spiritual self gets liberated from matter. Let us look at
Ricoeur’s treatment of these four myths.
28 Chapter One
THE FOUR MYTHS
The Creation Myth

Sometimes Ricoeur calls this the “Theogonic” myth because it begins, not
with the account of how the world and human beings came to be, but with
the story of the divine coming to be. This is a key point for Ricoeur and will
distinguish this type of myth particularly from the “Adamic Myth.” Instead
of affirming the existence of a good God at the origin of all things, as the
Adamic account does, the creation myth begins with the struggle by which the
“younger” supreme god emerges as triumphant over the “older” gods. Only
after describing the origin of the gods does the creation myth turn to the world
and humanity. The coming to be of the world and human beings is, as Ricoeur
says, “the last act of a drama that concerns the generation of the gods.”
That the coming-to-be of the gods is described at all is significant. The way
in which the gods come to be is also significant. The supreme god emerges
through a kind of domestic violence. Thus, chaos, disorder, and evil are prior
to the gods themselves and even enter into their very being and their way of
acting. Human beings do not originate evil, but only continue it. Evil is not
only prior to the beginnings of the human being, it even predates the divine
being. Ricoeur uses the Babylonian myth Enuma Elish to illustrate this type
of myth. Tiamat is the primordial mother, Apsu the primordial father. To-
gether they represent the “initial commingling of the vastness of the marine
waters with the fresh waters” (Ricoeur 1967, 177). The younger gods, led by
Marduk, plot against Tiamat and Apsu. When Apsu discovers the plot, he
develops a plan to destroy the younger gods. Before he can carry out his plan,
Apsu is killed. Enraged, Tiamat gives birth to monstrous creatures.
The creation of the world follows upon the violent struggle through which
Marduk, the younger god, emerges triumphant over the older Tiamat. Marduk
has saved the gods from the evil power of Tiamat. So creation follows the salva-
tion of the gods by Marduk, who has imposed order on chaos. Not only does the
creation of the world follow on the violent victory of Marduk, but it emerges
from that violence. Marduk cuts the body of Tiamat in two and the distinct
parts of the cosmos are formed from her divided body. “Thus,” says Ricoeur,
“the creative act, which distinguishes, separates, measures, and puts in order, is
inseparable from the criminal act that puts an end to the life of the oldest gods,
inseparable from a deicide inherent in the divine” (Ricoeur 1967, 180).
And the human being is born from a new crime. The chief of the rebel
gods is slain and from his blood Marduk advised Ea to create the human
being. Humanity takes its origin from the life of a god, but from a rebel god
“ravished by murder” (Ricoeur 1967, 180). And so, just as violence is at the
heart of the coming-to-be of the gods, it is at the heart of the creation of the
Paul Ricoeur 29
cosmos and the creation of the human being. “Thus violence,” says Ricoeur,
“is inscribed in the origin of things, in the principle that establishes while it
destroys” (Ricoeur 1967, 182–83).
Where does salvation lie in the Creation myth? Because creation itself
comes about through the struggle against evil, salvation is not distinct from
creation. “If evil is coextensive with the origin of things, as primeval chaos
and theogonic strife, then the elimination of evil and of the wicked must be-
long to the creative act itself. In this ‘type’ there is no problem of salvation
distinct from the problem of creation; there is no history of salvation distinct
from the drama of creation” (Ricoeur 1967, 191).
Human participation in this drama of creation takes place in two ways, in the
sphere of ritual in which the people re-enact the cosmic drama that gave birth
to creation, and in the sphere of politics where the king wards off the enemies
of the state and of the gods. Human beings, according to this myth were created
for the service of the gods, and this service “calls for the real re-enactment of
the drama of creation” (Ricoeur 1967, 192). “By the celebration of the festi-
val,” says Ricoeur, “the people place their whole existence under the sign of
the drama of creation” (Ricoeur 1967, 192). The king plays a crucial mediating
role, standing as he does between the people and the god, mirroring the god to
his people, representing his people before the god. It is through “the role of the
king in the festival that the transition from cosmic drama to history is affected”
(Ricoeur 1967, 193). In fact, the king is divine, although “by investiture and
adoption rather than by actual filiation” (Ricoeur 1967, 194).
As the recognized representative of the gods of cosmic order, the king is
charged to see that the political order, mirror image of cosmic order, prevails
in his kingdom. This particular idea of kingship, specifically the relation of
the king to the gods who imposed order on the original chaos, has implica-
tions for the “conception of violence and its role in history” (Ricoeur 1967,
194). The king’s position as ruler is precarious, just as was the position of the
triumphant gods in the cosmic order. It is important that the king control his
enemies by whatever means necessary. The king’s control of his empire is not
just a political necessity, but a mandate from the god he represents. In fact, it
is an easy step, says Ricoeur, to identify the king’s enemies as representing
the forces of chaos overcome in the original cosmic battle between the gods.
This view of political reality as reflecting the divine struggle through which
the creation itself took place is the ultimate justification, says Ricoeur, of any
holy war theology. Though he does not find that the Assyro-Babylonian cul-
ture (which gave rise to the epic of Enuma Elish which Ricoeur uses as an
example of the first type of myth) explicitly developed this theology of war,
Ricoeur maintains that “any coherent theology of the holy war is founded on
the first mythological ‘type’ of Evil” (Ricoeur 1967, 198).
30 Chapter One
The main features of Ricoeur’s account of the Creation Myth can be sum-
marized in a series of propositions: “Before recounting the genesis of the
world it recounts the genesis of the divine” (Ricoeur 1967, 175–76); Chaos
is anterior to order, and evil is primordial. “. . . If the divine came into being,
then chaos is anterior to order and the principle of evil is primordial, coexten-
sive with the generation of the divine” (Ricoeur 1967, 177); The coming to be
of the gods involves a kind of domestic violence through which the younger
gods triumph over the older gods; Human beings do not originate evil but
only continue it; Humanity itself comes into being through an act of violence
between the gods; Since creation itself is the overcoming of evil, salvation is
not distinct from creation; Salvation takes place through a twofold participa-
tion in the drama of creation: first in the sphere of ritual where the people
put themselves “under the sign of the drama of creation,” and second in the
political sphere where the king carries on a holy war to overcome the enemies
of the state and of the gods.
The Tragic Myth

The Greek tragedies of the fifth century BC express this myth in its classic
form. Ricoeur gives three reasons why, in his opinion, we must begin with
Greek tragedy. First, Greek tragedy is not just one example among others.
It is “the sudden and complete manifestation of the essence of the tragic; to
understand the tragic is to relive in oneself the Greek experience of the tragic,
not as a particular case of tragedy, but as the origin of tragedy—that is to say,
both its beginning and its authentic emergence” (Ricoeur 1967, 211). In ad-
dition, the Greek version of tragedy shows the connection of the tragic with
theology, i.e., with ideas of the divine (Ricoeur 1977, 212). Greek tragedy
carries “all at once to its utmost limits” the theme of people blinded and led
to their destruction by the gods. The third reason for beginning with the Greek
example of tragedy is that it is particularly well suited to demonstrate “that
the tragic vision of the world is tied to a spectacle and not to a speculation”
(Ricoeur 1967, 212). The dramatic form of presentation is necessary because
the idea of predestination to evil by a god is “unthinkable” and thus cannot be
translated into philosophy. It can only be represented in the form of dramatic
action without the benefit of philosophical justification.
For Ricoeur “the crux of the tragic,” the specific characteristic that makes
tragedy tragic, is the combination of two themes, divine predestination to
evil and heroic greatness. It was Aeschylus, says Ricoeur, who tied together
the tragic themes of “blindness” sent by the gods, fate, jealousy on the part
of the gods, and immoderation on the part of humans and added this specific
element that defines tragedy, the conjunction of divine predestination and
Paul Ricoeur 31
heroic greatness. The tragic emotion of fear ( phobos) arises when fate or
destiny, confronted by the resistance of the hero, finally crushes him or her.
Ricoeur takes the figures of Zeus and Prometheus in Aeschylus’ Prometheus
Bound as the representatives of the divine and human poles of the tragic vi-
sion. The figure of Zeus sums up in a personal way the “diffused Satanism of
the daimones,” the impersonal fates. Opposite Zeus, facing him, is the figure
of Prometheus who represents the hubris or excess of the hero “treated as
authentic greatness and not as unwarranted exaltation” (Ricoeur 1967, 220).
This crucial element of the conjunction of divine predestination and heroic
greatness produces what Ricoeur calls “the dialectics of fate and freedom”
(Ricoeur 1967, 220). Without this dialectic there would be no tragedy. Trag-
edy requires both the hostile divine transcendence, the “pitiless god,” and the
freedom of the “hero that delays the fulfillment of fate, causes it to hesitate
and to appear contingent at the height of the crisis” (Ricoeur 1967, 220). It
is this hesitation and delayed realization of what has been determined by fate
that gives tragedy its dramatic quality. The spectator knows that fate will win
out in the end, but waits in terror ( phobos) through the delaying action of the
hero until the predestined future arrives as something new. Ricoeur cites the
example of Oedipus the King. Oedipus has been predestined to kill his father
and marry his mother. When the play begins Oedipus has already carried out
his fate and the audience knows it, but Oedipus does not. Through the pain-
ful process of recognition, what was already true historically becomes true
for Oedipus.
Ricoeur points out that hubris, the immoderation or excess of the hero,
is not of itself tragic. Before the rise of tragedy in Aeschylus, Greek writers
like Solon treated hubris as a moral defect and denounced it as something to
be avoided because it could be avoided. In tragedy hubris cannot be avoided
because the hero is a victim of divine possession. “This malignancy of good
fortune, which is turned into misfortune by greed and pride, does not become
tragic until it is brought into conjunction with the mystery of iniquity of the
wicked god” (Ricoeur 1967, 222). Yet, in spite of the divine possession in
tragedy, we can discern the emerging shape of responsibility in the form of
immoderation or excess.
In return, the immoderation introduces a human movement, a contrast, a tension

into the heart of the mystery. ‘Man’s share’ must at least begin to be discerned
if the ethical moment in evil is to appear; there must be at least an indication
of a dawn of responsibility, of avoidable fault, and guilt must begin to be dis-
tinguished from finiteness. But this distinction tends to be muted, annulled by
predestination; the indistinctness of divine and human guilt is an incipient and
annulled distinction (Ricoeur 1967, 222).
32 Chapter One
The failure of this “dawn of responsibility” to emerge into the full day of an
ethical vision of life is precisely what distinguishes the logic of the tragic
myth from that of the Adamic.
If the hero carries out evil deeds under the necessary decree of Fate, what
meaning can we give to the notion of salvation? In the creation-drama, as
we have seen, salvation was identical with creation itself, since creation was
the overcoming of evil. And the original act of creation “was re-enacted
in the battles of the king and in every conflict where the eye of faith could
make out, behind the face of the enemy, the ancient adversary vanquished
at the beginning by the deeds of the gods” (Ricoeur 1967, 227). To the
question “What can the end of evil be like in the tragic vision?” Ricoeur
answers that “when it remains true to its type” it can only offer deliverance
through sympathy, tragic pity, “an impotent emotion of participation in the
misfortunes of the hero, a sort of weeping with him and purifying the tears
by the beauty of song” (Ricoeur 1967, 227). This answer seems to apply to
spectators of the tragic drama. But Ricoeur’s discussion of salvation—he
uses the term “deliverance”—takes in both the spectator and the hero of the
dramatic presentation.
The hero of the tragic drama experiences deliverance through the passage
of time: “ . . . the passage of time in the Greek tragedies suggests the thought
of a redemption by time, which wears out the claws and teeth of the wrath of
gods and men” (Ricoeur 1967, 227). In The Eumenides, the last play of the
trilogy, Oresteia, Aeschylus moves away from tragic type of myth to a logic
more typical of the creation-drama, namely the transformation of the gods
themselves from malevolent to benevolent characters; “holiness wins out
over primordial badness” (Ricoeur 1967, 228). But this movement away from
the tragic does not, for Ricoeur, constitute a real deliverance for the hero. It
shifts the action to a conversation among the gods and a new constructive role
assigned to the Furies.
In Sophocles this movement away from tragedy does not take place “and
in this sense Sophocles is more purely tragic than Aeschylus” (Ricoeur 1967,
228). Sophocles’ Antigone “which is a tragedy of insoluble contradiction, be-
gins precisely at the point where Aeschylus, in the Eumenides, saw a way out
of the tragic; the city is no longer the place of reconciliation; it is the closed
city which drives Antigone into defiance and the invocation of laws incom-
patible with the historic existence of the city” (Ricoeur 1967, 229). Though
Ricoeur qualifies his interpretation of Sophocles by pointing to the end of the
tragic in Oedipus at Colonus, he maintains that Oedipus’ transformation “is a
suspension of the human condition rather than its cure” (Ricoeur 1967, 228).
Salvation within the tragic vision takes place through what Aeschylus in the
Agamemnon calls “suffering for the sake of understanding.”
Paul Ricoeur 33
Ricoeur does not believe that Greek religion ever offered “a genuine end
for the tragic.” It offers the possibility of divine possession, “the penetration
of the divine into the human,” and of divine ecstasy, “escape from the human
into the divine.” Apollo accomplishes this descent of the divine into the hu-
man as “counselor” and “guarantor of legislative activity of the great found-
ers of laws” (Ricoeur 1967, 230). But Apollo does not heal the tragic soul.
His role as “master of ritual purifications” indicates the continuing necessity
for the tragic hero to return to the old purifications to wash away the stains of
defilement. And Dionysus, the god of ecstasy, “seeks even less to make the
wounded soul whole again” (Ricoeur 1967, 230). Rather than offering human
beings a way of being reconciled with themselves, Dionysus offers “exalta-
tion, a sort of sacred immoderation, by which one escapes from oneself rather
than becoming reconciled with oneself” (Ricoeur 1967, 230).
Thus, we come to a key point of Ricoeur’s interpretation of salvation in
the tragic vision: “. . . the tragic vision of the world excludes forgiveness of
sins” (Ricoeur 1967, 230). The lack of forgiveness in the tragic account of
salvation is congruent with the lack of full responsibility that we saw earlier
in the tragic account of the origin of evil. These two parallel features of the
tragic vision of existence, the absence of full responsibility and of genuine
forgiveness, distinguish it from the “Adamic” myth and the “eschatological”
vision, which we will take up next.
The above summary refers to Ricoeur’s treatment of salvation for the hero
who is the subject of the tragic drama. Ricoeur also considers, as we saw ear-
lier, a kind of salvation for the spectator, the ordinary person who, entering
the spectacle from the outside, shares in some sense the destiny of the tragic
hero. How does the dramatization of the tragic vision provide deliverance for
the spectator? The tragic spectacle, says Ricoeur, offers the spectator a way
of entering into the “place of tragic reconciliation,” the chorus. “One must
become a member of the chorus in order to yield oneself to the feelings which
are specifically those of the tragic reconciliation” (Ricoeur 1967, 231). Those
feelings are “the specific sort of fear ( phobos) which comes over us when we
are suddenly faced with the conjunction of freedom and empirical ruin” and
pity (eleos), “that merciful gaze which no longer condemns but shows pity”
(Ricoeur 1967, 231). “Such is the deliverance which is not outside the tragic,
but within it: an aesthetic transposition of fear and pity by virtue of a tragic
myth turned into poetry and by the grace of an ecstasy born of a spectacle”
(Ricoeur 1967, 231).
We can summarize Ricoeur’s account of the tragic type of myths in a series
of propositions. First, and most important, Ricoeur finds the crux of the tragic
in the convergence of the theme of divine predestination to evil and the theme
of heroic greatness. Ricoeur calls this the “dialectics of fate and freedom”
34 Chapter One
(Ricoeur 1967, 220). On the side of the hero’s freedom, and this is the second
point, the ethical dimension of human responsibility emerges but never comes
to fullness because of divine predestination. In the third place, though human
freedom cannot prevail against the predetermined will of the gods, human
beings can resist their fate, as is seen most clearly in the case of Prometheus,
who says no while submitting to his fate. A fourth point concerns salvation
in the tragic myth. It takes place in two ways. For the hero, deliverance takes
place through the passage of time and entails the understanding that comes
through suffering. For the ordinary people who participate in the tragedy as
spectators, deliverance takes place through fear and pity aroused by the poetic
presentation of the tragic myth. Finally, though a kind of deliverance occurs
within tragedy, “the tragic vision of the world excludes the forgiveness of
sin” (Ricoeur 1967, 230). Forgiveness is at the heart of the Adamic Myth to
which we now turn.
The Adamic Myth and the Eschatological Vision of History

From the beginning, Ricoeur gives us an orienting compass to keep us from
getting lost. “The ‘Adamic’ myth is the anthropological myth par excellence;
Adam means the human being” (Ricoeur 1967, 232). This myth is anthropo-
logical because in it the human being, not some form of divine being, is the
origin of evil. For Ricoeur, this entails three characteristics. First, Adam, the
ancestor of the human race, is human like us, not some kind of supernatural
being. For this reason Ricoeur avoids the language of the “fall.” The Adamic
Myth is “a myth of ‘deviation’ or ‘going astray’ rather than a myth of the
‘fall’” (Ricoeur 1967, 233). Second, this myth is “the most extreme attempt
to separate the origin of evil from the origin of good” (Ricoeur 1967, 233).
Here Ricoeur makes a distinction that is crucial to his thinking. In the Adamic
Myth the origin of evil is “radical,” the origin of good is “primordial.”
Though evil, symbolized in Adam’s turning away from God, lies at the root
of human existence, it is not the deepest or primordial level. The goodness
of the original creation lies deeper than evil. The third characteristic of the
Adamic Myth is that the role of the central figure, Adam, is balanced by the
subordinate figures of Eve and the Serpent who represent the presence of
temptation, indicating a prior existence of evil that mitigates in some way the
responsibility of Adam. This already-existing character of evil in the form
of temptation suggests a resonance with the other myths of evil that I will
explore later.
Ricoeur’s presentation unfolds in four sections. The first section, “The
Penitential Motivation of the ‘Adamic’ Myth,” shows how the myth func-
tions within the penitential consciousness of the Jewish people. In the second
Paul Ricoeur 35
section, “The Structure of he Myth: The ‘Instant’ of the Fall,” Ricoeur shows
how the intention of the myth is “to concentrate all the evil of history in a
single man, in a single act—in short, in a unique event” (Ricoeur 1967, 243).
The third section, “The ‘Lapse of Time’ of the Drama of Temptation,” shows
how the “unique event” is spread out in a drama “which takes time, intro-
duces a succession of incidents, and brings several characters into the action”
(Ricoeur 1967, 243). The final section, “Justification and Eschatological
Symbols,” shows the orientation of the myth toward the future in which some
kind of deliverance or salvation will lie, as they did in the Creation Myth
and the Tragic Myth, each of which entailed some kind of “way out” of evil.
Broadly speaking, then, Ricoeur’s treatment of the Adamic Myth falls into
two phases. The first is an investigation of the myth in its function of symbol-
izing the beginning of sin, the second an exploration of Jewish history and
theology to see if they contain corresponding symbols of the end, symbols
which would entail deliverance from sin. What follows are the essential ele-
ments of each of these phases.
Ricoeur begins his treatment of the first phase with a question: “What
does it mean to ‘understand’ the Adamic Myth” (Ricoeur 1967, 235)? First,
answers Ricoeur, we have to understand that it is a myth, not a historical ac-
count of events that occurred in a certain place at a certain time. “It must be
well understood that the question, Where and when did Adam eat the forbid-
den fruit? no longer has meaning for us” (Ricoeur 1967, 235). Abandoning
a historical interpretation of the story opens up the possibility of interpreting
it as myth. “But then we should not say, ‘The story of the “fall” is only a
myth’—that is to say, something less than history, but ‘The story of the fall
has the greatness of myth’—that is to say, has more meaning than a true his-
tory” (Ricoeur 1967, 236). That meaning “resides in the power of the myth
to evoke speculation on the power of defection that freedom has” (Ricoeur
1967, 235). By “power of defection” Ricoeur means the will’s ability to devi-
ate from what is good for the person choosing, and to freely choose situations
that constitute a form of slavery.
The second point of Ricoeur’s answer to the question of how we are to
understand the Adamic Myth is that this myth is not a “point of departure”
for Israel’s experience of sin but actually “presupposes that experience and
marks its maturity” (Ricoeur 1967, 237). The myth is itself an interpretation
of earlier symbols of sin that had arisen out of Israel’s experience, symbols
such as “deviation, revolt, going astray, perdition, captivity.” The question
for Ricoeur will be to find what the Adamic Myth adds to these prior sym-
bols. Whatever it adds must be recognized as a later and non-essential addi-
tion. As Ricoeur remarks, the figure of Adam is not important in the Hebrew
Testament. Nor does Jesus refer to Adam in the New Testament. “It was St.
36 Chapter One
Paul who roused the Adamic theme from its lethargy; by means of the con-
trast between the ‘old man’ and the ‘new man,’ he set up the figure of Adam
as the inverse of that of Christ, called the second Adam [I Cor. 15:21–22,
45–49; Rom. 5:12–21]” (Ricoeur 1967, 238). For Ricoeur, then, it is simply
not true that “the Adamic Myth is the keystone of the Judeo-Christian edifice;
it is only a flying buttress. . . .” (Ricoeur 1967, 239).
The answer to Ricoeur’s question about what the Adamic Myth adds to
Israel’s consciousness of sin lies in his understanding of how myth func-
tions. All myths, according to Ricoeur, have a threefold function; (1) they
universalize experience, (2) they establish a tension between a beginning and
an end, and (3) they investigate the relations between the primordial and the
historical. The Adamic Myth illustrates each of these three functions. It takes
the universalizing tendency already present in Jewish consciousness of sin
and concretizes it in the figure of Adam, the original and universal human be-
ing. It establishes a tension between the beginning and the end by projecting
Israel’s historical experience of the dialectic of “judgement and mercy” into a
myth of the beginning and the end. Human beings experience the judgment of
God in the form of exile from the garden, the tower of Babel, and the flood.
They experience God’s mercy in the rescue of Noah from the destructive
powers of the flood, in God’s promises to Abraham, and through the trans-
formation of those promises in a series of figures leading up to Christ, “the
second Adam.” Finally, the Adamic Myth investigates “the relations between
the primordial and the historical” by distinguishing a “primordial” divine act
of creation that is completely good and a “radical” historical act of the origi-
nal human beings falling away from God. “Thus,” says Ricoeur, “the myth
appears at a high point of tension in the penitential experience; its function is
to posit a ‘beginning’ (an existential not a historical beginning) of evil distinct
from the ‘beginning’ of creation, to posit an event by which sin entered into
the world and, by sin, death” (Ricoeur 1967, 243).
Having shown how the Adamic Myth fits into Israel’s consciousness of
sin, Ricoeur turns to the meaning of the narrative itself. First, we look at the
central instant of Adam’s sin. What happened? Underneath his elaborate and
nuanced analysis, Ricoeur’s answer to this question—what we need in order
to show the direction of his thought—is simple and clear. When Adam ate of
the forbidden fruit, he altered the relation of trust between himself and God
(Ricoeur 1967, 249). More precisely, he took upon himself a prerogative that
belongs to God alone, the determination of what is good and evil. The spe-
cific content of the prohibition, eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge
of good and evil, was insignificant in itself, especially if you compare it with
the sin of murder subsequently committed by Cain. What is significant is that
the act was prohibited.
Paul Ricoeur 37
The consequence of the rupture between God and Adam is that something
ends and something else begins. What ends is a “time of innocence,” what
begins is a “time of malediction” (Ricoeur 1967, 244). It is significant, says
Ricoeur, that the story of the fall is inserted into a story of creation. The cre-
ation story designates the beginning of something good, the fall indicates the
beginning of evil. Human life, then, from its beginning, shows the ambiguity
of having been created good and having become evil. The goodness always
remains as the primordial condition on which is superimposed a condition of
evil which, though “radical,” does not reach deeply enough into humanity
to eradicate the “primordial” good. “Sin does not define what it means to be
human; beyond our becoming sinners, there is our being created” (Ricoeur
1967, 251). Nevertheless, the ambiguity, “created good and become evil, per-
vades all the registers of human life” (Ricoeur 1967, 246). Human life “after”
the fall is subject to hardship.
Ricoeur has answered the question “what happened in the ‘instant’ of the
fall?” Now he turns to the question “how did it happen?” How did the drama
that led to the rupture between God and man unfold over time? “The same
myth that focuses the ‘event’ of the fall in one man, one act, one instant, also
spreads it out among several characters—Adam, Eve, the serpent—and sev-
eral episodes—the seduction of the woman and the fall of the man” (Ricoeur
1967, 252). The serpent’s seduction of Eve, for that is where the drama be-
gins, expresses the “transition” from innocence to sin. The transition leads
from the innocence in which Adam first accepted God’s prohibition against
eating the fruit to a doubt about God’s intentions. What had first appeared as
a “creative limit,” a limit that allowed human beings to develop within the
finite status of creatures, came to appear as something negative. The serpent’s
question: “Has God truly said . . . ?” initiates the transition. “It is,” says
Ricoeur, “a question that seizes upon the interdiction and transforms it into an
occasion for falling. . . .” (Ricoeur 1967, 253). The limit which had formerly
provided an orientation now appeared as a “hostile negativity.” The serpent
denies the consequence that God had predicted if Adam were to eat the fruit
and opens up a new possibility, which will follow on breaking God’s com-
mand: “You will not die; for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will
be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3:4–5).
In striving to “be like God” by breaking the commandment, Adam, in
effect, chooses to become his own creator. From this rejection of creature
status follows what Ricoeur calls “the evil infinite of human desire—always
something else, always something more—which animates the movement of
civilization, the appetite for pleasure, or possessions, for power, for knowl-
edge . . .” (Ricoeur 1967, 254). As we will see later, René Girard finds what
Ricoeur calls “the evil infinite of human desire” at the heart of the notion of
38 Chapter One
original sin. But for Girard it is a “mimetic” desire, wanting what the other
has precisely because the other has it, not because it is good in itself. The
scriptures call this covetousness. For Ricoeur, Eve represents the point of vul-
nerability in human beings, men and women alike, to this kind of temptation.
The serpent represents the phenomenon that the temptation to evil always
seems somehow external to human beings, that evil seems to be “already
there” before individuals add their own sinful contribution, and that evil even
takes on a kind of cosmic structure. “Thus the serpent symbolizes something
of man and something of the world, a side of the microcosm and a side of
the macrocosm, the chaos in me, among us, and outside” (Ricoeur 1967,
258). The temptation represented by the serpent exists in me, even before I
have sinned, and it exists in the world—a world of fallen angels—luring me
toward deeds that contradict my desire for happiness. For Ricoeur the serpent
“represents the aspect of evil that could not be absorbed into the responsible
freedom of man . . .” (Ricoeur 1967, 258). The serpent is a kind of residue of
the tragic vision that cannot be entirely expunged from the Adamic Myth and
its emphasis on human freedom as the origin of evil.
Ricoeur now moves to a consideration of salvation, what he calls “Justi-
fication and Eschatological Symbols.” The question here is whether we can
find a set of symbols of the “end” of human existence that are “homoge-
neous” with the symbols of the beginning. We have already seen this sort of
correspondence in considering the other myths, each of which offered its own
version of salvation. It is clear that for Ricoeur, the Adamic Myth has a kind
of “career”—the word is mine, but it corresponds to Ricoeur’s treatment of
the myth from its fixed point at the beginning of Genesis to its reawakening
in the writings of Paul in the New Testament. As we have seen, the Adamic
Myth does not come at the beginning of Israel’s experience of evil, but sums
up and universalizes that experience. The story of Adam and Eve in Genesis
was most probably written after the account of God’s saving acts in history.
To answer the question about the symbols of the end corresponding to the
symbol of the beginning, Ricoeur will trace the development of symbols of
promise and redemption first found in the Hebrew Testament and fulfilled
in the New Testament. Two figures from late Judaism, the Gospels, and the
Pauline epistles express the culmination of this development, the symbols of
the Son of Man and the Second Adam. Ricoeur works his way up to these
later symbols phenomenologically by tracing “the progressive enrichment of
the figures or images that answer from the beginning to that of Adam in order
to overtake the symbols of the Son of Man and the Second Adam” (Ricoeur
1967, 261).
“The figure of Abraham may be said to be the first answer to the figure of
Adam” (Ricoeur 1967, 262). In him Israel represents its development as “a
Paul Ricoeur 39
history directed by a ‘promise’ and moving toward a ‘fulfillment’” (Ricoeur

1967, 262). At this point in history the promise refers to land and blood: a
promised land and a posterity as innumerable as the sands on the seashore.
This original promise, delayed as Israel’s fortunes waxed and waned in the
course of its history, was transformed into eschatology, the focus on a future
world that will follow on the destruction of this present world. The figure
of the king is an example of this evolution of the promise. The oracle in
II Samuel (7:12–16) concerning the permanence of David’s line speaks of
“earthly and political hopes.” “Your house and your kingdom shall be made
sure forever before me; your throne shall be established forever” (II Sam.
7:16). But in Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Isaiah “The King, the Anointed One
. . . begins to be ‘eschatologized’ . . .” (Ricoeur 1967, 264). Ricoeur cites the
words of Isaiah 9:1–6: “For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given:
and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called
Wonderful Counselor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, the Prince
of Peace.”
Here Ricoeur makes a point that is crucial not only to this passage from
Isaiah, but to his whole interpretation of the Adamic Myth, and in particular
his refusal to call it a myth of the fall. “The important thing for us is that the
representation of a reconciled cosmos which accompanies this image of the
coming Reign expresses not at all the regret for a lost golden age, but the
expectation of a perfection the like of which will not have been seen before”
(Ricoeur 1967, 265). The promise of a harmonious and peaceful future is not
the restoration of a state of innocence lost through the disobedience of Adam,
a state not expressed or implied in the story told in Genesis, but something
new.
Ricoeur refers to two other figures that emerge during this same period
when the image of the messianic king is evolving into that of a future Prince
of Peace. The first is the Servant of Yahweh found in II Isaiah (42:1–9; 49:
1–6; 50:1–11; 52:13–53:12), the second is The Son of Man found in the
books of Daniel, Ezra, and Enoch. The Servant Songs of Isaiah introduce
something new, the image of a mysterious figure—we do not know whether
this is an individual or the people of Israel or a remnant—who will restore
Israel and be a light to the nations through his sufferings, through “the vol-
untary ‘gift’ of a suffering taken on himself and offered to others” (Ricoeur
1967, 266). This is a very different image from that of the king: “we need a
new ear to understand the song of the suffering servant who gives himself for
the remission of sins” (Ricoeur 1967, 266). “Surely he has borne our infirmi-
ties, and carried our diseases; yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by
God and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for
our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that has made us whole, and by
40 Chapter One
his bruises we are healed” (Is 53:4–5). In this figure of the Suffering Servant
Ricoeur finds the first manifestation of the idea of pardon, the central theme
of the symbols of the end that correspond to the symbol of the beginning of
sin. “It is through an enigmatic personage who substitutes his suffering for
our sins that pardon is announced” (Ricoeur 1967, 266). Ricoeur is not think-
ing of just the passive carrying away of sin by the scapegoat. A scapegoat
does not choose to carry the burden of sin. The Suffering Servant does choose
and in doing so becomes a source of salvation for others. “Expiation through
the voluntary suffering of another, however mysterious the Ebed Yahweh
[the loving kindness of God] may be is an essential key to the idea of pardon.
We may not understand how a loving God can allow one he loves to suffer,”
yet, says Ricoeur, the suffering of the innocent is crucial to redemption. René
Girard, as we will see in a later chapter, explores the willingness of Christ to
suffer rather than to inflict suffering on others.
The other, very different, figure is that of the Son of Man: “I watched
during my visions in the night, and behold, on the clouds of heaven there
came one like a son of man; he advanced toward the Ancient of Days, and
they brought him near to him. And there was given him dominion, glory, and
kingship; and all peoples, nations, and people of every language served him.
His eternal dominion will never pass away, and his kingship will never be
destroyed” (Dan. 7:13–14). This figure, the man of the end, corresponds to
Adam, the man of the beginning. The son of man will be both Judge of the
world and the King to come.
Both of these figures enter into the earliest Christology; Ricoeur calls it that
of Jesus himself. In Mark, Jesus refers to himself as the Son of Man: “Again
the high priest asked him, ‘Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One?’
Jesus said, ‘I am; and you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of
the Power and coming with the clouds of heaven’”(Mk. 14:61–62). “[A]fter-
wards,” says Ricoeur, “Jesus for the first time unites the idea of suffering and
death, which had previously pertained to the theme of the suffering servant of
Yahweh, with the figure of the son of man; . . .” (Ricoeur 1967, 269). The son
of man is precisely “man.” And the suffering servant contributed “the idea of
substitutive suffering that is voluntary in character” (Ricoeur 1967, 270). The
result of the combination of these two figures is shown in the story of the last
judgment of the sheep and goats; the judge (the Son of Man) is identified with
the oppressed (the Suffering Servant). Jesus identifies himself both as judge
and as victim. “As often as you did it to one of these, you did it to me” (Matt.
25:40). “The Judge of human beings is identical with them insofar as they
come face to face in action and insofar as they are crushed by the ‘greater’
ones” (Ricoeur 1967, 270). The notion that “The Son of Man came not to be
ministered to but to minister, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mk.
Paul Ricoeur 41
10:45) “expresses completely the fusion of the two figures—the Servant of

the Eternal and the Son of Man” (Ibid., 271).
Ricoeur now introduces Paul’s figure of the Second Adam, which, he says,
“adds a decisive trait” to the figures Son of Man and Suffering Servant. St.
Paul establishes a comparison between the first Adam and the second: “For
if the many died through the one man’s trespass, much more surely have
the grace of God and the free gift in the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ
abounded for the many” (Rom. 5:15). The “much more surely” is important. It
indicates that the gift is not just a restoration of what had been lost through sin
but a new creation that is better than what was lost. Ricoeur clarifies his point
by referring to two phases in Paul’s treatment of the drama of sin and salva-
tion, the first contrasting disobedience and obedience, the second contrasting
sin and grace. “For just as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made
sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous”
(Rom. 5:19) And not only did Adam disobey, but after Adam’s disobedience,
“the law came in, with the result that the trespass multiplied; . . .” (Rom. 5:20).
Even though the contrast between Adam’s disobedience and Christ’s obe-
dience is crucial, it is in the contrast of sin and grace, that the “decisive trait”
of the figure of the second Adam comes to light: “ . . . but where sin increased,
grace abounded all the more . . . “(Rom. 5:20b–21). This abounding “all the
more” of grace is the fullest expression of the work of restoration entailed in
the Adamic Myth as Ricoeur interprets it, extending from the first Adam of
Genesis to the second Adam of Paul’s Letter to the Romans. Ricoeur notes
that Paul even gives a certain finality, i.e., intentionality, to the disobedience
of Adam and its results, a finality that points to the merciful intentions of God
toward all people: “For God has imprisoned all in disobedience so that he
may be merciful to all” (Rom. 11:32). Adam’s sin was the “happy fault”—to
use the Church’s words—that “merited such and so great a redeemer.”
Before leaving this recapitulation of Ricoeur’s account of the Adamic
Myth, a final point needs to be treated. In ending this section on the Adamic
Myth, Ricoeur returns to the notion of pardon. “This detour through the ‘im-
ages of the End’ permits us to give the notion of ‘pardon’ all its richness”
(Ricoeur 1967, 274). Clearly the notion of pardon is central to Ricoeur’s
version of the Adamic Myth. The key point is that pardon is not primarily a
psychological, i.e., individual, event but the participation of the believer in
the “types” of the first and second Adam. Ricoeur cites St. Paul who says that
the individual is “transformed” [metamorphousthai] (2 Cor. 3:18) or “con-
formed” [summorphos] (Rom. 8:29) to the image of the Son, and that “Just
as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we will also bear the image
of the man of heaven” (1 Cor. 15:49). Ricoeur insists on the point: “It is not
that individuals undergo a certain experience and then project it into a world
42 Chapter One
of images; on the contrary, it is because they are incorporated into that which
those ‘images’ signify that individuals attain the experience of forgiveness
( pardon)” (Ricoeur 1967, 275). Again,
in order to arrive at the experience [of forgiveness] one must have come from
the symbolic universe constituted by the accumulation of figures stretching from
the Adam of the Yahwist editor to the two Adams of the Pauline epistles and
including the figures of the Messiah-King, the Shepherd-King, the Prince of
Peace, the Servant of Yahweh, and the Son of Man, to say nothing of the Lord
and the Logos of the apostolic Church. Pardon, as something experienced, gets
its meaning from the participation of the individual in the ‘type’ of the funda-
mental human being (Ricoeur 1967, 274).
As we have already seen, Ricoeur begins his treatment of the Adamic Myth
with the affirmation that “The Adamic Myth is the anthropological myth par
excellence: Adam means Man” (Ricoeur 1967, 232). The myth puts a human
being at the beginning of sin, the First Adam, and at the end, the Second
Adam, who is also the incarnate God. It is time to summarize the stages
through which Ricoeur has traced the “career” of the myth.
The first point is that in the Adamic Myth God simply is, without history
and without competition; no account is given of the coming to be of God. Sec-
ond, God creates the universe in all its parts, physical and spiritual, the world
of nature and the human world, and God’s creation is good. The third point is
that evil entered the world when Adam went against God’s prohibition and ate
of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The deeper meaning
of Adam’s deed was the intention to become like God, determining what is
good and evil. Fourth, the consequence of Adam’s deed was the introduction
of hardship into human affairs. The fifth point is that, although human beings
are responsible for evil, their responsibility is mitigated by the figure of the
serpent who, in tempting them, represents an “already-there” presence of evil.
Finally, God’s response to the “turning aside” of human sin is to promise a
restored state of humanity that is better than the state lost through sin. The
promise is fulfilled definitively in Jesus Christ, the second Adam. “Where sin
abounded, grace abounded all the more” (Romans 5:20). This abounding of
grace over sin is an expression of the infinite compassion of God.
The Myth of the Exiled Soul and Salvation Through Knowledge

We move now to the fourth type of myth about the origin and end of evil, “The
Myth of the Exiled Soul and Salvation Through Knowledge” (Ricoeur 1967,
279). This type, says Ricoeur, is at the base of all expressions of “anthropo-
logical dualism.” “What distinguishes it from all the other types is that it di-
Paul Ricoeur 43
vides the human being into ‘soul’ and ‘body’; it is on the basis of this myth that
man understands himself as the same as his ‘soul’ and other than his ‘body’”
(Ricoeur 1967, 279). This type is well illustrated by ancient Orphism, which is
accessible to us now principally through the Platonic tradition. Ricoeur com-
ments that some authorities “identify the myth of the exiled soul purely and
simply with the Orphic myth.” But studying the Orphic myth presents difficul-
ties because we no longer have it in a pure form. Platonic and neo-Platonic
philosophy is nourished by this myth and presupposes it, but we do not know
what the original myth was like before Plato transformed it philosophically.
The essential lines of this mythical type, what Ricoeur calls “The mythical
schema of the exiled soul,” become evident in a comparison with the other
types.
. . . This myth is the only one which is, in the proper sense of the word, a myth
of the ‘soul’ and at the same time a myth of the ‘body.’ It tells how the ‘soul,’
divine in its origin, became human—how the ‘body,’ a stranger to the soul and
bad in many ways, falls to the lot of the soul—how the mixture of the soul and
the body is the event that inaugurates the humanity of man and makes man the
place of forgetting, the place where the primordial difference between soul and
body is abolished. Divine as to his soul, earthly as to his body, man is the forget-
ting of the difference; and the myth tells how that happened (Ricoeur 1967, 280).
Ricoeur distinguishes between a “myth of situation” which describes the

present human situation and a “myth of origin” which explains how that situ-
ation came about. Though we do not have it in its original form, the myth
is well known. The “cunning and cruel Titans” assassinate the infant god
Dionysos, then boil and eat his members. Zeus punishes the Titans by incin-
erating them with lightning. From their ashes Zeus creates the human being
who thus participates in “the evil nature of the Titans and the divine nature
of Dionysos, whom the Titans had assimilated in the course of the horrible
feast” (Ricoeur 1967, 282). Because this “myth of origin” is known to us, not
in its primitive form but only through the Neo-Platonists, Ricoeur turns first
to the “myth of situation” which we can reconstruct “on the sole basis of the
documents of the archaic and classical epoch . . .” (Ricoeur 1967. 282).
Ricoeur finds the nucleus of the situational myth in Plato’s Cratylus in
which Plato traces the etymology of the word “body” defined in distinction
from the soul.
It was the Orphics in particular, I think, who imposed that name [body], in the be-
lief that the soul atones for the faults for which it is punished, and that for its safe-
keeping [hina sozetai], it has round about it, the body in the likeness of a prison;
hence, that it is, as its name implies, the soma [the jail] of the soul, until the soul
has paid its debt, and there is no need to change a single letter. (Cratylus, 400c)
44 Chapter One
The soul seems to bring with it some kind of previous fault for which it is
atoning by its sojourn in the body. Interestingly, Origen, one of the most cre-
ative of the Church Fathers, held this theory of a fault committed before be-
ginning of the individual’s life on earth. In the Orphic myth, the body, though
not the origin of evil itself, becomes a place of exile for the soul, a prison in
fact. The prison of the body is also “a place of temptation and contamina-
tion,” “a degrading sanction” (Ricoeur 1967, 284). Prison life itself, which
is first a place of punishment for a previous evil, becomes in its own turn a
source of new evil: “. . . the soul in prison becomes a secondary delinquent,
continually subject to the hardening effect of the regime of the penitentiary”
(Ricoeur 1967, 284). But the myth of the exiled soul goes even further. Not
only does the soul dwell in the body as a kind of prison, but the soul’s life in
the body alternates with its life in Hades where it atones for evils committed
in the body. So the soul is caught between two forms of punishment, one dur-
ing life, the other after death. It is indeed a vicious circle. “The circularity of
life and death is without doubt the more profound myth that underpins [sous-
tend] the two myths of punishment in the body and punishment in Hades. To
be born is to ascend from death to life, and to die is to descend from life to
death” (Ricoeur 1967, 285).
It is a pessimistic vision. In fact, to use Ricoeur’s words, “This mixture
of condemnation and reiteration is the very face [figure meme] of despair”
(Ricoeur 1967, 287). In reaction to this despairing interpretation of the body
“as an instrument of reiterated punishment,” the Orphics developed the no-
tion of the soul as divine, “not from here . . . from elsewhere” (Ricoeur 1967,
287). “ . . . [I]n its present body it leads an occult existence, the existence of
an exiled being that longs for liberation” (Ricoeur 1967, 287). This notion
of the soul as something divine led the Orphics to a different interpretation
of altered states of consciousness. Other Greek cults spoke of “enthusiasm,”
literally, possession of the soul by a god. But for the Orphics altered states of
consciousness were “ecstasy,” a standing forth or excursion of the soul from
the body. “Ecstasy is now seen as manifesting the true nature of the soul
which daily existence hides” (Ricoeur 1967, 287). Only the Orphics among
the ancient Greeks “attained the revolutionary intuition that the human being
is no longer a mortal but a god” (Ricoeur 1967, 288). The crucial dividing
line in Orphism is not between the gods who have kept immortality for them-
selves and human beings who are subject to the law of repeated alternations
between the two prisons, Hades and the body. The division is between the
soul which is in itself divine and the body its prison.
“The important thing now,” says Ricoeur, “is to escape from the alterna-
tion of life and death, from reiteration; the ‘divine soul’ is a soul that can be
delivered from this reciprocal generation of contrary states, from the ‘wheel
Paul Ricoeur 45
of birth and rebirth’” (Ricoeur 1967, 288–89). This leads us to a “new un-
derstanding of the self.” This Orphic idea of a divine soul independent of the
body inspired philosophy’s efforts to “conceive the soul’s identity with itself”
(Ricoeur 1967, 289). .
This, then, is the “myth of situation,” which proclaims the duality of a
divine soul imprisoned in a body. Now an essential ingredient of the Orphic
view leads to the necessity of a “myth of origin.” For human beings in their
present state have “forgotten” the true nature of their existence. “The question
raised by the myth, then, is this: Why is that duality forgotten? Why is that
twofold nature experienced as a confused existence?” (Ricoeur 1967, 298).
The myth of origin explains how the two natures came to be confused in our
present state as human beings, a state that “makes necessary a constant ef-
fort to regain the vision of duality.” This myth of origin is the story we have
already seen of how the human race came from the ashes of the Titans who
had eaten the divine infant Dionysos. And just as the Adamic Myth was for-
mulated by the Jahwist after Israel had already articulated its consciousness
of sin, so the Orphic myth of origin is an evolution of the myth of situation.
Having considered the “myth of situation” which lays out the fundamental
human dilemma of being a divine soul in an imprisoning body and the “myth
of origin” which “explains” how this confused situation came about, let us
turn now to Ricoeur’s account of the “type of ‘salvation’ that goes with this
type of “evil” (Ricoeur 1967, 300). The essential ingredient of salvation in
the Orphic myth is knowledge. The tragic myth with its “not-to-be-avowed
theology of the wicked god excludes philosophy and finds fulfillment in the
spectacle” (Ricoeur 1967, 300). This was a key point in Ricoeur’s treatment
of tragic vision: the idea of predestination to evil by a god is “unthinkable.”
But “the myth of the exiled soul is par excellence the principle and promise of
“knowledge,” or gnosis (Ricoeur 1967, 300). And knowledge is precisely this
act “in which man sees himself as soul, or better, makes himself the same as
his soul and other than his body—other than the alternation of life and death
. . .” (Ricoeur 1967, 300). This “awakening to itself of the exiled soul” is, says
Ricoeur, the basis of all Platonic and Neo-Platonic philosophy. The body is
“desire and passion,” the soul is the principle of all attempts to put a distance
between the reason (logos) and passion. “All knowledge of anything, every
science, whatever its object, is rooted in the knowledge of the body as desire
and of oneself as thought in contrast to desire” (Ricoeur 1967, 300–301).
We can now summarize this myth. First, this is the only one of Ricoeur’s
four mythical types that separates the human being into a soul and a body,
the soul being the divine self, the body a prison. Second the true situation of
the real divine self imprisoned in a body has been forgotten by human beings
in their natural state. The myth of origin that tells the story of Dionysus and
46 Chapter One
the Titans serves as a reminder of the real human situation. Third, the soul is
subject to a cycle of dying and rebirth that entails punishment both for sins
committed by individuals and for the evil that is inherited. Finally, liberation
from the cycle of death and rebirth is gnosis, the knowledge that the soul is
the real self and the body its prison.
THE CYCLE OF THE MYTHS
The Primacy of the Adamic Myth

Having explored each of the four myths, Ricoeur takes his stand in one of
them, the Adamic, and situates the other three in relation to it, like planets
revolving around a star. This cycle of the myths, as Ricoeur calls it is, in my
view, the boldest, most interesting, and most provocative feature of Ricoeur’s
treatment of the myths concerning the origin and end of evil. First, Ricoeur
says we cannot equally relate to all the myths even though each of them
speaks to us in some fashion. Not wanting to be the Don Juan of myths, we
need a vantage point from which to view these four symbolic narratives of the
origin and end of evil. For Ricoeur, that vantage point is the Adamic Myth,
“the place where the pre-eminence of one of those myths is proclaimed today
. . .” (Ricoeur 1967, 306).
Resonances between the Adamic Myth and the Other Myths

Having chosen the Adamic Myth as standpoint, Ricoeur now shows how each
of the other myths is related to it. Within the concentric structure set up by the
gravitational space around the Adamic Myth in the center, the tragic myth is
closest to the Adamic, the Creation myth next, and the Orphic myth farthest
away. From the standpoint of the Adamic Myth, Ricoeur reaffirms the tragic.
Even though the Adamic Myth is anti-tragic, it manifests several tragic as-
pects. Ricoeur’s essential point is that although the Adamic Myth presents
human beings as the initiators of evil through the act of disobedience, it also
reveals evil as already there in the figure of the Serpent who tempts Eve. In
more universal terms, it is already there in the ineluctable reverse side of sin
implied in the very act of freedom. The exercise of freedom inevitably in-
volves potentially negative consequences not intended by the one acting. We
might aim, for instance, to acquire enough wealth to live a dignified life only
to find ourselves trapped in the very possessions that are meant to liberate
us. Developing certain possibilities necessarily excludes the development of
others. “Who,” Ricoeur asks, “can join the intensity of friendship and love to
the breadth of universal solidarity?” (Ricoeur 1967, 312). Ricoeur says that
Paul Ricoeur 47
the fateful aspects are experienced as fault, not in an ethical sense but in an
existential sense. “Because fate belongs to freedom as the non-chosen portion
of all our choices, it must be experienced as fault” (Ricoeur 1967, 313).
We have been discussing the tragic aspect of human freedom. The tragic
aspect also appears in the divine side. Conceiving of God as ethical, reward-
ing the good, punishing the evil, was a great achievement of Jewish theology.
But even within Jewish thought this vision “ran aground” (echouer) over the
contemplation on the suffering of the innocent. The story of Job, the classi-
cal expression of the Jewish challenge to the ethical vision, presents us with
a phenomenon Ricoeur calls “unverified faith.” God shows Job the grandeur
of creation and, in effect, asks Job to surrender his claim for an explanation
that will justify God’s actions. The figure of Adam and the figure of Job
represent two poles of the Hebrew vision. The evil Adam commits leads to a
just exile. But the evil suffered by Job is an unjust deprivation. The figure of
Adam calls for the figure of Job, which acts as a corrective in that it helps us
come to terms with the evil that happens to the innocent. Only a third figure,
says Ricoeur, “could announce the transcending of the contradiction between
a suffering justly deserved and a suffering for which the victim is not at fault.
That figure would be the ‘Suffering Servant’” (Ricoeur 1967, 324). Isaiah
develops this idea of the suffering freely accepted by the innocent one. By
accepting unmerited suffering, the innocent one turns it into “an action ca-
pable of redeeming the evil that is committed” (324). The action of accepting
the suffering makes of it a “gift that expiates the sins of the people” (324).
“The suffering that is a gift takes up into itself the suffering that is a scandal
(Job), and thus inverts the relation of guilt to suffering” (Ricoeur 1967, 325).
Now, rather than being caused by guilt, as in the case of Adam and Eve, the
suffering of Isaiah’s Servant takes away guilt. This in brief is Ricoeur’s no-
tion of the “reaffirmation of the tragic.” As we have seen earlier, this image
of the Suffering Servant along with the image of the Son of Man appears in
the New Testament as an explanation of Christ’s redemptive mission. As we
will see later, Japanese author Shusaku Endo, in his last novel, Deep River,
powerfully portrays this notion of redemption through innocent suffering.
From the perspective of the Adamic Myth we can, Ricoeur contends, also
affirm the Creation myth, but only “up to a certain point” because the myth
of chaos is further removed from the Adamic Myth than is the tragic. The
key to the connection is that the Creation myth allows us to “think” the pres-
ence of evil at the heart of being. The tragic myth with its idea of predestina-
tion to evil by the gods is “unthinkable” in Ricoeur’s view. But the notion
of an evil at the heart of things, before the creation of the world or of human
beings seems to have survived into modern times even though its symbolic
form in the myth of creation has been superceded by ethical monotheism
48 Chapter One
of the Hebrew Testament. “. . . Although the naïve theogony of Babylonia

and archaic Greece is dead, more refined onto-theologies have not ceased
to appear, according to which evil is an original element of being” (Ricoeur
1967, 327). Ricoeur points to the cosmological fragments of Heraclitus, the
German mysticism of the fourteenth century, and German idealism, all of
which “propose philosophical and learned equivalents of theogony: evil has
its roots in the pain of being, in a tragedy that is the tragedy of being itself”
(Ricoeur 1967, 327). This means that if being-as-evil is equally primordial
as being-as-good, neither having final power over the other, then all we can
hope for from life is an endless struggle between good and evil. No hope of
final redemption is possible. We can never say, as Julian of Norwich did,
that “all will be well.” But if evil comes into the world only through free
choice, angelic first, then human, then, perhaps, redemption is possible. If
the free choice of evil, that is, of deviating from the good, is committed
against a good and loving God, then that God can forgive and restore what
has been damaged. This is, in fact, the logic of the Adamic Myth which dif-
fers essentially from the logic of tragedy.
In this “dynamics of the myths,” standing in the place of the Adamic Myth,
we have “reaffirmed” the tragic, and to a lesser extent the theogonic. But,
says Ricoeur, the Adamic Myth struggles with the Orphic myth. This myth of
the soul exiled in the body, precisely because it is the only myth that separates
the human person into soul and body, is furthest removed “typologically”
from the Adamic. Yet, it too has persisted in Christianity, principally through
the influence of Platonism and neo-Platonism. The basis of the connection
between the myth of exile and the Adamic Myth is, as with tragic and theo-
gonic myths, “the experience of evil as already there” (Ricoeur 1967, 331).
This is the “other side” of the Adamic Myth that first sees human beings as
the origin of evil and then sees the evil that is already there. “But, while the
tragic myth interprets passivity and seduction in terms of divine blinding and
the theogonic myth interprets them in terms of a resurgence of the primordial
chaos, the Orphic myth develops the aspect of the apparent externality of the
seduction and tries to make it coincide with the ‘body,’ understood as the
unique root of all that is involuntary” (Ricoeur 1967, 331).
Even though this Orphic myth is far from the Adamic, still Ricoeur finds
related themes in the Hebrew understanding of sin. The captivity in, and
Exodus from, Egypt, the Babylonian captivity and the return to Israel are all
related to the notion of exile. The mythical expression of these historical ex-
periences is found in the notion of banishment integral to the story of the fall;
“the fall inaugurates a time of banishment, wandering, and perdition, sym-
bolized successively by the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the garden of
Paradise, the wandering of Cain, the dispersion of the builders of Babel, and
Paul Ricoeur 49
the undoing of creation in the flood” (Ricoeur 1967, 331). Even the notion
of exile in the body can be found in Hebrew literature. Ezekiel and Jeremiah
use images of sin drawn from the body, the heart of stone, the lewdness of
the adulterer compared to a beast in heat.
St. Paul, though he never falls into the soul-body dualism of the Orphic
myth, reinforces the notion of sin as connected with the “flesh” understood
as a symbol for everything opposed to the Spirit. But it is above all through
a sort of “contract with Neo-Platonism” that Christianity moves “towards a
quasi-dualism, accredited by the inner experience of cleavage and alienation”
(Ricoeur 1967, 333). As this “contract” is lived out, the distance between
the Adamic Myth and the myth of the exiled soul, “still very perceptible in
St. Paul, will become smaller when the peculiar traits of the Adamic Myth
become attenuated and new traits of Christian experience make the myth of
the exiled soul more seductive” (Ricoeur 1967, 334). Adam will become
less and less the symbol of our humanity and his innocence will become “a
fantastic innocence, accompanied by knowledge, bliss, and immortality . . .”
(Ricoeur 1967, 334). Adam’s fault will become a “fall” comparable to the
fall of the soul into a body in the Orphic myth, “an existential downgrading,
a descent from the height of a superior and actually superhuman status . . .”
(Ricoeur 1967, 334). Ricoeur does not believe that Christianity ever yielded
completely to the contamination of the myth of the exiled soul, but its per-
sistent presence underscores the importance of understanding the difference
between the Adamic Myth and the Orphic and the influence of the Orphic
myth on Christianity.
REFLECTIONS AND THEOLOGICAL RETRIEVAL
Ricoeur claims to be doing neither philosophy nor theology in this herme-

neutics of myth. What then does this “symbolism of evil” have to offer
to the theologian? Without attempting to develop a theology based on
Ricoeur’s work, I would like to give some indication of how I find it useful.
Most importantly, Ricoeur provides a map that allows us to situate the vari-
ous approaches to the relation of God and evil. Ricoeur takes his place in
the Adamic Myth. This fixed point relativizes the value of the other myths,
places them in orbits closer to or farther from the Adamic Myth, and thus
allows the truth of each to emerge. A second helpful feature of this study
is Ricoeur’s treatment of hermeneutics. The notion of “demythologizing,”
though not original with Ricoeur, is crucial to his approach because it al-
lows the myth to be myth. It is thus a remythologizing. When one accepts
the fact that the myth of Adam and Eve is not a historical explanation of
50 Chapter One
how sin came into the world, one is free to explore how it reveals the ex-
istential structure of human sin. This is the stage of criticism that moves
us out of what Ricoeur calls a “first naïveté.” A “second naiveté,” on the
other side of the critical analysis, returns us to our beginning in faith, now
a critical faith.
A third significant contribution to theology is the richness of Ricoeur’s
analysis of each of the myths on the origin and end of evil. Even though
he takes his stand in the Adamic Myth and views the other myths from that
vantage point, Ricoeur enters sympathetically into each myth to retrieve the
truth that each contains. Particularly helpful is Ricoeur’s emphasis on the in-
ner logic of each myth. They are myths of the beginning and the end of evil,
and the end is coherent with the beginning.
The beginning of evil in the violent struggle of the gods portrayed in the
myth of chaos, a struggle out of which human beings are born, leads logically
to the holy war as a way of overcoming evil in the realm of politics. The act of
salvation reenacts the act of creation. Once one understands this coherence in
each of the myths, one can see how incoherent transpositions take place. For
instance, the presence of a kind of holy war theme in the Hebrew Testament
is inconsistent with the idea of God contained in the Adamic Myth and with
the Hebrew understanding of sin that predates the Adamic Myth. Holy war
as an exercise in salvation has its ground in the myth of chaos and appears in
Jewish literature only as “cut flowers.”
If the symbol itself, and Ricoeur’s meditation on the myths of evil, give
rise to thought, they give rise also, by that very fact to questions. I would
like to consider one of those questions and sketch some answers that might
lead to further reflection. The question concerns the centrality Ricoeur gives
to the Adamic Myth. Though Ricoeur considers his choice a presupposition,
he does offer a rationale. The presupposition is that “the place where we can
best listen to, hear, and understand what all the myths together have to teach
us is the place where the pre-eminence of one of those myths is proclaimed
still today—namely, the Adamic Myth” (Ricoeur 1967, 306). The “theologi-
cal retrieval” that I propose in this essay begins at this very point. Ricoeur’s
“presupposition” is neither theological nor philosophical. But a theological
motive does exist for choosing the Adamic Myth; that motive is faith. As late
as 1995, Ricoeur refers to his pact not to mix the non-philosophical sources
of his conviction with the arguments of his philosophical discourse (Hahn
1995, 50). To retrieve Ricoeur’s position for theology requires another pact,
the Anselmian commitment to proceed from a faith that seeks understanding.
Anselm claims to write his Proslogium “in the person of one who strives to
lift his mind to the contemplation of God, and seeks to understand what he
believes” (Anselm 1968, 2).
Paul Ricoeur 51
Having stated his presupposition, Ricoeur moves to the reasons for his
choice. These reasons seem to me more like clarifications about how he
understands the Adamic Myth rather than reasons for choosing it. His first
reason is that the Hebrew consciousness of sin expressed in the Adamic Myth
is the appropriate counterpart of the Christian doctrine on the forgiveness of
sin. Second, the Adamic Myth is “revealed because it is revealing.” In other
words, the verification of this myth and the justification for choosing it as a
privileged standpoint, lie in its power to reveal the deep structure of human
evil. This is, Ricoeur acknowledges, a philosophical argument and would
have been developed in the third volume of Ricoeur’s study on the voluntary
and the involuntary. The final argument for choosing the Adamic Myth as
privileged standpoint, is that it serves to illuminate the other myths, reaffirm-
ing in various degrees their essential truths.
Even when one has made explicit the theological motive of faith as the
basis for designating the Adamic Myth as the privileged standpoint, another
challenge arises about the legitimacy of this choice. The challenge comes
from critiques of the centrality long given to the Adamic Myth in Christian
theology and the consequent emphasis on guilt and sin rather than suffering.
To pick one example of this critique, Wendy Farley of Emory University
challenges the pride of place given to this myth in the Christian tradition
by making suffering rather than sin the center of the problem of evil and by
working from a conceptual environment of tragedy rather than of the fall.
Moreover, Ricoeur himself, in his “Intellectual Autobiography” published in
1995 as the opening essay in Lewis Hahn’s collection of studies on Ricoeur,
credits to his study of Freud that took place after the writing of The Sym-
bolism of Evil “a decreased concentration . . . on the problem of guilt and
a greater attention to undeserved suffering . . . (Hahn 1995, 21). These are
precisely the issues raised by Wendy Farley.
Although the choice of the Adamic Myth as privileged standpoint from
which to view the other myths could, in 1967, be presented as a presupposi-
tion with some accompanying clarification of what the choice meant, it may
require further justification forty-five years later. That further justification,
beyond the clarifications cited above, can be found in a deeper look at the
inner logic of Ricoeur’s study on the symbolism of evil.
First, The Symbolism of Evil is part of Ricoeur’s larger project on the phi-
losophy of the will, inaugurated with the publication of The Voluntary and the
Involuntary and continued ten years later with Finitude and Guilt of which
The Symbolism of Evil is the second volume. This overarching goal already
sets Ricoeur on the path toward choosing the Adamic Myth as the privileged
place to stand because only the Adamic Myth offers the possibility of a fully
free will. The first section of The Symbolism of Evil on the primary symbols
52 Chapter One
of defilement, sin, and guilt, ends with the concept of “the Servile Will.”
This concept is self-contradictory because will means freedom by its nature
and servitude means “the unavailability of freedom to itself” (Ricoeur 1967,
151). St Paul expresses this “unavailability of freedom to itself” in his famous
lament in Romans: “For I do not do what I want, but I do what I do not want
to do” (Rom. 7:15). The Adamic Myth is the only one of the four myths that
Ricoeur treats which both recognizes and resolves the dilemma of the servile
will. This myth contains three elements related to freedom. First, it sees God
as the Source of human freedom as of all other goods. Then, it sees Adam and
Eve separating themselves from that Source and thus from the actuality of
freedom. Finally, it sees God, the Source of freedom, reconciling human be-
ings to himself through a series of interventions that culminate in the sending
of his own Son, Jesus Christ. As St. Paul says, God was in Christ reconciling
the world to himself (2 Cor. 5:19).
None of the other three myths can solve the dilemma of the servile will. For
each the limiting factor against which the will struggles lies outside itself. In
the tragic myth the limit lies in the jealously of the god that is pleased to pre-
destine the hero to unavoidable evil. The lesson of the tragic myth is “do not
aim too high, for the gods will bring you down.” The lesson of the Adamic
Myth is that all things are possible with God. The Creation myth locates
evil within the sphere of divinity itself. Human beings achieve salvation, but
not real inner freedom, by fighting the battles of the gods. The Orphic myth
locates evil in the body, not in the servile will. The Adamic Myth alone sees
God as fully on the side of human freedom. Only the Adamic Myth opens
the way for a healing of the human will. This is why Ricoeur says that in the
Adamic Myth evil is radical but not primordial, deeply rooted, in other words,
but not the ultimate reality of human existence. Since evil is only radical, it
rests on a primordial goodness and can be overcome by the original Source of
that primordial goodness. That Source of goodness available to human beings
for the healing of the will, we call grace. Ricoeur makes much of Paul’s claim
in Romans that where sin abounded grace abounded all the more. No other
myth offers this miracle of abounding grace. How could they? In all of them
evil is not just radical, but primordial. In all the other myths, evil shares with
good the status of ultimate reality. In the Adamic Myth only the good is the
ultimate reality. Goodness shares itself first through the gift of creation, then
through the gift of grace. The vehicle of grace is forgiveness. Ricoeur notes,
as we have seen above, that the tragic vision of the world excludes forgive-
ness, precisely because the gods are jealous of human success. The God of the
Adamic Myth wants human beings to thrive. Irenaeus’ famous dictum sums it
up “The glory of God is human beings fully alive. The life of human beings is
Paul Ricoeur 53
the vision of God” (“Gloria enim Dei vivens homo, vita autem hominis visio
Dei) [Irenée de Lyon 1965, 649].
The ultimate justification, then, for the choice of the Adamic Myth is that it
alone sees ultimate reality as purely good and thus makes possible the miracle
of forgiveness. The Ultimate Reality, God, wills the good for human beings
even more that they will it for themselves. God rejoices in the freedom of
the human will. If this is true, then a hermeneutic of suspicion toward God,
though it may have its place for a time—as in the case of Job—cannot be the
final attitude of a believer.
CONCLUSION
I have called this essay on Ricoeur’s hermeneutic of religious symbol “a

theological retrieval.” What I have attempted to retrieve is the role of faith in
grounding the choice of the Adamic Myth as the privileged place from which
to view the other myths. This retrieval does not entail a critique of Ricoeur
but a completion of something he did not include in the project of The Sym-
bolism of Evil. In a second retrieval, this time using Ricoeur’s own analysis
of the Adamic Myth, I have tried to show how the logic of that myth justifies
its choice as the standpoint from which to view the other myths. I remain con-
vinced that Ricoeur’s work as a whole is a fruitful source of reflection for the-
ology. Though Ricoeur methodically separates the non-philosophical sources
of his conviction from his philosophical discourse, those non-philosophical
sources are at work in his thought. Ricoeur reveals how profoundly this is true
in his admission that he found the lineaments of his book Oneself as Another
(Ricoeur, 1992) in the “magnificent lines that conclude the priest’s diary—
not the final lines of the novel—in Bernanos’ Diary of a Country Priest: ‘It
is easier than one thinks to hate oneself. Grace is to forget oneself. But, if
all pride were dead in us, the grace of all graces would be to love oneself
humbly, as any of the suffering members of Jesus Christ’” (Hahn 1995, 50).
Compassion, in other words, begins with oneself.
Chapter Two
The Adamic Myth in

the Hebrew Testament
The primeval history, which the Yahwist constructed from elements of

very different kinds, proclaims first of all with impressive one-sidedness
that all corruption, all confusion in the world, comes from sin; but it
also testifies that the continually widening cleft between God and man is
matched by a secret increasing power of grace.
—Gerhard Von Rad, Genesis: A Commentary, 24
Having examined the Adamic Myth in relation to other ancient myths ac-
counting for the origin and end of evil, we now turn to its context in the
Hebrew Testament, to trace the history of a story and its successive interpre-
tations. The first chapter of that history concerns the place of the Adam and
Eve narrative in the Hebrew Bible. Surprisingly, after its appearance in the
book of Genesis, the story disappears from Israel’s scriptures. “The contents
of Gen., ch 2, and especially ch. 3” [the story of the fall], says Gerhard von
Rad, “are conspicuously isolated in the Old Testament. No prophet, psalm, or
narrator makes any recognizable reference to the story of the Fall” (Von Rad
1961, 98). But we must not, Von Rad hastens to add, let this isolation blind us
to the fact that between this story of the Fall and “the subjects which Israel’s
faith was usually careful to mention [i.e., the Exodus from Egypt, the cov-
enant, the entry into the promised land]” there are “manifold and important
connecting lines running back and forth between here and there” (Von Rad,
99). Another biblical theologian, David Clines, speaks of recurrent patterns
in various accounts within the Pentateuch. The exploring of those “connect-
ing lines” and “recurrent patterns” is the aim of this chapter. We will discover
that the story of Adam and Eve is an expression of Israel’s covenant theology.
We will also find here the origins of the sin that will spread like a virus in the
primeval history and continue in the life of Israel. And the divine compassion
55
56 Chapter Two
that will abound in Israel’s history begins in this story with a small, intimate
gesture toward the couple after their disobedience, ashamed for the first time
of their nakedness (Gen. 3:21). This act, small in comparison to God’s acts of
saving Noah from the flood or delivering the people of Israel from slavery in
Egypt—is full of significance as a revelation of God’s compassionate nature
at the very beginning of the history of sin.
A couple of important qualifications need to precede the treatment of
God’s compassion in the Old Testament. First, recognizing with Von Rad
that the story of disobedience connected with Adam and Eve is isolated to the
first eleven chapters of Genesis, we mainly explore that story while attending
to some of the “manifold and important connecting lines” that Von Rad also
mentions. We need also to keep in mind a crucial limit to God’s compassion.
In the story of Adam and Eve itself and the narratives that follow it in the first
eleven chapters of Genesis, God’s compassion is universal because the char-
acters in these stories are portrayed as the ancestors of all human kind, not
just of the Jews. But as we move into the history of Israel proper, especially
in the account found in Exodus, God’s compassion is notably partisan. God
has compassion on the Jews, not on their enemies. The divine treatment of
the Egyptians, for instance, especially the killing of their first-born children
in the last plague, strikes modern readers as harsh. On the other hand, God
does forgive the people of Nineveh in the story of Noah. This is a complicated
topic that would have to be explored carefully in a work that claimed to cover
the topic of compassion thoroughly in the entire corpus of the Old Testament.
This is not such a work.
ADAM AND EVE IN THE HEBREW BIBLE
If we start reading the Hebrew Bible from the beginning, we first encounter
this drama of human sin and divine grace in the story of Adam and Eve and
the primeval history of which the story is a part. The story recounts God’s
creative goodness, human refusal to accept the terms entailed in the gift of
creation, the disastrous consequences of that refusal, and God’s determina-
tion to repair the damage. It is a story of love met with refusal, refusal met
with punishment, punishment yielding to compassion, compassion leading
to forgiveness. This is the core of Israel’s faith, powerfully expressed in the
primeval history but not expressed there exclusively. This chapter will focus
primarily on the context of Adam and Eve in the Pentateuch with some refer-
ences to the wider context in the Hebrew Bible as a whole.
Biblical scholars have followed different methods for exploring the mean-
ing of the Pentateuch and the connections of its constitutive parts. Gerhard von
The Adamic Myth in the Hebrew Testament 57
Rad (1901–1971) and Martin Noth (1902–1968) have explored the sources
brought together to form the text as we have it today. That text, they maintain,
is the work of a final editor who collected various written sources already in
existence. These sources, in turn, drew from a variety of preexisting written
and oral material. According to Von Rad and Noth, the principal sources that
make up the Pentateuch, designated by significant features of each source
rather than by clearly identifiable “authors,” are the Yahwist (J), the Elohist
(E), the Deuteronomist (D), and the Priestly (P) documents. The theory based
on the identification of these sources is called the “documentary hypothesis.”
An important feature of Von Rad’s approach is that he treats the first six books
of the Hebrew Bible, the Hexateuch, rather than the first five. This means the
addition of the book of Joshua in which the people of Israel actually enter the
Promised Land. Von Rad begins with what he considers the most primitive
core of the Hexateuch and shows how its principal editor, the Yahwist, adds
various traditions to make up the final product that he calls the Hexateuch.
Although the place of Von Rad and Noth in the history of Old Testament
studies is assured, more recent scholars, while recognizing the importance of
their work, criticize their reliance on the search for sources and their concern
with the development of those sources into a final text. One such scholar,
David J. A. Clines begins, not with a search for sources, but with the final text
itself. He attempts to determine whether he can detect a pentateuchal theme
and, if so, discern what the theme is. I will take advantage of both methods
to help us locate the story of Adam and Eve in its larger context and thus to
shed light on its meaning.
VON RAD’S GENETIC ANALYSIS
A movement toward reinterpreting the Bible through a return to the original

languages in which it was written, attention to internal inconsistencies, repeti-
tions, and other features indicating the unlikelihood of a single author began
as early as the late medieval period and continued during the Renaissance
and Reformation (Hillers 1982, 17). Baruch Spinoza, more famous as a phi-
losopher than as a biblical scholar, recognized in his Tractatus Theologico-
Politicus (1670) that “Moses did not write the Pentateuch, which is the work
of ‘someone else, who lived many centuries after Moses,’ maybe Ezra”
(Hillers, 18). Spinoza, anticipating the method later exegetes would follow,
outlined his criteria for interpreting the Bible. Hillers paraphrases: “The ex-
egete needs to examine the nature and properties of the language in which the
Bible was written; then analyze the subject matter and outline it to show the
contents; next study the environment of the books—who wrote them? what
58 Chapter Two
do we know of the author’s life? what was the occasion for his writing? the
age in which he lived? for whom did he write? and in what language—last,
investigate the subsequent history of the book” (Ibid.). We do not need to
trace the history of biblical interpretation as it developed in the centuries fol-
lowing Spinoza except to say that it continued to refine the methods referred
to above and to develop theories about how our present Bible came to be.
Following the “documentary hypothesis” outlined above, Von Rad developed
a theory about how the Hexateuch developed into its present form. I am par-
ticularly interested to determine how the story of Adam and Eve functions in
its context, the Pentateuch or, for Von Rad, the Hexateuch.
From Creedal Formulas to Adam and Eve and the Primeval History
Von Rad begins with the conviction that the historical core of Israel’s faith
embedded in the Hexateuch consists in God’s loving care for the people of
Israel, carried out in a series of divinely guided events. First, through Joseph,
God leads the people into the land of Egypt (Genesis 37, 39–50) where they
eventually become slaves; then, through Moses, God leads them out of slav-
ery in Egypt (Exodus 1–15), and finally, through Joshua, into the Promised
Land (Joshua). God’s actions and the circumstances surrounding them, says
Von Rad, are described in certain creedal formulas that constitute the earli-
est formulation of Israel’s faith. Von Rad describes the path that leads from
these earliest formulations to the much later development of which the story
of Adam and Eve is a part.
Von Rad identified three creedal statements that he considered the most
primitive articulation of Israel’s faith, as just described, and he attempted to
show how a subsequent editor built the edifice of the Hexateuch on them.
First, Von Rad noted that these succinct formulations of Israel’s faith con-
tain no reference to the primeval history (Gen. 1–11), of which the Adamic
Myth is part, nor are there present other key features of the final formulation
of Israel’s faith. Next Von Rad showed how the Yahwist editor (J), begin-
ning with these creedal formulas, added other materials now included in the
Hexateuch. Von Rad has a high regard for the Yahwist’s contribution. “For it
was the Yahwist who, so far as we can see, gave to the entire Hexateuch its
form and compass. The Yahwist marks that decisive line of demarcation in
the history of culture which we can observe for so many peoples; he was the
collector of the countless old traditions which until then had circulated freely
among the people” (Von Rad 1961, 17).
Von Rad includes three versions of the creedal formula, Deut. 26:5–9,
Deut. 6:20–24, and Joshua 24:2–13. In spite of superficial differences among
them, each of these three texts embodies the same foundational elements of
Israel’s faith. We can see those elements by considering one of these texts in
its entirety and the final lines of another. From Deuteronomy:
A wandering Aramean was my father; and he went down to Egypt and so-
journed there, few in number; and there he became a nation, great, mighty, and
populous. And the Egyptians treated us harshly, and afflicted us, and laid upon
us hard bondage. Then we cried to the Lord the God of our fathers, and the
Lord heard our voice, and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression; and
the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and outstretched arm, with
great terror, with signs and wonders; and he brought us into this place and gave
us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey (Deut. 26:5–9).
The last chapter of the Book of Joshua offers us a longer and more embellished
version of the same simple formula. Its final lines emphasize a crucial feature
of these early formulations of Israel’s faith, the absence of any contribution on
their part to the benefits conferred on them: “And I sent the hornet before you,
which drove them out of your way; it was not by your sword or by your bow. I
gave you a land on which you had not tilled, and cities which you had not built,
to dwell in; you have eaten of vineyards and olive groves which you did not
plant” (Josh. 24:12–13). These succinct narrations, says Von Rad, not the story
of Adam and Eve, constitute the earliest expression of the core of Israel’s faith.
And yet the story of Adam and Eve, incorporated into the final version of the
Yahwist source comes to have a resonance with this foundational expression
of faith and, more important, with the fundamental themes of the Hexateuch
of which the formulas are the core. How does it happen?
A possible answer to this question lies in Von Rad’s account about how
the Yahwist enriched these original creedal formulas by adding to them other
ancient traditions that had, before his editorial genius laid hold of them, re-
mained separate and disconnected one from the other. Three elements make
up the essential content of the creedal formulas: the people of Israel descend
into the land of Egypt and eventually became slaves, God liberates the people
from Egypt, God leads them into the Promised Land, “a land flowing with
milk and honey.” These recitations are full of gratitude for the wonderful
works of God toward the people of Israel, works that God carried out without
any effort on their part. But the creedal formulas omit some of the central
elements in the biblical story that we now have in the Hexateuch, namely, the
primeval history that includes the creation accounts, the story of Adam and
Eve and the saga of increasing sin that follows (Gen. 4–11), and the establish-
ing of the Covenant at Sinai (Exod. 19). Moreover, says Von Rad, the account
of the patriarchal period found in the creedal formulas is sketchy compared
to the final version. Without losing the essential content of the original for-
mulas, the Yahwist editor adds the missing elements, incorporating the Sinai
60 Chapter Two
tradition, extending the account of the patriarchal tradition, and including the
primeval history (Von Rad 1961, 20–23).
The Incorporation of the Sinai Tradition

The “incorporation” of the Sinai tradition (Exod. 19:1–Num. 10:10) adds to the
original creedal formulas the notion of covenant between God and his people.
The creedal formulas, Von Rad notes, “witness to God’s gracious leading; it is
a sacred history” (1961, 20). The Sinai tradition adds the notion of a covenant
based on obedience to God’s will. After reminding Moses on Mount Sinai
“how I bore you up [the people of Israel] on eagle wings and brought you here
to myself” (Exod. 19:4), God draws a momentous conclusion: “Therefore, if
you hearken to my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my special pos-
session, dearer to me than all other people, though all the earth is mine” (Exod.
19:5). So now, beginning with the creedal formulas’ proclamation of God’s
leadership of his people, the Yahwist has added a second strand, the notion of
a covenant and the obedience it entails. “In the union of these two traditions,”
says Von Rad, “the two basic elements of all biblical proclamation are outlined:
law [Sinai] and Gospel [God’s leading into the Promised Land]” (Von Rad, 20).
The Extension of the Patriarchal Tradition

A second addition, the “extension” of the patriarchal tradition, adds the no-
tion of promise to the tradition of God’s leading the people of Israel into the
Promised Land. The creedal formulas, as identified by Von Rad, speak of a
deed God has already accomplished: “. . . he brought us into this place and
gave us this land . . . “(Deut. 26:9), only briefly mentioning “the God of our
fathers,” i.e., the patriarchs. The Yahwist extension of the patriarchal narrative,
beginning with Abraham, imagines a time before the events described in the
creedal formulas and projects into Israel’s future a promise of land and multiple
descendants. The creedal formulas regard the gift of land as an accomplished
fact; the extended patriarchal history regards the gift only as a promise. This
notion of promise, never fully realized even when Israel’s God leads his people
into the Promised Land, introduces an element of openness toward the future
that will remain a permanent feature of Israel’s faith. This openness allows for
a continuous revision of the first formulations of Israel’s faith.
The Inclusion of the Primeval History

We come, finally, to the Yahwist’s inclusion of the primeval history (Gen.
2:4b–12:3), which includes the story of creation and fall and the continuing
descent into sin that follows the first act of disobedience. Von Rad’s words,
which appear at the head of this chapter describe primeval history: “The pri-
meval history, which the Yahwist constructed from elements of very different
kinds, proclaims first of all with impressive one-sidedness that all corruption,
all confusion in the world, comes from sin; but it also testifies that the contin-
ually widening cleft between God and man is matched by a secret increasing
power of grace” (Von Rad 1961, 22–23). Paul’s proclamation from Romans
expresses the same idea more succinctly, “Where sin increased, grace has
abounded all the more . . .” (Rom. 5:20b).
Now we are in a position to ask how the story of Adam and Eve comes
to have a resonance with the creedal formulas that, according to Von Rad,
express the earliest form of Israel’s faith and, more importantly, with the
fundamental themes of the Hexateuch of which these formulas are the core.
The creedal formulas record the fact of God’s saving actions on behalf of
Israel, making a case for the gratitude owed by the people to their benefactor.
By incorporating the Sinai tradition, extending the patriarchal tradition, and
including the primeval history, the Yahwist editor situates the story of Adam
and Eve in the context of covenant (Sinai), promise (the patriarchs), and the
unfolding drama of sin and redemption (primeval history). We can, then, un-
derstand Adam and Eve not only as disobeying a command but as breaking
an implied covenant, not only as forfeiting their beautiful life in the land of
Eden, but as participating in a promise of new land in the future, with multiple
progeny, and a renewed relation with God. We will return to the subject of
the story of Adam and Eve as covenant theology.
DAVID CLINES: THE THEME OF THE PENTATEUCH
David Clines, following a different method, gives his own answer to the
question about how the story of Adam and Eve is related to larger themes in
the Pentateuch (not the Hexateuch). Protesting against the “primacy of the ge-
netic method” (Clines 2001, 12), Clines begins with the Pentateuch in its final
form and looks for a theme drawn from indicators in the biblical material. As
it turns out, Clines’ determination of the overall theme of the Pentateuch—
and especially, his statement of “patterns” in the primeval history—though
following a different method, closely resembles Von Rad’s conclusion.
Clines carefully defines “theme”: “The theme of a narrative work may
first be regarded as conceptualization of its plot” (Clines, 19). Or, a theme
can be regarded as “the central or dominating idea in a literary work . . . the
abstract concept which is made concrete through its representation in person,
action, and image in the work” (Clines, 20; Thrall and Hibbard, 486). A third
definition of theme is “a rationale of the content, structure and development
62 Chapter Two
of the work” (Clines, 20) in terms of the final form of the work not its genetic
development. Theme orients one to a work, “it makes a proposal about how
best to approach the work. Theme is not identical with the author’s intention;
it “refers only to that aspect of the author’s intention that is expressed in the
shape and development of the literary work” (Clines, 21).
Clines identifies a theme for the Pentateuch as a whole. “The theme of
the Pentateuch is the partial fulfillment—which implies also the partial non-
fulfillment—of the promise to or blessing of the patriarchs. The promise or
blessing is both the divine initiative in a world where human initiatives always
lead to disaster, and are [sic] an affirmation of the primal divine intentions for
humanity” (Clines, 30). Clines notes three elements in the promise: “posterity,
divine-human relationship, and land.” The posterity element is prominent in
Genesis 12–20 where we find the promise made to Abraham that his descen-
dants will be as numerous as the sands on the seashore (Gen. 15). The divine-
human relationship element is found in Exodus and Leviticus with the giving
of the law that sets forth how God will relate to the people and the people to
God. The land element belongs particularly to Numbers and Deuteronomy
where movement toward the land dominates the material. How the story of
Adam and Eve participates in this larger theme will become evident from
looking at Cline’s identification of a theme for the primeval history.
Clines returns, in a later chapter, to the material that is not considered in
the elements of the pentateuchal theme; namely, the primeval history. Since
the primeval history forms the immediate context of Adam and Eve’s story,
it is particularly important for our study. Considering the primeval history
offers an interpretive lens that will enable us to relate the Adam and Eve nar-
rative, not only with the first eleven chapters of Genesis, but with the rest of
the Pentateuch as well. Clines identifies three formulations that might express
the theme of the primeval history: “A Sin-Speech-Mitigation-Punishment
Theme;” “A Spread-of-Sin, Spread-of-Grace Theme;” and “A Creation-
Uncreation-Re-creation Theme.”
The Sin-Speech-Mitigation-Punishment Theme

Clines, with the help of Gerhard Von Rad and Claus Westerman, identifies a
recurring pattern in the Pentateuch: sin, speech, mitigation, and punishment.
Von Rad noted that the first eleven chapters of Genesis manifest a pattern of
human sin, followed by divine punishment, and finally divine forgiveness or
mitigation (Von Rad 1961, 152 ff; Clines, 67). Westerman observed that be-
tween the sin and the punishment occurs a “divine speech announcing or de-
ciding the penalty” (Westerman 1961, 47; Clines, 25). And Clines observed
something that neither Von Rad nor Westerman had noted: the event of miti-
gation or grace takes place between the divine speech and the divine punish-
ment. Clines lists five examples of this pattern, the first of which occurs in
the story of Adam and Eve. In Genesis 3:6, the sin takes place, Eve eats of
the fruit and gives it to Adam. In 14–19, God speaks first to the Serpent, then
to Adam and Eve, telling them of the consequences of the sin. The mitigation
occurs in v. 21 when God makes leather garments for Adam and Eve. Then,
in vv. 22–24 follows the punishment, expulsion from the Garden. The same
pattern can be found in four other episodes of Genesis 1–11:
Table 2.1.
Episode Sin Speech Mitigation Punishment
Fall 3:6 3:14–19 3:21 3:22–24
Cain 4:8 4:11–12 4:15 4:16
Sons of God 6:2 6:3 ?6:8, 18ff 7:6–24
Flood 6:5, 11ff 6:7, 13–21 6:8, 18ff 7:6–24
Babel 11:4 11:6f ?10:1–32 11:8
Clines seems to be stretching the hypothesis in designating a mitigation

element in the Babel episode. Perhaps that is why he includes a question
mark before the relevant verses. Von Rad was of the opinion that no gesture
of mitigation can be found in the punishment inflicted on the builders of the
tower of Babel. The mitigation in the case of the Sons of God and the Flood—
it is one mitigation for both episodes—does not affect those who committed
the sins but only those who did not participate in the sin, namely, Noah, his
family, and his animals. God mitigates the punishment by instructing Noah
how to avoid the flood. For the sinners the punishment was unmitigated.
The clearest examples of the sin-speech-mitigation-punishment motif are the
stories of Adam and Eve and Cain. God made leather garments for Adam
and Eve. And for Cain—who complained, “My punishment is too great to
bear. Since you have now banished me from the soil, and I must avoid your
presence and become a restless wanderer on the earth, anyone may kill me
at sight” (Gen. 4:13–14)—the mitigation is God’s promise: “Not so! . . . If
anyone kills Cain, Cain will be avenged sevenfold” (Gen. 4:15).
The mitigation that Clines refers to is a softening of, or an exception to, the
punishment resulting from sin. We can also look at this same phenomenon of
mitigation and frame it in terms of what it says about God. What kind of God
would regularly mitigate punishment? Why did God make leather garments
for Adam and Eve, or promise to protect Cain from possible killers, or exempt
Noah and his family from destruction by the flood? The answer to these ques-
tions touches a central aspect of Israel’s idea of God and provides another
64 Chapter Two
way to view Clines’ very helpful formula. We can look at God’s mitigations
as compassionate gestures. Presumably, God made leather garments for Adam
and Eve, not because their nakedness was an offense to the divine majesty,
but because God recognized the disarray of the hapless couple after their sin.
Presumably, God was moved by Cain’s anguished cry and took pity on him.
Presumably also, God recognized the injustice of punishing Noah and his fam-
ily along with the guilty. The divine mitigations arise from divine compassion.
Jonah’s explanation about why he did not want to accept God’s call to preach
repentance to the Ninivites—“I knew that you are a gracious and merciful
God, slow to anger, rich in clemency, loathe to punish”—constitutes a basic
motif in Israel’s history (see also Exod. 34:6–7; Num. 14:18).
The Spread-of-Sin, Spread-of-Grace Theme

As a second possible theme of the primeval history, Clines proposes “A
Spread-of-Sin, Spread of Grace” motif (Clines, 70). Von Rad had already
suggested this theme, noting that although increasingly severe punishments
followed on the spread of sin, a parallel spread of grace on God’s part ac-
companied the sin and its punishments (Von Rad 1972, 152f). Clines’ crite-
rion for the adequacy of a theme is the extent to which it provides a unifying
explanation of the materials being considered. A significant advantage of the
spread-of-sin, spread-of-grace theme is that it gives the underlying rationale
not only for the narrative sections—the stories of Adam and Eve, Cain, the
flood, etc.—of the primeval history but for the creation account in the first
chapter of Genesis as well as the genealogies (Gen. 4:17–26; 5; 11:10–26),
and the Table of Nations (Gen. 10). This theme differs from the “sin-speech-
mitigation-punishment” pattern in that it refers not just to a mitigation before
the punishment occurs, but to state of blessing following on the punishment.
Adam and Eve do not die immediately after their disobedience even though
God had threatened that they would. The go on to have children, fulfilling
God’s command to “Be fertile and multiply” (Gen. 1:28; 4:1, 25). Cain, after
his sin and its punishment, continues to live his life under God’s protection,
having descendants and even founding a city (Gen. 4:17–24). God promises
Noah and his descendants never to destroy all bodily creatures by the waters
of a flood; “there shall not be another flood to devastate the earth” (Gen.
9:8–11). And even the sinful ambition of the builders of Babel, not mitigated
before the punishment, unfolds into the promises given to Abraham.
A Creation-Uncreation-Recreation Theme
As a third possible theme, closely related to the second, Clines proposes
that we look at the primeval history as a sequence of God’s creation, hu-
man undoing of creation through sin, and God’s re-creation of what humans
have dismantled. Creation, as described in chapters 1 and 2 of Genesis, has
proceeded “by the forging of bonds: between humans and the soil, humans
and the animals, the man and the woman, humanity and God” (Clines, 81).
But Adam and Eve, Cain, the generation that existed before the flood, and
the builders of the tower of Babel, have, in a variety of ways, brought about
the dissolution of the harmony envisioned by God in creating the world. The
undoing of creation results in punishment. God even seems to despair of
creation altogether at one point and threatens to destroy it. But the renewed
creation once again accomplishes the separation of sea and land after the
flood as God had first done in the account of creation of Genesis 1. Clines
concludes that this theme too is pervasive enough to be taken into account in
stating the theme of Genesis 1–11.
A combination of the second two proposed themes, says Clines, serves
as the most adequate thematic statement of the primeval history. Clines
concludes that the first theme (sin-speech-mitigation-punishment) is not
sufficiently representative “of the total content of the primeval history to
be regarded as part of its theme (though it is, obviously, a recurrent motif”
(Clines, 83). If we combine the two themes—in fact, they seem to be differ-
ent ways of making the same point—two possible readings of the primeval
history emerge, one pessimistic, the other optimistic. The pessimistic reading
says that no matter what God does, no matter how many times God dispenses
grace, mitigates punishment, forgives, and recreates, human sin always re-
emerges. Sin seems to have the last word. The optimistic version says that
God’s grace has the last word: “Even when humanity responds to a fresh start
with the old pattern of sin, God’s commitment to [the] world stands firm,
and sinful humans experience the favour of God as well as [God’s] righteous
judgment” (Clines, 83).
How do we know which interpretation most adequately represents the pri-
meval history? It all depends, says Clines, on where we place the ending of
the primeval history. The last story, the Babel episode, ends without mitiga-
tion, recreation, or redeeming grace. God punishes Babel with the multiplica-
tion of languages and the dispersal of the city’s inhabitants throughout the
earth (Gen. 11:8–9), an action that suggests the total breakdown of society
for which we are still paying the price. But perhaps the story of Babel is not
the final significant word in the primeval history, even though it is the final
narration. Clines locates the clue that allows us to choose the optimistic end-
ing in the genealogy that follows the story of Babel. We tend to discount ge-
nealogies but they contain important clues. The concluding genealogy of the
primeval history mentions both Shem, Noah’s son on whom he pronounced a
blessing (Gen. 9:26) and Abraham to whom God will give the promise of de-
66 Chapter Two
scendants and land. The inclusion in this genealogy of Shem, “firmly linked
into the primeval history (Clines, 85), and Abraham, the first of the patriarchs
and the figure on whom the promise to Israel rests, suggests a transition from
the primeval history to the patriarchal history rather than a clean break. So the
primeval history ends, not with the vision of the inhabitants of Babel wander-
ing around the earth unable to communicate, but rather with a forward look
toward the story of promise that begins with Abraham and continues through
his descendants. This connecting of the primeval history with the patriarchal
history and the promises to Abraham also enables us to see how the story of
Adam and Eve is an expression of the larger theme of the whole Pentateuch.
This will become even clearer when we consider the story of Adam and Eve
as an expression of covenant theology.
Convergence of Von Rad and Clines

So we have seen that Gerhard von Rad and David Clines, each following a
different methodology, come to the same conclusion regarding the theme
of the primeval history (Gen. 1–11). Even though these chapters recount a
history of sin and punishment, they narrate even more profoundly a story of
grace, forgiveness, and a re-creation of what sin has dismantled. The pattern
that begins in the primeval history will be evident in the whole, of the Penta-
teuch and, indeed, of the Hebrew Bible.
ISRAEL’S NOTION OF SIN AND SALVATION
We have been considering the place of the Adamic Myth in the Hebrew
Bible, particularly the Pentateuch (or, according to Von Rad, the Hexateuch)
of which it is an integral part. Now, as we consider its relation to a wider
theology of sin and salvation in the Hebrew Bible, we will go deeper into
the recognition of the Adamic Myth as an expression of covenant theology.
We begin by noting Paul Ricoeur’s description of Israel’s different levels of
consciousness regarding sin.
Three Levels in the Consciousness of Evil

In the first part of The Symbolism of Evil, Paul Ricoeur speaks about the
“confession of the evil in man by the religious consciousness” (Ricoeur 1967,
3). He speaks of a “re-enactment” of that confession as a preliminary step to-
wards a “philosophy of fault.” In his re-enactment of the religious confession
of evil, Ricoeur distinguishes between three levels in the consciousness of
evil: defilement, sin, and guilt. Defilement, the most primitive level, refers to
a physical contamination or impurity, analogous to a stain prior to any moral
culpability. For the most part, our modern consciousness has left behind this
conception of evil, relegating it to the realm of superstition. To get in touch
with evil as defilement, “we have to transport ourselves into a consciousness
for which impurity is measured not by imputation to a responsible agent but
by the objective violation of an interdict” (Ricoeur, 27). The consciousness
that sees evil as defilement, as misfortune rather than misbehavior, faring
ill rather than doing ill, “transforms all possible sufferings, all diseases, all
death, all failure into a sign of defilement (Ricoeur, 27). The violation of
sexual prohibitions and prohibitions against spilling blood account for a large
part of the category of defilement.
Examples of evil-as-defilement abound in Scripture and even in contem-
porary consciousness. Robin Cover refers to these as “cultic and uninten-
tional sins” and cites multiple instances in the Hebrew Testament (Cover
1992, 34). One example occurs in the Second Book of Samuel, as the ark
was being brought to Jerusalem, “Uzzah reached out his hand to the ark of
God and steadied it, for the oxen were making it tip. But the Lord was angry
with Uzzah; God struck him on that spot, and he died there before God”
(II Sam. 6:6b–7). This ritual violation suggests a contamination of impu-
rity completely separated from any ethical fault. To the objective side of
defilement—the defiling force itself, impurity, taboo, ritual prohibition—
there is a corresponding subjective side, the dread of violating the prohibition
and incurring the consequent sickness, failure, ritual impurity, etc. Ricoeur
calls it “ethical dread” because it fears not physical danger but moral con-
tamination. “Man enters the ethical world through fear not love” (Ricoeur,
30). And redemption in this level of consciousness consists in purification,
healing, removal of the symbolic stain, restoration of wholeness.
Ricoeur’s second level of the consciousness of evil, sin, he defines as:
“The category that dominates the notion of sin is the category “before God”
(Ricoeur 1967, 50). In this sense, sin is a personal and interpersonal trans-
gression rather than a quasi-material infection. The central historical element
of Israel’s faith that defines sin is the covenant. We can never understand
Israel’s mature conception of sin unless we begin with the covenant and par-
ticularly the covenant that came through Moses: “Therefore, if you hearken to
my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my special possession, dearer
to me than all other people, though all the earth is mine” (Exod. 19:5). The
Ten Commandments and all the other prescriptions that follow constitute
the spelling out of this covenant. The possibility always remains of reduc-
ing these commandments to ritual prohibitions and requirements and thus
falling back into the notion of evil as defilement. The Pharisees did it. But
68 Chapter Two
the covenant is essentially interpersonal and dialogic. It involves a tension

between what Ricoeur calls “the infinite demand and the finite command-
ment” (Ricoeur, 54 ff).
But why should the people of Israel love God and obey his commandments?
The motive is clear. Israel’s love and obedience are born out of gratitude.
George Mendenhall and Gary Herion illustrate this feature of Israel’s covenant
tradition by comparing it to Late Bronze Age (LB) treaties that, according to
them, have a historically significant relation to Israel’s Sinai covenant tradi-
tions (Mendenhall, Herion 1992, 1191) and contrasting it with the Iron Age
Loyalty oaths. The LB treaties emphasize gratitude for deeds previously done
by the sovereign as motivation for obedience. The Iron Age loyalty oaths ap-
peal to “brute military force” as the only motive for obedience (Mendenhall,
Herion, 1182). Israel’s covenant tradition bases obedience on gratitude. The
divine announcement of the covenant that we saw above: “. . . if you hearken
to my voice and keep my covenant . . . ,” etc., begins with a “Therefore;” it
is the final step of an argument of which God has already stated the premise:
“You have seen for yourselves how I treated the Egyptians and how I bore you
up on eagle wings and brought you here to myself. (Exod. 19:4). Therefore,
if you hearken to my voice . . . “(Exod. 19:5). The creedal formula in Joshua
23 that we considered earlier occurs in the context of a covenant renewal
ceremony. The formula recalls the wonderful deeds of God for his people,
his leading them out of slavery in Egypt with great prodigies, his delivering
into their hand the people inhabiting the land they were about to enter, and his
conducting them into “cities which you had not built, to dwell in . . . “(Josh.
24:1–13). Then Joshua, who has been reminding the people of God’s good-
ness, concludes: “Now therefore, fear the Lord and serve him completely
and sincerely. Cast out the gods your fathers served beyond the River and in
Egypt, and serve the Lord” (Josh. 24:14). And the Ten Commandments begin,
not with the first commandment but with a statement of historical fact that
serves as the rationale for all the commandments: “I, the Lord, am your God,
who brought you out of the land of Egypt, that place of slavery” (Exod. 20:2).
Then follows the commandment, “You shall not have other gods besides me”
(Exod. 20:3). In light of the other texts we have considered, it seems fair to
assume a causal connection between “I, the Lord . . . who brought you out of
Egypt” and therefore “You shall not have other gods before me.”
Israel’s sins, then, are always some form of ingratitude, or forgetfulness, or
some other kind of turning away to other gods from the God who has brought
them out of Egypt into the Promised Land. The essential ingredient of sin in
the faith of Israel is the amnesia that leads to infidelity—we might call it the
originating original sin. And just as the objective consciousness of evil as
defilement entailed a subjective dread of the consequences of violating, even
unconsciously, an interdict, so the objective consciousness of evil as sin,

turning away from God, entails the subjective dread of God’s wrath toward
those who turn away from him. This wrath, says Ricoeur, “is no longer the
vindication of taboos, nor the resurgence of a primordial chaos, as old as
the oldest gods, but the Wrath of Holiness itself ” (Ricoeur, 67). This wrath
will eventually be revealed as what it really is at its root, the sadness of love
(Ricoeur, 67). It “will have to be converted and become the sorrow of the
‘Servant of Yahweh’ and the lowliness of ‘the Son of Man’” (Ricoeur, 67).
The “wrath” of God is ultimately the anger of a rejected lover toward those
who have failed, through their disobedience, to express the gratitude they owe
to the one who has conferred benefits on them.
In discussing the “Wrath of God” in the Hebrew Bible, Gary Herion, dis-
tinguishes between two kinds of anger, “passion,” and “pathos.” “Passion,”
says Herion, “can be understood as an emotional convulsion which makes it
impossible to exercise free consideration of principles and the determination
of conduct in accordance with them” (Herion 1992, 991). Passion indicates
a lack of self-control and, in humans at least, is censured in Old Testament
writings. “Pathos,” on the other hand, “is an act formed with care and inten-
tion, the result of determination and decision” (Herion, 991). The wrath of
God in the Old Testament, especially the prophets, says Herion “tends to be
portrayed in this way . . . it seems not to be an essential attribute or funda-
mental characteristic of Yahweh’s persona, but an expression of his will”
(Herion, 991). Herion finds only five examples in the Hebrew Bible of God’s
anger as “passion,” Genesis 32:22–32 (Jacob wrestling with the angel/God);
Exodus 4:24–26 (God is about to kill Moses until his wife Zipporah circum-
cises their son); Exodus 19:21–25 (God, speaking to Moses, threatens to vent
his anger on the people if they try to come up to the Lord); Judges 13:21–23
(Manoah fears that God will kill him and his wife because they have seen
God); II Samuel 6:6–11 (God is angry with Uzzah and strikes him dead for
reaching out to steady the Ark in danger of falling). Only the last of these
examples seems a clear example of God actually behaving irrationally out of
anger. We considered it above as an example of sin as defilement.
Most often, God’s anger is a response to human sin. Herion notes that
it is the Eden narrative that “acquits Yahweh of any charge of capricious
“passion” precisely “by associating the miserable aspects of human life with
some fundamental act of disobedience by the prototypical human being . . .”
(Herion, 993). And yet, in spite of the many “provocations by human sin”
the book of Genesis never explicitly says that God “became angry” (Herion,
993). None of the punishments catalogued in Genesis, the expulsion of Adam
and Eve from Eden, the refusal of Cain’s offering and cursing Cain to wander
the earth, the sending of the flood, etc., “is explicitly tied to divine ‘wrath’”
70 Chapter Two
(Herion, 993). Fishbane notes that human violence and lawlessness motivated
God’s decision to destroy humankind in the time of Noah, not some “whim-
sical eruption of divine wrath and the consequent disruption of the natural
order—features well-known from world folklore. . . . By directly linking
divine punishment to human evil, the narrator undercuts the terror known
to ancient Mesopotamians of whimsical, even narcissistic gods” (Fishbane
1979, 31–32). The first expression of God’s anger occurs in Exodus 4:13–14,
where God becomes angry at Moses when he shows reluctance in accepting
the mission God wants to give him. The next expression of God’s anger oc-
curs after the Sinai covenant and in the context of the special relationship that
now exists between God and God’s people. God warns what will happen if
they neglect the justice toward one another that is implied in the Covenant:
“You shall not wrong any widow or orphan. If ever you wrong them and
they cry out to me, I will surely hear their cry. My wrath will flare up, and I
will kill you with the sword; then your own wives will be widows, and your
children orphans” (Exod. 22:22–23).
But whatever punishments follow on the sins of Israel, pardon is always
waiting for them. Once they turn back to God, God will receive them. The
prophet Hosea announces what Israel can expect if she turns away from her
sins of idolatry and false worship: “I will heal their defection, I will love
them freely: for my wrath is turned away from them. I will be like the dew
for Israel; he shall blossom like the lily; He shall strike root like the Lebanon
cedar and put forth his shoots” (Hos. 14:5–7). If turning away from God pro-
duced a kind of sterility that kept the people from being productive, turning
back and the pardon that greets the repentant Israel will heal them and make
them fruitful.
The category “sin” names the objective relation of the people in their
relation to God. The subjective pole that corresponds with the ontological
condition of sin, Ricoeur calls “guilt” (Ricoeur, 101). “Sin designates the real
situation of man before God, whatever consciousness he may have of it. . . .
Guilt is the awareness of this real situation . . . “(Ricoeur, 101). Guilt is not
an awareness of being tainted or afflicted, as is the case with evil considered
as defilement, but the voice of my conscience accusing me of what I have
done, “the evil use of my liberty,” as Ricoeur puts it (102). Through my sin,
I am cut off from my origin. “Guilt is the loss of the bond with the origin,
insofar as that loss is felt” (Ricoeur, 103). For Ricoeur, the phenomenon of
guilt constitutes a “revolution in the experience of evil” (Ricoeur,102). The
experience of guilt also involves one objective pole and a subjective pole.
The objective pole is the person against whom sin has been committed, God.
“Against you alone I have sinned,” says Psalm 51. The Psalm also names the
subjective pole: “For I know my offense; my sin is always before me.” I have
done it, not a collectivity, but I personally. This is very different from the no-
tion of collective guilt that was characteristic of Israel in the beginning. After
the first commandment, the prohibition against worshipping false gods, God
pauses for a moment before delivering the second commandment to empha-
size the seriousness of what he is saying: “For I, the Lord your God, am a jeal-
ous God inflicting punishment for their fathers’ wickedness on the children
of those who hate me, down to the third and fourth generation (Deut. 5:9).
Later in the prophets Jeremiah and Ezekiel, this notion of collective re-
sponsibility in the sense of inherited guilt will be reversed. Jeremiah speaks
of a new day and a new covenant. “In those days they shall no longer say,
‘The fathers ate unripe grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge,’ but
through his own fault only shall anyone die the teeth of him who eats the
unripe grapes shall be set on edge” (Jer. 31:29–30). And in those days, the
Lord will make a new covenant. “But this is the covenant I will make with
the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord. I will place my law within
them, and write it upon their hearts; I will be their God and they shall be
my people” (31:33). The new internalization of the ancient covenant paves
the way for the new law of the New Testament. Ezekiel preaches essentially
the same message (Ezek. 18:1–4). Thus guilt comes to have an individual
meaning. Even though the leaders of the nation of Israel will be exiled to
Babylon—a collective punishment—still individuals will be judged person-
ally on the basis of their own behavior.
So we have three stages in the consciousness of fault, defilement, sin, and
guilt; each stage marking a progression over its predecessor. The impersonal
and mechanical working of defilement gives way to the interpersonal, I-Thou
dynamics of sin. And the objective character of sin as rupture with God
evolves into the personal responsibility of individuals for their fidelity to the
covenant. Ricoeur ends the discussion on “The Primary Symbols: Defile-
ment, Sin, Guilt” that constitutes the first part of The Symbolism of Evil, with
a brief chapter on the “Recapitulation of the Symbolism of Evil in the Servile
Will” which provides a bridge from the Old Testament material to the New
Testament (Ricoeur1967, 151–157). The idea of a “servile will” is paradoxi-
cal. The will is by definition the principle of freedom. It can of course be
inhibited by the action of others, as happened to the Jewish people in Egypt.
But the will can also be the cause of its own enslavement. We will later see
Paul’s famous expression of this notion: “What I do, I do not understand. For
I do not do what I want, but I do what I hate” (Rom. 7:15). And later still
Augustine speaks of his will in chains through his own fault. Ricoeur consid-
ers this paradoxical notion—he calls it a “schematism”—of a “servile will”
as a “recapitulation” of the symbols employed in the confession of fault that
he has presented, defilement, sin, and guilt.
72 Chapter Two
The Adamic Myth as an Expression of Covenant Theology

We return now to the story of Adam and Eve as an expression of covenant
theology. Though the text does not present God’s relation with Adam and
Eve in expressly covenantal terms, we can hardly understand it outside the
framework of covenant. We have already seen Von Rad’s contention that by
including the Sinai covenant tradition in the first six books of the Bible along
with the primeval history, the Yahwist editor has framed the story of Adam
and Eve in the context of covenant. I believe we can make an additional and
even more compelling argument by considering the Adam and Eve story in
the context of the tightly structured primeval history in which it occupies a
crucial place.
Within the primeval history, with its description of the origins of human
sin in the disobedience of Adam and Eve and the proliferation of sin in fol-
lowing chapters, we have the covenant God concluded with Noah, God’s
promise never to destroy the human race again. This covenant, unlike the
covenant with Moses, is unconditional. No matter what sins humans commit,
God will not, according to this promise, destroy them with a flood. Noah is a
second Adam, participating in the new creation of the world just as Adam had
participated in its un-creation. The re-creation, described in Genesis 8:1–3,
begins with the receding of the flood waters. In language clearly reminiscent
of Genesis 1:26ff, God speaks to Noah:
And God (Elohim) blessed Noah and his sons and said to them: ‘Be fertile and
multiply and fill the earth. Dread fear of you shall come upon all the animals
of the earth and all the birds of the air, upon all the creatures that move about
on the ground and all the fishes of the sea; into your power they are delivered.
Every creature that is alive shall be yours to eat; I give them all to you as I did
the green plants. Only flesh with its lifeblood still in it you shall not eat. For
your own lifeblood too, I will demand an accounting: from every animal I will
demand it, and from humans in regard to his fellow humans I will demand an
accounting for human life. If anyone sheds the blood of a human being, by a
human being shall his blood be shed; For in the image of God have humans been
made. Be fertile, then, and multiply; abound on earth and subdue it (Gen. 9:1–7).
Michael Fishbane comments on this passage: “Noah is thus portrayed as a

new Adam in a renewed creation. The hopes of comfort and consolation an-
ticipated in 5:29 [“Out of the very ground that the Lord has put under a curse,
this one (Noah) shall bring us relief from our work and the toil of our hands”]
are now consummated (Fishbane, 34).
Noah, stands precisely in between Adam and Abraham, ten generations
from Adam, ten generations from Abraham (Gen. 5; 11:10–26). “Abraham
is, like Noah, a new Adam and a renewal of human life in history” (Fishbane,
39). The whole primeval history thus functions as a kind of prologue to the
story of Abraham and his descendants. In the light of this tight structuring of
the primeval history, Adam and Eve at the beginning, Noah in the middle, and
Abraham at the end, the disobedience of Adam and Eve takes on the aspect
of breaking a covenant. Rather than being grateful for what God had lavished
on them, they sought to improve their status and become like God. This is the
central sin of the primeval history. Fishbane calls it the “Issue of Will, Desire,
and Aggressive Rebellion: Eve, Adam, and the serpent; the serpentine sin and
Cain; the gods and the daughters of the earth; the builders of Babel” (Fish-
bane, 38)—all of them set out to challenge the prerogatives of God.
The covenant with Noah is the centerpiece. We can read backward from
it to Adam and forward to Abraham. Adam received the gift of creation and
a special place in the Garden of Eden. He also received a prohibition with
a curse attached; if he ate the fruit of the tree in the middle of the Garden,
he would die. He and Eve do eat the fruit and thus initiate the unraveling of
creation. Cain and the Nephilim, continue the degeneration until God decides
to destroy the earth totally. In Noah, God mitigates the punishment, begins
re-creating the world, and makes a unilateral covenant never to destroy the
earth again, no matter what sins human beings commit. When the builders of
the Tower of Babel also challenge God, God causes confusion by multiplying
human languages and scattering people across the earth, thus bringing about
yet another element of chaos in the creation that God had originally created
good. Thus ends the primeval history, which, as we have seen earlier, ends
with an opening to the patriarchal history. In the patriarchal history, begin-
ning with Abraham, God begins again with another covenant.
Violating God’s prohibition set in motion a process that will become the
prototype of sin and salvation in the entire history of Israel. As soon as Eve
and Adam eat, even before God announces their punishment and exiles them
from the Garden, an internal dislocation takes place in the couple; “Then
the eyes of both of them were opened” and for the first time they became
ashamed of their nakedness and made loincloths for themselves (Gen. 3:7).
And then, “when they heard the sound of the Lord God moving about in the
garden at the breezy time of the day” (Gen. 3:8) they hid themselves from
the Lord God. Adam and Eve have lost the comfort they once had with their
own nakedness— “The man and his wife were both naked, yet they felt no
shame” (Gen. 2:25)—and the fearless relation they had had with God. The
relation between the two of them seems altered too. Adam blames his wife
for his disobedience and later God announces to Eve that, along with bearing
children in pain, “ . . . your urge shall be for your husband, and he will be your
master” (Gen. 3:16b). The author reveals that the subordination of woman to
man was not the original state of things but came about through the couple’s
74 Chapter Two
disobedience. The Yahwist account has introduced a dimension of interiority

that gives his account a strikingly modern tone. In a few simple lines, the au-
thor explains the loss of the four intimacies that define us a humans, intimacy
with one’s self, intimacy with God, intimacy with one another, and intimacy
with nature. We will return to these three intimacies later in a chapter on
forgiveness.
From the very beginning, then, we have an example of Ricoeur’s “servile
will” i.e., the will estranged from itself by its own doing. Before God ban-
ishes Adam and Eve from the garden, they have earned for themselves an in-
ternal exile. They have turned a stony heart to God. Ezekiel will represent the
Lord’s salvation as a kind of heart transplant: “I will remove the stony heart
from their bodies and replace it with a natural heart so that they will live ac-
cording to my statutes, and carry out my ordinances . . .” (11:19–20). Distrust
of God leading to disobedience has produced this stony heart that only God
can repair. We could also use the language of the Orphic myth that thinks of
the human being as a spiritual soul exiled in a material body. Paul Ricoeur, as
we have seen, cautions about the use of this imagery but he also notes that as
long as we take our stand clearly in the logic of the Adamic Myth, the Orphic
vision has a certain relative truth.
The full story of God’s restoration of the natural heart and the return from
exile takes up the whole of the Hebrew Bible and continues into the New Tes-
tament. The first step of God’s mercy appears even in the story of Adam and
Eve, with the Creator’s gesture of making leather garments for the couple.
Other steps follow in the primeval history, the “mitigations” that Clines refers
to, God’s protective care of Cain (Gen. 4:15), the divine choice of Noah and
his family to survive the flood (Gen. 7:1–7), and the promise to Noah never
again to destroy the human race by flood (Gen. 9:8–17). The story of salva-
tion continues in God’s call and promise to Abraham, the divine kindness
shown to Isaac and Jacob, God’s guidance of Joseph for the salvation of the
chosen people, and the leadership of Moses on behalf of the people enslaved
in Egypt. God’s mercy is evident throughout the Hebrew Testament.
ADAM AND EVE AND ORIGINAL SIN
We now come to a question that is crucial for our understanding of the history
of Adam and Eve’s story and its interpretations. Does Israel’s notion of sin,
drawn from its own historical experience and universalized, as we have seen,
in the story of Adam and Eve, contain elements of what, in the Christian tra-
dition, would come to be called original sin? We read Adam and Eve’s story
through the complicated and finely ground lens of historical interpretations.
Most potent have been the interpretations of Paul and Augustine who see the
human will as affected by a hereditary weakness received from Adam and
Eve. For Augustine, the affliction of will is transmitted by the act of sexual
intercourse that perpetuates the human race. Although we will discuss Paul
and Augustine in later chapters, for now we have to remove our Christian
lenses and, as much as we can, look at sin from a Hebrew perspective. We
concentrate on the intent of the story of Adam and Eve, its dynamism, as
indicated in the text itself in the context of the primeval history, remembering
that the story does not recur in later books of the Hebrew Bible.
In his book, The Biblical Doctrine of Original Sin, A. M. Dubarle examines
the notion of original sin in Old and New Testaments and focuses on the story
of Adam and Eve as the central text of the Old Testament related to original
sin. To what extent does the story of Adam and Eve in itself suggest a doc-
trine of original sin? A traditional distinction provides a helpful guide as we
set out to answer the question. Original sin turns out to be a compound notion;
its two component parts being originating sin and originated sin. Originating
sin is a free act that brings about an unfree state that gives rise to further sins.
The unfree state is not itself a freely committed sin but a predisposition to sin;
this is originated sin. We can reformulate the question about Adam and Eve
and original sin: “Does the story present an originating sin? In other words,
does the disobedience of Adam and Eve—note that the text never calls it
“sin”—set something in motion that continues in the descendants of this first
couple? Does the Hebrew Bible treat the sins that follow the story of Adam
and Eve, in the primeval history and the rest of the story of Israel, as effects
of the disobedience in the garden?
Confining ourselves to the story itself, we can begin by looking at the
originating sin of Adam and Eve and its originated consequences. Beginning
with the originated consequences, we will work back to the originating sin.
The process is simple enough.
We need to consider what life was like in the Garden of Eden before and
after disobedience. The text provides six indicators of life before the fall:
nakedness without shame (Gen. 2:25), familiarity with God (Gen. 3:8–10),
the absence of hardship, mutual equality between the man and the woman,
death as a natural condition of human existence (Gen. 2:17b), and the pres-
ence of temptation in the figure of the serpent. Each indicator presents us with
a different challenge. The first, nakedness without shame, is a clear indicator.
The others require some deductive reasoning.
Dubarle, examining what we can know of the state of things in the garden
before the disobedience of Adam and Eve, points to the simple observation
at the end of Genesis 2, “The man and his wife were both naked, yet they
felt no shame” (Gen. 2:25). He focuses his discussion on the importance of
76 Chapter Two
being clothed as a way of preserving human and social dignity. “. . . Clothing

is the epitome of all the dissimulations that make social life possible, and not
merely the precautions taken to avoid sexual excitement” (Dubarle 1967, 75).
In the time of innocence, Adam and Eve did not need such dissimulations
because they did not live in a hostile society. We can better understand the
meaning of nakedness by looking at Jewish practice in the Bible. Stripping
people of their clothes was a common form of punishment in Israel. Isaiah
speaks of the exiles from Egypt and Ethiopia, young and old, who will be led
away by the king of Assyria “naked and barefoot, with buttocks uncovered”
Is. 20:4); the nakedness will be a source of shame. Jeremiah speaks of the
humiliation to come on the inhabitants of Jerusalem: “Because you have
forgotten me, and trusted in the lying idol, I now will strip off your skirts
from you so that your shame will appear” (Jer. 13:26). Adam and Eve, be-
fore their disobedience, did not experience nakedness as a source of shame.
Besides these cultural meanings of nakedness, we can also think of “feeling
no shame at their nakedness” as a symbolizing a kind of inner harmony with
themselves in their natural condition, an intimacy with self, that Adam and
Eve lost through their disobedience.
The incident of Adam and Eve hiding from God as he walked in garden
also reveals life before the fall. We must deduce that they hid because they
had eaten the forbidden fruit. When they enjoyed an easy familiarity with
God, they would, as the text appears to suggest, not have needed to hide.
Life before disobedience is without hardship, since as punishment God pro-
nounces there will be pain in childbearing for Eve, and the soil will resist
Adam’s efforts to cultivate his crops. We can conclude that these conditions
did not exist before Adam and Eve disobeyed. A fourth indicator lies in God’s
words to Eve, “Your urge shall be for your husband, and he shall be your
master” (Gen. 3:16b). This edict suggests a change in the status of the woman
vis-à-vis the man, a mysterious combination of desire and subordination.
Continuing our consideration about life in the garden before disobedience
requires a look at the precise role of death as the end of life. We note God’s
original command to Adam: “. . . the moment you eat from [the tree] you are
surely doomed to die (Gen. 2:17b). Fishbane says that Genesis 3 “deals with
the profound interconnection between knowledge and death” (Fishbane, 21).
The promise of death announced in Genesis 2:17, “is not only mortality but
also the human awareness of mortality” (Fishbane, 21). Would they not have
died had they not eaten? Why didn’t they die when they did eat? The sentence
God pronounces refers to death only in a subordinate clause, suggesting that
dying was an event to be expected even before the disobedience: “By the
sweat of your face shall you get bread to eat, until you return to the ground
from which you were taken; for you are dirt and to dirt you shall return” [ital-
ics added] (Gen. 3:19). The punishment appears related to the anticipation
of death rather than death itself. “To know pain, to be conscious of desire,
and to anticipate death are, from the perspectives of this text, indicative of
mankind’s rupture from an aboriginal, primal harmony” (Fishbane, 21). Tak-
ing the changes explicitly noted in the story, we can generalize to a loss of
harmony, tranquility, and order in human life. The author seems to suggest
that death would henceforth be subject to turmoil rather than a natural, non-
traumatic event.
A sixth feature of life in the garden before disobedience takes us to the
originating sin. Even before Eve, then Adam, contradicted God’s command,
the serpent, “the most cunning of all the animals that the Lord God had made”
(Gen. 3:1a) dwelt in the garden as an external power of temptation. And Eve
showed a susceptibility to the serpent’s wiles as did Adam, following her
lead. This is worth dwelling on for a moment. Even in the state of innocence
and harmony before the fatal act of preferring their will to God’s, Adam and
Eve were susceptible to temptation. The Christian tradition has interpreted
original sin as an inherited tendency toward sin. Here we have a susceptibility
to sin even before the act that gave rise to the tendency to sin. This suscepti-
bility will become clearer as we look more closely at the precise nature of the
temptation that makes up a part of the originating sin.
The temptation and the sin are complex. The serpent questions Eve about
the prohibition, exaggerating it: “Did God really tell you not to eat of any of
the trees . . .” (Gen. 3:1b)? Eve corrected the exaggeration (2–3). The serpent
moves from exaggeration to denial: “You certainly will not die . . . your eyes
will be opened and you will be like gods who know what is good and what
is bad” (5). The woman ate and gave some to her husband. “Then the eyes of
both were opened and they realized that they were naked; so they sewed fig
leaves together and made loincloths for themselves” (7). The originating sin
is the eating of the fruit, but the eating comes out of a deeper, more original,
sin, doubting God’s motives for forbidding them to eat the fruit. The serpent
persuaded Eve that God was keeping something from them, preventing them
from enjoying a benefit that would be theirs if they ate. Augustine says that
Adam and Eve “began to be evil” in a secret way before the outward act of
disobedience became visible. The secret invisible evil was pride which Au-
gustine calls “a perverse kind of elevation” (City of God, XIV, 13, 608). We
will treat Augustine’s view at length in another chapter.
So the ultimate originating sin consists in doubting the goodness and verac-
ity of God, treating God with suspicion rather than with gratitude, regarding
the Creator as a competitor. The story presents all of this as occurring in
discrete moments with specific consequences laid out one by one. Taking the
story not historically but symbolically, we can regard it as an allegory. Sin
78 Chapter Two
originates with turning away from God in doubt, suspicion, forgetting of his
benefits, preferring our own will to his. From this fertile soil arise all the par-
ticular sins that we know. As we will see, Paul found among the “idolaters”
this sequence of turning away followed by specific sins: “. . . for although
they knew God they did not accord him glory or give him thanks. . . . There-
fore God handed them over to impurity . . .” etc. (Rom. 1:21a, 24).
In Adam and Eve’s story do we have the foundations of a doctrine of
original sin? We can certainly see the foundations but not the fully devel-
oped doctrine of Augustine. The effects described in the story, intended first
for Adam and Eve for the rest of their lives, seem to carry forward to their
descendants. God stations “the cherubim and the fiery revolving sword, to
guard the way to the tree of life” (Gen. 3:24b). Eve is called the “mother of
all the living” (Gen. 3:20), implying that her descendants will share her fate.
The subsequent chapters of the primeval history reveal an unfolding history
of sin that repeats the turning from God first undertaken by Adam and Eve.
“Furthermore Genesis as a whole,” says Dubarle, “and the Yahwist section
in particular, is convinced that the ancestor’s conduct and fate condition the
destiny of his posterity, without it being necessary for the same free deci-
sion to be taken anew in each generation” (Dubarle, 67). On the other hand,
Dubarle also cautions that though “the author of Genesis emphatically states
the existence of a physical and moral legacy passing from one generation to
another” (Dubarle, 69), “. . . it would be asking much more of him than he
meant to give, if in his work we sought a theory of the relationship of these
two factors [physical and moral] and the exact part played by each” (Dubarle,
70). Paul and Augustine, as we will see, emphasized the inherited character
of sinfulness and located its effects in a certain weakness of the will. Modern
society still debates the relative weight of heredity and environment in the
constitution of character for good or ill.
If we move beyond Adam and Eve and the primitive history into the rest
of the Hebrew Bible, we find some elements of what has become the doctrine
of original sin. Robin Cover affirms that not only Israelite theologians, but
their Hittite and Mesopotamian contemporaries recognized that “sin was a
universal moral flaw, pandemic in the human race” (Cover 1992, 36). Refer-
ences to the universal character of sin occur throughout the Hebrew Testa-
ment. We have seen texts from the primeval history. Job’s “friend” Eliphaz
puts the rhetorical question: “Can a man be righteous as against God? Can a
mortal be blameless against his Maker? Lo, he puts no trust in his servants,
and with his angels he can find fault. How much more with those who dwell
in houses of clay, whose foundation is in the dust . . .” (Job 4:17–19). We can
find in the psalms references to a universal human frailty expressed in im-
ages like smoke, grass that fades, the dust to which we return: “For my days
vanish like smoke; my bones burn away as in a furnace. I am withered, dried

up like grass, too wasted to eat my food” (Ps. 102:3–4). Psalm 53 shows us
the image of God who “looks down upon the human race, to see if even one
is wise, if even one seeks God. All have gone astray: all are perverse. Not
one does what is right, not even one” (Ps. 53:3–4). Psalm 51 comes closest
to suggesting something like original sin: “True, I was born guilty, a sinner,
even as my mother conceived me” (Ps. 51:5). In the New Jerome Biblical
Commentary, John Kselman and Michael Barre call this passage “poetic
hyperbole meaning ‘thoroughly sinful’” (Kselman and Barre 1990, 534).
Richard Clifford comments that “Before the all-holy God a human being
can plead no self-righteousness but can only ask for God’s purifying favor”
(Clifford 1989, 765). Mitchell Dahood is more explicit in finding in this pas-
sage the equivalent of a teaching of original sin: “All men have a cogenital
[probably a misprint for “congenital”] tendency toward evil; this doctrine
finds expression in Gen. viii 21; I Kings viii 46; Job iv 17, xiv 4, xv 14, xxv
4; Prov xx 9” (Dahood 1968, 4). All the passages cited by Dahood affirm the
universality of sin; none connect that sin with the disobedience of Adam and
Eve. Humans sin, in the theology of the Hebrew Bible, out of the frailty that
is intrinsic to their constitution, not from an inherited sin passed along from a
first ancestor, a frailty that seems akin to the susceptibility to temptation that
we found in Adam and Eve even before the fall.
CONCLUSION
The articulation of Israel’s faith came out of a struggle that lasted over cen-
turies, a struggle involving God’s creative activity and generosity toward hu-
mans and their disobedience, ingratitude, and forgetfulness of God. The pat-
tern of gratuitous initiatives on God’s part and disobedience on Israel’s part
emerged in the history of the chosen people long before the inclusion of the
story of Adam and Eve in the Hebrew Bible. But Adam and Eve, represented
as the archetypical parents of the human race, play out the drama in a tightly
knit narrative. All the elements appear, God’s generosity, the ingratitude and
disobedience of the recipients of that mercy, the consequences of that disobe-
dience, including expulsion from the delights of garden into a life of hardship,
and God’s compassion. God showed compassion first in the simple gesture
of making clothes for Adam and Eve and then in the events of the primeval
and patriarchal histories, the deliverance from Egypt and, ultimately in the
whole history of Israel.
R. E. Friedman points out the extraordinary intimacy of Israel’s God in
the early chapters of the Hebrew Bible and the gradual diminishment of that
80 Chapter Two
closeness as the Bible progresses: “In the first few chapters of the Bible God
is utterly involved in the affairs of the first humans. The text pictures God and
humans in a state of intimacy that is unmatched in subsequent biblical nar-
rative” (Friedman, 8). The breathing of life into the first man, the formation
of the first woman, the planting of the Garden of Eden and the fashioning of
the animals (Gen. 2:7–8, 19–23)—all of these were accomplished personally
by God. “God personally walks in the garden, and the humans hear the sound
(3:8). And God speaks familiarly to the humans in conversation (3:9–19)”
(Friedman, 8). Friedman traces the diminishment of this intimacy throughout
the Bible, beginning as early as the account of the story of the Flood. And
while God is gradually “disappearing,” says Friedman, the involvement of
humans in their own destiny is increasing. Friedman is careful to point out
that God’s “disappearance” is a “diminishing visible presence just as the
increasing control of human beings over their own destiny is an apparent
increase (Friedman, 58). God is still present and active. Is this God’s ceding
power to human beings or their taking it for themselves? “Or is it neither of
these; but rather, like children growing and separating from their parents, the
biblical story too is about the growing, maturing, and natural separating of
humans from their creator and parent” (Friedman, 59).
Within this dialectic of God’s presence and absence, and human depen-
dency and freedom, is the ongoing drama of sin and redemption. Israel’s
theology developed out of conflicting elements and moved in a definite
direction—from God’s anger to God’s compassion. God’s anger and mercy
alternated, but mercy trumped anger. God threatened to destroy the human
race by a flood then, after preserving Noah from the consequences of the
flood, promised never to destroy the human race by flood again. Psalm 89,
referring to the permanence of David’s dynasty, expresses this coincidence of
opposites: “If they fail to observe my statutes, do not keep my commandments,
I will punish their crime with a rod and their guilt with lashes. But I will not
take my love from him, nor will I betray my bond of loyalty. I will not violate
my covenant; the promise of my lips I will not alter” (Ps. 89:32–35). We have
seen how Israel’s theologians sometimes looked at sin as a kind of defilement,
to use Ricoeur’s term, that could come about by the unintentional violation of
a ritual prohibition. But the theology of the covenant transformed sin into a
rupture between an infinitely generous God and a reluctant, vacillating, and
disobedient people. As soon as the people ceased to resist and turned back to
God, the Lord was there to receive them.
The quality of God’s mercy is wonderfully captured by a creedal formula
that recurs throughout the Hebrew Bible. Sometimes the formula embod-
ies the tension between God’s righteous anger and his mercy. But always it
tilts to the preponderance of mercy over justice. “The Lord is slow to anger
and rich in kindness, forgiving wickedness and crime; yet not declaring the
guilty guiltless, but punishing children to the third and fourth generation for
their fathers’ wickedness” (Num. 14:18; Exod. 34:6–7). The two poles of the
formula as expressed here seem almost contradictory, but, as we have seen,
in the evolutionary progress of Israel’s theology, Jeremiah and Ezekiel will
pronounce a reversal of this passing on of collective guilt. This formula pro-
vides the key to understanding the Book of Jonah in its contrast between the
abounding mercy of God toward the repentant sinner and the reluctant proph-
et’s desire to see the guilty suffer. At the end of the delightful and instructive
drama of Jonah’s story, the prophet confesses to God the reason he fled from
the mission God had called him to, preaching repentance to the wicked people
of Nineveh. Jonah was not afraid he would fail but that his preaching would
in fact bring the people to repentance and thus set them up for God’s mercy.
“This is why I fled at first to Tarshish. I knew that you are a gracious and
merciful God, slow to anger, rich in clemency, loathe to punish” (Jon. 4:2b).
After recalling the wonders God had worked among his people, Nehemiah
praises God’s mercy in the face of the sins of Israel’s insolent, stiff-necked,
and disobedient fathers: “But you are a God of pardons, gracious and com-
passionate, slow to anger and rich in mercy; you did not forsake them” (Neh.
9:17; see also Ps. 86:15; 103:8; 145:8; Joel 2:13).
Isaiah 52 expresses Israel’s abiding hope in God, appealing to the dialectic
of divine wrath and divine mercy. The prophet speaks to God’s people, call-
ing them out of their former suffering: “Awake, awake!/Arise, O Jerusalem,/
You who drank at the Lord’s hand/ the cup of his wrath;/ Who drained to
the dregs/ the bowl of staggering” (Is. 51:17). And to the awakened listeners
Isaiah promised a new reality: “But now, hear this, O afflicted one,/drunk, but
not with wine, Thus says the Lord, your Master,/your God who defends his
people:/ See, I am taking from your hand/the cup of staggering;/The bowl of
my wrath/you shall no longer drink” (Is. 51:21–22).
This brief look at Adam and Eve’s story, with its dynamic of sin and for-
giveness in the context of the Hebrew Bible, prepares the way for the chapter
that follows, which discusses the Adamic Myth in the New Testament and
the dialectic expressed by Paul: “Where sin abounded, grace has abounded
all the more” (Rom. 5:20).
Chapter Three
The Adamic Myth

in the New Testament
If because of the one man’s trespass, death exercised dominion through

that one, much more surely will those who receive the abundance of grace
and the free gift of righteousness exercise dominion in life through that
one man, Jesus Christ.
—Romans 5:1, NRSV1
We have been following the history of Adam and Eve’s story and its interpre-
tations and tracing the drama of human sin matched by divine compassion.
The first chapter of that history dealt with the emergence of the narrative
in the Hebrew Testament where it recapitulates and universalizes Israel’s
experience of sin and grace already narrated in other accounts. The Hebrew
Bible, however, does not “remember” the saga of Adam and Eve in the way
it remembered its slavery in Egypt and God’s deliverance, or the divinely
engineered restoration from the Babylonian Captivity. Adam and Eve’s story
disappears from Israel’s consciousness. As Paul Ricoeur notes, the story of
Adam and Eve does not become a cornerstone of Israel’s faith. The second
chapter of their story must await Paul’s treatment in the New Testament.
This chapter establishes the lines of contact between the New Testament
and the Adamic Myth. We turn now to the New Testament with these ques-
tions: Can the Adamic Myth be called a cornerstone of Christianity? Does
the dynamic logic of this myth provide a vision that expresses the notion of
salvation in Christianity? Above all, does the New Testament continue to un-
fold the dialectic of sin and grace that began in Adam and Eve? The answer,
although affirmative, is not obvious—at least not for the whole of the New
Testament. In Paul it is obvious. By making Christ the “Second Adam,” Paul,
probably familiar with inter-testamental allusions to Adam and Eve, resurrects
83
84 Chapter Three
the figure of Adam from its dormancy in the Old Testament and extends its
scope, making of it a foundation stone of his theology. The first part of this
chapter shows the development of Paul’s thought and, in particular, which
aspects of the Adamic Myth are crucial to his thought. We must ask, however,
do other books of the New Testament, particularly the Gospels, embody the
inner dynamic of the Aamic Myth (as opposed to the other myths that Ricoeur
explores), and, if so, what aspects of the Adamic Myth find a place in the the-
ology of the Gospels? The second part of the chapter will argue that the inner
logic of the Adamic Myth provides a framework for the Gospels, especially
the condition of universal moral impotence coupled with the power of freedom
through life in Christ that provides a unifying vision to the diverse theologies
we find there.
After briefly revisiting the dynamic elements of the Adamic Myth already
presented, we will see how Paul, in his Letter to the Romans, and to a lesser
extent in his First Letter to the Corinthians, elaborates the vision of salvation
embodied in the Adamic Myth. Then, guided by the questions about whether,
to what extent, and how they might express the logic of the Adamic Myth, we
will explore the idea of salvation in the Gospels. A brief schema that lays out
three phases of salvation in Christian thought will conclude the chapter and
set the stage for an investigation into the dynamics of forgiveness.
This discussion will be guided by the questions implicit in the last chapter:
Is the doctrine of original sin a source of liberation rather than the negatively
charged vision of human life that many people see in it? How do Paul and the
Gospel writers conceive the sinful situation that creates the need for salva-
tion? How does salvation come about? What is God’s role? What is our role?
Is there a connection between our role and God’s role?
ESSENTIAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE ADAMIC MYTH
Before examining how the dynamics of the Adamic Myth are present in the
New Testament, it is helpful to recall the essential elements of that vision. The
Adamic Myth is a mythical type embodied in a variety of narratives, parables,
and myths—among them, the central New Testament narratives and theologi-
cal developments. The logic of the Adamic Myth extends into the entire pri-
meval history with its history of sin “matched by a secret increasing power of
grace” (Von Rad). Finally, we ask what it means to speak of the “dynamics”
of the Adamic Myth? It means that this story with its symbolic elements is
charged with energy capable of revealing the inner truth of the human spirit.
That energy lay dormant in the Hebrew Bible until Paul found a way to tap it
as the negative pole of a corresponding positive: salvation in Christ.
The Adamic Myth in the New Testament 85
The Adamic Myth can be summarized in six points: the goodness of God
and everything God has created; the prohibition against eating of the tree
of the knowledge of good and evil; the serpent’s temptation and Adam and
Eve’s disobedience; the consequences of disobedience, that is, evil as ex-
pressed in the fourfold loss of intimacy with self, God, neighbor, and nature;
God’s initiative in restoring what has been lost; and human cooperation with
God’s initiative. The full scope of this vision comes to explicit fullness only
in the writings of St. Paul. We might say that Paul makes of Jesus the second
pier of a bridge that has as its first pier the figure of Adam. The bridge itself,
supported by these two piers, is the historical extension over which walk the
figures of Abraham, Moses, and the kings and prophets of Israel.
We now turn to Paul to see how he makes of Jesus the New Testament
pier of the Adamic Myth. After considering Paul, we can complete the list of
characteristics of the Adamic Myth in its full extension from Genesis to the
New Testament.
THE ADAMIC MYTH IN PAUL
In Paul we find transformation of the Adamic Myth in The Letter to the Ro-
mans, his most mature work and, to a lesser extent in Chapter 15 of his First
Letter to the Corinthians. Romans plays in reverse the turning away from
God narrated in the Adamic Myth. Just as the disobedience of Adam and Eve
brought about the unraveling of creation, so the obedience of Jesus Christ has
knitted it up. The knitting up Paul calls justification, reconciliation, redemp-
tive liberation, or expiation. The argument of Romans unfolds in three phases.
First Paul describes the situation that gives rise to the need for salvation, both
for pagans and for Jews. All fall under the reign of sin. Then Paul introduces
the figure of Abraham, who occupies in salvation history a mid-point between
the pagans (or Gentiles) with their knowledge of God through nature and the
people of Israel formed by the law. Paul sees in Abraham the prototype of the
believer. Abraham embodies, as a type, the answer to the question, “What must
we do to be saved?” We must believe. Finally, Paul establishes Jesus Christ as
the second Adam and shows how the gospel of Jesus Christ, by offering salva-
tion from the dilemma of the enslaved will, is the “power of God for salvation
to everyone who has faith, to the Jew first and also to the Greek” (Rom. 1:16).
The Situation of Sin is Universal

Paul begins, not with the consequences of Adam’s and Eve’s disobedience,
but with “the ungodliness and wickedness of those who by their wickedness
86 Chapter Three
suppress the truth” (Rom. 1:18). These people knew God because what can
be known about God is plain from creation. But although they knew God,
“they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile
in their thinking, and their senseless minds were darkened.” They worshipped
idols, “images resembling a mortal human being or birds or four-footed ani-
mals or reptiles” (Rom. 1:21–23). Their sin, then, was a turning away from
God toward gods. The consequence of their sin was that “God gave them up”
to vices, “degrading passions,” in which Paul includes illicit sexual relations
and “every kind of wickedness, evil, covetousness, malice . . .” and so forth.
He seems to exclude no type of sin. The phrase, “God gave them up . . .” oc-
curs three times in Romans 1:18–32. “God gave them up in the lusts of their
hearts to impurity” (Rom. 1:24), “God gave them up to degrading passions”
(Rom. 1:26), “God gave them up to a debased mind and to things that should
not be done” (Rom. 1:28). The crucial point of Paul’s analysis, for this study,
is that with the Gentiles, as with Adam and Eve, the originating sin is failing
to recognize God or give him thanks. All the other “sins” come as a conse-
quence of the original turning away, the originating sin.
Though Paul himself does not mark the connection, this turning away of
the pagans from the knowledge and glorification of God seems to parallel the
turning away of Adam and Eve from God through disobedience. The conse-
quences of turning away from God for the pagans, and for Adam and Eve and
their descendants, are similar. In case his Jewish listeners might be feeling
righteous in hearing this critique of the Gentiles, and congratulate themselves
on being righteous for having the law, Paul reminds them that they are under
the same judgment to the extent that they do similar things. Just having the
law does not justify a person, “For it is not the hearers of the law who are
righteous in God’s sight, but the doers of the law who will be justified” (Rom.
2:13). So then, both Gentiles and Jews stand in need of salvation because they
have turned away from God. “Are we [Jews] any better off? No, not at all; for
we have already charged that all, both Jews and Greeks, are under the power
of sin . . .” (Rom. 3:9). The Gentiles have turned away from God as mani-
fested in nature, the Jews have turned away from God as revealed in the Law.
Abraham as the Model of Justification by Faith

In the second phase of Paul’s argument he presents a solution that applies
both to Jews and Gentiles: Paul appeals to the figure of Abraham who found
salvation not through the law, which God revealed only later through Moses,
but through the obedience of faith. Abraham is a universal figure because he
is an example for all people, not just for Jews. Paul quotes God’s promise
to Abraham, i.e., that he would become “the father of many nations” (Rom.
4:18). The key is that Abraham was justified by faith not by obedience to
the law. When God promised children to Abraham and Sarah and said that
Abraham would become the father of many nations, Abraham believed even
“when he considered his own body, which was already as good as dead, for
he was about a hundred years old, or when he considered the barrenness of
Sarah’s womb” (Rom. 4:19).
Justification by Faith in Jesus Christ, the Second Adam

In the third phase of his argument, Paul transitions from Abraham’s faith in
God’s promise, to the Christian’s faith in what God has actually done in Jesus
Christ. We can discern seven steps in the unfolding of this third phase. First,
Abraham’s faith becomes the model of the Christian’s faith: “Now the words,
‘it was reckoned to him,’ were written not for his sake alone, but for ours”
(Rom. 4:23–24). Abraham’s faith is the model, but the object of that faith is
different although parallel. Just as Abraham believed that God would bring
about the seemingly impossible feat of giving children to a barren couple, so
Christians are asked to believe in the seeming impossibility of life coming out
of death. This paradox of life coming from death is what Bernard Lonergan
calls “the law of the cross” (Lonergan 1961, 524–535), which he believes to
be “the essence of redemption” (Ibid., 527). “It [righteousness] will be reck-
oned to us who believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead, who
was handed over to death for our trespasses and was raised for our justifica-
tion” (Rom. 4:24–25).
Just as God took the initiative to save a remnant from the flood, by having
Noah build an ark, just as God promised Abraham that he would be the father
of many nations even though he was old and his wife barren, and just as God
raised up Moses to save his people from the slavery of Egypt, so now “God
proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us”
(Rom. 5:8). Our justification takes place through our believing in what God
has done in Jesus Christ, impossible as that might seem.
The second step—the crucial move in the completion of the Adamic
Myth—is Paul’s teaching that Christ is the second Adam. “Therefore, just
as one man’s trespass led to condemnation for all, so one man’s act of righ-
teousness leads to justification and life for all. For just as by the one man’s
disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s [Jesus’]
obedience the many will be made righteous” (Rom. 5:18–19). Paul refers to
Christ’s death for us as a “free gift” that leads to justification, just as the sin
of Adam lead to condemnation (Rom. 5:18).
In the third step Paul returns to the law—by which he means the Law of
Moses—and its role in salvation from a Christian point of view. Paul now
88 Chapter Three
shows the true depths of the situation of sin from which humans need to be
redeemed. It is not just that a situation of sin exists—that in itself would
only mean that someone needs to do something. The law has increased
sin and, in fact, produced a situation of “ethical impossibility” (Byrne,
224–233). In chapter 1, Paul referred to the situation of sin that followed on
the pagans’ turning away from the knowledge of God. God in fact “turned
them over” to these sins as a consequence of their refusal to acknowledge
and glorify him. Now Paul insists that for those under the law—the Jews,
that is—the law has solidified the reign of sin. It is not that the law itself is
sin, but the law has revealed sin. The law is a pedagogue. I would not have
known that it was wrong to covet, says Paul, if the law had not said, “You
shall not covet” (Rom. 7:7). But the law is a pedagogue that has gotten
linked to the very thing it is trying to prevent, sin. Sin takes advantage of
the law—one commentator says that sin “hijacked” the law (Byrne 1996,
220)—and runs rampant, producing all kinds of covetousness. This is a
paradoxical teaching and Paul expresses it forcefully to set up his idea of
salvation in Christ:
Apart from the law sin lies dead. I was once alive apart from the law, but when
the commandment came, sin revived and I died and the very commandment that
promised life proved to be death to me. For sin, seizing an opportunity in the
commandment, deceived me and through it killed me. So the law is holy, and
the commandment is holy and just and good. Did what is good, then, bring death
to me? By no means! It was sin, working death in me through what is good, in
order that sin might be shown to be sin, and through the commandment might
become sinful beyond measure (Rom. 7:8b–13).
This extraordinary insight specifies the situation from which humans need to
be saved. The law itself has increased sin. The prohibition contained in the
law has produced the very thing it was meant to prevent. Paul is thinking of
the law of Moses. Can one apply it to the first “sin,” that of Adam and Eve?
Brendan Byrne suggests that, in fact, Paul was thinking both of Adam and
Israel (Byrne, 218). The prohibition against eating of the tree of the knowl-
edge of good and evil became, through the trickery of the serpent, a kind of
incitement to eat.
The fourth step of Paul’s argument is what Ricoeur calls “the servile will,”
the will enslaved by its own action and incapable of doing what a will is
meant to do, i.e., choose the good (Ricoeur 1967, 151–57). Paul expresses the
idea in his famous lament: “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not
do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate” (Rom. 7:15). And again, “For I
do not do the good I want but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do
what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me”
(Rom. 7:19). This bondage of the will constitutes the situation that necessi-
tates a moral and spiritual conversion.
The fifth step is Paul’s answer to his own question: “Wretched man that I
am! Who will rescue me from this body of death” (Rom. 7:24)? If the law,
“weakened by the flesh,” produced a situation of ethical impossibility, life in
the Spirit brings about in the believer the state of “ethical possibility” (Byrne,
234–41). How does this reversal take place? The answer to this question takes
us to the heart of the Adamic Myth as transformed by Paul. God does for us
what the law could not do: “by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful
flesh, and as a sin offering, [God] condemned sin in the flesh, so that the just
requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us who walk not according to the
flesh but according to the Spirit” (Rom. 8:3–4).
Three points in this quotation deserve comment: First, it is God who takes
the initiative to free us from sin, and this is consistent with the logic of the
Adamic Myth. The second point regards the kind of initiative God now takes.
It is different from any of God’s earlier initiatives. God has sent his own Son
“in the likeness of sinful flesh and as a sin offering,” and thus condemned sin
in the flesh. In this way, the just requirement of the law—Paul has consis-
tently affirmed that the law is good—is fulfilled. This sending of God’s Son
represents the closest possible identification of God with the suffering and,
indeed, the sin of his people, so close in fact that Paul can say, “For our sake
[God] made him to be sin who did not know sin, so that we might become
the righteousness of God in him” (2 Cor. 5:21). The third point is that though
God takes the initiative, human beings have a role to play and a choice to
make. God’s initiative requires a human response. The choice Paul puts
before the Christian is to live out the logic of our baptismal promise (Rom.
6:1–4). “Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so
that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we
too might walk in newness of life.” In Romans 8, Paul expresses this choice
as whether to live by the flesh or by the Spirit—”so that the just requirement
of the law might be fulfilled in us who walk not according to the flesh but
according to the Spirit” (Rom. 8:4).
By “the flesh” Paul means all that is opposed to God’s Spirit, all egotism,
greed, violence, lust, and every other form of idolatry by which humans
put their own desires in the place of God’s will. “‘Flesh’ and ‘Spirit,’” says
Brendan Byrne, “do not denote separate elements in the make-up of human
individuals (‘body’ and ‘soul,’ for example) but rather two possibilities of
existence—the one self-enclosed, self-regarding and hostile to God, the other
open to God and to life” (Byrne, 238).
The sixth step considers the place of suffering in the salvific plan of God.
Even though Christ, through his death and resurrection, has restored ethical
90 Chapter Three
possibility, a possibility actualized through the Christian’s faith, suffering and

frustration still remain part of life even in the new dispensation, but Paul turns
suffering into an argument for hope. “For I reckon that the sufferings of the
present time are a small price to pay for the glory that is going to be revealed
in us” (Rom. 8:23). Having stated his confidence that suffering will be caught
up in glory, Paul goes on to describe three levels of “groaning”: the groaning
of all creation, our own groaning, and the groaning of the Holy Spirit. The
groaning of the Holy Spirit takes place within the groaning of creation and
of human beings. This theme in Romans 8 hearkens back to Romans 5 where
Paul has already said that we [Christians] “boast in our sufferings, knowing
that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and
character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s
love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit” (Rom. 5:3–5).
What is striking in these passages from chapters 5 and 8 of Romans is the
degree to which God, through Jesus Christ and his Spirit, has entered into the
very deepest recesses of human sin and suffering. We see here the ultimate
expression of the divine compassion that accompanied human beings along
the way of suffering and sin beginning with God’s gesture of making leather
garments to clothe Adam and his wife (Gen. 3:21).
To advance to the seventh step, the superabundance of grace, we must go
back to an earlier section of Romans. The restoration of the human situation
through the grace of Christ is better than the situation lost through sin. Be-
ginning with the situation of ethical impossibility caused by the complicity
of sin and the law, Paul goes on to exalt the power of grace: “But law came
in, with the result that the trespass multiplied; but where sin increased, grace
abounded all the more . . .” (Rom. 5:20). Paul himself, in a rhetorical flourish
that highlights the paradoxical nature of what he is saying, poses the question,
“What then are we to say? Should we continue in sin in order that grace may
abound?” (Rom. 6:1). Paul’s rhetorical question, a device common within an-
cient diatribe, sets up the answer: “By no means! How can we who died to sin
continue living in it?” (Rom. 6:2). Paul’s resounding affirmation in chapter
8 that “ . . . the sufferings of the present time are a small price to pay for the
glory that is going to be revealed in us” (Rom. 8:18) seems to be an echo of
the earlier statement about abounding grace. So, in the new dispensation of
justification in Christ, the Holy Spirit transforms sin and suffering themselves
into the hope of glory.
Summary of the Adamic Myth in the Light of Romans

Can we now summarize the phases of Paul’s doctrine of salvation as con-
tained in his Letter to the Romans? I have identified three phases: the univer-
sal reign of sin, the faith of Abraham as the model of faith to be practiced by
all those who want to be saved, and, finally, faith in Jesus Christ, the second
Adam, as the source of righteousness, salvation, and reconciliation. Now that
we have seen how Paul completes the construction of the Adamic Myth by
providing a pier in the New Testament to correspond to the pier in Genesis
and allowing us to see the procession of salvific characters in the Old Testa-
ment as a bridge, we can at last complete the list of elements of this vision
that has been a leitmotiv of this work: the goodness of God and everything
God has created; the prohibition that appears in the Genesis story as a com-
mand not to eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,
emerges among the pagans as a kind of natural law, and takes the form of
the Mosaic law for the historical community of Israel; temptation from the
serpent, the only pre-existing evil in the Garden; disobedience or the viola-
tion of the prohibition by Adam and Eve, by Israel, and by the pagans; the
consequences of the violation, namely, the situation of sin that has hardened
into an ethical impossibility requiring salvation from the outside; God’s ini-
tiative in restoring through a series of mediators—the last of whom is his own
Son—what has been lost through disobedience and turning away from God;
the super-abundance of grace relative to the abundance of sin; and, finally,
the necessity for human beings to accept the gift of the Holy Spirit and to
prove that they have accepted it by living according to the Spirit rather than
according to the flesh.
If we go back to the questions posed at the beginning of this chapter, we
can give Paul’s answers. To the question: “From what do we need to be
saved?” Paul’s answer is the universal reign of sin. This reign of sin can
be seen in the consequences of Adam’s disobedience, in the list of vices to
which God “turned over” the pagans when they refused to acknowledge and
thank him, and in the situation of the children of Israel who did not obey the
law. “All, both Jews and Greeks, are under the power of sin . . .” (Rom. 3:9).
This reign of sin entails a loss of intimacy—with self, God, neighbor, and
nature—and hardship in the exercise of living, darkness of the mind, vio-
lence, and every other kind of vice. Moreover, this reign of sin is a form of
slavery that leaves human beings impotent with regard to the moral law. No
matter how much they might want to live according to the law, they are un-
able to do so and keep doing what they do not want to do. It is a desperate
situation, literally without hope.
To the question, “What does God do about the situation?” Paul answers
that God loves us enough to send his Son to die for us. In the midst of a
situation without hope, God gives a motive for hope, namely the grace of
the Holy Spirit. Paul notes: “ . . . and hope does not disappoint us, because
God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has
92 Chapter Three
been given to us” (Rom. 5:5). The gift of the Holy Spirit comes through Jesus
Christ, the ultimate proof of God’s love. “But God proves his love for us in
that while we still were sinners Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8). The effect
of the gift of God’s love is to take away condemnation (katakrima). “For
the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of
sin and death” (Rom. 8:2). Life in Christ replaces moral impotence, “ethical
impossibility” with “ethical possibility” so that those who believe can fulfill
the just commands of the law. Finally, the gift of God’s love takes the form
of a groaning through which the Spirit of God enters into our groaning and
turns it into hope. What God does, then, is utterly reverse the consequences
of sin. As Brendan Byrne puts it: “. . . all believers (Jewish and Gentile) have
been gifted with God’s righteousness in Christ. . . . They have been swept
up within a ‘solidarity of grace’ immeasurably more ‘powerful for salvation’
than the solidarity in sin stemming from Adam” (Byrne 1996, 208–209). God
has reversed the sequence of events that followed on the sin of Adam and
Eve, the sin of the Gentiles, and the sins of Israel.
It appears that God has opened a door. With regard to our third question
“What are human beings to do toward salvation?” Paul’s answer—simple
to state as it is difficult to put into practice—accept the gift offered. That
means, first, to believe as Abraham did. Abraham is the model of the believer
because he believed in the face of the impossible. Justification for the Chris-
tian comes first through faith in what God has done in Jesus Christ. Then
the Christian must enter into the death of Christ. The Christian is baptized
into the death of Christ so as to share in the resurrection of Christ (Rom. 6).
Finally, the Christian is to live by the Spirit, rather than by the flesh, to take
advantage of the freedom offered through the gift of the Spirit and not fall
back into slavery to sin.
SALVATION IN OTHER NEW TESTAMENT WRITINGS
Paul’s development of the notion of salvation in his most influential work,

The Letter to the Romans seems clearly to be within the framework of the
Adamic myth; what about the rest of the New Testament? Romans might be
seen as bringing to completion the inner dynamic of the myth. Paul provides
us with the most explicit, sustained, and influential account of Christ as sec-
ond Adam. But other New Testament writers also knew Christ in relation to
the beginnings of the human race in Adam, saw his salvific obedience on the
Cross as the reversal of Adam’s disobedience, and recognized his grace and
mercy as the only antidote to sin. An early 5th Century Holy Saturday homily
by Epiphanius of Cyprus dramatically draws together hints and clues from the
New Testament.
This imaginative recreation of Christ’s descent into hell after his crucifix-
ion abounds in gentle irony and the voluntas pietatis or “will of tender mercy”
described by Hugh of St. Victor (see above, ix–x). Jesus introduces himself
to Adam: “I am your God, who for your sake have become your son.” The
author imagines Christ after the crucifixion as going “to search for our first
parent, as for a lost sheep . . . He has gone to free from sorrow the captives
Adam and Eve, he who is both God and the son of Eve.” Christ contrasts
their garden with his: “For the sake of you who left a garden, I was betrayed
to the Jews in a garden, and I was crucified in a garden” Christ invites these
first humans, once in paradise, now in hell, to see his hands “firmly nailed to
a tree, for you who once wickedly stretched out your hand to a tree.” Finally
Christ invites Adam and Eve to share in the place he has opened through his
redemptive death and resurrection: “Rise, let us leave this place. The enemy
led you out of the earthly paradise. I will not restore you to that paradise, but
I will enthrone you in heaven” (PG 43, 439, 451, 462–463).
If we look closely at the non-Pauline New Testament writings, we can find
some of the indications that gave rise to this imaginative vision. Just after his
account of Jesus’ baptism and before describing the temptations that prepare
Jesus for ministry, Luke gives a genealogy that, unlike Matthew’s, traces
Jesus’ ancestry back to Adam. Matthew’s genealogy occurs at the beginning
of his Gospel, even before Jesus’ birth, and traces the savior’s ancestry only
back to Abraham, suggesting a clear connection with the history of Israel but
not with the origins of the human race. In mentioning Adam, Luke establishes
a connection with the origins of the humanity itself and implies that Christ’s
fidelity in ministry will reverse the infidelity of Adam. Luke’s account of Je-
sus’ rejection of Satan’s temptations in the desert seems to be a reversal of the
capitulation of Adam and Eve to the serpent’s urgings (Franklin, 2001, 931,
col. 2; Karris, 1990, 688, col.2; Stöger, 1981, 80). Stöger compares Luke’s
account with Paul’s claim in Romans 5:19, “As the many became sinners
through the disobedience of one man [Adam] so, too, by the obedience of one
[Christ] the many were justified” (Stöger, 1981).
Three times in Acts, 5:30, 10:39, 13:29, Luke refers to Jesus’ death on a
tree, clearly evoking the image of the tree from which Adam and Eve ate and
pointing to Jesus’ obedience as reversal of their act of disobedience. “The
God of our ancestors raised up Jesus, whom you had killed by hanging him
on a tree” (5:30). 10:39 also refers to Jesus’ death by hanging on a tree and
adds, “but God raised him up on the third day and allowed him to appear, not
to all the people but to us who were chosen as his witnesses, and who ate and
94 Chapter Three
drank with him after he rose from the dead” (see also 13:29). When we hear
Luke call the cross a tree through which Jesus entered into his resurrected life,
we think of the tree of life to which God closed off access in Genesis 3 after
Adam and Eve went against God’s command by eating of the fruit of the tree
of knowledge of good and evil. By his obedience, Jesus, by passing through
death, has opened the door to eternal life once closed by the disobedience of
Adam.
If we add to Acts’ Cross-as-tree references Revelation’s promise of ac-
cess to the tree of life, we have an even stronger case for seeing Christ as
the second Adam. The references in Revelation occur at crucial points, the
beginning and the end of the Book. “To everyone who conquers I will give
permission to eat from the tree of life that is the paradise of God” (2:7b). The
two references in chapter 22, the last chapter of the Book, occur in the context
of Revelation’s vision of “a new heaven and a new earth” announced at the
beginning of chapter 21. Chapter 22 refers to “the river of the water of life”
and adds the comment, “On either side of the river is the tree of life with its
twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the
tree are for the healing of the nations” (22:6b). A few lines later: “Blessed are
those who wash their robes, so that they will have the right to the tree of life
and may enter the city by the gates” (14b, 19b).
All these promises of access to the tree of life reverse God’s preventive
measures described in Genesis 3 to keep Adam and Eve from the Tree of Life:
“Then the Lord God said, ‘See the man has become like one of us, know-
ing good and evil; and now, he might reach out his hand and take also from
the tree of life, and eat, and live forever’—therefore the Lord God sent him
forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken”
(Gen. 3:22–23). And the promised new heaven and new earth announce the
reversal of the unraveling or un-creating of heaven and earth that followed
Adam’s disobedience. But the promise is not unconditional. Revelation’s
last reference to the tree of life, the last words of the book before the closing
peroration, raise the possibility of losing once again the access opened by
Jesus’ death and resurrection: “. . . if anyone takes away from the words of
this prophecy, God will take away that person’s share in the tree of life and
in the holy city, which are described in this book” (22:19). Disobedience still
closes off access to the tree of life.
Between these references to the tree of life we have, in Chapter 12 of
Revelation, the images of the woman, the child, and the dragon that recall the
curse God placed on the serpent in Genesis 3: “I will put enmity between you
and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will strike your head
and you will strike his heel” (Gen 3: 15). Commentators believe the account
in chapter 12 of Revelation was put together by the author from two other
non-Christian sources, “a narrative describing the conflict between a woman

with child and a dragon (vv. 1–6 and 13–17), and a narrative depicting a
battle in heaven (vv. 7–9)” (Collins, 1990, 1008, col 2). The identity of the
woman, Collins notes, has been disputed. Catholic tradition has identified her
with Mary. She could also be “the heavenly Jerusalem, personified wisdom,
or the Church” (Ibid). Collins concludes: “In the present form of chap. 12 the
woman is the heavenly Israel, the spouse of God” (Ibid.). As for the dragon,
this final form of chapter 12 identifies him “with the serpent of Gen 3, who
in turn is identified with the devil and Satan” (Ibid). Richard Bauckham also
sees in v.9 a reference to the serpent of Eden who is identified “as also the
sea-monster or dragon Leviathan, destined for eschatological defeat by the
sword of God (Isa 27:1).” In the woman, Bauckham sees not Mary the mother
of Jesus, but “the people of God “both Israel and the Church. V.3, not Mary’s
pregnancy so much as the sufferings of Israel from which the Messiah came
and which he bore” (Bauckham, 2001, 1296, col. 2).
This last reference to “the sufferings of Israel from which the Messiah
came” suggests the figure of Second Isaiah’s Suffering Servant (42:1–4;
49:1–6; 50:4–9; 52: 13–53:12), along with the title Son of Man suggests a
path from Christ to Adam. Jesus himself referred to the story of Adam and
Eve only once, in connection with the issue of divorce: “Have you not read
that the one who made them in the beginning ‘made them male and female,’
and said, ‘for this reason a man shall leave his father and mother . . . ’” Three
other New Testament passages refer to Adam and Eve in the context of the
relation between man and woman (Matt. 19:4–5, I Timothy 2:13–14, and
II Corinthians 11:3). These direct references to Adam and Eve do not point
to Jesus’ role as Second Adam. But the title, Son of Man, and its connection
with the Suffering Servant of Isaiah do, upon closer inspection, invite a com-
parison with Paul’s dramatic parallel between Christ and the first parent of
the human race, Adam, the Man. The Son of Man is the Son of Adam.
The designation “Son of Man” appears eighty-four times in the New Testa-
ment, most often in the Gospels but also twice in Revelation (1:13, 14:14),
once each in Acts (7:56), and Hebrews (2:6). In all the Gospel references, it is
Jesus who uses the title of himself; it is the characteristic way in which Jesus
speaks of himself. The Son of Man is the sower of good seed (Matt 13:37),
the judge who will come in glory “to reward all people according to their
works” (Matt 16:27), the one who has power to forgive sins (Mark 2:10),
Lord of the Sabbath (Mark 2:28). In almost half of the Gospel references,
Jesus couples the designation Son of Man with the notion of the suffering
servant or simply suffering (for example, Matt. 8:20, 17:12, 20:18; Mk. 8:31,
9:12, 10:45; Lk. 9:22, 18:31, 22:22; Jn. 8:28, 12:34, 13:31). Christ, then, is
the Son of Man (Adam) who voluntarily shares in the sufferings brought to
96 Chapter Three
all Adam’s children through their parents’ disobedience, and who, paradoxi-
cally, accomplishes human salvation through that very suffering.
Paul Ricoeur argues that Christ’s self-designation in the synoptic tradition,
as Son of Man and Suffering Servant, situates that tradition firmly within the
vision of the Adamic Myth. We will also discover that the synoptic tradition
manifests other key characteristics of the Adamic vision, among them, the
universality of the reign of sin, the inability of human beings to save them-
selves, the abounding mercy of God who sent his Son as liberator of sons and
daughters longing for freedom, and the teaching that salvation comes from
God alone. They do not contain Paul’s central affirmation that “by the one
man’s transgression the many died . . .” (Rom. 5:1b).
The Adamic vision consists, as we have seen, of the following elements:
the absolute goodness of God and God’s creation, the presence of prohibition,
restriction, or law that sets conditions for human life in the created world;
temptation from the serpent, the turning away from God through disobedi-
ence, the loss of intimacy with self, God, neighbor, and nature that are the
consequences of turning away; the initiative of God toward reconciliation,
the superabundance of grace compared with the abundance of sin, and the
necessity on our part to accept the gift of salvation. The questions posed at
the beginning of this chapter are again a framework for what follows: What
do we need to be saved from? What is God’s role in salvation? What is our
role? And what is the connection between our role and God’s role?
The Son of Man and the Suffering Servant in the Gospels

Ricoeur holds that Paul’s designation of Christ as the Second Adam both
incorporates and transcends the designation Son of Man. “This new figure
[the second Adam] at the same time consecrates the preceding ones and
adds a decisive trait to them” (Ricoeur 1967, 271). The decisive trait is the
superabundance of life that comes with the intervention of the second Adam,
as expressed in Paul’s phrase, “Where sin increased, grace abounded all the
more” (Rom. 5:20). In other words, Christ’s coming not only restores the
state of things before Adam and Eve’s disobedience, it makes possible a
higher state of existence. Ricoeur suggests that it may be necessary to have
assimilated the succession of figures, Messiah, Son of God, Son of Man,
Suffering Servant in order to understand the one “which insures the ultimate
symmetry between the Adamic figure of the myth of origin and the series of
eschatological figures—namely, the figure of the ‘second Adam’” (Ricoeur
1967, 271). My concern here is to show that the gospel figure of the Son of
Man is indeed an Adamic image even though it lacks some of the fullness that
Paul attributes to the figure of the second Adam in Romans and 1Corinthians.
We must recognize from the beginning that the term “Son of Man” applied
to himself by Jesus in the Gospels does not establish him as the Second Adam
with the same clarity that we find in Paul. The expression “Son of Man,” as
it turns out, has a complicated history. Scholars suggest that it comes into the
Hebrew Scriptures from other sources than the story of Adam in the book
of Genesis. The most notable occurrence of the figure of the son of man in
the Old Testament is in Daniel 7: The context is Daniel’s apocalyptic dream
that presents a vision of a new kingdom of God to replace kingdoms that will
pass away. Daniel recounts that in the dream, “I saw in the night visions, and
behold, with the clouds of heaven there came one like a son of man, and he
came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him” (Dan. 7:13).
Son of Man also appears in Old Testament books other than Daniel, notably,
Ezekiel (93 times), The Wisdom of Solomon, 1–6; 4 Ezra, 11–13; 2 Baruch,
and in other texts such as Psalm 8. The term also appears in the non-biblical
book, I Enoch. Its origin does not seem to be directly the figure of Adam
from Genesis. “Broad consensus sees this chapter [Daniel 7] as the product
of a complex history of tradition with deep roots in non-Israelite mythology”
(Nickelsburg 1992, 137). It also has roots, as Nickelsburg makes clear in this
same article, within the Hebrew tradition.
Paul Ricoeur, on the other hand, makes the connection with the Adamic
myth of Genesis. “This figure [the son of man],” says Ricoeur, “the most
distant from the figure of the earthly king, will lead us back . . . to the initial
figure: To Man, to Anthropos” (Ricoeur 1967, 267–68). But, Ricoeur adds
that though the figure of the Son of Man leads us back to the initial figure, it
is not identical with the Adam of Genesis: “The Son of Man is Man; but he
is no longer the First Man, but a Man who is coming; he is the Man of the
end, whether he be an individual or the personification of a collective entity,
of the remnant of Israel, or of the whole of humanity” (Ricoeur 1967, 268).
The figure of the Son of Man looks toward the future, to a kingdom that is to
come, something we have not yet seen, rather than to the simple restoration
of a state of being that was lost. In this sense, the figure of the Son of Man
shares something of the “grace abounding” so prominent in Paul’s designa-
tion of Christ as the Second Adam. The important point here is that the figure
of the Son of Man is thoroughly anthropological and thus radically connected
with the anthropological myth, the myth of Adam.
This figure of the Son of Man, as applied to Jesus, is transformed by
its coupling with the figure of the suffering servant into a radically new
vision—incomprehensible to many of Jesus’ followers, even to his disciples
in the beginning—that transforms suffering into a source of hope. So the
Adamic vision of the Gospels, expressed in the figures of the Son of Man
and the Suffering Servant, is indeed very like that of Paul who finds in Jesus
98 Chapter Three
the Second Adam. But the Adamic vision is also expressed in other ways in
the Gospels.
The Gospel View of God’s Role in Salvation

Having reviewed in the non-Pauline New Testament writings these various
resonances with the story of Adam and Eve—the Cross as tree (Acts), the
Tree of Life, the serpent, the new creation (Revelation), the Son of Man and
the Suffering Servant (the Gospels)—we can now look for other features, in
the New Testament outside of Paul that might express what I would call the
logic of the Adamic Myth so thoroughly developed by Paul and alluded to in
other New Testament writings. Three features predominate: the universality of
the reign of sin, the inability of humans to save themselves, and the abounding
mercy of God who sent his Son as liberator of those who would believe in him.
The Universal Reign of Sin in the Gospels

As we have seen, Paul maintains not only that all have sinned but that a power
of sin is at work in the world challenging the power of God. According to
E. P. Sanders, the general Jewish view that all people sin, at least in the sense
that they “commit a sin at some time or other,” is accepted throughout the
New Testament (Sanders 1992, 41). Sanders refers to Paul’s affirmation that
“all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23) and points to
the “assumption of universal sinfulness . . . seen in the Lord’s Prayer, where
the disciples are told to say, ‘forgive us our debts’ (Matt. 6:12) or ‘forgive us
our sins’ (Lk. 11:4)” (Ibid.). “All four Gospels and Acts,” says Sanders, “place
early a passage which displays the assumption that all have sinned” (Ibid.).
Sanders points to Matthew’s affirmation that “Jesus shall save the people from
their sins” (Matt. 1:21), Mark’s reference to John the Baptist’s preaching of
“a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins,” to Jesus’ preaching that
his hearers should “repent” (Mk. 1:4, 15) and to John’s reference to John the
Baptist’s saying of Jesus that “he takes away the sins of the world” (Jn. 1:29).
At the end of what Sanders calls “the first Christian sermon” we find Peter’s
call to his hearers: “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of
Jesus Christ so that your sins may be forgiven . . .” (Acts 2:38).
Henri Rondet says of Jesus, “Like the precursor, he preaches penance. All
men are sinners and should repent” (Rondet 1972, 20). The texts Rondet cites,
Matt. 4:17, Mk. 1:15, and Lk. 13:3, address the call of repentance to all Jesus’
listeners and thus imply that all have sinned. The text from Luke says explic-
itly that the Galileans who died in Pilate’s sacrifices and others who died as
a result of the fall of a tower were not worse sinners than other Galileans or
others living in Jerusalem; “No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all
perish as they did” (Lk. 13:3). This seems to imply that all Jesus’ listeners
and, presumably, all those who would hear or read his message are sinners.
The New Testament teaching about the universality of sin is not as unam-
biguous as Paul’s affirmation in Romans that “all have sinned and fall short
of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23). In fact, several passages in the Gospels
seem to suggest that the world is divided into two groups, those who humbly
acknowledge their sins and ask for God’s mercy and those who refuse to
admit that they are sinners. Luke’s Jesus says “I have come to call not the
righteous, but sinners to repentance” (Lk. 5:32). Taken by itself, this passage
might be seen to suggest that a class of people exists, the righteous, who have
no need of salvation. Yet another more plausible way of reading the Gospels
suggests that “the righteous” are simply those who refuse to admit their sins,
the Pharisees and Scribes (Jn. 9), the older son in the story of the Prodigal Son
(Lk. 15), or the debtor who refused to forgive a debt owed to him (Matt. 18).
A striking example is the familiar parable told by Jesus “to some who
trusted in themselves that they were righteous and despised others” (Lk.
18:9). A Pharisee and a tax collector go to the temple to pray. The Pharisee
thanked God that he was not like other people, “thieves, rogues, adulterers, or
even like this tax collector” (Lk. 18:10) and went on to recount his virtuous
deeds. The tax collector, on the other hand, “would not even lift up his eyes
to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God be merciful to me a sinner’” (Lk.
18:13). After declaring the tax collector justified rather than the Pharisee,
Jesus ends with a generalization: “for every one who exalts himself will be
humbled, but he who humbles himself, will be exalted” (Lk. 18:14). No one
has the right to exalt himself. Why not? It seems legitimate to read this text
as implying that all are in some way sinners. If such a reading is correct, then
for Jesus, any righteousness that one might claim as one’s own does not exist.
The only way to be authentic would be to admit one’s need for redemption
and cast oneself on God’s mercy.
Matthew’s parable of the forgiven debtor who refused to forgive someone
who owed him much less than what his master forgave him (Matt. 18) gives
two motives for forgiveness. The most striking and the one readers are most
likely to remember comes at the end of the parable: if we do not forgive our
brothers and sisters from the heart, God will be merciless to us. (Matt. 18:35).
But the more compelling, if more subtle, motive is that all who follow Christ
have been forgiven a debt much larger than anything they will be asked to
forgive. All Christians are forgiven sinners and should never forget God’s
mercy to them.
Not only can we find indications also in the Gospels of Paul’s clear teach-
ing that all have sinned, we encounter references to a power of sin. John’s
Gospel, for instance, speaks throughout of a power comparable to Paul’s
100 Chapter Three
notion of a sin that dwells in us making us do what we do not want to do and

not do what we want to do (Rom. 7:17–20). Sometimes John characterizes
the power as darkness; sometime he refers to the devil. And just as in Paul
the liberating power of Christ frees the enslaved will, in John the light of
Christ overcomes the darkness, and the power of Christ overcomes the power
of the devil. The back and forth struggle between light and darkness recurs
at key points in John. In the Prologue, “. . . the light shines in the darkness
and the darkness does not overcome it (or the darkness did not comprehend
it” (1:5). Speaking to Nicodemus, who comes to him at night (Jn. 3:2), Jesus
says: “And this is the verdict, that the light came into the world, but people
preferred darkness to light, because their works were evil. For everyone who
does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, so that his
works might not be exposed” (Jn. 3:19–20). Before Jesus appears to his disci-
ples walking on the water, John tells us, “It had already grown dark and Jesus
had not yet come to them” (6:17b). The story of the man born blind revolves
around light and darkness (9:1–40). At the end of “The Book of Signs,” Jesus
says, “I came into the world as light, so that everyone who believes in me
might not remain in darkness” (12:46) . . . After the Resurrection, Mary Mag-
dalene came to the tomb “while it was still dark” and did not recognize Jesus.
Rondet finds in the story of the man born blind of John’s Gospel (Jn. 9)
a further indication of a universal reign of sin (Rondet 1972, 20). However,
instead of tracing human sin to Adam, John traces it to the devil (diabolos).
In the passage just before the story of the man born blind, Jesus refutes the
Pharisees’ claim to be children of Abraham: “You are of your father the
devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from
the beginning, and has nothing to do with the truth because there is no truth
in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar
and the father of lies” (Jn. 8:44). The first letter of John warns his hearers not
to be like Cain “who was from the evil one and murdered his brother” (I Jn.
3:12). We might well see in the Serpent who tempted Cain’s parents the first
manifestation of the “father of lies.”
The powers of sin in John, darkness and the devil, might seem to constitute
a dualism. In fact, E. P. Sanders has noted a sort of incipient dualism in Paul’s
conception of sin as an external force that could take over the law. In his article
on sin in the Anchor Bible Dictionary, Sanders finds some inconsistencies in
Paul’s case for the universality of sin and even speculates on a kind of dualism
in Paul’s treatment of sin as an alien power. But, says Sanders, even though
such a dualism might exist in Paul’s thought, he never takes the step of making
the power of sin a Being. We must say the same of whatever duality we might
detect in John. Even in these hints of an incipient dualism that never comes to
maturity, we find an echo of the Adamic Myth. The striking presence of the
serpent in the Genesis narrative, in the midst of a world that has been created
good, indicates a kind of externality of evil in an otherwise good creation.
Eve’s response to the serpent and Adam’s response to Eve, also indicate a
subjective vulnerability to temptation even before the event of disobedience.
Ricoeur, as we have seen, interprets the externality of evil as a residue of the
tragic myth. The presence, however, of a power of evil in the form of tempta-
tion does not negate the fundamentally anthropomorphic origin of evil in the
form of Adam’s disobedience. And, as we have seen, the power of sin in Paul
and the powers of light and the devil in John, though formidable adversaries,
are infinitely subordinate to the power of light and grace coming from Christ.
Inability of Human Beings to Save Themselves

So it seems that the Gospel authors present Jesus as teaching that all human
beings are subject to a reign of sin—and not only subject to sin, and even to
a power of sin outside themselves, but also without a way to escape by their
own power. All are subject to the moral impotence that Paul laments and
that we have seen as one of the key features of the Adamic Myth. Matthew
recounts the story about the servant with the huge debt who has to beg his
master for forgiveness; he cannot forgive himself. The tax collector of Luke’s
gospel prays for mercy and is justified, even while the Pharisee who imagines
that he needs no forgiveness is not justified. Those who deny this impotence
are blind. The whole of John 8 is a condemnation of the Pharisees who are
going to die in their sin “unless you believe that I am he” (Jn. 8:24). They will
die in their sin precisely because they do not recognize that they are sinners
in need of salvation. At the end of the story of the man born blind in chapter
9, the Pharisees will say: “Surely we are not also blind, are we”? And Jesus
replies: “If you were blind, you would have no sin; but now you are saying,
‘We see,’ so your sin remains” (Jn. 9:40–41). By thinking that salvation
comes from themselves, specifically from their punctilious observation of the
Law, the Pharisees put themselves beyond possibility of salvation.
Humble recognition of one’s inability to save oneself is a necessary condi-
tion for salvation. Especially in the Gospel of John, but also in the Synoptics,
Jesus does not even claim for himself some independent righteousness apart
from his Father. “I will no longer talk much with you, for the ruler of this
world is coming. He has no power over me; but I do as the Father has com-
manded me, so that the world may know that I love the Father” (Jn. 14:30–31).
The temptation by which the serpent tricked Adam and Eve into disobey-
ing God was the illusion that behind God’s prohibition against eating the fruit
of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was divine jealousy, a desire to
keep something back from his creatures, and that Adam and Eve would, in
fact, become like God if they disobeyed his command. The reign of sin begins
102 Chapter Three
with that temptation, not historically but existentially. And liberation from sin
occurs when people accept creation as God’s gift and submit to the divine or-
der established when God created the world. Having blighted the harmonious
order of creation by claiming for themselves prerogatives that belong to God
alone, human beings introduced alienation and hardship into their relations with
themselves, with nature, with other humans, and with God. As a consequence,
human beings can only hope for restoration through God’s gracious favor.
The Doctrine of Redemption Precedes the Doctrine of Sin

The Gospels, then, echo Paul’s teaching that the reign of sin is universal
and that human beings are incapable by themselves of attaining salvation.
It would be a distortion, however, to make this teaching about sin the cen-
tral doctrine of either Paul or the Gospels, or later of Augustine. The New
Testament’s principal message is the redemption that is offered in Christ for
those willing to accept it. Sin is simply that from which people need to be re-
deemed. To return to Paul, Sanders’ conclusion is important: “If there is some
truth in the suggestion that Paul was influenced by dualistic thought, there is
more in the view that his discussions of sin are the reflex of his soteriology”
(Sanders 1992, 46). In other words, the teaching that Jesus is redeemer pre-
cedes the teaching about the power of sin. The stories about Jesus’ interaction
with sinners—and his parables—express concretely this abstract theology.
Jesus is interested primarily in opening up possibilities, not in accusing or
condemning. When he exposes those who want to condemn the woman taken
in adultery, Jesus refuses to condemn her himself and instead offers her ad-
vice that seems to carry with it the power to fulfill what he is recommending:
“Go your way, and from now on do not sin again” (Jn. 8:11).
Paul’s anguished lament in Romans 7, “Who will save me from this body
of death?” opens the door to the next verse, “Thanks be to God through Jesus
Christ our Lord!” and to the opening cry of Romans 8, “There is now no
condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the Law of the Spirit of
life in Christ has set you free from the law of sin and death” (Rom. 8:1–2).
Jesus’ words to the adulterous woman say concretely to her: “There is now
no condemnation for those who follow me” (Jn 8). Perhaps the most inviting
words of the New Testament are Jesus’ “Come to me all you that are weary
and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest” (Matt. 11:28). And
who is not weary and heavily burdened? If some such people exist, they
need not, it would seem come to Jesus. So the central message of the New
Testament is salvation, healing, rest, freedom from sin, hope for the future
even to eternal life through Jesus Christ. “For in Him fullness was pleased to
dwell, and through Him to reconcile to himself all things whether on earth or
in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross” (Col. 1:19–20).
Summary of Gospel View of Salvation

The Gospels teach that God saves us through his mercy toward sinners. This
teaching, dramatically illustrated in Luke’s story of the Prodigal Son, is also
expressed in his Sermon on the Plain. Moreover, Jesus ate with sinners, he
welcomed them into the circle of his intimate followers, he came to find those
who were lost and rejoiced more over one sinner found than over ninety-nine
righteous persons who need no repentance (Lk. 15:7). This constant teaching
of the Gospels echoes Paul’s affirmation in Romans, “But God proves his
love for us that while we were still sinners Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8).
Christ ultimately expresses God’s mercy through his own humiliation and
death. This is what Lonergan calls “the law of the cross.” I will return to it. If
this is what God does, what does God expect us to do?
God created us without our collaboration; he cannot save us without it. A
cryptic statement of what we must do to be saved appears in Mark’s account of
Jesus’ words at the beginning of his ministry just after he has returned from the
encounter with Satan in the wilderness: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom
of God has come near; repent (metanoiete) and believe ( pisteuete) in the good
news” (Mark 1:15). This repenting and believing represent a complete change
of mind and heart, a new way of seeing the world and responding to it. What
that means in detail I have set out above. These are the main points.
It is clear that Christ expects his followers to obey the commandments. The
fact that Jesus invites his hearers to go beyond the keeping of the command-
ments suggests that obedience by itself is not enough for salvation. In this
the gospel accounts echo Paul who insists that salvation comes not through
observance of the law but by believing in Christ. Renunciation in order to fol-
low Christ even to the point of death, universal love that reaches to strangers,
that is, to those outside our familiar circle, and even to enemies; forgiveness,
humility, rejoicing in wrong done to us—all of these belong to the path of
salvation indicated by Christ.
If we ask about the relation between God’s role in salvation and ours, the
answer is clear. God is the initiator of salvation. This is a key feature of the
Adamic Myth reflected in Paul and in the Gospels. Our role in salvation, what
we have to do to be saved, is subordinate to God’s role. It consists first in
accepting through faith the gift of salvation. Having accepted the gift of sal-
vation, we then imitate God’s mercy toward us through our love of neighbor.
CONCLUSION
Having summarized the synoptic teaching about salvation, we may now re-
turn to the question posed at the beginning of this chapter, namely, whether,
104 Chapter Three
to what extent, and how the non-Pauline New Testament writings express the
logic of the Adamic Myth. We have noted significant references in Acts and
Revelation, the resonance between the gospel designations “Son of Man” and
“Suffering Servant” on the one hand and Paul’s term designating Christ as the
“Second Adam.” We have also considered the notion of the universality of sin
and, in fact, of a power of sin at work in the world, an idea prominent in Paul
and in the Gospels. Finally, an exploration of central parables and narratives
of the Gospels has manifested key elements of the logic of the Adamic Myth.
This discussion of salvation in Christianity in the framework of the Adamic
Myth, more precisely of the Adamic Myth as stretching from Genesis to Ro-
mans, places the New Testament within the logic of the Adamic Myth rather
than any of the other four myths described by Paul Ricoeur in his work, The
Symbolism of Evil. The other three myths, the Creation myth, the tragic myth,
and the Orphic myth, all see the origin of evil as external to human beings.
The Adamic Myth sees evil as coming into the world through human sin. It
sees the all-good Creator of the world, and of human beings, as taking the
initiative—not once, but repeatedly—to overcome the consequences of sin
in human life. God’s initiative always requires human cooperation because,
although God created humans without their collaboration, he cannot save
them without it. We can schematize this program of salvation in three steps
that correspond to the evil consequences that followed on the disobedience
of Adam. The first step in salvation, corresponding to the loss of intimacy
with self, God, and neighbor that followed Adam’s sin, is a restoration of
that intimacy, ending in the healing of the moral impotence that afflicts the
human will. The second step, corresponding to the fact of suffering and death,
is the transformation of suffering through renunciation, the law of the cross,
and forgiveness. The last step, corresponding to the loss of hope produced by
death, is the new hope founded on the resurrection of Christ and the promise
that those who die grounded in hope and love will share in that resurrection.
In a later chapter we will return to an issue central to the New Testament
teaching and a key theme of this book, the role of forgiveness.
NOTE
Part II
THE SYMBOL GIVES RISE

TO THOUGHT: FROM BIBLICAL
NARRATIVE TO AUTOBIOGRAPHY,
THEORY, AND DOCTRINE
Chapter Four
Augustine
Original Sin and Compassion
For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.
Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that
dwells in me.
—Rom. 7:19–20, NRSV1
For Augustine of Hippo (354–530 AD) the fundamental theological cat-

egory was grace, the divine help given to human beings who labor under
the burden of sin. When Jesus says, “Come to me all you who labor and
burdened and I will give you rest” (Matt. 11:28), he speaks of grace. Au-
gustine called the burden original sin, an inherited condition that gives rise
to the evil people do. Grace implies not only sin but also compassion. Jesus
Christ, the bearer of grace, did not just take away sin by a kind of magic;
he entered into it, bore its consequences, and thus freed humans from its
burden. So if Augustine is doctor of grace, he needs to be doctor of compas-
sion, too. That is, we need to be able to find in him that deep experience
of human nature that will allow us to say of him, as John’s Gospel says of
Jesus, that he knew what it was to be human (Jn. 2:25). Jesus knew human-
ity, its grandeur and its perversity. Such knowledge made him both wary
and compassionate. This study began with the claim that a consciousness of
sin in ourselves—original and actual—tends to move us to compassion (see
introduction). If we are aware of being under the same burden of weakness
as everyone else, we tend to judge others more favorably. Do we find in
Augustine, chief architect of the Church’s tradition regarding original sin,
this connection between original sin and compassion? The answer requires
some nuance.
107
108 Chapter Four
On the one hand, key features of Augustine’s teaching seem to imply a God
lacking in compassion. Augustine held, for instance, that unbaptized infants
are subject to condemnation, the mildest condemnation of all, but still con-
demnation. Augustine also held that God grants the grace of conversion and
final perseverance to a limited number of people—predestines them even be-
fore creation—and leaves the rest to suffer the consequences of Adam’s sin in
whom they have all sinned and deserved condemnation. And Augustine main-
tained that the original sin that all inherit from Adam is transmitted through
the power of lust that is “both the consequence and the agent of transmission
of original sin” (Lancel, 425). Augustine saw in the concupiscence that accom-
panies the act of sexual intercourse a crucial element in the transmission of
original sin. Note that Augustine did not consider marriage evil, nor even the
act of sexual intercourse itself evil; but the concupiscence which arose because
of the disobedience of Adam and Eve is evil. Before the fall, God exhorted
Adam and Eve to “increase and multiply” (Gen 1:28). But it was only after the
fall that the first couple felt shame at their nakedness. Augustine interprets this
shame mentioned in Genesis 3:7 as indicating that concupiscence or sexual
desire was awakened by the sin of disobedience. “Why then did they experi-
ence shame because of those [sexual] members after their sin, except that
there arose in them that indecent motion which would certainly not be part of
marriage, if human beings had not sinned” (Marriage and Desire, 5, 6). These
doctrines seemed harsh to Augustine’s contemporaries and they seem so to us.
And yet, in spite of these teachings that seem inconsistent with the notion
of a compassionate God, we can find within and throughout Augustine’s
teachings, including his doctrine of original sin, evidence of a deep human-
ity. It is a characteristic feature. Henry Chadwick, who, as we will see, had
reservations concerning the notion of predestination, says of Augustine,
“When he tells a story, its dramatic force is given the maximum effect by
consummate artistry, with an exact eye for the differing motives of human
character, but above all by the manifest affection that he feels towards frail
mortals whose actions he thinks far from a model of conduct” [italics added]
(Chadwick, 1–2).
One cannot say the same of Pelagius whose more optimistic view of hu-
man nature thinly veiled a program of rigorous moral expectations. “Pelagius
never doubted for a moment that perfection was obligatory; his God was,
above all, a God who commanded unquestioning obedience. He had made
men to execute his commands; and He would condemn to hell-fire anyone
who failed to perform a single one of them” (Brown, 342; Augustine, The
Deeds of Pelagius, 3, 9, 11). Since, according to Pelagius, we have no innate
vulnerability of will that keeps us from choosing the good, we have no excuse
not to choose it and therefore no claim to compassion. When Augustine him-
Augustine 109
self, arguing against Pelagius’ contention that all sin is pride, asserts, “Many
sins are, after all committed out of pride, but not every wrong action is done
with pride. Many wrong actions are done by the ignorant, by the weak, and
often by persons weeping and groaning” (Nature and Grace, 29.33) he shows
that his pessimism about human nature unaided by grace is more merciful
than Pelagius’ optimism. People sin out of weakness.
Augustine did, of course, recognize the work of pride. But for Augustine
pride is both more subtle than it is in Pelagius and more insidious. So subtle,
in fact, that only grace can heal it. Pride not only sometimes leads to evil
deeds but “lies in ambush for the human spirit, even in good actions” (Ibid.,
31, 35). And unaided human efforts to overcome the pride that rises from
virtuous deeds fail just as surely as efforts to persevere in good works. “For
its healing, pious souls entreat him with tears and mighty groans to stretch
forth his right hand to those who are trying to overcome [pride] and in some
sense to trample it under foot and destroy it” (Ibid.). For as soon as we rejoice
at overcoming pride in the midst of our good works, “pride raises its head as
a result of this joy and says, ‘See I am still alive. Why are you triumphant?
And I am alive precisely because you are triumphant’” (Ibid.). Only radical
humility before the work of God in us roots out pride.
We have here a tension between two voices of Augustine, one harsh, one
gentle. How resolve the tension? One could simply lop off the unacceptable
teachings that violate the universal sense of the faithful that God must be lov-
ing and compassionate. In a way the Church did this by not approving some
aspects of Augustine’s thought. This chapter will follow a different course.
Beginning with these difficult teachings of Augustine, working our way
through them rather than setting them aside, we will explore the humaneness
at the heart of Augustine’s thinking and preaching, especially the compas-
sion implicit in his doctrine of original sin, even in the midst of the troubling
elaboration of it called predestination, an elaboration in which Augustine
placed himself “on the frontiers of heresy” (Lancel, 425). I say “in the midst
of” his elaboration because I do not mean to claim that the doctrine of pre-
destination itself is compassionate. But when it came to preaching Augustine
showed ambivalence about his own teaching, recognized its difficulty, and
admitted quite openly that he found it troubling. After looking at these more
difficult and troubling aspects of Augustine’s teachings we will consider
the foundational teachings from which they arose and of which they were
distortions or exaggerations, namely the doctrines of grace and original sin.
We will explore the sources of these doctrines, in scripture and Augustine’s
own experience, and the gradual emergence of the Bishop of Hippo’s mature
thinking through a long course of development, including the great contro-
versies with Manichees, Donatists, and Pelagians.
110 Chapter Four
With respect to his place in the larger arc through which Christian belief
developed over centuries, we can identify three levels in Augustine’s thought.
First, in predestination Augustine proclaimed a doctrine never incorporated into
the tradition through official Church recognition, a doctrine explicitly repudi-
ated by the Council of Orange a century after Augustine’s death2. We might
call this an outlandish teaching, so outlandish in fact that Augustine himself
showed discomfort with it. Second, in teaching that unbaptized infants suffered
condemnation Augustine found support in the magisterium of his time. But
the tradition eventually abandoned this teaching, recognizing it as inconsistent
with the mercy of God. And, in the Council of Trent, the Church abandoned
Augustine’s teaching that concupiscence is sin. Finally, Augustine’s doctrine
of the necessity of grace for salvation and of the condition of original sin that
makes that grace necessary has become, in the official teaching of the Church
at least, a permanent cornerstone of Christian belief. The claim of this chapter
will be that in all these levels, even the most difficult, Augustine’s deep pastoral
instincts ultimately prevail over the rigor of his reasoning.
ON THE FRONTIERS OF HERESY
We begin by looking at the most extreme expression of Augustine’s theology

of grace. Augustine’s teaching on predestination seems unfair and arbitrary
and a contradiction of the New Testament affirmation that God wills all
people to be saved (I Tim. 2:4; II Peter, 3:9). Even some of Augustine’s most
ardent followers and faithful defenders in his own time like Prosper of Aqui-
taine and a certain Hilary, both laymen, had difficulty with the doctrine and
wrote to Augustine for help in explaining it to the monks of southern Gaul
who objected to Augustine’s teaching. These monks had, in fact acknowl-
edged the errors of Pelagius, and “accepted the doctrine of original sin and
the need for rebirth through the grace of God (Teske, 1990, 22). But they also
believed that all people had been offered this grace and therefore objected
to Augustine’s doctrine that only some had been predestined to grace. If
“vessels of honor” are distinguished from “vessels of dishonor” before the
creation of the world, then “sinners lose any motive to rise up from their sins
and the saints find an occasion for tepidity” (ibid).
The Church never officially accepted the position of Augustine on pre-
destination (Teske, 1999, 25). His highly sympathetic biographer, Henry
Chadwick, briefly summarizes the outcome of Augustine’s controversy with
Pelagius over grace and freedom: “The subsequent verdict of the Church
on the controversy about grace has been to reject Pelagianism without fully
Augustine 111
endorsing the rival predestinarianism of Augustine” (Chadwick, 2010, 165).

Chadwick observes further that restatements of Augustine’s views on pre-
destination by Thomas Bradwardine in the Middle Ages, John Calvin in the
Reformation, and the Jansenists in the 17th Century have “never failed to pro-
voke a strong counter-reaction. Within the mainstream of traditional western
Christianity, this side of Augustinianism has not been comfortably digested”
(166). It does not do “sufficient justice to freedom” (166).
In The Gift of Perseverance, Augustine himself recognized that preach-
ing this doctrine could be problematic “so that,” as Augustine says, “the
multitude of those who are uneducated or slower to understand think that
[the doctrine] is somehow refuted by its being preached . . .” (The Gift of
Perseverance, 57). In other words, why preach repentance if God has already
chosen who will be saved and who will be left to suffer the consequences of
their solidarity in the sin of Adam? A few paragraphs later, Augustine sug-
gests a subterfuge that seems highly artificial, namely that one not preach this
doctrine in the second person, “‘And if some of you (italics added) obey, but
have been predestined to be rejected, the power to obey will be taken away
so that you cease to obey.’ For what else does saying this seem to do but to
curse or somehow foretell evil” (61). Rather, the preacher should say these
things, not of those listening, but of a universal and impersonal they, “That
is, we should not say ‘If any of you obey, but are predestined to be rejected,’
but ‘If any obey,’ with the rest in the third person, not in the second” (Ibid).
Then Augustine adds, as if to indict his own teaching. “For one does not
speak of something desirable, but of something dreadful, and with great
harshness and hatefulness it is thrown as if into the face of the listeners
. . .” (Ibid). It would be hard to find a more stinging criticism of Augustine’s
doctrine from his most ardent opponents. Serge Lancel finds in this passage
about preaching the voice of the pastor whispering to the theologian to tone
down the harshness of his teaching at least in form, but doubts the effective-
ness of the ploy. “These manipulations of pure form sometimes cause a smile:
what kind of hearers could the preacher put off the scent by addressing them
impersonally in the third person plural” (Lancel, 2002, 433). We might also
find in Augustine’s words a startlingly honest admission of something indi-
gestible in his own teaching.3
More convincing than his advice about preaching, which might seem con-
trived, we have Augustine’s own performance as a preacher, humbly standing
before his listeners and acknowledging the difficulty of his doctrine. In one of
his sermons preached during the height of the Pelagian controversy, probably
about the year 417,4 Augustine acknowledged his hearers’ resistance, “‘But it
troubles me,’ you say, ‘that this one perishes, that one is baptized. It troubles
112 Chapter Four
me, it troubles me as a man.’” And Augustine adds immediately, “Well if you

want to know the truth, it troubles me too, because I too am human” (Sermon
26, 15).
Toward the end of The Gift of Perseverance, Augustine gives additional ad-
vice from the pastoral side. He cautions against the manner of speaking which
he has said should be used in preaching predestination unless the preacher
adds “this or something of the sort and says, ‘And so, you ought to hope for
this perseverance in obedience from the Father of lights from whom comes
down every best gift and every perfect gift (Jas. 1:17). And you ought to ask
for it by daily prayers and, in doing this, you ought to be confident that you are
not strangers to the predestination of his people, because he himself also grants
that you say these prayers and have his confidence’” (Gift of Perseverance,
62). Then Augustine adds what is really the whole point of his teaching on
predestination: “But heaven forbid that you despair about yourselves because
you are commanded to place your hope in him, not in yourselves” (Ibid).
In all this pastoral sensitivity of Augustine we can find the expression of a
certain humility that characterized his attitude toward his own writings. Toward
the end of Augustine’s The Gift of Perseverance, after reminding his readers
that he has been consistent in teaching that God’s grace is necessary for final
perseverance, Augustine adds, “And yet, I would not want anyone to embrace
all my views in order to be my follower, but only those points on which he sees
that I am not mistaken . . . For I speak with more arrogance than truth if I say
that I have now at this age come to perfection without any error in my writing”
(Ibid., 55). In the same spirit, at the end of his De Trinitate (399–419) Augus-
tine prays, “O Lord, the One God, God the Trinity, whatsoever I have said in
these books is of you, may those that are yours acknowledge; whatsoever of
myself alone, do you and yours forgive. Amen (On the Trinity, 51, last par.).
In concluding his chapter on Augustine’s long dispute with Julian of Ecla-
num over predestination and the necessity of grace for the beginning, middle,
and end of our acts of willing, Serge Lancel asks why the “doctor of grace”
held on to this doctrine of predestination. We have seen the trouble this doctrine
caused for Augustine himself. His opponents and even some of his supporters
were even more troubled. Not only is the teaching difficult to accept because
of our image of God as merciful, it also contradicts the explicit teaching of
the New Testament that God wills all people to be saved (I Tim. 2:4; II Peter,
3:9). Lancel recognizes that the way Augustine “skirted around” these texts of
Paul and Peter is widely considered the weakest point of his attempt to under-
stand the Christian faith, but quickly adds: “No one would dream, however, of
drawing the conclusion that [Augustine] felt some morose pleasure by leaving
a good proportion of his fellow men abandoned by God” (Lancel, 434). The
problem, in Lancel’s view, was that Augustine in the last twelve years of his life
“was a prisoner of his Anti-Pelagian polemic” (434). He was afraid to give an
Augustine 113
inch to his adversaries in the dispute over the necessity of God’s grace in every
stage of the path to salvation. This may be true, but if we go back to the piv-
otal document “To Simplician—on Various Questions,” written in 396, even
before Augustine had taken up arms against Pelagius, we find, in the second
part of that work, the doctrine on predestination already well formed. Perhaps
Augustine would have softened that doctrine if it had not been for his battle
with Pelagius. Whatever the case, it remains a troubling teaching.
Another factor in Augustine’s articulation of predestination was his exces-
sively narrow and literal interpretation of certain texts from Scripture. In the
same crucial work of 396, which we have already considered above, “To
Simplician,” Augustine refers to God’s choice of Jacob and rejection of Esau
in Genesis, discussed already by Paul in his letter to the Romans (Rom. 9:
10–13). Augustine cites first God’s prediction to Rebecca, mother of Esau
and Jacob, “Two nations are in your womb, two peoples are quarreling while
still within you: but one shall surpass the other, and the older shall serve the
younger” (Gen. 25:23). Augustine also cites the prophet Malachi: “I have
loved Jacob but hated Esau” (Mal. 1:3b) and points out that neither the love of
Jacob nor the hatred of Esau had anything to do with prior good or bad deeds
of the two brothers. Augustine is also careful to point out that God hates not
the man Esau, but the sinner. We ask what sin God hates since Augustine has
already said that God’s choice of Jacob and rejection of Esau was not based
on any virtue or sin of theirs. The sin God hates in Esau is the sin of Adam in
which he participates. So does Jacob of course, but God has chosen to rescue
him from the consequences of that sin. If we read the texts Augustine cites
from Genesis regarding Esau and Jacob in the context of the whole story—as
Augustine could have done—their value is minimized. The choice of Jacob
and the rejection of Esau appear more the result of maternal intrigue than of
divine predestination. Isaac preferred Esau since he was a good hunter, but Re-
becca preferred Jacob and Rebecca cooked up—literally—a scheme to get the
paternal blessing for her preferred son (Gen. 25:27–34). Moreover, the choice
of Jacob and the rejection of Esau are not a matter of eternal salvation or dam-
nation but of position within the family and its consequences for the brothers’
posterity. We have here one example of how Augustine used scripture in a
way that seems to wrench it from its context to support his own position.
DOCTRINES GRADUALLY ABANDONED

IN THE COURSE OF HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT
Augustine taught that “little ones who leave the body without baptism will be
under that mildest condemnation of all. But,” he adds immediately, “one who
preaches that they will not be under any condemnation misleads others very
114 Chapter Four
much and is himself very mistaken” (Punishment and Forgiveness of Sins,

21). Augustine claimed that his opponents, the Pelagians, made precisely this
mistake in ascribing “salvation and eternal life to unbaptized little ones as a
recompense for their innocence” (Punishment, 26, 48). The Church, too, con-
demned this view along with other key Pelagian teachings in the Council of
Carthage in 418. “If any say . . . that in the kingdom of heaven there will be
some intermediate place or any place anywhere in which the little ones will
live happily who have left this life without baptism . . . let them be anathema”
(Canon 3). The Church’s later belief in limbo, a place of natural happiness
without the vision of God, better reflects the view of the Pelagians than the
view of Augustine. And now the Church has dropped even the narrow vision
of God’s mercy implied in Limbo.5
Augustine and the teaching Church of his time felt compelled to maintain
this severe teaching by their reading of the key passage, Romans 5:12. We
read in contemporary versions of this passage variations on the following:
“Therefore, just as through one person [Adam] sin entered the world, and
through sin, death, and thus death came to all, inasmuch as all sinned [italics
added] . . . “The Latin version of this passage available to Augustine and his
contemporaries translated the Greek, “eph ho”—now translated as “inasmuch
as”—as “in quo” or “in whom.” So the rendering Augustine and his contem-
poraries read was something like this: “Therefore, just as through one human
being [Adam’s] sin entered the world, and through sin death, and so it was
passed on to all human beings in whom (i.e., in Adam) all sinned.” Augustine
recognized the distinction between the actual sins that adults commit and
infants cannot commit and the sin inherited from Adam. But, based on his
understanding of Romans 5:12, he came to think of the inherited sin as really
sin and deserving of condemnation unless one is saved through Baptism.
This crucial aspect of Augustine’s belief, a belief he shared with the
Church of his time, explains much of the other material we find troubling,
including the notion of predestination. Augustine justifies predestination on
the assumption that all humans deserve condemnation because of their share
in the sin of Adam. “The whole mass of humanity owes a debt of punishment,
and if all suffered the penalty of damnation they deserved, they certainly
would not be paying an unjust penalty” (Augustine, “Nature and Grace,” 5,5).
If God chooses to select out some from that fate, he is justified in doing so.
In “To Simplician” Augustine compares this strategy to the gospel passage
from Matthew in which the master pays the late comers just as much as those
who had showed up at the beginning of the day (Matt. 20:11ff; To Simplician,
Book Two, 16). Not easy, Augustine admits, for human beings to understand.
“[God] decides who are not to be offered mercy by a standard of equity which
is most secret and far removed from human powers of understanding” (Ibid).
Augustine 115
Once we acknowledge that human beings, though affected by the sin of

Adam, do not deserve condemnation—as the Church now teaches—then the
whole structure of the doctrine of predestination is shaken at its foundations.
Predestined to holiness perhaps but not rescued from condemnation.
To understand how Augustine came to teach a doctrine that he recognized
as harsh—a doctrine that troubled him as a man—we must turn to the theol-
ogy of grace and original sin that constitutes Augustine’s most lasting contri-
bution to the life of the Church. For it was in pushing to an extreme limit a
theology at the heart of Christian belief that Augustine went to the frontiers
of orthodoxy.
THE AUGUSTINIAN TEACHING

OF GRACE AND ORIGINAL SIN
Augustine developed his theology of grace out of a meditation on the writings

of Paul. Other biblical texts from Old and New Testaments reinforced Paul’s
teaching but the foundation is Pauline. The question is how human beings are
to be saved. Paul interpreted the Old Testament as teaching that salvation is
based on merit, specifically on the merit that comes from observing the Law.
Paul argued that, though the Law can tell us what is right and what wrong, it
does not give us the power to actually choose the good and reject the wrong.
We have reviewed Paul’s teaching in chapter 3 above. The crucial point here
is that the human will after the fall is not capable by itself of consistently
choosing the good and rejecting evil. Paul’s famous lament sums up the hu-
man condition: “For I do not do the good I want but the evil I do not want
is what I do” (Rom. 7:19). The grace of Christ is precisely what saves the
believer from this chronic impotence of the will.
Augustine accepts Pelagius’ stages in the unfolding of acts of will, the
ability, the will, and the action: “That is the ability by which one can be righ-
teous, the will by which one wills to be righteous, and the action by which
one is righteous” (The Grace of Christ and Original Sin, I, 4). According to
Augustine, Pelagius taught that the first of these three, the ability, “was given
to nature by the creator and is not in our power” (Ibid). But the other two
elements, the willing and the doing, come from us alone without any help of
grace. Pelagius cites a passage from Paul on which Augustine also relies; but
the two interpret it differently. “It is God, after all, who produces in you the
willing and the accomplishment” (Phil. 2:13). For Pelagius God’s producing
in us the willing and the accomplishment is the law and teaching. (Grace of
Christ, I, 10, 11, par. 1). But, says Augustine, “we want the Pelagians at some
point to admit not merely the grace by which we are promised the great glory
116 Chapter Four
to come, but that by which we believe in and hope for it; not merely the grace
by which wisdom is revealed, but that by which we love it as well; not merely
the grace by which we are urged on to everything good, but that which moves
us to action” (Ibid., I, 10,11, par 2).
“That by which we love it as well”—here is the heart of Augustine’s
doctrine of grace. Only love, delight in doing good can overcome in us the
power of concupiscence. Augustine speaks of fulfilling the law out of fear
rather than from a love of righteousness (The Spirit and the Letter, 8, 13).
Perhaps his fullest statement comes a few paragraphs later in this same
work. If one obeys the law out of fear of punishment, one obeys in the
manner of a slave. “For there is lacking that good fruit that springs up from
the root of love. But if faith that works through love is present (Gal. 5:6),
one begins to find delight in the law of God in the interior human being”
(Ibid., 14, 26).
Augustine’s teaching on original sin developed over time out of three
sources. As a theological position, original sin was a corollary of the belief
that the grace of Jesus Christ is the only source of salvation. Original sin and
the actual sins that proceed from it were, for Augustine, precisely what Christ
saves from. This line of reasoning proceeded deductively. Another source of
Augustine’s teaching about original sin was his observation of the behavior of
human beings which, inductively, provided evidence of a deep wound in hu-
man nature. Finally, Augustine’s own interior struggle for freedom, recorded
in his Confessions, provided a personal foundation elaborated in all of his
mature writings. We will consider each of these, beginning first with the last
mentioned since it was chronologically first.
Serge Lancel claims that the years 396–397 stand out as one of those
“specially favored periods” one often finds in the course of an author’s de-
velopment. These were the beginning years of Augustine’s time as Bishop
of Hippo, first as coadjutor, then as full bishop. To these years belong “the
richest results, in both the pastoral field and in [Augustine’s] development
of fundamental texts” (Lancel, 187). Among the fundamental texts of those
years are two that mark the beginnings of Augustine’s doctrine of original
sin, To Simplician, and the Confessions. To Simplician contains Augustine’s
answer to two questions posed by his mentor and friend who would soon suc-
ceed Ambrose as Bishop of Milan. Simplician had asked for an interpretation
of two passages from Paul’s Letter to the Romans. Simplician’s first question
had to do with Romans 7:7–25 which contains Paul’s famous lament, “For
I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do” (Rom.
7:19). The second had to do with Romans 9:10–29 in which Paul addresses
the issue of predestination. The first question, the one that concerns us here,
was whether Paul meant his lament to apply to the person under the law or
Augustine 117
the person under grace. Augustine is quite clear: Paul, although he had him-
self by the time of this writing come under grace, was speaking as someone
under the law, thus not able to do what he wanted and avoid what he did not
want. Under the impulse of his dispute with the Pelagians, Augustine, as we
will see, later changed his interpretation of this passage, recognizing that even
under grace the Christian struggles to be faithful.
We come to the crucial document that has a special place in the writings
of Augustine and a foundational role in the development of his doctrine of
original sin, the Confessions. This account of Augustine’s struggle to free his
will from its chains not only lies under his doctrine of original sin, but pro-
vides the foundation of all his subsequent thought and writing. John O’Meara
finds the Confessions, with its description of the human struggle, at work in
Augustine’s, The City of God. “. . . the City of God is the application of the
Confessions to the history of mankind” (O’Meara, xvii).
It is surely significant that Augustine wrote his Confessions between 397
and 401, shortly after his answer to the first question of Simplican about the
meaning of Romans 7:7–25 in 396. The question of Paul’s famous lament
about not doing what he wanted to do and doing what he did not want to
do as well as his liberation from this situation through the grace of Christ
was on Augustine’s mind. Paul’s brief account of the enslaved will and
its liberation expresses the inner logic by which Augustine developed his
own life story. On several occasions Augustine speaks of his will in chains.
“. . . I was held fast, not in fetters clamped upon me by another, but by my
own free will which had the strength of chains” (Conf., VIII, 5). And a little
later as the moment of conversion was approaching: “I was in torment, re-
proaching myself more bitterly than ever as I twisted and turned in my chain.
I hoped that my chain might be broken once for all, because it was only a
small thing that held me now (VIII, 11). As his struggle intensified just before
his famous liberation in the garden, Augustine referred quite explicitly to
Paul’s lament: “My action did not come from me, but from the sinful principle
that dwells in me [Rom. 7:17]. It was part of the punishment of a sin freely
committed by Adam, my first father” (Conf., VIII, 10).
Augustine’s quite personal struggle brought him to a consciousness of the
basic truth of original sin, a term he used for the first time in his response to
the first question of Simplician (To Simplician, Book I, 10). Also in his first
book to Simplician, Augustine discusses the division Paul makes in three
stages of human liberation from sin. First comes a stage before the law when
sin is dead or latent (Rom. 7:8b). Second, when the law comes, it awakens
sin: “but when the commandment came, sin became alive” (Rom. 7:9). Paul
says he didn’t know what it meant to covet until the law said “thou shalt not
covet” (Rom. 7:7). So law awakens the consciousness of sin but does not give
118 Chapter Four
the power to avoid it. The third stage is liberation through the grace of Jesus
Christ: “For the law of the spirit of life has freed you from the law of sin and
grace” (Rom. 8:2). Augustine explicates at length Paul’s three stages of bond-
age to and liberation from sin in his answer to Simplician’s first question.
If we apply these three stages elaborated by Paul to Augustine’s develop-
ment of his own life journey, we find an amazing parallel. The nine years
during which Augustine found himself under the influence of the Manichees
was really a time prior to the law. The Manichees taught that the evil sub-
stance in us sins, not our own will. In this sense, Augustine was not “under
the law.” The law did not apply to him because another substance acted in
him. Eventually, as Augustine struggled free of the Manichee influence, he
came to recognize his own responsibility toward the law: “When I chose to
do something or not to do it, I was quite certain that it was my own self, and
not some other person who made this act of will . . .” (Conf., VII, 3, par 2).
But though Augustine recognizes that he has a will and has thus come under
the law, he is not able by his free will alone to conform to the law, the second
phase. The struggle that comes from this situation moves him toward the
third phase, liberation through grace. This comes about in a dramatic way in
his conversion experience in the Garden. In what may be the most dramatic
scene of his Confessions, Augustine describes how, under increasing frustra-
tion and longing he hears a child’s voice call “take and read” (Ibid., VIII, 13,
par 2). Taking up the Scripture, Augustine read the words from chapter 13 of
Romans, “not in rioting and drunkenness . . . ,” and experienced a flood of
release. It was the beginning of his surrender to grace.
In his relatively brief response to the first question of Simplician and his
longer Confessions, we have Augustine’s first articulation of his doctrine of
original sin. We need to pause and note what this first articulation contained
and did not contain. At stake was the freedom of the will, that is, the freedom
to do what one desires to do and avoid what one desires not to do. Grace frees
the will in the sense of empowering it. We do not yet have the issue of final
salvation or final condemnation. We do not have a resolution of the question
of whether the original sin is truly sin for which Adam’s progeny must pay
the price. The “originating sin” appears in these writings as the cause of the
concupiscence in the will that draws one toward evil away from the good.
Only later, facing the issue of infant baptism in the heat of the controversy
with Pelagius, will Augustine affirm that the sin we have inherited entails
not just the origin of a weakness of the will in adults but the condemnation
referred to above, of infants who have not been baptized.
Augustine’s personal struggle and gradual liberation ground his own com-
passion toward those who struggle in a similar way. His personal experience
kept him from the harshness of Pelagius in judging the faults of others. Even
Augustine 119
after his liberation through the conversion in the garden, Augustine continued
to feel the pull of concupiscence.
Later, in the midst of the Pelagian controversy, Augustine would reverse
his response to Simplican’s question about whether Paul’s lament is spo-
ken by someone under the law or someone under grace. In 396, Augustine
thought it was someone under the law, not yet under grace.
Augustine’s observation of human behavior served as a second source of
his conviction about what original sin was. Not only did he recognize his own
confusion and turmoil, he saw it in those around him. Augustine was not, as
Serge Lancel notes, “an egghead theologian poring over texts” (Lancel, 422).
Julian’s ardent adversary, Julian of Eclanum shared the Pelagian confidence
about what human beings could do on their own unaided by grace. Not Au-
gustine. “Against Julian’s naturalism and optimism [Augustine] mainly set
the daily findings of his experience as a man and pastor. He had only to look
around him to fuel a pessimism whose anthropological foundations his medi-
tations on St. Paul had begun to give him some thirty years earlier . . .” (Ibid).
We will see later Augustine’s observations on the behavior of his family and
friends recounted in his Confessions that also confirmed his conviction of
the universality of original sin. Augustine’s interior journey with its struggle
from slavery to freedom and his observations of human behavior give the
experiential grounds of his doctrine of original sin.
The third source, the theological foundation for the doctrine of original
sin, lay in the doctrine of Christ as universal savior that Augustine inherited
from St. Paul and other scriptural readings. Though Augustine was not “an
egghead theologian poring over texts,” he had pored over texts throughout
his life and the texts influenced him. As he pursued the restless quest that
led him to Christianity, Augustine found texts that awakened something in
him at each stage only to disappoint in the end until St. Paul opened the door
to salvation through the grace of Christ. Augustine was, as he himself tells
us, “trying to find the origins of evil,” to reconcile the fact of evil with the
existence of God (Conf., VII, 5). Ideas about what evil is and where it comes
from also entail prescriptions for salvation. The Manichees offered Augustine
the doctrine of two substances, one evil, one good. The evil substance, quite
apart from the human will, produces evil deeds. We have seen how Augustine
came to reject this solution and to accept responsibility for his own deeds.
Through Cicero’s Hortensius (now lost), Augustine learned to love truth for
its own sake (Ibid., III, 4). The Platonists, especially Plotinus, prompted him,
“to look for truth as something incorporeal” (Ibid., VII, 20), thus opening him
to interiority and the transforming power of contemplation. Finally he began
to study “the venerable writings inspired by your Holy Spirit, especially those
of the Apostle Paul (Ibid., VII, 21).
120 Chapter Four
Augustine discovered in St. Paul whatever truth he had found in the Pla-
tonists and something more as well, namely that whatever good we do comes
as the gift of God’s grace, and not as an achievement of our own (Ibid.).
Whereas Platonic contemplation was a method for lifting the spirit out of
its enslavement to flesh, a method that one could perfect through practice,
Christian discipleship was a matter of surrender to the power of the Word of
God who had become incarnate. Though the Platonists recognized the word of
God, they did not acknowledge that the Word had taken on flesh and died for
our sins (Conf., VII, 9). Theirs was a path of salvation through knowledge. In
the Christian scriptures Augustine found the path of charity. Augustine’s por-
trait of himself during his Platonist days explains the difference: “I was full of
self-esteem, which was a punishment of my own making. I ought to have de-
plored my state, but instead my knowledge only bred self-conceit [I Cor. 8:1).
For was I not without charity, which builds an edifice on the firm foundation
of humility, that is, on Jesus Christ? But how could I expect that the Platonist
books would ever lead me to charity” (Conf., VII, 20)? Along with charity
went humility, the best antidote to thinking of oneself as better than the others.
Charity implied not only love of God but love of neighbor. In his work,
On Christian Teaching, written during this same fruitful period, 396/97,
Augustine spoke of “the counsel of compassion” (concilium misericordiae).
This counsel, the fifth of seven stages Augustine lays out for the ascent of
the Christian soul to the vision of God, arises from the command of charity.
“Here,” says Augustine, “[the Christian] strenuously occupies himself with
the love of neighbor and becomes perfect in it (On Christian Teaching, VII,
21). In the thirteenth book of the Confessions, Augustine elaborates the point
more fully. In an allegorical interpretation of the seven days of creation, Au-
gustine compares the seed-bearing fruits to the works of mercy. “When we
love our neighbor by giving him help for his bodily needs, our souls bear fruit
in works of mercy proper to their kind, for they have seed in them accord-
ing to their species” (Conf., XIII, 17). From these good deeds, the Christian
passes on “to that more sublime harvest, the joy of contemplation” (Ibid., 18).
These works of mercy designate for Augustine a crucial difference between
the Platonic and the Christian path to contemplation. The Christian way takes
into account the incarnational character of human existence, and not only its
incarnational character but also that fact that humans have sinned and thus
incurred dissolution and death. This human situation entails recognition of
bodily and spiritual poverty and the consequent need for works of mercy. And
because we all share the same humanity wounded by sin, our works of mercy
come out of a profound humility. “For from our weakness we are moved by
pity (compatimur) to serve those in need, aiding them as we would wish to
be aided ourselves if we were in like distress” (XIII, 17).
Augustine 121
In the passages cited above, Augustine refers to the help we give our neigh-
bor “for his bodily needs.” A little further on in chapter 13 of the Confessions,
Augustine addresses the neighbor’s moral situation. Consistent with what we
have seen in his letter, To Simplician, Augustine distinguishes between those
under grace and those not yet under grace. The person under grace “who has
spiritual gifts and has been refitted for closer knowledge so that the image
of God who created him is his pattern must obey the law, not pass judgment
on it” (Ibid., XIII, 23). Being under grace does not give a person the right
to judge those not under grace. God knows them, we do not. “Furthermore
no man, even though he has the gifts of the spirit, can pass judgment on the
peoples of this world who still struggle on without your grace. How can he
claim jurisdiction over those who are without, (I Cor. 5, 12), when he does
not know which of them will come into the sweet domain of your grace and
which remain forever in the bitter exile where you are not loved” (Ibid., XIII,
23)?
This reservation of judgment relative to those not under grace does not, at
this stage of Augustine’s development, apply to the relation between those
under grace and those who share the gift of grace with them. “The man who
has spiritual gifts also judges the faithful, approving what he finds to be
right, blaming what he finds to be wrong” (Ibid, final paragraph). The person
with special gifts under the regime of grace can judge others under grace by
their almsgiving, by their practice of chastity, by fasting, “and by the soul’s
regard for its duty to God when it reflects upon the sensations of which it is
conscious through the body” (Ibid.). Finally, Augustine gives the rationale
for this exercise of judgment, fraternal correction. “For he judges only those
things which he also has the power to correct” (Ibid).
At this stage of his development, Augustine, as we have seen above in dis-
cussing the letter, To Simplician, still took Paul’s famous lament in Romans
7 about doing the things I do not want to do and not doing the things I want
to do as applying to the person not yet under grace but not to the person un-
der grace. But later, under the pressure of the controversy with Pelagius that
dominated Augustine’s attention from 412 until his death in 430, Augustine
came to recognize that even under the regime of grace the Christian still ex-
periences the strange waywardness of the will that provoked Paul’s lament
and thus deserves compassion. This is a crucial point in coming to understand
the connection between Augustine’s teaching on original sin and his radical
compassion. We will return to this point in the discussion of Augustine’s
struggle with the Pelagians that provides the context for his final elaboration
of the doctrine of original sin.
Even at the period of Augustine’s development we are now considering,
the early years of his episcopate from 396–400—the period of his letter, To
122 Chapter Four
Simplician, the Confessions, and On Christian Doctrine—Augustine has

moved beyond the first hopes evoked by his conversion in 386. Between
the time of his conversion to Christianity (386) and the writing of his Con-
fessions (397–98), Augustine underwent, as we have seen, a dramatic shift
brought about by two influences, the experience of resistance in his own life
to the platonic ideal he had set before himself, and a close re-reading of St.
Paul. The reading of Paul helped him make sense of his own experience.
“His re-reading of Saint Paul in the mid-390s is one of the great divides of
Augustine’s intellectual development” (Markus 1989, 22). This re-reading,
coupled with his personal experience of continuing temptation, put an end
to Augustine’s “belief in human self-determination” and introduced him to
“the beginnings of the theology of grace he would deploy against Pelagius”
(Markus, 22).
Markus refers to Peter Brown’s biography of Augustine that examines
this period of Augustine’s life in a chapter provocatively entitled, “The Lost
Future.” The chapter title suggests disappointment and, indeed, this period of
Augustine’s life required him to let go of something that had sustained him
since his earliest “conversion.” But, paradoxically, the disappointment opens
Augustine to what will be most liberating in his theology of original sin, the
doctrine that has seemed to many full of pessimism about human life. Brown
describes the world Augustine will have to give up: “. . . From 386–391 . . .
Augustine was still rooted in the old world. The ideal on which he had based
his life still belonged to the Platonic tradition of the ancient world. He would
be a ‘sapiens,’ a wise man, living a life of contemplation, determined, as were
his pagan contemporaries . . . ‘to grow god-like in their retirement’” (Brown
139, Augustine, Ep. 10, 2). Observing that “Ten years later this great hope
had vanished,” (Brown, 140), Brown cites Augustine: “Whoever thinks that
in this mortal life a man may so disperse the mists of bodily and carnal imag-
inings as to possess the unclouded light of changeless truth, and to cleave to it
with the unswerving constancy of a spirit wholly estranged from the common
ways of life—he understands neither what he seeks, nor who he is who seeks
it” (Augustine, de cons. Evang., IV, x, 20).
In reading Paul’s account of liberation from slavery through the grace of
Christ, Augustine found the story of his own conversion. His captivity had
been deeply rooted in his will. Not only was Augustine the victim of his own
sinful habits, which had become a chain holding him back, he believed he
was subject to a more profound weakness that he shared with the human race,
an originating sin. And until that was healed, no amount of self-discipline
would free him, not even Platonic contemplation. Once having surrendered
to the power of grace, Augustine found that it had its own logic and its own
demands. Working out the implications of that logic occupied the last thirty
Augustine 123
years of Augustine’s life. The more Augustine reflected on the logic of grace,
the more he came to recognize the utter dependence of human beings on the
redemptive action of Christ.
A DOCTRINE DEVELOPED THROUGH CONTROVERSY
Augustine’s doctrine of original sin developed, as we have seen, from his

own experience, from his observation of human beings, and from his reading
of Scripture, especially Paul. At stake in this first stage of development was
Augustine’s own personal struggle for liberation that brought him to conver-
sion. But Augustine soon recognized an even higher set of stakes, the Chris-
tian tradition itself, the integrity of Catholic teaching, and the community of
the Church. When Julian of Eclanum, the last and most formidable of Augus-
tine’s Pelagian adversaries, attacked Augustine, he attacked the fathers who
had preceded Augustine in teaching the doctrine of original sin. That at least
was Augustine’s view. Julian had found in Augustine’s doctrine of original
sin a resurgence of Manichaeism. If he is guilty, says Augustine, so are the
many fathers who have held the doctrine of original sin. “You frequently
accuse of us of being Manichees, but also consider, if you are awake, the
many great and good men, defenders of the Catholic faith, whom you dare to
attack with so hateful an accusation (Against Julian, I, 3, 5). In the pages that
follow Augustine lists by name and cites their works church fathers from the
East and the West who have maintained the doctrine of original sin. When he
comes to John Chrysostom, Archbishop of Constantinople and a contempo-
rary of Augustine whom Julian had cited as holding that unbaptized children
are without sin, Augustine makes the all-important distinction between actual
and original sin which Julian has obscured, “But you transform [Chrysos-
tom’s] words into your teaching. He said that little ones do not have sins, that
is personal sins. For this reason, we rightly call them innocent . . .” (I, 6,22).
What is crucial to note here is that Augustine’s position on original sin,
which began in a personal struggle, came to maturity through controversy.
Three formidable adversaries, the Manichees, the Donatists, and the Pela-
gians, impelled Augustine to define and clarify the teaching of the tradition.
When Julian found lurking under Augustine’s doctrine of original sin the
heresy of Manichaeism, he threw his adversary back to the struggle that had
marked his early years. Augustine had spent nine difficult years of his youth
personally caught in the web of these people he calls “those would-be saints,
who were such frauds both to themselves and to others” (Conf., Bk. V, Ch 10,
103). His efforts to disentangle himself and his subsequent writings against
the Manichees constitute the first great controversy of his life. The second,
124 Chapter Four
lasting from about 393–411, involved him in conflict with the Donatist her-
esy. From 411 to the end of his life, Augustine pursued the third controversy
with Pelagius and the Pelagians.
A thread runs through all these controversies that leads us into the heart
of the texts we are considering here. The thread is the extent of the will’s
freedom. Augustine’s thinking develops and his final position is complex; the
development itself is crucial to understanding his thought. One’s belief about
freedom influences one’s attitude toward compassion. If people are fully free,
fully responsible for their actions, they seem to deserve less compassion, as
Pelagius illustrates. People not fully free, Augustine believed, people labor-
ing under constraints not of their own making, call forth more compassion.
As we have seen above, Augustine’s Manichee period, from about 375
to 484, embroiled him in their doctrine of two wills, one evil, one good. In
his Confessions, Augustine describes his state of mind at this time: “I still
thought that it was not we who sin, but some other nature that sins within us”
(Conf., Bk. V, Ch 10, par 2). In his darkness, Augustine found this a conve-
nient place to dwell, not having to admit guilt and confess so that “you [God]
might bring healing to a soul that had sinned against you” (Ibid., Bk. V, Ch
10). But gradually, Augustine came to find liberation in the idea of his own
will: “One thing lifted me up into the light of your day. It was that I knew
that I had a will, as surely as I knew that there was life in me. When I chose
to do something or not to do it, I was quite certain that it was my own self,
and not some other person, who made this act of the will, so that I was on the
point of understanding that herein lay the cause of my sin” (Ibid., Bk. VII,
Ch 3). Augustine returns to this idea in Book IX: “ . . . by now I had learned
to tremble for my past, so that in future I might sin no more. And it was right
that I should tremble, because it was not some other nature belonging to the
tribe of darkness that had sinned in me as the Manichees pretend” (Ibid., Bk.
IX, ch 4).
During this time also, Augustine was trying to resolve the problem of evil:
“I was trying to find the origin of evil, but I was quite blind to the evil in
my own method of research” (Ibid., Bk. VII, Ch 5). Augustine expresses the
classic dilemma simply: “Where then does evil come from, if God made all
things and because he is good, made them good too” (Ibid., Bk. VII, Ch 5)?
For the Manichees, good and evil are two different substances. Their position
is a variation of the mythic type that Paul Ricoeur calls “The Creation Myth”
(chapter one). But for Augustine, the idea of God’s infinite substance being
limited by another reality completely different from God contradicted the
very notion of God. Augustine came to see that God is good, that all God has
created is good and—another way of saying the same thing—that everything
that has being is good. “They are in you because you hold all things in your
Augustine 125
truth as though they were in your hand, and all things are true in so far as they
have being. Falsehood is nothing but the supposed being of something which
has no being” (Ibid., Bk. VII, Ch 15). And to his further question about what
wickedness was he answers, “I saw that it was not a substance but perver-
sion of the will when it turns aside from you, O God, who are the supreme
substance . . .” (Ibid., Bk. VII, Ch 16).
Augustine continues to struggle with the division in his will: “My in-
ner self was a house divided against itself” (Ibid., VIII, 8). Because of this
phenomenon of the divided will, which the Manichees also recognized in
themselves, they had claimed the existence of two wills, one good, one evil.
But for Augustine, now liberated from his false teachers, the divided will
revealed something other than the existence of two different wills: “All this
[his habit of sin] happened to me although I did not want it, but it did not
prove that there was some second mind in me besides my own. It only meant
that my mind was being punished” (Ibid., VIII, 10). Here Augustine shows
his dependence on St. Paul: “My action did not come from me, but from the
sinful principle that dwells in me. It was part of the punishment of a sin freely
committed by Adam, my first father” (Ibid., VIII, 10).
Two opposed, but not contradictory affirmations, contain Augustine’s final
position. First, against the Manichees, the human will is free. When I com-
mit sin it is truly my will that performs the act not some other will dwelling
in me. I am responsible for my acts. But though my will is free in principle
and demands that I accept responsibility for my acts, my will is not free in an
unqualified way. It is free in principle but divided in fact, subject to my inten-
tions but subject also to a certain weakness that Augustine, following Paul,
calls sin, “the sin that issues from a more voluntary sin, for I was Adam’s
son” (Ibid., VIII, 10). It is here, the heart of Augustine’s doctrine of original
sin, that Pelagius thrusts the sword of his denial. According to Pelagius and
his followers, including Julian of Eclanum, we are free in an unqualified way,
without any prior inclination to evil. Adam’s sin was only a bad example that
we are free to follow or not. And Julian uses this qualification that Augustine
introduces into human freedom as a warrant to accuse him of Manichaeism.
Pelagius and Julian do not have that bold quality of thought that F. Scott
Fitzgerald admired so much as the mark of a great mind, “the ability to think
opposed thoughts at the same time and still retain the ability to function”
(Fitzgerald 1993, 69). For them only two alternatives existed. Either the will
was free or it was not free. They did not see how it could be both free and not
free at the same time.
This issue of free will, at the center of Augustine’s controversies with the
Manichees and the Pelagians, was also relevant to his position in the Donatist
controversy. The Donatists were hardliners. They maintained that the Chris-
126 Chapter Four
tian priests who had apostatized, handing over the holy books to be burned
in the face of Roman threats, could not validly perform the sacraments after
they returned to communion with the Church since they were apostates and
that anyone baptized by them needed to be re-baptized. Augustine’s position
was that the Donatists did not understand the true nature of the sacraments,
which depend not on human virtue for their efficacy but on the grace of Christ
which operates through imperfect human instruments.
Augustine spent enormous energy opposing the Donatists. “For ten years
he spent all his energies as a writer and a diplomat in combating them, his
object being first to defeat their leaders in argument and then, as a result of
a general conference, to persuade the mass of the Donatist Church to reunite
with the Catholics” (Frend 1971, 228). Although Augustine’s victory over the
Donatists did not last beyond his death because, at least according to Frend
(Ibid., 234), he did not understand the depth of resistance that sustained the
movement, his writings against them reveal his own view of Church and
sacrament and, more important still for the subject of this paper, his compas-
sion toward those who had betrayed their faith through human weakness.
Augustine understood that the human will is not perfectly free and that, out
of weakness, it can engage in sinful acts. But that does not prevent God from
acting even in sinful people to bring about the effects of the sacraments.
Augustine’s response, spelled out at length in his treatise, On Baptism,
Against the Donatists, contains several crucial elements that will continue
within the Christian Church even to the present. One is that the effect of the
sacraments does not depend on the virtue of the one administering or the one
receiving but on the power of Christ present in them. Closely related to this
affirmation is the distinction between the sacrament itself and its “grace.”
People can have validly received the sacrament in such a way that they never
need to receive it again, says Augustine, but the valid reception does not
guarantee that they have achieved a holy life.
Augustine makes these points repeatedly in On Baptism, Against the
Donatists. To the hypothetical question: “If the unrighteous may baptize,
and give remission of sins, why do we destroy their credit and call them un-
righteous?” he answers, “. . . in the first place, that the baptism with which
they baptize is not theirs . . .” In other words it is Christ’s. “. . . and
secondly, . . . it does not follow that whosoever has the baptism of Christ
is also certain of the remission of his sins if he has this only in the outward
sign, and is not converted with a true conversion of the heart so that he who
gives remission should himself have remission of his sins” (On Baptism,
VI, 32–36). The baptized Christian, in other words, though a member of the
Church, is still on the way, still evolving into the fullness of life in Christ.
Augustine 127
From these two points follows Augustine’s discussion of different ways of

“being in the Church.” For Augustine, it is not as easy as the Donatists, with
their rigid standard of purity, believed it was, to determine who is inside and
who is outside. Only God knows who is inside and who outside: “For in that
unspeakable foreknowledge of God, many who seem to be without are actu-
ally within, and many who seem to be within, yet really are without” (Ibid.,
V, 27–38). Augustine describes different levels of participation, from those
who are deeply at home in the Church to those who struggle mightily to se-
cure a foothold in the midst of their weakness (Ibid., V, 27–38).
What emerges in the course of the controversy are two radically different
ways of conceiving of the Church. “On the one hand, there is the orthodox
Catholic Church, prepared to compromise with the evils of this world for the
sake of unity and peaceful progress” (Frend 1971, 112). This is the Church
that Augustine will defend. “On the other hand, there is the Church of the
Holy Spirit, of enthusiasm, of open hostility to the world, individualistic
and intolerant” (Ibid., 112–113). The Donatists follow this second way of
thinking. The terminology might be confusing. The “orthodox church,” in
this instance, is orthodox precisely because it is filled with the compassion
that recognizes God’s power at work even through sinners, and the Church
of the Holy Spirit, as conceived by the Donatists, is not orthodox in as much
as it fosters an unreal and unattainable idea of holiness. It was, of course, the
conversion of Constantine and the subsequent establishment of Christian-
ity that gave rise to these two views of the Church. The Donatists were still
attached to the Church of martyrs and could not tolerate the return of those
who had defected by turning over the holy books to be burned, the traditores,
without demanding of them a second baptism. Augustine, on the other hand,
recognized that though the Church, as the bride of Christ, was pure, it was
also a collection of sinners reaching toward the holiness of the bridegroom.
Peter Brown expresses the difference: “The Donatists had claimed, against
the Catholics, that, as the church was a unique source of holiness, so no sinner
could have a part in it . . . The Catholicism of Augustine, by contrast, reflects
the attitude of a group confident of its powers to absorb the world without
losing its identity” (Brown 1967, 2000, 208–209).
Along with these two views of the Church are two views of the individual
Christian. For Augustine, Baptism was only a beginning of a long develop-
ment. “Augustine,” as Brown explains, “endowed the concrete rites of the
Catholic Church with a mysterious and enduring validity. Yet he did so in
order to make the Church itself a field of innumerable, personal evolutions.
The individual Catholic was only ‘guarded’ by his sacraments; he still had
before him the long process of spiritual growth” (Ibid., 218). And the in-
tegrity and validity of the sacrament does not depend on the holiness of the
128 Chapter Four
recipient: “Nor is it material, when we are considering the question of the

genuineness and holiness of the sacrament, ‘what the recipient of the sacra-
ment believes and with what faith he is imbued.’ It is of the very highest
consequence as regards the entrance into salvation, but is wholly immaterial
as regards the question of the sacrament’” (On Baptism, III, 14–19).
Underlying all this is the Augustinian conviction that, even after Baptism,
a certain weakness of the will, a darkness and confusion, a reluctance to con-
form one’s life totally to the demands of holiness still afflicts the Christian.
For the Donatists, such weakness, at least as it was manifested in the hand-
ing over of holy books, is a clear indication that baptism did not take. Since
Augustine sees baptism as a beginning not of itself guaranteeing salvation, he
can be compassionate with the sinner.
We come full circle to the doctrine of Pelagius to which Augustine turned
after he had finished with the Donatists. The Donatists shared with Pelagians
the conviction that the human will was possessed of all the freedom it needed
to resist evil; for the Donatists evil took the form of temptation to apostasy.
When Christians did not resist, they had only themselves to blame and could
not be excused on the basis of some chronic weakness of will which only
God’s grace could heal. And Peter Brown notes the connection between
Augustine’s anti-Donatist and anti-Pelagian writings: “Augustine’s writings
against the Pelagians follow closely on his campaign against the Donatists.
Between them, they are a significant landmark in that process by which
the Catholic church had come to embrace, and so to tolerate, the whole lay
society of the Roman world, with its glaring inequalities of wealth and the
depressing resilience of its pagan habits” (Brown, 351).
This is the Augustine who responds to Julian of Eclanum’s denial of the
reality of original sin, taking umbrage at Julian’s efforts to enlist the authority
of Chrysostom. What is at stake is nothing less than the foundations of com-
passion, forgiveness, and the restoration of the sinner through God’s grace.
Paradoxically, the Pelagian denial of original sin leads away from compas-
sion toward severe righteous judgment, away from Jesus’ willingness to eat
with sinners toward the Pharisees’ ritual purity, away from the recognition of
the Church as a communion of sinners to an unbridgeable divide between the
righteous and the unrighteous. And the affirmation of an original sin shared
equally by all paves the way of forgiveness by establishing from the begin-
ning a solidarity in weakness that rules out any firm distinction between those
inside and those outside the Church.
At the height of his controversy with the Pelagians, about the year 420,
Augustine returned to the lament referred to in Romans of a person choosing
what he does not want and not choosing what he wants. In the first part of
his letter To Simplician, as we have seen above, Augustine interpreted these
Augustine 129
as the words of someone still under the law, not yet under grace. But now,
twenty years later, he sees that even the person under grace has reason to utter
this lament. “I had once thought that this passage from the apostle described
a human being under the law. Later, however, these words but now it is not I
who do this (Rom. 7:17) made me feel their force” (Answer to the Two Let-
ters, I, 10.22). Augustine makes clear what he means. Not that people under
grace consent to sin but that they struggle with the resistance of the flesh.
They “are not yet in that perfect peace in which death will be swallowed up
in victory” (Ibid., I, 11.23). This struggle between the spirit that proclaims
“I delight in the law of God in the interior self” (Rom. 7:24; Answer to Two
Letters, I, 10.22) and the flesh that resists the law of God finds expression in
Paul’s admission, “We too who have the first fruits of the Spirit groan in our-
selves as we await the adoption of our body” (Rom. 8:23; Answer to Two Let-
ters, I, 11.23). In other words, even those who have surrendered themselves
to the grace of Christ still struggle against the powerful urges of the flesh.
It is certainly possible that Augustine has been instructed by his own expe-
rience. At the time of his conversion in 386, a life of virtue and contempla-
tion of God seemed like an easy thing. Already ten years later, by the time
of his writing the Confessions and other works of this period, Augustine had
realized that a life of Christian virtue was a struggle, as he affirms in Book
X of the Confessions. God had given him the grace of continence. “But in
my memory” he says, “. . . the images of things imprinted upon it by my for-
mer habits linger on. When I am awake they obtrude themselves upon me ,
though with little strength. But when I dream, they not only give me pleasure
but are very much like acquiescence in the act” (Bk. X, Ch 30). And now,
after the lapse of another twenty years, Augustine has come to recognize that
the struggle never ends until death. In his Answer to Two Letters Augustine
speaks of those who do not consent to sin, but still struggle with temptation.
In another work written a few years before the Answer to Two Letters, Au-
gustine even manifests, in opposition to Pelagius, an understanding of those
who do consent to sin. “Many wrong actions are done by the ignorant, by the
weak, and often by persons weeping and groaning” (Nature and Grace, 29,
33). By exalting the freedom of the human will, Pelagius, in effect, removed
the grounds for a sympathetic view of sinners.
Augustine’s final position on sin lies midway between the Manichaeism
that denies the freedom of the will altogether and the Pelagianism that exag-
gerates it. Against the Manicheans, Augustine affirms that we are free. It is
truly we who sin. Against the Pelagians, he affirms that we sin as those af-
flicted by a weakness that affects all humans. Forgiveness is not relevant in
the Manichaean worldview because we ourselves do not sin. In the Pelagian
view forgiveness addresses individual acts of wrongdoing; it does not reach to
130 Chapter Four
a healing of a deep wound that affects the will even before individual wrong
acts are committed. In Augustine’s view, a view adopted by the Church, the
redemption brought about by Christ, is a healing, not just of particular sins,
but of the of the whole person afflicted by a tendency toward sin.
AUGUSTINE ON FREEDOM
These three great controversies through which Augustine came to his mature
position on original sin, involve a gradual clarification of his notion of free-
dom. We find a delicate balance between freedom and determinism on the
one hand and freedom and grace on the other. An understanding of these two
very different polarities will help us situate Augustine’s position on freedom,
which lies between the Manichaean denial of freedom on the one hand and
the Pelagian affirmation of unlimited freedom on the other. Human freedom
is neither non-existent as the Manichees taught nor unlimited as Pelagius
taught. The human will in the actual order of things after the disobedience of
Adam and Eve is a divided will. As a consequence of Adam’s disobedience
of God’s will, human beings are now justly afflicted with a will that does not
obey itself. The punishment fits the crime. “To state it briefly, then,” Augus-
tine says, “in the punishment of that sin, what is the retribution for disobedi-
ence if not disobedience itself? For what is man’s misery if not simply his
own disobedience to himself, so that because he would not do what he could,
he cannot now do what he would” (City of God, XIV, 15)? This, of course,
echoes St. Paul’s lament in the seventh chapter of Romans, “For I do not do
the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do” (Rom. 7:19).
Augustine’s mature interpretation of the sin of Adam expressed in the City
of God suggests not an ambivalence about freedom or an outward hostility
but a regret for something humans could have had but do not have because
of Adam’s disobedience. What is sinful in Adam’s act is not the exercise of
human freedom in itself, but the exercise of that freedom contrary to the com-
mand of God, and not a difficult command at that: “Man held in contempt
the command of the God Who had created him . . .” (Ibid., 611). Adam and
Eve, who, according to Augustine, should have experienced gratitude toward
God for his abundant generosity, instead saw themselves as competitors,
interpreting God’s command as an attempt to keep from them knowledge
of good and evil and eternal life. If Adam and Eve had obeyed, they would
have achieved authentic freedom, spiritual freedom grounded in acknowledg-
ing their existence from and in God. “What followed, therefore, [on Adam’s
disobedience] was a just condemnation; a condemnation such that man, who
Augustine 131
would have become spiritual even in his flesh had he kept the commandment,
now became fleshly even in his mind . . .” (Ibid., 611).
What emerges from these passages and from others throughout Augus-
tine’s mature work is his conviction that full freedom for human beings can
be found only in God. Freedom exercised in opposition to the benevolent,
life-giving will of God, is illusory freedom, a kind of slavery really. Anyone
who does not grasp this conception of Augustine’s will continually be mis-
reading what he says, finding in his theology a negative weighting of what
he actually affirms. An example is Augustine’s description of his grief over
the death of his friend in the fourth book of The Confessions. In deeply mov-
ing language, Augustine describes the grief he felt over the sudden loss of
his friend. “My soul was a burden, bruised and bleeding. It was tired of the
man who carried it, but I found no place to set it down to rest” (Conf., IV,
7). Though the reader might be touched by this account of Augustine’s grief,
Augustine found signs of disordered affection in his own excessive sadness.
The problem was that he had loved his friend outside of God, in whom he did
not believe at this point in his life. “Blessed are those who love you,” he says,
“and love their friends in you and their enemies for your sake” (Ibid., 79).
Augustine resists the notion that humans can be free outside of God. If
freedom means the power to do what we want and avoid doing what we do
not, then, for Augustine, we can be actually free only with the grace of God.
Adam and Eve were in principle free to eat or not eat the forbidden fruit, but
in eating they chose, without knowing it, a loss of freedom. In Augustine’s
view, seeking to be free outside of God is precisely the beginning of all sin:
“. . . the first evil act of the will, since it preceded all other evil acts, consisted
rather in its falling away from the work of God to its own works than in any
one act” (City of God, XIV). And the first sin entailed all the others that fol-
lowed because it perverted the order by which alone human beings can thrive.
“For man has been so made that it is to his advantage to be subject to God,
and harmful to him to act according to his own will rather than that of his
Creator” (Ibid., XIV, 12). Augustine says that Adam and Eve “began to be
evil” in a secret way before the outward act of disobedience became visible.
And this secret, invisible evil was pride, which Augustine calls “a perverse
kind of elevation.” “For it is,” he says, “a perverse kind of elevation indeed to
forsake the foundation upon which the mind should rest, and to become and
remain, as it were, one’s own foundation” (Ibid., XIV, 13). The characteristic
in Adam and Eve that made it possible for the devil to successfully tempt
them was a certain complacency. “The first evil came, then, when man began
to be pleased with himself, as if he were his own light; for he then turned
away from that Light which, if only he had been pleased with It instead,
132 Chapter Four
would have made the man himself a light” (Ibid., XIV). These passages raise
the interesting question regarding whether Augustine believed in some kind
of “sinful” state, some kind of defect in the will in Adam and Eve even before
the act of disobedience that got us all in trouble.
THE EVOLUTION OF AUGUSTINE’S FINAL POSITION
The question remains—and it is the central question—regarding whether and

how Augustine’s position on original sin embodies a liberating vision or a
constricting vision, a vision that leads to an abundant humanity or one that
leads to a narrow prison of guilt. The simple answer is that, through a series of
conversions that involved deep shifts away from previously held convictions,
Augustine became more and more liberated in his personal life and thinking.
Throughout his life, Augustine’s thought evolved; he had a restless heart and
mind that pushed him from one conquered stronghold to another. First came
a conversion to the love of wisdom itself through the reading of Cicero’s
now lost Hortensius (Conf., III, 4). We might say Augustine discovered that
he had a mind. His concern with the problem of evil led to his involvement
with the Manichees: “I fell in with a set of sensualists, men with glib tongues
who ranted and raved and had the snares of the devil in their mouths” (Ibid.,
III, 6). Augustine’s falling out from his nine-year Manichaean phase took
another laborious conversion in which he discovered he had a will. The great
conversion that put an end to Augustine’s long struggle with sensuality and
false ambition by opening him up to God’s grace took place in a garden
reminiscent of the Garden of Eden where the anguished seeker heard a voice
inviting him to “Take and Read,” Tolle, lege (Ibid., VIII, 12). We might say
that Augustine re-discovered his will, this time under the influence of grace.
ORIGINAL SIN AND THE

SEPARATION OF THOUGHT AND FEELING
Brown goes behind this last profound shift in Augustine’s thinking to the in-
sight that provoked it. In what Brown describes as “a reassessment of human
motivation” (Brown, 148), Augustine discovered that the will was moved by
feelings, particularly by the feeling of delight (delectatio). Humans can only
sustain a course of action if they feel drawn to it. This helps to explain Paul’s
famous lament already referred to in this work, “For I do not do the good I
want, but I do the evil I do not want” (Rom. 7:19). Why don’t I do it? Augus-
tine’s answer is simple: because I don’t feel like it. Though I might “want”
Augustine 133
it intellectually, my feelings do not want it; I do not “delight” in it. “It is this
psychological discovery,” says Brown, “which gives cogency to the interpre-
tation that [Augustine] placed on Paul. Briefly, Augustine had analyzed the
psychology of ‘delight.’ Delight is the only possible source of action, nothing
else can move the will” (Brown 148). And that delight, as Paul goes on to
say, can enter into us only as a gift of the Holy Spirit; we cannot summon it
by act of the will.
Another step in the evolution of Augustine’s thought, in response to a
further question, brings us closer to the liberating power of his doctrine of
original sin. The question is “Why can we not summon our feelings in sup-
port of what we know we should do?” Augustine’s answer may be the most
radical aspect of his teaching about the condition we call original sin. We
suffer from a separation between the realm of thought and the realm of feel-
ing. Choosing is not just a matter of knowing, “it is a matter in which loving
and feeling are involved. And in men, this capacity to know and to feel in a
single, involved whole, has been intimately interrupted” (Brown, 375). “The
understanding flies on ahead,” says Augustine, “and there follows, oh, so
slowly, and sometimes not at all, our weakened human capacity for feeling”
(Augustine, 2003, Exposition of Psalm 118 (119), 4). The originating sin of
Adam and Eve’s disobedience has afflicted us with a deep division between
what we want intellectually and what our feelings will support.
Pelagius and Caelestius, the men whose teaching impelled Augustine to
develop his doctrine of original sin, maintained that it was an easy matter to
choose the good. Not for Augustine. They did not detect any radical weakness
in the human will and thought that all we had to do was decide to choose. But
Augustine gradually came to see how deep was the disengagement of intellect
and feelings in human beings and how much they needed healing to restore the
unity of these two faculties that make choice possible. The healing involved
the coincidence of two opposite realities, a growing ability of the will to
choose what the understanding puts before it as good, we might call it a capac-
ity for self-actualization, and, on the other hand, a submission of the will to the
One who alone can give it the freedom to self-actualize. This is a paradox that
Alcoholics Anonymous understands perfectly. In order to achieve the sobriety
they so much desire—at least with their mind—alcoholics must first sur-
render their will to a higher power. And the higher power will give them
the capacity to choose what they want. Self-surrender opens the door to self
determination.
Augustine was keenly aware of the force of addiction; he called it “habit,”
(habitus). Examples occur throughout the Confessions. The prime example,
of course, is Augustine’s own persistent sensuality: “I was bound down by
this disease of the flesh. Its deadly pleasures were a chain that I dragged along
134 Chapter Four
with me, yet I was afraid to be freed from it . . .” (Confessions VI, 12). And,
like most addicts, Augustine shunned help: “I refused to accept the good ad-
vice of Alypius, repelling the hand that meant to loose my bonds . . .” (Ibid.).
Augustine was also held down for a long time by his vain ambition of being
a rhetorician from which his reading of Cicero’s Hortensius delivered him.
“It altered my outlook on life” (Ibid., III, 4). As Augustine approached the
time of his conversion in the garden, he still clung to his addiction: “Habit
was too strong for me when it asked ‘Do you think you can live without these
things’” (Ibid., VIII, 11).
And Augustine’s friend Alypius, who was “quite remarkably self-controlled
in matters of sex” (Ibid., VI, 12), “became obsessed with an extraordinary
craving for gladiatorial shows” (Ibid., VI, 8). Augustine describes how his
friend, after resisting mightily the invitation of his friends to attend the
games, agreed to go, resolving to close his eyes to the scene before him. But
he did not close his ears and, when the crowd roared at an incident in the
fight, he opened his eyes and “and fell more pitifully than the man whose fall
had drawn that roar of excitement from the crowd” (Ibid.). “When he saw
the blood, it was as though he had drunk a deep draught of savage passion.
Instead of turning away, he fixed his eyes upon the scene and drank in all the
frenzy, unaware of what he was doing” (Ibid.). And even Augustine’s saintly
mother, Monica, when she was a young woman “developed a secret liking
for wine” that was satisfied at first with a few drops from the cask, then bit
by bit “became a habit, and she would drink her wine at a draught, almost by
the cupful” (Ibid., IX, 8). Augustine even speaks of an intervention. Monica
was able to break the habit when God’s “healing power” was shown to her
through the “harsh words of rebuke” of a servant girl who “called my mother
a drunkard” (Ibid.). Augustine also alludes to what we would call today, wife-
abuse. After describing how adroitly him mother, Monica, handled her hot-
tempered husband, Patricius, Augustine notes, “Many women, whose faces
were disfigured by blows from husbands far sweeter-tempered than her own,
used to gossip together and complain of the behaviour of their men-folk”
(Ibid., IX, 9). All that spared Monica from similar behavior from her husband
was the rule she followed of not resisting him when he was angry but waiting
“until he was calm and composed” before explaining what she had done. Au-
gustine’s awareness of sin as habit and disease requiring healing—we would
use the word “addiction” in the cases described above—opened him to the
necessity for compassion.6
Augustine’s meditative re-reading of Paul and his attention to the experi-
ence of continuing weakness in himself awakened him to his own need for the
help of the Holy Spirit. The same awakening also opened up the possibility of
compassion for other sinners. It is important that we recognize how signifi-
Augustine 135
cant a development this was in Augustine’s thought. In the time of his argu-
ments against the Manicheans, Augustine was at pains to assert the freedom
of the human will and the responsibility that went with that freedom. With
the emphasis on freedom and responsibility came some harshness in response
to the laxness of the Manichees who claimed that we were not responsible
for our acts. We are responsible for our acts, Augustine insists. Brown cites
Augustine’s response of 390 to the Manichees: “O pig-headed souls, give me
a man . . . who stands up to the senses of the flesh, and to the blows which
it rains on the soul; who stands up to the habitual thinking of men . . . who
carves away at his spirit” (Brown 144; Augustine, de vera religione, xxxiv,
64). Ten years later, having gone through the journey of transformation noted
above, Augustine will adopt an entirely different tone: “Let them deal harshly
with you, who do not know with what efforts truth is found and with what
difficulty errors are avoided; let them deal harshly with you, who do not know
how rare and exacting it is to overcome imaginations from the flesh in the
serenity of a pious intellect, let them deal harshly with you who do not know
with what pain the inner eye of man is healed, that he may glimpse his Sun”
(Brown, 144; Augustine, Answer to the Letter of Mani, 2).
CONCLUSION
Augustine inherited an interpretation of the effects of Adam’s sin inaugurated

by St. Paul and passed along through the early Fathers of the Church. His ge-
nius transformed the tradition, not in an opposed direction, but into a deeper
dimension of interiority. Augustine’s theology, nourished by the tradition,
comes to life through his interiority. The God who is utterly beyond us dwells
within us. He expresses the idea in one of those succinct, hard-to-translate
Latin sentences:7 “You are more inward to me than my inmost self and higher
than my highest self—interior intimo meo et superior summo meo” (Conf.,
III, 6). In his reflection on the dynamics of his own consciousness, Augustine
is extraordinarily modern. In Book X of the Confessions, he explores the sub-
terranean ways of memory, recognizing how thoroughly our identity resides
in it, noting how much of ourselves is hidden from our consciousness, how
much we forget, and how laborious it is to recover it. “O Lord, I am working
hard in this field, and the field of my labours is my own self. I have become
a problem to myself—literally “a land of difficulty and much sweat (terra
difficultatis et sudoris nimis)—like land which a farmer works only with dif-
ficulty and at the cost of much sweat” (Ibid., X, 16). The image of the worker
sweating over the land recalls the curse laid on Adam after his disobedience:
“Cursed be the land because of you! In toil shall you eat its yield all the days
136 Chapter Four
of your life” (Gen. 3:17b). That Augustine would interiorize the curse is typi-
cal of his allegorizing method that turns images from Scripture into a way of
exploring the interior world of consciousness.
Has any serious writer ever shown us more of the inner workings of his
own thought? Augustine refined his thinking under the pressure of contro-
versy but he brought forth arguments tested first in the realm of his reflection
on Scripture and his personal experience. Augustine’s recognition of the
mystery of his own inner self opened him up to the mystery of the other sin-
ners with whom the planet is populated. He could be angry, at times he was
harsh, but gradually the evolutions of his own thought led him to a humility
that could not possibly stand in judgment on the hearts of others.
Augustine’s thought is summarized by his mentor Paul who also recog-
nized his inner weaknesses and lamented them in the famous cry: “So, then, I
discover the principle that when I want to do right, evil is at hand. For I take
delight in the law of God in my inner self, but I see in my members another
principle at war with the law of my mind, taking me captive to the law of sin
that dwells in my members” (Rom. 7:22–23). But when Paul—and his stu-
dent Augustine after him—looks for a remedy, he finds it not in self-mastery
but in Christ: “For the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus has freed you
from the law of sin and death” (Rom. 8:2).
NOTES
2. The Council of Orange, which met in 529, set out the relationship between
grace and freedom, “entirely in the spirit, and to a great extent in the words of St.
Augustine” (Neuner, Roos, Rahner, The Teaching of the Catholic Church, 378).
The Council’s teaching on predestination sets a clear frontier which Augustine ap-
proached without crossing: “This too we believe according to the Catholic faith, that
all baptized persons, once they have received grace by baptism, can and must, with
the help and cooperation of Christ, achieve what is necessary for the salvation of the
soul if they are willing to work loyally.” In other words, salvation is open to all, not
just to a predestined few. The Council also vigorously rejects the notion of predestina-
tion to evil: “Not only do we not believe that some by divine power are destined for
evil, but if any there be who wish to believe so much evil, we anathematize them with
all detestation” (Ibid. 381). It is important to note that, though Augustine taught that
God predestines some but not all to salvation, he did not teach, with a few exceptions,
that God predestined any to evil. Those who are not predestined to salvation simply
endure the condemnation they have merited through sharing in the sin of Adam. This
may not be encouraging but it is not predestination to evil.
Augustine 137
3. Perhaps Augustine’s distinction between teaching and preaching calls for a new
hermeneutical principle to be added to the already well known, “Lex Orandi est lex
credendi—the law of prayer is the law of belief.” Augustine, in the words quoted
above, already paid tribute to such a principle by his counsel that we must pray with
hope. If we pray with hope, he seems to be saying, then we can also believe that God
has chosen us. But when he teaches a doctrine such as predestination that he counsels
against preaching, Augustine raises a question that he himself did not consider. Does
not the fact that we ought not preach a doctrine, raise questions about the doctrine’s
validity? In other words, can we say that “the law of preaching is the law of belief.”
That is, if you cannot preach it you ought not teach it. A doctrine that cannot be
preached does not stand up as doctrine.
4. Hill, E. 1990.
5. Recently the Church has dropped even the teaching on Limbo. On April 20,
2007 Pope Benedict XVI approved a report of the International Theological Com-
mission that recommended revising the official Catholic Church opinion and opening
up the possibility that unbaptized babies can go straight to heaven. The Commission
report agreed that no definitive answer exists in past church documents but that suf-
ficient evidence exists for changing the position. This revision comes after years of
deepening awareness of the extent of divine mercy.
6. Gerald May, in his book Addiction and Grace, suggests that “addiction” might
well be a contemporary name for original sin.
7. I find that the translation of R. S. Pine-Coffin, for instance, in the Penguin Clas-
sics series fails to capture the force of Augustine’s Latin: “You are deeper than my
inmost understanding and higher than the topmost height that I could reach” (Saint
Augustine, Confessions, Penguin Books, 1961, III, 6, 63).
Chapter Five
Adam and Eve and Original Sin

Classical Formulations
and Modern Developments
When they heard the sound of the Lord God moving about in the garden at
the breezy time of the day, the man and his wife hid themselves from the
Lord God among the trees of the garden.
—Gen. 3:8, NRSV1
Thomas answered and said to him, “My Lord and my God.”

—Jn. 20:28, NRSV2
We have considered at some length Augustine of Hippo’s foundational formu-

lation of the doctrine of original sin. Augustine, as we noted, was not a mere
theoretician. He began with a personal struggle and in the process became a
keen observer of human behavior illuminated. His struggle and his observa-
tions were guided by scripture, especially the writings of Paul. From experi-
ence Augustine moved to theory. Both the experiential ground of Augustine’s
theory, recorded in his Confessions, and the polemical works through which he
refined and developed his theory—the anti-Pelagian writings—gave renewed
energy to a tradition that began before him and continued long after him. We
turn now to the developments that have continued long after Augustine. We
will not examine these developments with the same care we devoted to Au-
gustine. But some sampling of the thought to which the archetypal symbols of
the myth of Adam and Eve have continued to give rise will help to fill out the
long history through which the “truth” of the myth has evolved.
We begin with a review of official church teaching, both Catholic and Prot-
estant, contained in papal pronouncements, conciliar documents, confessional
statements, and declarations. We will then examine certain key theological
139
140 Chapter Five
developments as well, developments that witness to the amazing fecundity

of the originating symbols and to the restless speculative instinct that has
propelled the development of doctrine. The focus in this chapter is on the
theoretical formulations of the doctrine. The connection between original sin
and compassion so central to this study will, for the moment, remain in the
background. The reason is simple; the theoretical elaborations have focused
on the doctrinal issues rather than explorations of consciousness. The source
of original sin, its effects in human life, its remedy—these have been the
focus. The Church’s teaching on original sin remained relatively unchanged
from the fifth century to the twentieth. Then in the 1950s and 1960s new
theological interpretations began to emerge. Since that time, theologians have
continued to engage in revisions of the traditional interpretation.
PAPAL DECREES AND CHURCH

COUNCILS ON ORIGINAL SIN
The overarching question in all the disputes about sin and grace is how we are
justified, or made right, in our relationship with God. The Catholic Church
and the churches of the Reformation believed that human relations with God
had been permanently damaged through the sin of Adam. How were they to
be made right? Both Luther and the Council of Trent speak of “justification.”
that is, restoring a right relationship with God and attaining salvation. The
general response of the Christian tradition was that human beings could be
restored to a right relationship with God and gain eternal life only through
God’s initiative. We have seen this insight expressed in the powerful image
of Julian of Norwich’s servant who, rushing off to do the lord’s will, fell into
a ditch from which he could not get out by his own efforts. The issue, then,
is what human beings are capable of on their own and what they can do only
through the help of God called “grace.”
Early Decrees: the Pelagian Context

The provincial Council of Carthage in 418, attended by 200 bishops, formu-
lated the Church’s first official teaching on the doctrine of original sin. As
with almost all councils, the teachings of Carthage in 418 responded to posi-
tions considered contrary to the Church’s authentic teaching. The heretical
teaching in this case came from Pelagius and the theological inspiration of the
Council’s teaching came from Augustine. We have already considered their
controversy. Condemned first in an episcopal synod of 416 and then in the
Sixteenth Council of Carthage in 418, the key elements of Pelagius’ teaching
Adam and Eve and Original Sin 141
were as follows: Adam was created mortal; Adam’s sin harmed only himself
not the human beings descended from him; newborn children are in the same
condition as Adam before his fall; and Christ’s death and resurrection are not
the cause of people’s rising from death since some people were free of sin
even before Christ’s coming (Neuner and Depuis, 135). These teachings went
contrary to the Church’s foundational position that human beings cannot save
themselves without Christ’s grace.
A second document, the Indiculus, a summary of official teachings pub-
lished sometime between 435 and 442, confirmed the teachings of the Coun-
cil of Carthage but dealt with a further refinement of the Pelagian heresy that
had arisen since the Council. This heresy—called semi-Pelagianism because
its followers, though they accepted the Church’s condemnation of Pelagius
for teaching that human beings could be saved without the grace of Christ—
affirmed that at least the desire for salvation was entirely natural and did not
require grace. This also the Church condemned in the Indiculus. “God so
works in the hearts of people and in the free will itself that a holy thought, a
good counsel and every movement of a good will comes from God” (Neuner
and Depuis 1982. #1911, 548). Even more clearly, the Indiculus states:
“Therefore, with the help of the Lord, we are so strengthened by these Church
norms and these documents [earlier pronouncements] derived from divine au-
thority that we acknowledge God as the author of all good desires and deeds,
of all efforts and virtues by which from the beginning of faith human beings
tend toward God” (#1914, 549).
Heresies do not disappear just because the Church condemns them. In spite
of the Indiculus, the semi-Pelagian controversy continued. The last definitive
doctrinal statement of this early period comes from the Council of Orange
(529). The Council’s declarations were based on a document put together by
Pope Felix IV, with the help of Caesarius of Arles and Prosper of Aquitaine,
from some, but not all, of Augustine’s positions on grace. Neuner and Depuis
call the Council “a moderate Augustinianism” (550) that upholds key ele-
ments of Augustine’s teachings on grace.
The teachings of the Council of Orange were meant to put an end to the
heresy of the semi-Pelagians, once and for all, reaffirming the Church’s
teaching that even the desire for God comes from grace. “If anyone says
that the grace of God can be conferred because of human prayer, and not
rather that it is grace itself that prompts us to pray, such a one contradicts the
prophet Isaiah, or the apostle [Paul] who says the same thing: ‘I have been
found by those who did not seek me; I have shown myself to those who did
not ask for me’” (Rom. 10:20; Is. 65:1; Neuner and Depuis #1915, 550). The
Council’s “Canons on Grace” repeat the same point in various ways: anyone
who “contends that God awaits our will before cleansing us from sin, but does
142 Chapter Five
not confess that even the desire to be cleansed is aroused in us by the infusion
and action of the Holy Spirit, opposes the Holy Spirit. . . .” A comprehensive
statement sums up all the variations on the theme:
If anyone says that mercy is divinely conferred upon us when, without God’s
grace, we believe, will, desire, strive, labour, pray, keep watch, endeavour,
request, seek, knock, but does not confess that it is through the infusion and
inspiration of the Holy Spirit that we believe, will or are able to do all these
things as is required; or if anyone subordinates the help of grace to humility or
human obedience, and does not admit that it is the very gift of grace that makes
us obedient and humble, he contradicts the apostle who says: “What have you
that you did not receive?” (1 Cor. 15:10; Neuner and Depuis #1918, 550–51).
The “Conclusion redacted by Caesarius of Arles” reaffirms these points and

clearly rejects a position that seems to have been present in some way in Au-
gustine and will recur in the teaching of Calvin, divine predestination to evil.
After affirming that all those baptized “if they are willing to labour faithfully,
can and ought to accomplish with Christ’s help and cooperation what pertains
to the salvation of their souls,” adds an explicit rejection of predestination to
evil. Not only does the Church not believe “that some are predestined to evil
by the divine power,” it anathematizes any who “believe such an enormity”
and “with great abhorrence” condemns them.
The Lutheran Context: Augsburg and Trent

The papal pronouncements and conciliar decrees of the fifth century re-
sponded to the dangers perceived in Pelagianism. The sixteenth century
Council of Trent responded to what the Catholic Church saw as threats to
true doctrine from Martin Luther (1472–1546). If the Church saw in Pelagius
an excessive optimism about what human nature could accomplish by itself,
without the aid of divine grace, it saw in Luther an excessive pessimism.
Further, just as Augustine, the “doctor of grace” provided the teaching incor-
porated into official pronouncements in the fifth century, Thomas Aquinas
(1225–1274) provided the theological framework for the teaching of Trent.
Before looking at Luther and Trent, it will be helpful to consider how Thomas
Aquinas (1225–1274) refined the Augustinian teaching on original sin. Cru-
cial to Thomas’ teaching on original sin is the distinction between the natural
and the supernatural. The “original justice” of which the tradition speaks, was
for Aquinas, not a justice given to Adam and Eve as a natural endowment.
It was rather supernatural destiny given to them at the time of their creation.
This original justice, says Thomas, “held all the soul’s parts together in one”
(Aquinas, ST, I–II, q. 82, art. 2, reply to obj. 3). The disobedience of Adam
and Eve broke down the proper subordination of the human will to God, of
moral choice to reason, and of the powers of the body to will and reason
(Wiley 2002, 85). Once Adam and Eve lost this harmony, maintained by a
special gift of God’s grace, among all the soul’s parts, they could not regain
it by their own efforts. Adam and Eve and their descendants were thus thrown
back onto their own resources without the possibility of attaining the destiny
God had intended for them. The redemptive grace given through Christ gave
human beings the power to achieve their supernatural end.
To explain how the aspects of original sin worked together, Aquinas turned
to the four causes of Aristotle (384–322 BC) that he had found in studying
works of the Greek philosopher recently discovered by the Arabs.3 A cause
for Aristotle is “that from which . . . a thing comes into being” (Metaphys-
ics, 1013b, Bk. V, Ch. 2). The four causes are material, formal, efficient, and
final. Each of the four causes enters into the being of the thing in a different
way. The material cause is the stuff of which something is made, e.g., marble
in a statue. The formal cause is what makes the matter intelligible, e.g., the
shape of a human being carved from marble. The formal cause answers the
question “What is it?” as the perplexed observer might ask in front of an
amorphous lump of stone or metal. The efficient cause is the agent who
brings about the product, e.g., the sculptor of a statue. A subdivision of the
efficient cause is the instrumental cause, that is, the instrument the agent uses
to produce an effect; for instance, the chisel in the hand of the sculptor. The
final cause is the purpose of the thing produced, e.g., the statue is made to
honor some individual or to give pleasure to the beholder.
Aquinas applies the four causes to original sin, beginning with the formal
cause, that which defines original sin as sin. Just as original justice consisted
formally in the subjection of the human will to God, so original sin consists
formally in turning away from God and thus losing original justice. And the
loss of original justice leads to the material aspect of original sin, disorder
in the powers of the soul. (ST, q. 82, art 3, response). “Accordingly, the
privation of original justice, by which the will was made subject to God, is
the formal element in original sin, while every other disorder of the soul’s
powers is a kind of material element in respect of original sin” (Ibid.). This
disorder of the “powers of the soul” Aquinas calls “concupiscence” (reply to
first objection). Augustine was speaking of this material element in original
sin when he spoke of his sinful habits as chains.
The efficient or principal cause of original sin is the free choice of Adam
not to obey God’s command. The instrumental cause is the semen through
which the condition of the soul called original sin is transmitted to Adam’s
posterity (Aquinas, q. 83, art 1, Response). Aquinas does not speak of a final
cause of original sin, a purpose served by original sin. This makes sense since
144 Chapter Five
sin is precisely a turning away from the purpose God had in mind for hu-
man beings. However, one can speak in a paradoxical way of original sin as
having the purpose of bringing about the redemptive activity of Christ. Paul
hints at this when he says: “For if, by the transgression of one person, death
came to reign through that one, how much more will those who receive the
abundance of grace and the gift of justification come to reign in life through
the one person, Jesus Christ” (Rom. 5:17).
Luther and Trent

Aquinas’ analysis of original sin in terms of causality is a useful way to ap-
proach the definitions of the Council of Trent. Since the teachings of Luther
and the other reformers serve as the particular context of Trent, we will have
to consider the reformers’ ideas of original sin and justification. I will limit
myself to the positions of Luther. Whether the Catholic bishops understood
Luther correctly or not—and there is evidence that they did not—Luther’s
positions, precisely as interpreted by the Roman Church, became a catalyst
for setting out as clearly as possible the Church’s understanding of sin and
justification. If we set the Catholic teaching of Trent opposite the teaching
of the Lutheran confessions, we will find the two not as far apart as Trent
seemed to think. It seems likely, from the perspective offered by five hun-
dred years of distance from the Reformation and the Catholic response to it,
that both sides misread each other’s positions. The “Joint Declaration on the
Doctrine of Justification” approved by the Lutheran World Federation and the
Catholic Church in 1998 clearly moves beyond the misunderstandings and
mutual suspicion of the sixteenth century.
On October 31, 1517, Luther posted his “95 Theses” under the title “Dis-
putation of Dr. Martin Luther Concerning Penitence and Indulgences.” The
theses did not lay out Luther’s teaching on original sin but only his views on
the granting of indulgences. At this point it seems that Luther did not intend
a complete break with the Roman Church, but only wished to denounce what
he saw as an unacceptable abuse, the selling of indulgences to raise money
for building St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. During the year 1520, Luther pub-
lished three significant works that laid out his teachings. In the “Address to
the Christian Nobility of the German Nation” Luther attacked church corrup-
tion and abuses of authority and stated his belief in the right of lay persons
to spiritual independence. “Concerning Christian Liberty” contains Luther’s
doctrine of justification by faith and his basic theological positions. In the
“Babylonian Captivity of the Church,” Luther criticized the sacramental sys-
tem as practiced in the Roman Catholic Church and established the Scriptures
as the supreme authority in Christianity.
In 1520, three years after Luther had posted his “95 Theses” and twenty-
five years before the Council of Trent, Pope Leo X condemned what he saw
as certain errors of Luther. Among the condemnations are the following:
Luther seemed to teach that original sin was actually a sin that kept a person
who died without baptism from entering into heaven even though there is no
actual sin. Leo also condemned Luther’s teachings that “In every good work
the just man sins,” and that “A good work perfectly performed is a venial
sin” (Neuner and Depuis 1923/31, 554). The Confession of Augsburg (1530),
based on Luther’s Articles of Schwabach, but written by Philip Malencthon,
express clearly the first position condemned by Leo. The second article “Of
Original Sin,” states that all people are born into sin and “that this original
disease or flaw is truly a sin, bringing condemnation and also eternal death
to those who are not reborn through baptism and the Holy Spirit” (Bettenson
1963, 210).
The sixth session of the Council of Trent (1547) lays out the position of
the Catholic Church on justification. Trent’s “Decree on Justification” agreed
with Lutherans in condemning the errors of Pelagius, repeating the same doc-
trine laid out in the councils of the fifth and sixth centuries and expressly con-
firmed in Lutheran confessions of faith. The “Canons on Justification,” brief
summaries of the Decree’s teachings, condemn certain positions the Council
attributed to the reformers. We can divide the issues under three questions.
First, what are the material effects of original sin in the sinner? Second, what
is the role of believers in their justification? Third, what is the effect in the
sinner of the justification offered by Christ? Regarding the material effects
of original sin, the Catholic Church understood the reformers to say that
freedom of will disappeared after the Fall and that the more people strove for
salvation, the more they sinned. Trent affirmed the freedom of the human will
even before justification and condemned those who held the opposite (Canon
5). Trent also condemned anyone who would say “that all works performed
before justification, no matter how they are performed, are truly sins or de-
serve God’s hatred; or that the more earnestly one tries to dispose himself for
grace, the more grievously he sins . . .” (Canon 7). The Catholic position is
thus that, even though the human will is afflicted with a certain impotence
regarding its own salvation, it is not utterly devoid of the ability to do good.
The bishops at Trent also rejected certain positions regarding what believ-
ers are able to do or need to do in order to attain salvation and regarding who
can be saved. Trent understood Luther’s affirmation of the necessity of faith
for salvation as excluding the need for good works and affirmed the opposite
(Canon 9). To attain salvation, people must perform good works (Canons
18, 19, 20). And not only are these good works “the fruits and signs of the
justification obtained,” as the reformers held, but they are also “a cause of
146 Chapter Five
[justification’s] increase” (Canon 24). Trent clearly attributes to human good

works a real causality in obtaining justification. Human beings participate in
their own salvation “through the grace and charity which is poured into their
hearts by the Holy Spirit and inheres in them” (Canon 11). The theologians
of Trent understood some of the reformers at least—no one is mentioned by
name in the text—to be saying that people are justified “either by the imputa-
tion of Christ’s justice alone or by the remission of sins alone” (Canon 11)
and not through any participation on their part made possible by grace. Per-
haps the clearest affirmation of human participation in justification is found
in Canon 32. “If anyone says that the good works of the justified person are
the gifts of God in such a way that they are not also the good merits of the
justified person,” let the one holding such a position be, as the Council puts
it, “anathema.”
Trent also rejected the requirement, attributed to the reformers, that “to at-
tain the remission of sins, everyone must believe with certainty and without
any hesitation based on his own weakness that he is absolved and justified
. . .” (Canon 13). Human salvation is conditioned not on subjective certainty
in the one saved but by the saving work of Christ. The bishops of Trent also
rejected the position that some are predestined to salvation, some to evil by
the divine power (Canon 17).
Trent’s tone of condemnation, expressed in its repeated formula “anathema
sit,” is offensive to modern ears, both Protestant and Catholic. Trent never
names those it condemns, nor does it cite texts expressing the positions it
rejects. The reformers had no chance to speak at the Council. Nevertheless, in
spite of the absence of dialogue before or during the Council, Trent sets forth
a remarkably balanced picture of original sin and salvation. It avoids Pelagius’
excessive optimism about justification, already rejected a thousand years
before Trent convened. In defining original sin, Trent carefully distinguished
between the tendency toward sin that it called “concupiscence” and the actual
sins that deserve punishment: “The Catholic Church has never understood that
[concupiscence] is called sin because it would be sin in the true and proper
sense in those who have been reborn, but because it comes from sin and in-
clines to sin” (Neuner and Depuis, 139, Trent, Decree on Original Sin, 512).
Lutheran Positions
The positions of the Catholic Church are clear from Trent, as are their opin-
ions of what the reformers held. What is not clear from Trent is what the
reformers themselves actually held. To determine that, we will need to con-
sider the reformers’ confessional statements. I will limit myself to documents
setting forth the Lutheran positions. Differences among various reformers
were significant. Even among Lutherans, differences emerged, and doctrines

developed from earlier statements of Luther, through the Augsburg Confes-
sions of 1530, based on teachings of Luther but authored by Malencthon, up
to the Formula of Concord (1577) and, finally, the completed Book of Con-
cord put together in 1580.
As would become evident five hundred years after the Lutheran Confes-
sions and the Council of Trent, during the dialogues on justification be-
tween Catholics and Lutherans, the differences between the two sides were
not as great as the hardened traditions of opposition had made them seem.
The Augsburg Confessions (1530) affirmed a doctrine of original sin and
justification very close to the teaching of Trent. Augsburg, while denying
that people are saved by good works, recognized their necessity. “Further, it
is taught that good works should and must be done, not that a person relies
on them to earn grace but for God’s sake and to God’s praise” (Augsburg
Confession, XX, “Faith and Good Works,” (Book of Concord, #27, 56).
Good works, says Augsburg, come from the Holy Spirit. “When through
faith the Holy Spirit is given, the heart is moved to do good works. Before
that, when it is without the Holy Spirit, the heart is too weak” (Augsburg
XX, 29–31). Augsburg also taught the freedom of the human will. The
Confession recognizes both the freedom of the will that enables people “to
live an outwardly honorable life and to make choices among the things that
reason comprehends” and the inability of human effort to make a person
acceptable to God “without the grace, help, and activity of the Holy Spirit”
(Augsburg XVIII, 1–2).
The question still remains about the effect of original sin in the human
spirit. That Lutherans struggled among themselves to determine the extent
of damage done to Adam’s descendants by his disobedience is evident from
the “Formula of Concord” of 1577. The subtitle of the Formula sets forth its
purpose: “A thorough, pure, correct, and final restatement and explanation
of a number of articles of the Augsburg Confession on which for some time
there has been disagreement among some of the theologians adhering to this
Confession, resolved and reconciled under the guidance of the Word of God
and the comprehensive summary of our Christian teaching.” The Declaration
sets forth a kind of diagnostic of original sin and justification that helps in-
terpret not only the Lutheran position, but also the Catholic. At stake was the
question of how deeply the disease had entered into human nature.
The “Solid Declaration,” second part of the “Formula of Concord,” de-
scribes the terms of the “dissension among a number of theologians of the
Augsburg Confession about what original sin, strictly understood, is” (Book
of Concord, 508). One side held a view the Formula calls “nature sin” or
“person sin,” meaning that “the nature, substance, and essence of fallen man,
148 Chapter Five
at least the foremost and noblest part of his essence . . . is original sin itself”
(Ibid.). In this view no difference exists between human nature and original
sin. The other side maintained that human nature remains God’s handiwork
and cannot be identified with original sin. Original sin is rather “something in
man’s nature, in his body, soul, and all his powers, . . . an abominable, deep,
and inexpressible corruption thereof . . .” (Ibid.). The corruption consists in a
lack of the righteousness in which Adam was originally created such that “in
spiritual matters he is dead to that which is good and is turned to everything
evil, and that, because of this corruption and this inborn sin which inheres in
his nature, all actual sin flows out of his heart” (508–09). One side, then, sees
human nature as so utterly corrupted by original sin as to be identified with it.
The other side, desiring to preserve the integrity of nature as God’s creature,
claims only that original sin “inheres in [man’s] nature” (509).
The “Declaration of Concord” clearly rejects identification of original
sin with human nature. In effect, says the Declaration, such identification
is equivalent to Manichaeism. The Declaration, then, locates the Lutheran
position between Pelagianism and Manichaeism. Lutherans, according to the
Declaration, reject and condemn “the following and related Pelagian errors:
That human nature even after the Fall is incorrupt and, especially, that in
spiritual matters it is good, pure, and in its natural powers perfect” (Article 1,
511). The argument against the Manichaean identification of original sin with
human nature is twofold. If we identify human nature with original sin, we
thereby claim that God has created sin. If, on the other hand, we say that God
created human nature good but that “Satan created or made something es-
sentially evil and blended this with their nature” (512–513), then we say that
it is not human nature that sins “but a strange and foreign something within
man, so that God . . . does not accuse and condemn man’s nature, corrupted
by sin, but only the original sin” (513).
The Lutheran position of the Declaration echoes Augustine’s rejection of
both Manichaeism and Pelagianism. Against the Manichees, Augustine af-
firmed that the human will is free. Against the Pelagians, he affirmed that
it is not completely free. Lutheran documents affirm a limited freedom for
the human will. The Augsburg Confessions concede “that the human will
has some freedom for producing civil righteousness and for choosing things
subject to reason,” but add immediately “However, it does not have the power
to produce the righteousness of God or spiritual righteousness without the
Holy Spirit . . .” (“Confessions,” XVIII, Book of Concord, 51). Augsburg also
acknowledges the necessity of good works but denies that such works “rec-
oncile us with God or obtain grace” (“Confessions,” XX, Book of Concord,
54). Good works, rather than earning God’s favor, depend on it: Because the
Holy Spirit is given through faith, the heart is also moved to do good works”
(“Confessions,” XX, Concord, 56).
Reading the “Augsburg Confessions,” one realizes that Lutherans and
Catholics were not, even at that time, as far apart as some of their rhetoric
suggested. The passage of five hundred years since Augsburg and the Council
of Trent and the growing desire to look for common points rather than differ-
ences led finally to the Lutheran-Catholic dialogues of the late 20th century
that culminated in the Joint Declaration on The Doctrine of Justification.
“Together we confess,” says the Declaration: “By grace alone, in Christ’s
saving work and not because of any merit on our part, we are accepted by
God and receive the Holy Spirit, who renews our hearts while equipping and
calling us to good works.”
MORE RECENT THEOLOGICAL REAPPRAISALS
The classical texts I have been citing, including the Joint Declaration, are
doctrinal statements that express the traditional Christian position on original
sin. Christians have held that the exercise of human freedom led to a fall from
which human beings cannot rise without the help of God. The fall, according
to the tradition, has also left humans with concupiscence, a tendency to sin,
as an inheritance from the first human couple. The human will remains free,
and good works are necessary to achieve salvation but neither the freedom
nor the exercise of good works can merit salvation except through the grace
of Christ. Though the human will cannot by itself achieve salvation, the in-
tegrity of human nature remains intact as something good but infected by an
inherited vulnerability.
What the official teaching says is one thing. Theological speculation is
another. While respecting the doctrines set down in official Church teach-
ing, theologians explore the meaning of those doctrines to illuminate them
and make them fruitful in the lives of believers. Theology always reflects the
culture from which it arises and tries to answer questions posed by dominant
cultural expressions such as philosophy, science, literature, and even the
common concerns of believers struggling to make their faith real. As cultures
succeed one another, theologians shed new light on the mystery of salvation.
A consideration of some theological reappraisals from the second half of the
twentieth century and the first ten years of the twenty-first will give evidence
of a continuing interest in the subject of original sin as an abiding aspect of
human life and show some possibilities for reinterpretation. All of these reap-
praisals come out of the intellectual revolution that began before the Second
150 Chapter Five
Vatican Council, took shape in the Council’s 16 documents, and has contin-
ued to mature during the fifty years since the Council.
Historic developments in the twentieth century have brought about changes
in conceptions of human development that raise new questions about the
meaning of original sin. The philosophical turn to the subject, expressed in
various forms of phenomenology, personalism, and cognitional theory, has
profoundly influenced the way theologians look at original sin. The emer-
gence of evolution as a scientific hypothesis to explain the origin and devel-
opment of the human race challenges the traditional explanation of human
evil as coming from the sin of a first historical couple. Evolution offers no
verification of the hypothesis that the human condition, as we now experi-
ence it, originates in a fall from some earlier state of perfection. Whatever
perfection human beings might be capable of lies in the future, not the past.
We have become profoundly conscious in the past century of the frighten-
ing power of human violence. The manifestations of violence include two
world wars, many smaller but still destructive instances of armed conflict
between nations, the presence of gang warfare in cities, drug wars, genocidal
campaigns within nations—the Nazi “final solution” of eliminating the Jews
and the Rwandan massacre of Tutsis by Hutus come powerfully to mind—and
the institutional violence that keeps whole classes of people from participating
in human progress. The pervasiveness of violence suggests a way of looking at
the aspect of original sin the churches have called “concupiscence.”
Men and women of the twenty-first century are also conscious of living in
a global community. Financial crises that begin in one corner of the globe,
quickly spread to the whole global community. The environment knows no
national boundaries. Communicable diseases spread across the globe. AIDS
began in Africa. Now the infection occurs in every country. All nations
share one atmosphere whose degradation through pollution affects all. The
development of communication technology, television, and especially the
Internet, make far-off events immediately available. Modern educated people
have also largely, with notable exceptions, accepted the evolutionary view
of the development of human beings from the animal kingdom. Pope John
Paul II, in a 1996 address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, recognized
evolution as “more than an hypothesis” and acknowledged a convergence of
independent studies that “constitutes in itself a significant argument in favor
of the theory” (John Paul II, 1996, 4, par 2). These cornerstones of modern
consciousness require a rethinking of the traditional notions of original sin.
We turn briefly to look at some efforts to rethink original sin in light of
these heightened areas in modern consciousness. We have already consid-
ered above Aquinas’ analysis of original sin according to the four causes of
Aristotle. Aquinas’ analysis will provide a useful way of understanding the
approaches taken by various authors. The perspective offered by evolution,

for instance, gives rise to questions about the efficient cause of original sin,
which Aquinas, following the tradition, located in the free choice of Adam
and Eve to disobey God’s command. In the light of evolutionary theory it
seems naïve to think of a single couple as cause for all the fragility of the
human condition. The epidemic character of violence suggests a new way
of looking at the material cause of original sin, what the tradition has called
concupiscence. The heightened conscience moderns have of living in a global
community, has led some authors to look at the formal cause of original sin
as a break with humanity rather than a break with God. Feminist perspectives
offer a way of looking at what original sin consists of, that is, its materiality.
Evolutionary Perspectives
Several authors have reinterpreted the traditional understanding of original
sin in the light of evolutionary theory. I will consider the work of three au-
thors, Piet Schoonenberg (1964), Alszeghy and Flick (1965–67), and Daryl
Domning (2006).
Piet Schoonenberg’s 1964 work, Man and Sin, carefully reviews the tradi-
tional teaching about original sin “in the spirit of Teilhard de Chardin” (192).
This Teilhardian spirit means fundamentally that paradise lies not at the be-
ginning of human history but at the end. The “old static view” of the world,
according to Schoonenberg, sees the world coming from God’s creative hand
as simply good and ignores “the slow development of order and all the travail
involved in it . . .” (193). In the older static view, “all disorder, all suffering,
including biological death have entered the world only on account of sin
(193). Thus, as just mentioned, in the view of Teilhard and Schoonenberg,
“Paradise lies not at the beginning, but at the end . . . (194). From this it fol-
lows that the redemptive work of Christ is aimed not at restoring a condition
lost by sin but in countering by grace the effects of sin in the evolutionary
development of human beings. This “evolutionary picture,” says Schoonen-
berg “may be outlined in two sentences” as follows:
“The whole evolution of creation is crowned by a historical ascent of
mankind, crowned in its turn by Christ’s presence, which keeps growing too
towards his manifestation in the parousia, the beginning of “God all in all.”
That ascent is crossed by a similar ascent of sin, but God brings about the
triumph of the ascent in Christ” (194).
Schoonenberg’s understanding of that “ascent of sin” is the key to his
understanding of original sin. He describes this ascent first in terms of
what we have been calling the material cause of original sin, that in which
original sin consists as its material expression. Schoonenberg enumerates
152 Chapter Five
three manifestation that he calls “the sequels of sin” (63). First is “sin itself
as punishment” (63). Sin has its external manifestation and its inner core
that leaves a residue as a form of punishment. “That core of each action is
the decision through which the person realizes himself in some direction;
it is the attitude which he gives to himself” (63). That attitude is the “state
of sin” and it constitutes a kind of intrinsic punishment for the sin. The in-
trinsic punishment for smoking is addiction to smoking. A second sequel is
“the inability to love” (70). The third is “the inclination to evil” (80). “After
murder there remains hatred, after impurity, egoistic desire” (80). This is
more than just an inability to do something good; it is an inclination to evil.
Having enumerated some of the material aspects of original sin, Schoonen-
berg, turns to its efficient and instrumental causes. How does “the ascent of
sin” get started? How does it get transmitted? Schoonenberg recognizes the
beginning of sin in Adam’s disobedience but attributes its continuance not just
to heredity, but to what we might call environmental or situational causes. The
ascent begins somewhere, of course, but its upward movement is explained not
by that first sin alone but by the accumulated sins that follow. Schoonenberg
calls this accumulation of sin “the sin of the world” and the “situation of sin”
(chapter 3, “The Sin of the World”).” “The biblical warrant for Schoonenberg’s
position here lies in his interpretation of Romans 5:12. Schoonenberg cites the
version common in modern translations: “Therefore sin came into the world
through one man and death through sin, and so sin spread to all men because all
men sinned ” (italics added). Earlier translations, certainly the translation with
which Augustine would have been familiar, said that “sin came into the world
through one man in whom all sinned” (italics added). Schoonenberg considers
the difference of translations crucial. The earlier translation seems to suggest
that all humans sinned in Adam even before they had committed any personal
sins of their own. The modern translation suggests that “this domination of sin
is undergone only when one sins personally” (134).
The accumulation of personal sins and their consequences on the human
situation constitute the sin of the world or “the situation caused by sinful acts”
(111ff). Schoonenberg enumerates them: bad example (112), bad example
with pressure (113), obscuration of values and norms (115), total obscuring
of values and norms (115). Through all of these circumstances “Sin embodies
itself in the transgression of certain commandments, in the offense against
a certain virtue or value, in the production of some disorder in our world”
(118). These are manifestations of something deeper. “But the soul of sin,
its deepest personal core, consists in opposing the whole reality of God and
world, in conflicting with love, both natural and supernatural” (118). This is
what Aquinas calls the “formal cause” of sin, what defines sin as sin.
Alszeghy and Flick: Personalism and Evolution

In a series of articles dating from the 1960s, two Jesuits from the Gregorian
University in Rome, Zoltan Alszeghy and Maurice Flick, reappraise original
sin from the twin perspectives of personalism and evolution. Noting that
“Original sin is a theological theme that needs radical rethinking” (Alszeghy
and Flick 1967, 190), these two authors rethink the traditional doctrine by
moving beyond what they call an exclusively “juridical or ontic order” to-
ward the relational category of dialogue between persons. Humans, unlike
other living beings, become what they are meant to be through interaction
with other human beings and God. Original sin interrupts that dialogue.
Contrary to those who might want to explain original sin as simply a break-
down in the horizontal dimension of communication among human beings,
Alszeghy and Flick believe that only an interruption of communication with
God explains the phenomenon of original sin. If we try to explain original sin
as the distortion in human life that comes from “a selfish society that prevents
his development” (192), we interrupt the link with Adam’s sin described in
Trent’s declaration that original sin is “transmitted by propagation, not by
imitation” (DS 1513, Bettenson, 138). This line of thinking makes clear that
Alszeghy and Flick wish their reinterpretation to remain within the frame-
work of the Church’s defined teaching. This means that they see original sin
as rooted in a freely chosen break with God whose consequences affect all
human beings through propagation. We will see shortly the reinterpretation
these authors introduce into this traditional teaching in light of evolution.
The personalist viewpoint adopted by Alszeghy and Flick leads them to an
understanding that is both traditional and radical, radical precisely because it
gets to the roots of the tradition. The break with God, say these two authors,
is not just something that occurs in the order of objective being, a kind of
unconscious break with God that dooms us to a kind of blindness. Rather,
the break consists in something we can recognize in our own subjectivity,
the inability of each human being to recognize God as his or her own God.
The relation of children to their human parents illustrates the point. “One
does not assume the role of son by simply knowing the fact that a person is
one’s father. One’s father is discovered by immediate practical experience in
which the other’s presence as father makes one become son” (Alszeghy and
Flick 1965, 194).
We find this personalist interpretation already in biblical passages and later
developments of the tradition. Adam and Eve hid themselves from God’s
presence when, after they had disobeyed God’s command, God walked in the
garden “in the breezy time of the day” (Gen. 3:8). God was no longer their
God. In Romans Paul talks about the origins of sin among the Gentiles who
154 Chapter Five
“exchanged the truth of God for a lie and revered and worshiped the crea-
ture rather than the creator” (Rom. 1:25). The Gentiles’ refusal to worship
God, that is, to enter into intimacy with God, recognizing God as their God,
explains why God “handed them over to degrading passions” (Rom. 1:26).
Later in the same letter, Paul speaks of salvation for the believer as receiving
“a spirit of adoption, through which we cry, ‘Abba, Father’” (Rom. 8:15b).
Julian of Norwich, as we shall see in chapter nine, gets at the same truth when
she describes her servant/Adam as fallen into a ditch from which he can no
longer see his loving master.
The personalist reinterpretation of Alszeghy and Flick takes Aquinas’
formal cause of original sin, the break with God brought about by Adam’s
disobedience, and makes it part of the materiality of original sin. The loss of
intimacy with God that prevents me from seeing God as my God and keeps
groups of people as seeing God as theirs, is a “material” consequence of the
break with God. It is part of the stuff of original sin. In chapter six, we will
consider at greater length the loss of the four intimacies, intimacy with God,
with self, with the neighbor, and with nature. Modern psychology recognizes
the importance of bonding with parents, especially with the mother, as the
foundation of a healthy human existence. The break with God as formal cause
of original sin and the loss of intimacy as the material cause provides a help-
ful explanatory account.
Alszeghy and Flick approach original sin not only from the perspec-
tive of personalism but from the viewpoint of evolution. As noted above,
these authors understand their reappraisal as a legitimate extension of the
tradition. They consider the Council of Trent statement on original sin (DS
1510–1516) as the Church’s most important statement of this doctrine (Al-
szeghy and Flick, 1967, 199). The authors introduce a variation that they
believe preserves the authoritative teaching while recognizing an evolution-
ary perspective. If we assume that the human race repeats in its evolutionary
development the steps followed by individuals, we can suppose that several
generations of truly human beings “go through life without any more use of
reason than we observe in babies” (199). And at a certain moment, just as
happens in each human being’s development, our human ancestors “become
capable of a free decision” (200). God’s plan, says the hypothesis, intends to
produce human beings “vivified by grace” (200). The passage over to this
new stage requires a “leap” specifically different from all the preceding ones,
even hominization. Bringing man to divinization surpasses absolutely all pos-
sibilities of any created order. This leap is precisely what human beings fail
to make: “But at the moment for this option man sets himself in opposition to
God’s will and refuses to follow the plan of evolution with which he is asked
to cooperate” (200). Since human beings have failed to choose the condition
intended by God, God introduces a new way of fulfilling his still intact plan
of divinization. That way is Christ.
By introducing the hypothesis that Adam and Eve are the first humans
beings capable of free choice, these two authors suppose a stage of human
development prior to the emergence of free will, followed by a state in which
humans could finally choose whether to follow God’s divine plan. Adam and
Eve chose not to. Alszeghy and Flick claim to have preserved the orthodox
tradition and, at the same time, given due recognition to the theory of evolu-
tion. Still claiming to give due recognition to the tradition and to the theory
of evolution, Alszeghy and Flick explain the transmission of original sin to
all human beings in a new way. “According to our hypothesis the sin of the
first man who reached the use of reason affects all men whether they are his
descendants or not” (201).
Alszeghy and Flick, always concerned to reconcile their views with au-
thentic church teaching, next address the task of explaining how their theory
of transmission preserves the tradition. First, they deny that “physical descent
of all men from one Adam is a certain element of revelation” (201). What is
crucial, say these authors, is Trent’s affirmation of the universality of sin and
“participation in it through natural generation” (201). But the Church has not
defined “that the generative act is the cause of the transmission of original
sin” (201), it might only be the occasion. Still, even with these qualifications,
Alszeghy and Flick see the difficulty of explaining why all people share in a
common sinfulness. The answer lies in an appeal to the unity of humankind.
Two possible explanations of the unity of humankind emerge. The first
is offered by “theistic evolutionism,” which says that the unity of human-
kind is “not diminished but rather widened by being anchored on an earlier
level than hominization” (201). That earlier level is the time of incomplete
development when human beings have not yet collectively reached the age
of reason. The second, “more important and helpful,” in the eyes of our two
authors, “is the biblical notion of corporate personality” according to which
“a whole community determines its stand before God in the acts of a single
person” (201). This would certainly seem to be the Pauline view expressed in
Romans in which Paul correlates the gift of universal salvation accomplished
by Christ with the universal sin brought about by Adam. “For just as through
the disobedience of one person, the many were made sinners, so through the
obedience of one, many will be made righteous” (Rom. 5:19).
We can summarize the views of Alszeghy and Flick by relating the two
focal points of their revision of the traditional view to the Thomist “causes”
of original sin set out above. These authors appeal to personalism and evo-
lutionary theory. The personalist reinterpretation has to do with the material
side of original sin and answers the question of what exactly original sin in
156 Chapter Five
human beings consists in. For Alszeghy and Flick—they do not actually use
Aristotle’s four causes as Aquinas did—the “material” side of sin is the direct
correlative of its “formal” side. The formal cause of original sin in Aquinas’
analysis, is the separation from God through disobedience and the material
side is concupiscence, the tendency toward selfishness, lust, disharmony, etc.
Alszeghy and Flick hold that the result of the disobedience of Adam and Eve
(formal cause) is a chronic inability (material cause) to think of God as “my
God,” “our God,” as belonging to us and being for us. This identification of
the condition of original sin with the modern category of alienation seems to
me the most satisfying element of the Alszeghy and Flick analysis.
The second part of their analysis responds to the evolutionary context of
modern thought, the challenge to think of the original perpetrators of original
sin in an evolutionary perspective. These two authors respond to this chal-
lenge by projecting a time of growth before the first human beings were
capable of committing sin.
Sin as Selfishness: Another Evolutionary Perspective

Daryl Domning’s 2006 work, Original Selfishness: Original Sin and Evil in
the Light of Evolution, responding to the same evolutionary hypothesis that
motivated the work of Alszeghy and Flick, offers an even more radical rein-
terpretation of the doctrine of original sin. A brief editorial comment at the
beginning of the book summarizes the import of its contribution:
Daryl P. Domning explains in straightforward terms the working of modern

evolutionary theory, Darwinian natural selection, and how this has brought forth
life and the human mind. He counters objections to Darwinism that are raised
by some believers and emphasizes that the evolutionary process necessarily
enforces selfish behavior on all living things. This account of both physical and
moral evil is arguably more consistent with traditional Christian teachings than
are the explanations give by most contemporary “evolutionary” theologians
themselves (“Original Selfishness,” opening summary).
The opening summary also notes that “The prominent theologian, Monika K.
Hellwig dialogues with Daryl Domning throughout the book to present a bal-
anced reappraisal of the doctrine of original sin from both a scientist’s and theo-
logian’s perspective.” The thesis of the book, encapsulated in its title, is that
the root dynamism of human development, the engine, so to speak, of human
progress, is selfishness. The human race did not begin, as Genesis suggests and
as the tradition has maintained, in some state of perfection from which, through
an original act of disobedience by the first couple, the human race has fallen.
Perfection lies not in the past but in the future.
The evolutionary perspective forces us to acknowledge that Scripture is, above

all, not about the past but about the present in every age: about our existential
problems, about our relationship to God, about our [present] hopes for the fu-
ture, and even about creation itself—not as something made “very good” once
upon a time, but as a creatio continua, something God is making “very good.”
As Jesus put it, “My Father is at work until now, and I am at work as well” (Jn.
5:17; Domning 2006, 107).
Included in Domning’s thesis is the conclusion embraced by almost all the

reappraisals since the Second Vatican Council that the biblical story of Adam
and Eve is not an historical account of events that took place in the life of the
first human beings. The story of Adam and Eve expresses a profound truth,
a symbolic, “mythical” truth, not a historical one. We have already seen this
conviction expressed in the work of Paul Ricoeur (chapter two, above). For
Ricoeur and Domning, It is just as important that we hold firmly to the sym-
bolic truth as it is that we let go of the historical truth. Domning’s is a work
that merits detailed study. I will only note aspects of the argument that seem
particularly important to me. I am particularly interested in Domning’s rein-
terpretation of the story of Adam and Eve (Domning, Chapter Ten).
Domning gives a useful “working definition” of original sin that he claims
is “uncontroversial” (Domning 2006, 140). Original sin “is simply need for
salvation (by Christ) which is universal to all human beings and acquired
through natural generation” (140). Domning notes the observation of Alsze-
ghy and Flick that “any hypothesis capable of explaining these two dogmatic
truths [universality of sin, and participation in it through natural generation]
is . . . to be considered tenable” (Domning 2006, 140, Alszeghy and Flick
1967, 201).
Domning’s theory, though radical in its application of evolutionary theory
to original sin, is more traditional than some modern interpretations that resist
the notion of transmission of original sin by generation. The radical element
lies in Domning’s rejection of the traditional assumption “that the universal-
ity and the moral character of original sin both necessarily stem from one
and the same individual act, and moment in time” (Domning, 140). Domning
thus separates the “universality” of original sin and its “moral character.”
The universality of original sin comes not from Adam and Eve or from any
other human ancestor, but from “the common ancestor not only of all humans
but of all living things on Earth as well” (140). What interests Domning is
not the ancestor itself but the natural descent through which it passed on its
characteristics. This process is “governed by natural selection and the selfish
behavior it requires” (141). The first human beings, whoever they were and
whenever they appeared, inherited this natural selfishness. Domning thus
reaffirms in different terms the traditional insistence of transmission of origi-
158 Chapter Five
nal sin by generation rather than solely by imitation, as Pelagius is accused

of teaching and as some modern theologians have taught under the name of
“cultural transmission.”
Once again, the language of Aquinas is useful though Domning himself
does not employ it. This natural selfishness is the “material” cause of original
sin. In the traditional view, this material cause, the actual sinful situation of
human beings, follows from the efficient cause, namely the sin of Adam and
Eve. The formal cause, alienation from God, and the consequent alienation
from self, neighbor, and nature, gives the intelligible ground of a condition
that is in itself mysterious, our tendency toward selfishness. For Domning,
the material element comes down, not from human actions but from the origi-
nal selfishness that governs the development of all living things. Among all
living beings, humans were the first to have the possibility of going against
the natural selfishness they inherited by choosing to be selfless. But humans,
represented symbolically by Adam and Eve, failed the test and introduced
“sin” into the process of human development.
The sinfulness of human acts thus “proceeds from a source that is logically
and temporally separate from their common genealogical origin . . .” (141).
Though Adam and Eve symbolize the beginnings of human sin, it is not nec-
essary to posit a historical first couple in order to explain the universality of
sin. That universality comes from the original selfishness that characterizes
the development of all life forms. It seems implicit in Domning’a theory that
we must say that each time human beings were confronted with the reality
of inherited selfishness and offered the possibility of overcoming it through
a free choice to be selfless rather than selfish, they failed to realize the pos-
sibility. If some humans, confronted with this choice, actually did transcend
inherited selfishness, then we would expect to see a strain of human beings
who had grown accustomed to overcoming selfish tendencies. Domning
avoids this possibility by defining original sin as “that need for salvation (by
Christ) which is universal to all human beings and acquired through natural
generation” (140). This means that the human will, though offered the pos-
sibility of overcoming selfishness, is incapable of actually doing so without
the grace of Christ.
Domning notes that his account of original sin does not exclude Schoo-
nenberg’s account, but “broadens and deepens” Schoonenberg’s central
explanatory notion of cultural transmission (142). Schoonenberg and most
other post-Vatican II theologians “tend to equate it [original sin] with the sin-
ful situations or structures into which each person is born” (142). Domning
reaches into the time before the advent of human beings to posit a “‘society
before (human) society’ which was molding our ancestors’ behavior (both
learned and genetically determined) for millions of years before they became
human” (142). Domning’s broadening and deepening of the notion of cultural

transmission corrects what he finds to be a defect in Schoonenberg’s position,
namely the lack of any explanation of how culture first got infected.
Domning’s account of the origins of original sin has the advantage of us-
ing evolutionary theory to explain what is often left unexplained in the story
of Adam and Eve. Why were they so susceptible to what seems like a crass
temptation of the serpent? The hapless couple, first Eve, then Adam, seemed
all too ready to swallow the hook dangled in front of them. Domning takes his
place in a line of thinkers who have spoken of a condition of sin prior to the
sin itself. Irenaeus in the third century maintained that Adam and Eve were
like children, not yet mature enough to resist temptation. Näiveté, then, be-
comes the precondition that sets Adam and Eve up for a fall. For Augustine,
the precondition was a certain complacency. “The first evil came, then, when
man began to be pleased with himself, as if he were his own light; for then
he turned away from that Light which, if only he had been pleased with it
instead, would have made the man himself a light” (Augustine, City of God,
XIV, 13).
ORIGINAL SIN AS VIOLENCE
In her reappraisal of the doctrine of original sin, The Fall to Violence: Origi-
nal Sin in Relational Theology (1995), Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki redefines
both the formal and material causes of original sin. Instead of the traditional
designation of the formal cause as rebellion against God, Suchocki maintains
that the formal definition of original sin consists in a “rebellion against cre-
ation” (Suchocki 1995, 16). And instead of the traditional designation of the
material cause as concupiscence, Suchocki speaks of original sin as violence
(28–29).
Suchocki recognizes the depth of the tradition that defines original sin
as rebellion against God, but gives her own strong reasons for suggest-
ing another formality. The concept of sin as rebellion against God, says
Suchocki, “tends to cast the primary function of God as the moral lawgiver
who establishes the boundaries of acceptable human conduct” (17). It also
tends all too easily to translate “into a social formula for keeping marginal
and oppressed peoples in places of poverty and/or powerlessness, since it
tends to interpret rebellion against any form of political, social, or personal
power as rebellion against God” (17). Hiding all sin, “the enormity of politi-
cal torture, massive wars, cruel oppressions, child abuse . . . under the one
umbrella of rebellion against God effectively levels the distinction between
sins” (17–18). It also hides the real victims of sin, contributes to the devalu-
160 Chapter Five
ation of creation, “fosters rather than illuminates the Christian problem of

sin,” and “makes the fundamental conflict of human beings a promethean
defiance of deity which is probably remote from the experience of most
people” (18).
Given her formal definition of original sin as rebellion against creation, it
is not surprising that Suchocki finds the material element of original sin in
“human brutality” and “our penchant for violence” (28). Suchocki prefaces
each chapter of her book with a brief newspaper or journal report. All deal
with violence or environmental pollution and its effects. These reports, say
Suchocki, make sin concrete, help us avoid the “trivialization of sin”—such
things as “going off one’s diet or telling a white lie”—and keep us from
treating sin “as if it were synonymous with sex” (28). All these examples of
violence against human beings and against the earth complement the theo-
retical accounts that are never “fully adequate to the awful reality of human
ill-doing” (28).
Suchocki’s identification of original sin as violence that is primarily a
sin against creation and only secondarily a sin against God, comes out of a
feminist critique of Reinhold Niebuhr. Niebuhr, says this feminist critique,
along with Augustine and Aquinas, places the core of original sin, its formal
causality, in pride or rebellion against God, making one’s self the absolute
rather than God. The feminist critique embraced by Suchocki places the core
of sin in rebellion against one’s essential relatedness to creation or nature. Sin
is an offense against creation rather than a sin against God.
Both Niebuhr and his feminist critics place original sin in a failure of self-
transcendence. But for Niebuhr the self fails to transcend itself by failing to
recognize its essential relation of dependence on God. For Suchocki and the
other feminists she cites, the self fails to transcend itself in violating its es-
sential relatedness to other creatures. The failure can take place in a couple
of ways. One can make one’s self absolute, independent of other selves for
whom one has no sympathy or care. This is the sin of the privileged and
powerful. One can also absolutize other human beings, granting them real ob-
jective value and turning the self into an unreal subordinate reality. “One can
so identify with the other that one effectively loses—or never develops—a
sense of self ” (40). Suchocki and other feminists call this phenomenon “hid-
ing” (32–33, 40). This is the sin of the marginalized, among them women,
who never emerge from the shadow of the dominant other into their own
selfhood. It may well be that these two perspectives can be reconciled, as the
prophets of Israel do, by identifying sins among human beings as sins against
God. Suchocki, however does not want to reduce sins against human beings
to sins against God.
FEMINIST PERSPECTIVES
Suchocki stands out for her emphasis on violence as the material embodi-
ment of original sin. Her grounding of that emphasis on feminist principles
naturally leads us to a wider look at feminist perspectives. Christian feminist
theologians, including Suchocki, accept much of what the tradition proposes
on the subject of original sin. Rosemary Radford Reuther, for instance, af-
firms that original sin arises “out of the misuse of human freedom” (Wiley,
175), that “humanity has become radically alienated from its true relation-
ship to itself, to nature, and to God” (Wiley, 175; Reuther, Sexism and God
Talk, 37). Reuther accepts the Pauline-Augustinian teaching that “we derive
a profound existential recognition of the divided self, acting against its own
interests and desires” (Wiley 2002, 175; Reuther 1992, 142).
Rather than new insights into the efficient or instrumental causes of origi-
nal sin, feminist perspectives offer insight into the materiality of original sin,
answering the questions, “What does original sin consist of ?”4 According to
Wiley, Reuther “places the critique of the classical doctrine of original sin at
the heart of the feminist theology. The very purpose of feminist theology is
to name evil rightly” (Wiley 2002, 157). And that name is male domination.
What the tradition has obscured, say feminist theologians, is the patriarchal
structure that has ruled human consciousness unchallenged until recent times.
At the root of the social arrangements that embody male domination lie hid-
den structures of consciousness. Elizabeth Johnson uses Bernard Lonergan’s
term “scotosis” to characterize the resistance to feminist efforts to bring out
of hiding the structures of patriarchal consciousness. Scotosis is a blind spot
that obscures unwanted insights, preventing them from emerging into con-
sciousness (Johnson, She Who Is, 13). The title of Johnson’s book is a femi-
nist translation of the Hebrew name YAHWEH given by God to Moses at the
Burning Bush (Exod. 3:13–14). The Hebrew is difficult to translate because it
is a verb form and has several possible meanings. A common translation, the
one from which Johnson is working, is “I am who am,” or “He who is.” This
very name of God as it has been translated embodies the patriarchal structure
to which Johnson objects and entails the scotosis that prevents us from under-
standing the true nature of God.
The problem begins with interpretations of the story of Adam and Eve in
Genesis 2 and 3. Early church theologians found three key gender-related ele-
ments: woman was created inferior to man; woman’s sin is the cause of the
fall; the male is created to rule the female (Wiley, 155). The earliest scriptural
embodiment of this interpretation, according to Wiley, is found in 1 Tim.
2:8–15. “Let woman learn in silence with full submission. I permit no woman
162 Chapter Five
to teach or have authority over a man; she is to keep silent. For Adam was
formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but woman was deceived
and became a transgressor” (1 Tim. 2:12–14). This letter is probably not from
the hand of Paul, but rather from one of his followers.
Some scriptural texts embody this unconscious assumption of male su-
periority and are products of it, others counter the assumptions. But even
texts that might seem to challenge the patriarchal view have been interpreted
from a patriarchal perspective and subordinated to texts that seem to give
a biblical warrant to male domination of society. Feminist theologians see
Jesus’ teaching as anti-patriarchal. Jesus treated women differently than
did members of the religious and political establishment of his time. “In his
words and actions—parables, stories, healings, exorcisms, friendships, and
encounters—Jesus signaled domination as sin and freedom from subordinate
status as redemption” (Wiley 2002, 168). And Paul cites baptismal formulas
that show continuity between Jesus’ teaching and the reality lived by the
communities formed in his name. “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is
no longer slave or free, there is no longer male or female; for all of you are
one in Jesus Christ” (Gal. 3:28). But the deutero-Pauline letters written later
using his name but actually written by different authors “provide evidence
of the patriarchalizing of the church in the late first and early second century
C.E.” (Wiley 2002, 170).
In contrast to the liberating texts of Paul that seek to transcend the po-
larities of male/female, etc., Elizabeth Schussler-Fiorenza identifies “patri-
archal submission texts” that “seek to bring the communal structure of the
ekklesia into line with the structure of the patriarchal household” (Wiley,
170; Schussler-Fiorenza, 73). The complete form of these texts, according
to Schussler-Fiorenza, is found only in two passages from deutero-Pauline
letters, Col. 3:18–4:1 and Eph. 5:22–6:9. In these passages, the relations
between man and woman, master and slave, parents and children are hierar-
chical. “Wives, be subject to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord” (Col.
3:18). And “Wives, be subject to your husbands as you are to the Lord. For
the husband is the head of the wife just as Christ is the head of the church,
the body of which he is the Savior” (Eph. 5:23–24).
The “appropriation” of these patriarchal submission texts, says Wiley,
“submerged” the vision of Jesus and Paul that had rejected patriarchal struc-
tures. “The Christian church created its own separate and unequal spheres for
women and men” (Wiley 2002, 171). This submerging, in later New Testa-
ment writings, of the incipient movement toward equality and the elimination
of hierarchical distinctions found in the teachings of Jesus and the writings
of Paul has, according to the feminist perspective, continued in the develop-
ment of church tradition. The systematic distortion of the proper relation of
equality between men and women is intertwined with the history of original
sin, specifically in assigning an unwarranted role to women in the originating
of sin.
CONCLUSION
The feminist attention to male dominance as a principal manifestation of

original sin belongs to a larger category of oppression in general. Paul in Ga-
latians mentions the polarities of men and women, masters and slaves, Jews
and Greeks (Gal. 3:28) as divisions to be overcome in the Christian’s new life
in Christ. We can extend the list to include every kind of division exploited
by oppression, differences of race, social class, degrees of physical perfec-
tion. This universal unconscious tendency to exploit whatever advantage one
has against those who have less leads to the pervasive violence identified by
Suchocki and, as we will see in chapter seven, by René Girard. But even the
tendency toward exploitation and the violence to which exploitation gives
rise, finds its place within a wider category, selfishness (Domning). Selfish-
ness seems to be a basic category that has many manifestations, exploitation
of others, self-complacency, and covetousness, to name a few. All of these
can be taken as names for the material aspect of original sin.
I speak of original sin here in its “material” reality. The material aspect
tells us what original sin consists of. If the formal aspect consists in a separa-
tion from God, or in Suchocki’s view, a separation from creation, and the ef-
ficient and instrumental aspect consists in the act(s) of free will and their con-
sequences perpetuated by inheritance and cultural conditioning, the condition
that results from the formal, efficient, and instrumental causes is the material
cause, the stuff of original sin in its manifestations in human living.
We have been considering original sin from a theoretical perspective,
leaving aside some of the fundamental themes of this work that belong to
the realm of subjective consciousness rather than to the realm of speculation,
themes like compassion and forgiveness. The development of doctrine and
the historical succession of theoretical explanations may seem to have taken
us away from the central preoccupation of this work, the connection between
original sin, compassion, and forgiveness. At the conclusion of her work, The
Fall to Violence, Marjorie Suchocki offer some reflections that can serve to
bring us back to home base in the midst of our theoretical reflections. In the
next-to-last chapter of her book, “Forgiveness and Transformation,” Suchocki
reminds us of what is our central theme, the solidarity in sin that can, if real-
ized and accepted, lead to compassion. We all have varying degrees of guilt,
says Suchocki, depending on our level of freedom and the possibilities given
164 Chapter Five
to us in life. But, she adds, “there is no one who does not bear some degree
of responsibility for what he or she has done with the inherited past, no one
who does not in some sense integrate the sins of others into the self through
solidarity, no one who does not experience an inherent inclination toward ag-
gression that entails a capacity of violence” (Fall to Violence, 149).
This “inherent inclination toward aggression that entails a capacity for
violence” forms the subject matter chapter seven, “René Girard: Original
Sin as Covetousness.” Girard has developed an impressive system based on
an interpretation of original sin as the innate desire in human beings to have
what the other has precisely because the other has it. The inclination, not evil
in itself within bounds, can lead to the war of all against all when it becomes
generalized. Girard’s work may be the most influential elaboration of original
sin in our time.
NOTES
3. Aristotle describes the four causes in Book V, Chapter 2 of his Metaphysics. Ar-
istotle. 1952. Metaphysics. Translated by W. D. Ross in Great Books of the Western
World. Chicago: Encyclopedia Brittanica.
4. Tatha Wiley’s comprehensive work, Original Sin: Origins, Developments,
Contemporary Meanings, after tracing the historical development of original sin,
gives a useful summary of feminist positions. See chapter 7, “Original Sin in Feminist
Theology.”
Chapter Six
Compassion as Prelude to Forgiveness
While he was still a long way off, his father caught sight of him and was
filled with compassion.
—Luke 15:20b, NRSV1
For it belongs to humanity to suffer-with and to be moved by compassion

for the suffering of others. An animal is able to suffer but to suffer-with is
proper to humanity. For this reason, the will of tender pity is called the will
of humanity, because it belongs to a human being to be moved with tender
pity. And, in as much as he is human, we find this compassion in Christ.
—Hugh of St. Victor (1096–1141), On the Four Wills of Christ
We have considered how the Adamic Myth is situated in the world of ancient
Near Eastern accounts of the origin and end of evil, and we have explored its
place in the Old and New Testaments. We have examined the notion of origi-
nal sin and argued that a personal consciousness of original sin in oneself can
lead to compassion. This connection between original sin and compassion
seems to have occurred, as described in the chapter four, even in the thought
of Augustine. Now it is time to look more closely at the dynamic intercon-
nections among the three key terms of this study, sin—original and actual,
compassion, and forgiveness. What is sin? How does compassion work? How
does compassion lead to forgiveness?
Sin is an action against someone, an injury, an insult, a slight, an act of
disobedience. Even original sin, which is inherited, begins with an actual act
of disobedience. Ultimately, in the theologies of Judaism and Christianity, sin
is an action against God, but it can also be a sin against the neighbor. And
forgiveness is a response; it consists of letting go, sometimes of forgetting, of
165
166 Chapter Six
passing over, of releasing from the debt that sin incurs for the sinner. Mediat-
ing between sin and forgiveness is compassion. Examples abound in both the
Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. Compassion was at work in God’s
forgiveness of the people of Nineveh. “And should I not be concerned over
Nineveh, the great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty
thousand who cannot distinguish their right hand from their left?” (Jon. 4:11).
The human agent, Jonah, did not share God’s compassion. One can bypass
compassion in forgiving, but then the forgiveness is likely to be false or shal-
low, a mere act of the will without any support from the heart. Compassion
expands the heart and opens it to forgiveness, which follows as something
spontaneous, more like a gift than an act of virtue.
Compassion plays a crucial role in the dynamics of the Adamic Myth. The
sin of Adam and Even evokes God’s compassion. Even within the framework
of the narrative of Genesis 3, which ends with disastrous consequences for
the disobedient couple, God shows compassion, fashioning leather garments
for the man and his wife with which he clothed them (Gen. 3:21). In fact,
even God’s question when Adam and Eve hid from him, “Where are you?”
seems more compassionate than reproachful, as if God regretted the chain of
events that the couple had unleashed. And the multitude of sins that followed
the first disobedience, beginning with Cain’s murder of his brother, Abel,
and continuing through the prehistory and history of Israel, continued to call
forth God’s compassion. When God saw the wickedness of the people he had
created and that all the desires of their hearts were evil, “he regretted that he
had made man on the earth, and his heart was grieved” (Gen. 6:6). So even
God’s decision to wipe out all men and beasts seems to have been motivated
more by grief than anger. And, as it turned out, God relented of that decision,
mitigated it in favor of Noah, and promised after the flood never again to
strike down all living beings. God became for Israel, as we have seen, “The
Lord, the Lord, a merciful and gracious God, slow to anger and rich in kind-
ness for a thousand generations, and forgiving wickedness and crime and sin
. . .” (Exod. 34:6–7). Though the Old Testament does not refer to the story of
Adam and Eve after chapter 3 of Genesis, the Hebrew Scriptures do affirm
and reaffirm the pattern of God’s mercy in the face of the continual sin of his
people. This pattern will be the model that Jesus follows and also transforms
in the New Testament.
FORGIVENESS AS NECESSARY, POSSIBLE, AND ACTUAL
Through Paul’s New Testament transformation of the story of Adam and Eve
found originally in the book of Genesis, and through the more subtle but
Compassion as Prelude to Forgiveness 167
nonetheless clear expression of it in the Gospels and other New Testament

writings, the Adamic Myth has become a privileged, if controversial expres-
sion of the logic of salvation in Christianity. At the heart of the Adamic Myth
lies the notion that separates it from the other three myths described, as we
have seen, by Paul Ricoeur in The Symbolism of Evil, the notion that evil
came into the world through the free choice of the man and woman created
by God. This choice to prefer their own will to God’s and eat of the fruit God
had commanded them not to eat, sets up the archetypal situation in which
forgiveness first becomes a necessity, a possibility, and a reality. Forgiveness
becomes a necessity because Adam and Eve and their descendants have no
way to overcome by themselves the consequences of their act, a possibility
because God does have the power to reverse the situation caused by disobedi-
ence, and a reality because God chooses in fact to take the initiative in offer-
ing salvation to human beings.
Forgiveness is a conditional necessity, necessary for human beings if they
are to be restored to wholeness and necessary for God if the Creator wishes
to see the original purpose of his creation realized. We take for granted the
possibility of divine forgiveness. We should not. For forgiveness is possible
only if the one offended is willing to pardon the “wickedness and sins” of
his “stiff-necked people” and receive them as his own (Exod. 34:9b), as
Moses prayed in the refashioning of new tablets to replace the ones he had
destroyed; only if he is “The Lord, the Lord, a merciful and gracious God,
slow to anger and rich in kindness for a thousand generations, and forgiving
wickedness and crime and sin . . .” (Exod. 34:6–7). Forgiveness is possible
if this God is willing to forgive iniquities and heal diseases (Ps. 103:3), no
longer to remember” (Jer. 31:34) when they pray, “the sins of my youth and
my transgressions do not remember” (Ps. 25:7). Forgiveness is possible if
God can choose to tread underfoot his people’s guilt, to cast into the depths
of the sea all the people’s sins (Mic. 7:18–19). These are all expressions of
God’s habit of mercy.
Can we imagine Oedipus praying to Apollo or to the Fate that condemned
him to horrible deeds that they not remember the deeds of his youth or tread
underfoot his guilt or cast his sins into the sea? In the tragic vision of predes-
tination to evil such forgiveness is not possible. Or what god can a follower
of Orphism appeal to for forgiveness? That we are essentially spirit impris-
oned in a body is not our fault but the result of divine atrocities before we
were born. Or where could a follower of one of the creation myths, which
see human beings as the result of a cosmic struggle between the gods, turn
for forgiveness? According to this mythic type, we are essentially victims of
powers beyond ourselves and prior to our existence, not free beings who have
in some way chosen our destiny. Only if one has offended a caring and loving
168 Chapter Six
god, as is the case in the Adamic Myth, can the god forgive. But forgiveness
is only possible because even this caring and loving God can refuse forgive-
ness. Abraham understood as much when he begged God to spare the people
of Sodom even if only ten righteous ones could be found (Gen. 18:16–33).
But as we have seen, the God of Israel, who is also the God of Jesus, is predis-
posed to forgiveness, inclined to mercy, slow to anger—at least for those who
turn and ask. And so forgiveness has become a reality. And this forgiveness
is real, because it has actually happened in the history of Israel and the New
Covenant of Christ.
Forgiveness in the Christian Dispensation

Chapter three traced the lines of connection between the New Testament and
the Adamic Myth. The New Testament also builds on the Old Testament
image of a “gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in
steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing” (Jon. 4:2b) and the Jew-
ish belief that all have sinned and need God’s mercy. We now turn to the
distinctively Christian notion of forgiveness to see what it adds. The bibli-
cal notion of compassion works like a leaven in the Christian tradition. We
have already seen how Augustine’s teaching on original sin evolves toward
a theology of compassion. We begin not with the New Testament itself, but
with a follower of Augustine, Hugh of St. Victor (1096–1141), considered by
some the most influential theologian of the twelfth century. He catches the
teaching of the New Testament in the magnifying lens of a brief reflection
on the compassionate will of Christ entitled, “The Four Wills of Christ.”2
Beginning with Hugh’s reflection, we will explore how compassion operates
in the New Testament and why, though central to Christ’s teaching, it is so
hard for us to achieve.
Hugh of St. Victor’s “The Four Wills of Christ”

Hugh begins with the traditional distinction, enunciated by ecumenical
councils, between the human and divine wills of Christ. If Christ were to
be considered both fully human and fully divine, so the argument went, he
had to be possessed of both human and divine wills. Hugh goes beyond this
received distinction, while in no way contradicting it, by finding within the
human will of Christ three further “wills.” It is evident that these are not
separate wills, but aspects of the one human will. The rational will (voluntas
secundum rationem) is the aspect of Jesus’ human will by which he chose to
follow the decree of God for him, especially regarding the Passion. A second
aspect, the will of the flesh (voluntas secundum carnem), was the aspect by
which Jesus naturally resisted in his flesh the prospect of his suffering and
death. Hugh finds these two aspects of will, not only in Jesus himself but
in the disciples as well: “The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak” [Matt.
26:41]. The rational will and the will of the flesh appear strikingly of course
in Jesus’ prayer recorded a few verses earlier in Matthew: “My Father, if it is
possible, let this cup pass from me [will of the flesh]; yet not as I will, but as
you will” [rational will] (Matt. 26:39).
But the tension between Jesus’ rational will, by which he assented to God’s
plan for him, and the will of the flesh by which he resisted it is not the main
concern of Hugh of St. Victor’s treatise. The third aspect of Jesus’ human
will, the “will of compassion” (voluntas pietatis) or tender pity [Coolman’s
translation]3 takes up most of Hugh’s treatise. In Christ, says Hugh, the will
of compassion (voluntas pietatis) “sighed deeply over another’s evil through
co-suffering ( per compassionem) [Hugh of St. Victor, 176.841b]. In other
words, this is the aspect of the will by which Christ suffered over the evil,
deserved or undeserved, that befalls another. As examples of this will of
compassion, Hugh cites Luke’s account of Christ weeping over Jerusalem:
“As he drew near, he saw the city and wept over it, saying, ‘If this day you
only knew what makes for peace—but now it is hidden from your eyes” (Lk.
19:41–42). Luke does not say that Jesus thought the coming downfall of
Jerusalem was undeserved, just that he wept over it. “Hugh interprets Jesus’
tears as an expression of felt sorrow over the eternal fate of Jerusalem’s unbe-
lieving inhabitants, which he does not will, secundum pietatem,” (Coolman,
536), that is, according to his compassionate will. Presumably, though Hugh
does not say so explicitly, Jesus also recognized, with his rational will, that
the punishment was deserved and so accepted the fate of Jerusalem though he
grieved over it. This nuance is worth dwelling on for it relies on a distinction
that escapes many people wrestling with forgiveness. Hugh finds in Christ a
willingness to regret and feel sorrow over the sufferings that arise from a just
punishment even while he is upholding the justice of the punishment.
The second passage cited by Hugh is Jesus’ weeping over the death of
Lazarus, described in John 11. Hugh’s text, slightly different from that used
in modern translations, reads: “Jesus groaned in spirit and troubled himself ”
(Jn. 11:38). Hugh asks whether it was a “good troubling” and answers that it
was: Jesus’ humanity meant that just as he bore suffering in his body, he also
bore co-suffering in his mind (compassionem in mente). Note that in this case
Jesus is grieving over a natural phenomenon, death, and not over a destiny
brought about by sin. Clarifying the parallel between passion and compas-
sion, Hugh says of Jesus that: “He bore his passion that he might die for those
who were going to die; he bore compassion that he might weep for those who
were going to perish” (Hugh of St. Victor, 844d–845a).
170 Chapter Six
COMPASSION AS PRECONDITION FOR FORGIVENESS
Hugh uses his analysis of the four wills of Christ as a foundation for a
much larger claim, that compassion is the form of ideal humanity: “For it
belongs to humanity to suffer with (compati) and to be moved with tender
pity ( pietate) for the misery of others” (Hugh of St. Victor, 842). This is, of
course, the teaching of the New Testament. Moreover, the New Testament
makes a connection that Hugh does not pursue in this brief treatise, the con-
nection between compassion and forgiveness. Paul urges the Colossians,
and through them all Christians: “Put on, then, as God’s chosen ones, holy
and beloved, heartfelt compassion (splangkna), kindness, humility, gentle-
ness, and patience . . .” (Col. 3:12). This is to be done in imitation of Christ:
“. . . as the Lord has forgiven you, so must you also do” (Col. 3:13b). We
can use Hugh’s three aspects of the human will of Christ as the foundation
for a meditation on forgiveness. The argument of this chapter is that compas-
sion is a necessary precondition for forgiveness. The connection may seem
obvious, but discussions of forgiveness that bypass compassion, suggesting
that forgiveness is a matter only of rational willing, miss an essential ingredi-
ent of the process. Forgiveness is less an act of the rational will than of the
movement of tender mercy. We may say “I know I ought to forgive” [rational
will], “but I can’t bring myself to do it” [will of the flesh]. The only power
that can overcome the natural resistance of the flesh is the “compassionate
will” described by Hugh. Or we might even say, “I see no reason to forgive;
the one who offended me does not deserve forgiveness and forgiveness would
seem to justify the injury [rational will]. Again, it is the compassionate will
that would have to mediate between the rational will and the act of forgive-
ness. It is difficult, whatever our resistance might be, to forgive someone for
whom we have no compassion.
The New Testament, especially the Gospels, illustrates this connection
repeatedly. In the famous “sermon on the plain” in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus
expresses this teaching in sweeping terms that include not only friends but
enemies: “. . . love your enemies and do good to them, and lend expecting
nothing back; then your reward will be great and you will be children of the
Most High, for he himself is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. Be merci-
ful (oiktirmones) just as your Father is merciful” (Lk. 6:35–36). A parallel
passage from Matthew, “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is
perfect” (5:48) defines perfection in terms of mercy. To be “perfect” like the
heavenly Father is to imitate him in loving enemies as well as friends, “for he
makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous
and on the unrighteous” (5:45b).
Probably the most famous parable of forgiveness, also from Luke, is the
story of the Prodigal Son. “While he [the son] was still a long way off, his
father caught sight of him and was filled with compassion (esplangnisthe).
He ran to his son, embraced him and kissed him” (Lk. 15:20b). Note that
the father expresses compassion even before his son has come close enough
to acknowledge his fault. The parable illustrates not only how compassion
leads to forgiveness—in this case the compassion and the forgiveness are
hardly distinguished—but how the lack of compassion prevents forgiveness.
The older brother, hearing the commotion and learning what has happened,
becomes angry and refuses to go in to the feast. He feels no compassion to-
ward his brother but only jealous resentment. After all my years of service,
he says, “you never gave me even a young goat to feast on with my friends.
But when your son returns who swallowed up your property with prostitutes,
for him you slaughter the fatted calf ” (29b–30). And, even with this older
angry son, the father speaks compassionately: “My son, you are here with
me always; everything I have is yours” (31). Neither of the brothers grasped
what it meant to be son of such a loving father. Then the father reveals what
has touched his gentle heart and gives the reason for his rejoicing: “But now
we must celebrate and rejoice, because your brother was dead and has come
to life again; he was lost and has been found” (32).
Another parable, this one from Matthew, emphasizes the need to render
mercy for mercy received. When the man who owes a huge debt comes to his
master asking for forgiveness, the master begins with a movement of compas-
sion: “Moved with compassion (splangnistheis) the master of the servant let
him go and forgave him the loan” (Matt. 18:27). The story ends, as we know,
with the failure of the servant to forgive a fellow servant who owed a much
smaller debt, a failure that invoked the wrath of the master and the withdrawal
of the original forgiveness. The master’s anger toward the ungrateful servant
swallows up his compassion. Mark’s account of Jesus’ cure of the leper
includes a mention of compassion not included in Matthew’s and Luke’s
versions. When the leper approaches him with the bold request “If you wish,
you can make me clean,” Mark tells us that Jesus “moved with pity (splang-
nistheis), . . . stretched out his hand, touched him, and said ‘I do will it,’ be
made clean” (Mk. 1:41). In a passage that follows immediately, the healing
of a paralytic, Jesus makes clear the equivalence of healing and forgiving sin:
“Which is easier to say so the paralytic, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say
‘Pick up your mat and walk’” (2:1–12)?
Not only does the New Testament vividly illustrate the connection between
compassion and forgiveness, but it also urges the necessity of forgiveness and
stresses the reciprocity of forgiving and being forgiven. The parable from
172 Chapter Six
Matthew 18, cited above, is an example. Jesus tells his disciples in the sermon
on the plain of Luke 6, “Stop judging and you will not be judged. Stop con-
demning and you will not be condemned. Forgive and you will be forgiven.”
Judging and condemning set us up to be judged and condemned in our turn.
Forgiving sets us up to be forgiven. The prayer that Jesus taught his disciples
when they asked him how to pray, also contains the admonition to forgive-
ness: “ . . . forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors . . .” (Matt. 6:12).
In Matthew’s version of the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus returns to the point at the
end in case the disciples might have missed the point: “If you forgive others
their transgressions, your heavenly Father will forgive you. But if you do not
forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your transgressions” (14–15).
So we have the clear example of Jesus’ compassion and its connection with
forgiveness. But even with Jesus’ example and his clear teaching, his follow-
ers, to say nothing of humanity in general, find it difficult to feel compassion,
and therefore to forgive, in spite of Hugh of St. Victor’s claim that is belongs
to humans to be compassionate. Pelagius would be scandalized. Why, he
would ask, are the example of Jesus and his clear teachings not sufficient
motive for obeying his laws? And surely one of those laws, probably the
most important of all, is that we forgive one another. So why does compas-
sion come so hard? We have to look to Paul, for the answer, to the other New
Testament writers, and to Augustine and, more generally, to the Christian
tradition that recognizes the weakened condition of the human will and the
internal conflicts that tear at it. Compassion leading to forgiveness is the ex-
pression of a free will, and our freedom is compromised. In the next chapter,
we will look at the thought of René Girard who sees the primary evidence
of original sin in what he calls “mimetic rivalry,” the desire to have what the
other has simply because the other has it. The Bible calls it covetousness. The
older son in the story of the Prodigal Son provides the archetypal example.
One suspects that he only desired a party because his brother had one. The
Letter of James anticipates Girard by two millenia: “Where do the wars and
where do the conflicts among you come from? Is it not from your passions
that make war within your members? You covet but do not possess. You kill
and envy but do not receive” (Jas. 4:1–2). After his admonition to “be merci-
ful just as your Father is merciful” (Lk. 6:36), Jesus addresses some of the ob-
stacles to mercy: “Stop judging and you will not be judged. Stop condemning,
and you will not be condemned. Forgive and you will be forgiven.” These
passages suggest a circular relationship between compassion and forgiveness.
The gesture of forgiving can lead to the compassion that is its real ground.
Sometimes we have to start from the outside and work our way in.
But we need to push our questioning further. Why are we given to rivalry,
and envy, judging, and condemning rather than to the works of mercy? The
easy answer, of course, is original sin. We do not know how to will what
we really want and avoid what we really do not want. Paul, speaking of our
knowledge of God, says that we “see indistinctly (en ainigmati), as in a mir-
ror” (I Cor. 13:12). Ainigma in Greek means a riddle or an indistinct image.
Not only do we see God indistinctly, but we know ourselves and others en
ainigmati, confusedly. We have seen how, in the intense reflection that fol-
lowed his conversion, Augustine had become a “problem” for himself, “like
land which a farmer works only with difficulty and at the cost of much sweat”
(Conf. X, 16). Enigma, riddle, problem—these are all words that describe the
mystery of our human condition that we call original sin. But what is its inner
constitution? Can we find a structure that reveals its inner essence? Can we
perform a diagnostic of the dis-ease that characterizes our own lives and our
relations with one another? A patient might come to her doctor for an expla-
nation of her lack of energy. He might trace it to anemia, or depression, or
a tumor. And the remedy, if there is one, would be related to the underlying
condition. Can we do this with original sin?
What follows will be the first of several attempts to explore the pattern
of elements that make up original sin. We have seen that Augustine, in the
years before he developed his doctrine of original sin, became conscious of
the role of feelings in the operation of the will. It is one thing, he recognized,
to know intellectually what we should do, quite another to experience the
effective support necessary to actually choose the good our mind sets before
us. Augustine came to recognize a certain chaos in his feelings, a darkness,
a resistance to the known good. Assuming that Augustine is right, we might
expect that this same chaos in our feelings is what makes it hard to forgive
even though we might want to do so. To carry this line of thinking further, I
suggest we look at a suggestion made in the second chapter that the disobedi-
ence of Adam and Eve resulted in the loss of four intimacies crucial to human
living, intimacy with self, intimacy with God, intimacy with one another, and
intimacy with nature. The healing of these damaged intimacies opens us to
the possibility of compassion and forgiveness just as the treatment of some-
one’s anemia might restore their energy.
Restoration of Intimacy with Self

“Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and
they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves” (Gen. 3:7).
This account from Genesis symbolizes the loss of innocence and the beginning
of shame. This shame at nakedness, coming as an immediate consequence of
the first act of disobedience, reveals something profound about the constitu-
tion of sin. Shame, contempt for self, and even the feeling of condemnation,
174 Chapter Six
afflict human beings in a literally radical way; they are the roots of a luxuri-
ant growth of other evils that the subsequent chapters of Genesis describe in
detail. Modern writers have also explored this phenomenon of self-loathing.
The first chapter of this book on Paul Ricoeur’s treatment of the four myths
of the origin and end of evil ends with a quotation from Bernanos’ Diary of a
Country Priest: “It is easier than one thinks to hate oneself ” (Bernanos 1936,
252). This theme of self-hatred runs throughout the novel. The human being is
“a secret and cunning enemy to himself ” (Ibid., 92). Contrary to the common
opinion that peasants are simple people, Bernanos’ country priest, himself a
son of peasants, finds them “complicated.” “A peasant rarely loves himself ”
(Ibid., 23) and is indifferent to those who love him, not because he doubts their
sincerity but because he despises them for loving him. At their death, some old
men may let slip an anguished word that testifies to a hatred of self for which
there may be no forgiveness. It is a kind of despair.
If contempt for self is radical in human beings, then salvation needs to in-
volve a radical mending of the torn relationship. How does such healing take
place? Bernanos suggests a way, the grace of self-forgetfulness. Bernanos
contrasts forgetfulness of self with self-hatred. The work of grace, he says is
to help us forget ourselves, and “if all pride were dead in us, the grace of all
graces would be to love oneself humbly as any suffering member of Christ.”
To hate oneself is to be tied up in oneself. Self-hatred is a form of egotism.
Self-forgetfulness, on the other hand, opens up the possibility of compassion
toward oneself and toward others who suffer. And so salvation—perhaps the
first grace of salvation—is to restore intimacy with self, paradoxically in the
form of a self-forgetfulness that leads to compassion.
Related to a sense of shame and contempt for self, is a feeling of con-
demnation. Joseph Day, hero of Julian Green’s novel Moira, suffers from a
rigid Protestant background that leaves him at times with a crippling sense
of being condemned. Sexual desire is the problem. Joseph is consumed with
desire, yet believes it is evil. At a crucial point in the story, Joseph turns to his
memory of a verse from the first letter of John: “If your heart condemns you,
God is greater than your heart” (Green 1950, 185). John actually says, “Little
children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action. By this
we will know that we are from the truth and will reassure our hearts before
him whenever our hearts condemn us; for God is greater than our hearts, and
he knows everything” (1 Jn. 3:19–20). Joseph believed that these were God’s
personal words to him.
Finally, the alienation of the self from itself finds expression in the
enslaved (or “servile”) will and its attendant moral impotence to which I
have already referred (see above, 52, 71). The will no longer obeys its own
commands, does not do what it wants or avoid what it does not want. The
expression “enslaved will,” of course, has meant various things in the history
of Christian theology, including the utter depravity that Calvin attributed to
humans after “the fall.” Here it corresponds to what modern society calls ad-
diction. Gerald May suggests that to be human is to be addicted (May, 1988).
Restoration of Intimacy with God

Genesis shows Adam and Eve moving inexorably from shame at their naked-
ness to embarrassment before God. “They heard the sound of the Lord God
walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze, and the man and his
wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the
garden” (Gen. 3:8). The passage seems to imply that Adam and Eve would
normally have joined God in his evening stroll in the garden. But shame over
their nakedness has made such familiarity with God impossible. For Augus-
tine, intimacy with self and intimacy with God, are correlative. “Tu autem
eras interior intimo meo et superior summo meo,” he says, “You were more
inward to me than my inmost self and higher than my highest self.” (Augus-
tine 1950, Bk. III, Ch. 6, 118–21). Therefore, to be excluded from intimacy
with God is to be excluded from intimacy with myself, and exclusion from
the deepest part of myself excludes me from God.
In her diary, An Interrupted Life, Etty Hillesum, a young Jewish woman
from Holland who died in Auschwitz, explores this notion of intimacy with
God in a variety of ways, perhaps most strikingly through the image of
kneeling. “The story of the girl who gradually learned to kneel is something
I would love to write in the fullest possible way” (Hillesum 1983, 61). The
whole aim of what Christians call the spiritual life is to dispose oneself for
intimacy with God. Augustine’s whole intellectual and spiritual development
consisted in an increasing intimacy with himself that was at the same time an
intimacy with God.
The Restoration of Intimacy with Neighbor

The story of Adam and Eve suggests the loss of intimacy with the neighbor
by describing a distortion in the relation between Eve and her husband:
“Yet your urge shall be for your husband and he will be your master” (Gen.
3:16b). We can take this brief notice as a symbol of the tensions that exist
not only between husbands and wives but in all our human relationships.
These are precisely the tensions we noted in the Letter of James. They make
forgiveness a complicated matter. A circular relationship exists between in-
timacy with self, intimacy with God, and intimacy with the other. Insecurity
in myself tends toward troubled relations with others. Improved relations
with others can help heal my relation to myself. Without proper love of self
176 Chapter Six
and God, true love of neighbor is not possible. On the other hand, John uses
love of neighbor as a test of love of God. “Those who say, ‘I love God,’ and
hate their brothers and sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother
or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen”
(1 Jn. 4:20). John’s admonition extends, of course, not only to individual
brothers and sisters but to social groups. We have become conscious in
modern times of structures of alienation that embody patterns of hatred for
neighbor so deeply embedded that they go unnoticed by individuals caught
in them. Racial prejudice, gender bias, and class divisions are all examples.
Christianity teaches that healing of the relation with one’s neighbor and
healing of the distortions that come from violence, indifference, and greed,
is also necessary. This healing affects not only interpersonal relationships,
but relations with people outside our circle of intimates. When the priest and
Levite in the story of the Good Samaritan passed by the man who had been
beaten by robbers, they were practicing the art of evasion, walking with eyes
closed to the suffering of their neighbor. But the Samaritan, a foreigner, who
finally came to the man’s aid “was moved by compassion (esplangnisthe) at
the sight” (Lk. 10:33) and took care of him. Compassion opens us up not only
to forgiveness but to action on behalf of our neighbor. Compassion is really
another name for intimacy with the suffering neighbor. The ability to suffer-
with is the surest sign of friendship and true love in all its forms.
Intimacy with Nature

We can take God’s words to Adam after his disobedience, “Cursed be the
ground because of you! In toil shall you eat its yield all the days of your life”
(Gen. 3:17b), as symbolizing the human being’s difficult relation with nature.
It yields its fruits grudgingly, we exploit it and it punishes us. There is never
enough of it for our needs, we fight over it, and claim it for our exclusive use.
In the process, we lose our ability to enjoy it, to share it, to properly appreci-
ate it. Our age has dramatically revealed the limits of the human environment
to meet human needs and the tragic results of centuries of exploitation. Here,
too, we need healing before we can experience the compassion that leads to
forgiveness. The lust for land and its products is at the root of chronic ill-
nesses that afflict modern society, war, starvation, and poverty. Here compas-
sion takes the form of “suffering with” the land, the water, the air, grieving at
the degradation of the earth brought about by abuse of nature.
If we want to find the obstacles to the compassion that leads to forgiveness,
we have to look at the distortions in these four intimacies. Some examples
can help illuminate the complexity of the processes necessary for authentic
forgiveness.
SOME EXAMPLES
In his book, Wounds Not Healed by Time, Solomon Schimmel retells the story
of Eric Lomax, a British soldier captured by the Japanese during the Second
World War. For the next fifty years, Lomax harbored a hatred for Japan and
the Japanese, for his torturers and, in particular, for the translator/interpreter
who passed along to him in English the questions of his interrogators. Finally,
Lomax’s dreams of revenge ended when he was able, through a complicated
series of events, to meet the translator fifty years after the torture took place.
The translator had felt genuine guilt and had made extraordinary efforts to
atone for his part in these war crimes. When the two men finally met in Japan,
the deep grief of the translator took away all the feeling of anger on Lomax’
part and led him to a formal act of forgiveness. Basing his account on Lomax’s
own memoir, Schimmel describes the various stages Lomax went through on
his long journey to forgiveness. A key point in Lomax’ process was the real-
ization that the man whom he had identified in his memory with the tortures
had himself suffered in the aftermath and deserved Lomax’ compassion.
Sometimes forgiveness involves not just the parties injured but the commu-
nities of which they are a part. A striking example is the story of forgiveness
recounted in The National Catholic Reporter article of November 7, 1997,
“Parish Turns Murder to Grace.” The story began in June 1996, when a His-
panic boy shot and killed an Anglo youth on the border between Chicago and
Evanston, Illinois. In July 1997, a Cook County judge sentenced the 19-year-
old killer, Mario Ramos, to a sentence of forty years in prison without pos-
sibility of parole. The real drama of the story took place during the fifteen
months between these two dates. The Catholic parish of which Mario Ramos
and his parents were members responded to this tragedy by reaching out to
Mario in jail awaiting trial and to his parents who were overcome with shame.
A parishioner organized a group of Hispanic youth to address the divisions
and alienation that characterized them. Stephen Young, father of Andrew, the
murdered boy, also nineteen, said he was overcome with rage but vowed that
his son’s death would not be in vain. He carried out that vow by working for
gun control. Maureen, Andrew’s mother had fallen away from her Catholic
faith, but later experienced “an extraordinary encounter” with “some evange-
listic women,” and recommitted her life to Jesus.
Through the intervention of his pastor and members of the parish, Mario
Ramos became truly repentant and turned his life around. The story reaches
its dramatic high point when Mario, before his sentencing had taken place,
writes to Andrew’s parents. “Though I could spend the rest of my life in jail,
I don’t even come close to the hurt your family must be going through. I hope
that some way you may find it in your heart to forgive me.” At the same time
178 Chapter Six
Mario was composing his letter, Andrew’s mother, Maureen, was typing a
letter to him. “You don’t know me, though I suspect you have heard of me,”
she opens, “I am Maureen, Andrew’s mom. I’ve thought of you and prayed
for you many times since you shot and killed my son.” After telling about her
own religious conversion, she ends her letter with these words: “You’ve prob-
ably heard Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life. I’m writing to tell you IT’S
TRUE. He desires to lead you on a new adventure. If He is for you, who can
be against you? Well, I don’t know whether you’d ever feel up to asking my
forgiveness for killing my son, so I’ll go first. . . . “I FORGIVE YOU.” “The
two letters crossed in the mail,” says the author of the article. This simultane-
ous apology and forgiveness, so rare in an era accustomed to angry cries for
retribution, struck the parish and the entire community” (McClory 1997).
This account illustrates some key points regarding forgiveness. It shows
first that forgiveness is a process, a process that can involve a whole com-
munity as well as the individuals immediately involved. The individual act of
murder was rooted in the alienation of the Hispanic community, particularly
its youth, from meaningful involvement in the life of their city. Both the
Anglo and the Hispanic communities in the parish were willing to face the
deeper implications of what had happened and accept their complicity in the
situation that gave rise to the murder. Maureen Young, mother of the mur-
dered youth, because of her own religious conversion to Christ, was able to
draw on the resources of her faith to offer forgiveness even before she had re-
ceived an apology. Forgiveness arose in her as a form of gratitude for her own
healing by Christ. Mario’s repentance was a factor too, even though Maureen
did not know that he had written a letter asking for forgiveness. The justice
system also did its work. Given the transformation that had taken place in
Mario, the punishment seemed harsh to his friends, but all of them accepted
the sentence and set their sights toward creating a supportive network that
would help him withstand the corrupting influence of prison life.
MOTIVES FOR FORGIVING
The article, “Parish Turns Murder into Grace,” with its description of process
of forgiving, suggests another important category, motives for forgiveness.
Why should we forgive? Why should a family ever forgive the father who
has abandoned its members, especially if he has never repented? Why should
the black majority of South Africa forgive the atrocities that were committed
against them by the white minority for so many years? Nelson Mandela and
Desmond Tutu have provided an eloquent answer to this question—there is
no future without forgiveness. This will not satisfy everyone. Is it meaning-
ful to speak of Jews “forgiving” the horrors of the Holocaust, or as many

Jews prefer to call it “The Shoah?” The question here is what motivates
forgiveness. We have already considered compassion as a key motivator. But
compassion needs its motives too. What might move people to compassion?
One of those motives, of course, is the repentance of the injurer. Nothing
moves more powerfully toward forgiveness than a sincere apology from the
one who has done the injury. A central claim of this book has been that the
Christian doctrine of original sin is itself a significant motive for forgiveness.
By original sin I mean the condition, shared by all human beings, of the weak-
ness and confusion that lead us to evil deeds. We have already seen Augus-
tine’s recognition of a universal weakness of the human will as a mitigating
factor in an individual’s responsibility for sin. No one, says the doctrine of
original sin, escapes the infection and this should make us more understand-
ing of sin. Christian theology can never be satisfied with the division of hu-
man beings into the good and the bad. Everyone, both the worst criminals and
the most holy people, are good and bad at the same time.
The prayers of the psalmist, “I do not sit with the worthless, nor do I con-
sort with hypocrites; I hate the company of evil doers, and will not sit with
the wicked” (Ps. 26:4–5) or from another psalm, “Do not drag me away with
the wicked, with those who are workers of evil, who speak peace with their
neighbors, while mischief is in their hearts” (Ps. 28:3), do not fit easily into
Christian theology. Jesus offers a very different view of the attitude that justi-
fies in the sight of God. The parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector is
an instance. The Pharisee offers this prayer: “God, I thank you that I am not
like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector.”
The tax collector, on the other hand, standing far off and not even looking up
to heaven, says simply, “God, be merciful to me a sinner” (Lk. 18:11–13).
Jesus responds that the tax collector rather than the other went home justified.
Contemporary Christian theology still remembers this admonition. Desmond
Tutu, the former Anglican Archbishop of Capetown, insists that the perpetra-
tors of Apartheid were not utterly different from their victims and warned the
victims against considering themselves morally superior.
Etty Hillesum expressed this truth of solidarity in evil with startling clar-
ity. Speaking with her friend Klaas, Etty insists on the need to look at our
own sin rather than the sin of others: “And I repeat with the same old pas-
sion, although I am gradually beginning to think that I am being tiresome,
‘It is the only thing we can do, Klaas, I see no alternative, each of us must
turn inward and destroy in himself all that he thinks he ought to destroy in
others: (Hillesum 1996, 212). And Klaas responds “But that—that is noth-
ing but Christianity!” “And I,” says Etty, “amused by your confusion, retort
quite coolly, ‘Christianity, and why ever not?’” (Ibid.). What make Etty’s
180 Chapter Six
insistence on this point particularly striking is that the evil-in-others that con-
fronted her as she wrote this advice was the genocidal program of the Nazis.
Another theological motive for forgiveness is the conviction that God can
bring good out of evil. The fundamental instance of this for Christians, is of
course, their belief that God brought the good of redemption out of the evil
of the crucifixion. The suffering servant songs of the Prophet Isaiah express
this same belief within the Hebrew tradition. In fact, one of the images the
New Testament writers apply to Jesus is that of the suffering servant. Isaiah
portrays God as saying to his Servant, “It is too light a thing that you should
be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the survivors of
Israel; I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to
the ends of the earth” (Isa. 49:6). A clear example of this theological motive
for forgiveness occurs in the story of Joseph, to which I have referred. Joseph
recognized his brothers’ sin for what it was, but found the strength to set it
aside through his conviction that God used their sin and his own suffering to
fulfill the divine promises made to Abraham and his descendants that they
would be a lasting people.
In his last novel, Deep River, the Japanese novelist, Shusako Endo, has his
hero affirm that God has even used his sin to draw him closer to God. Speak-
ing to the unbelieving woman, Mitsuko, who had many years earlier tempted
him to have sex with her in order to destroy his faith, then rejected him, Otsu
says “After everything that happened to me I began to think that God, like a
magician, can turn any situation to the best advantage. Even our weaknesses
and our sins” (Endo 1994, 63).
The ultimate motive for forgiveness in Christian theology is the conviction
that God has forgiven us when we were sinners and that God loves both the
good and the bad. If deeply experienced in a personal way, this conviction
gives rise to gratitude. God does not love us because we are good; we are
good because God loves us. In fact, we are because God loves us. God’s love
first brought us into existence and when we sinned, it offered us the gift of
forgiveness. Christian scripture is clear on this point. First Paul, in his Letter
to the Romans:
For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. In-
deed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good
person someone might actually dare to die. But God proves his love for us in
that while we still were sinners Christ died for us. Much more surely then, now
that we have been justified by his blood, will we be saved through him from the
wrath of God (Rom. 5:6–9).
The First Letter of John puts it this way: “In this is love, not that we loved
God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our
sins. Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one an-
other” (1 Jn. 4:10–11). In Luke’s sermon on the plain, Jesus clearly states that
we should not just love those who love us, but should love even sinners. “. . .
Love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your re-
ward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to
the ungrateful and the wicked. Be merciful as your Father is merciful. Forgive
and you will be forgiven; give, and it will be given to you” (Lk. 6:35–38a).
The knowledge that justice has been done can also open the way to for-
giveness, though not necessarily. Sometimes seeing a criminal punished can
barely satisfy the desire for vengeance of the victim’s family. But it may also
happen that the rendering of justice can fulfill a legitimate desire of injured
persons to see their cause vindicated and thus free them for compassion and
forgiveness. This may well have been the case in the story “Parish Turns
Murder to Grace.” Justice and mercy are dialectically related. The Hebrew
Testament clearly shows the connection between justice and mercy in God.
Neither substitutes for the other, but both are connected. To substitute for-
giveness for justice can be a terrible mistake. Solomon Schimmel tells the
story of a nun brutally raped who refused to turn in her assailant, reasoning
that her forgiveness would have more effect on him than the process of crimi-
nal justice. This seems misguided. Aside from the tension her forgiveness
would leave in her own consciousness, there is the issue of protecting society
from a dangerous person. Yet justice does not remove the need for forgive-
ness. Ultimately, only God knows how to perfectly balance justice and mercy
but the reconciliation of humans among themselves demands that they try to
achieve some kind of equilibrium.
The Difference between the Hebrew Bible and

New Testament with Respect to Forgiveness
Since our study has been based on both the Hebrew and New Testament
treatments of compassion and forgiveness, it seems appropriate to conclude
this chapter with a comparison of their teachings on this subject. Christianity
differs from Judaism in three principal ways. First, the Christian God, while
still One, like the God of Israel, is also Three, Father, Son, and Spirit. Sec-
ond, the Father out of compassion for his people, sends his Son to become
a human being. One can see the difference of the two testaments through a
comparison of the parable of the unproductive vineyard found first in Isaiah
and repeated in Matthew. To the owner’s frustrated “what more was there
for me to do for my vineyard that I had not done?” of Isaiah’s version (Isa.
5:4), Matthew’s version responds: “Finally, he sent his son to them, thinking,
‘They will respect my son’” (Matt. 21:37). The result was no more positive
182 Chapter Six
in Matthew’s version, for they killed the son, but the degree of commitment
on the part of the owner was greater. The owner of the vineyard, in both cases
God, submits in Matthew’s version to violence and death through the death of
his son who is also God. The degree of God’s involvement, even to the point
of a humiliating death, is so enormous that even Christians refer to it as the
scandal of the Cross.
The third difference between Christianity and Judaism lies in Christian-
ity’s emphasis on forgiveness. Dennis Praeger, who describes himself as
“a religious Jew who has come to admire many Christians and appreciate
Christianity . . . as a holy path to God for non Jews,” says that weekly con-
versations with Christians over a decade have convinced him that “aside from
the divinity of Jesus, the greatest—and even more important—difference
between Judaism and Christianity . . . is in their different understanding of
forgiveness and, ultimately, how to react to evil” (Wiesenthal 1997, 216).
Praeger separates the two differences, but they are connected. In Jesus, the
divinity is subject to evil, not sovereign over it. He is the Suffering Servant
and so can teach about forgiveness both by his example and by his words.
By his own forbearance, by his willingness to suffer evil and unwillingness
ever to inflict it—think of Jesus’ refusal to resort to violence during his Pas-
sion (Matt. 26:51–54)—Jesus reveals the primacy of forgiveness. But he also
instructs his disciples that they should forgive one another, not seven times,
but seventy times seven times (Matt. 18).
While recognizing a basic truth in Praeger’s view, it would be a mistake to
exaggerate the difference between Christianity and Judaism with respect to
forgiveness. The Hebrew Scripture may not have the same universal teach-
ing about forgiveness of the neighbor under all circumstances, even for an
unrepentant offender—admittedly an important difference—but it does pres-
ent a sublime vision of divine and human compassion. The Law of Moses
celebrates the importance of compassion; toward aliens, widows, orphans, in
lending money to the poor, in taking the neighbor’s cloak (Exod. 22:20–26),
in the provisions for the poor in the Jubilee Year (Lev. 25), and in the pro-
hibition against reaping the fields to the very edge or picking the vineyard
bare, or picking up the grapes that have fallen so as to leave something for the
poor (Lev. 19:9–10). Though compassion is not yet forgiveness, it is, as we
have seen, a crucial mediator between sin and forgiveness. Israel’s Scripture
makes atonement for one’s sins and the sins of one’s household central to
Israel’s faith (Lev. 16:11) and urges God’s people to love their neighbor as
themselves (Lev. 19:18). And though sorrow for our own sins is not the same
as forgiving sins committed against us, repentance even in Christianity is a
normal requirement for forgiveness. And even if loving one’s neighbor as
one’s self does not specify what one is to do in the face of injury, this equat-
ing of self-love and love for the other, lies at the foundation of forgiveness.
And the Hebrew Scripture does contain examples of forgiveness of injuries
done, even in the absence of repentance from the offender. Esau forgives his
younger twin Jacob for stealing the birthright that belongs to Esau as well
as his father’s blessing without any expression of sorrow from Jacob. Esau
seems to have forgotten these injuries when he meets Jacob returning from
the home of their uncle Laban and embraces him warmly (Gen. 33:4), a form
of forgiveness. Joseph forgives his brothers who sold him to some passing
merchants as an alternative to killing him (Gen. 45:4–8) even in the absence
of any real repentance on their part. We will return to this example and par-
ticularly to the motive for Joseph’s forgiveness. In the First book of Samuel,
Abigail takes on herself the blame for the rude behavior of her husband,
Nabal, and David grants it (1 Sam. 25:25–35). And we can even find in Juda-
ism the general admonition to forgive even if the offender does not repent. In
these cases, the offended person should “forgive him from the heart and leave
vengeance to God” (T. Gad 6:7—cited in Gary Shogren, 1992, 837, col. 2).
But we must still recognize that Jesus’ teaching to forgive even one’s enemies
constitutes a distinguishing feature of Christianity.
The distinctiveness of Jesus’ teaching about forgiveness is further under-
lined if we consider that Greek culture, for all its ethical greatness, did not ar-
rive at a doctrine of forgiveness. An extended treatment of forgiveness in the
poetry, drama, and philosophy of ancient Greece is beyond our scope but it is
useful to note that Hellenism never developed a comprehensive and consis-
tent teaching about forgiveness of the neighbor. The Judaic and Greek tradi-
tions, of course, differ radically. In Judaism, God was one and compassionate,
in Greek literature the gods were multiple, caught up in rivalry, jealous of
one another and human beings as well, and therefore no models for forgive-
ness. “Greek gods do not command us to forgive . . . they themselves are not
conspicuously forgiving” (Dover 1991, 178). Christianity is obviously closer
to the Jewish tradition than the Greek. The Christian teaching that human be-
ings should forgive one another arises out of and completes Israel’s teaching
about the compassion of God and the compassion required of God’s people.
CONCLUSION: DEFINING FORGIVENESS
Wide reading in the literature of forgiveness makes one wonder if we all

define forgiveness in the same way. A touching article by the Holocaust
survivor, Elie Wiesel, illustrates the point. In a New York Times op-ed piece
184 Chapter Six
of October 2, 1997, entitled “A Prayer for the Days of Awe,” Wiesel states
his intention to “make up” with God after being angry for more than fifty
years. Wiesel makes clear that his problem is not with God, but with those
who perpetrated the crimes. Much healing has taken place in the hearts of the
survivors. He says of them:
They learned to build on ruins. Family life was recreated. Children were born,
friendships struck. They learned to have faith in their surroundings, even in their
fellow men and women. Gratitude has replaced bitterness in their hearts. No one
is as capable of thankfulness as they are. Thankful to anyone willing to hear
their tales and become their ally in the battle against apathy and forgetfulness.
For them every moment is grace.
This description seems to correspond to a first level of forgiveness, “laying

down the burden” of injuries experienced so that they no longer prevent a
person from living fully. Solomon Schimmel calls this “internal forgive-
ness.” But Wiesel clearly does not see this renewal of life as a stage on the
way to forgiveness. Immediately after his ringing affirmation that for the
survivors “every moment is grace,” he affirms just as clearly, “Oh, they do
not forgive the killers and their accomplices, nor should they. Nor should
you, Master of the Universe.” What does Wiesel mean by forgiving? Does
he mean to forget, to excuse, to justify? If he does, then one must agree no
one should forgive the Nazis. But it may mean something else. Wiesel did
not, as far as we know, have the experience described by Eric Lomax of
meeting one of the people responsible for his suffering and finding him full
of repentance and deep wounds of regret, vigorous in making amends as far
as he could. Would he have forgiven in that case? It is reasonable to suspect
he might have. At least many Jewish theologians would say he should. That
could do much, as we saw in the case of Eric Lomax, to open the heart to
forgiveness and justify it. But what if repentance on the part of the perpetra-
tors does not take place?
This might also be the place where Jewish and Christian theologies of
forgiveness differ. Wiesel’s unwillingness to forgive is not just a case of per-
sonal inability. It is a theological position. In Christian theology, forgiveness
has a certain absolute value independent of justice and independent of repen-
tance. I say “a certain absolute value” because justice retains its importance
in Christianity as does repentance. To substitute forgiveness for justice when
justice is possible is a perversion of forgiveness. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lu-
theran theologian who died in Flossenberg prison for opposing Hitler, might
call it “cheap forgiveness,” just as he talked about “cheap grace.” It would
be cheap because it tried to do away with the hard work of building a just
society where people can live together in peace. Gregory Jones, in his book,
Embodying Forgiveness, talks about Bonhoeffer’s notion of cheap grace,

commenting that “Cheap grace denies any real need for deliverance from sin
since it justifies the sin instead of the sinner” (Jones 1995, 13).
But forgiveness can be costly, even when justice cannot be achieved by
the internal mastery it demands on the part of the one who forgives. And,
admittedly, forgiving when repentance has not taken place, is an incomplete
form of forgiveness. It does not affect the person who has done the injury. It
does not arrive at reconciliation. But the change of heart and the substitution
of good will for ill will still constitute real forgiveness. A person can, in the
Christian theological tradition, stand in the truth, recognizing evil for what it
is, and still forgive without illusion, without false expectations. Such forgive-
ness is profoundly liberating.
And still, the more we pursue the topic of forgiveness in Christianity,
the more evident it becomes how deeply rooted Christian teaching is in the
Hebrew tradition, in spite of Dennis Prager’s insistence that Christianity and
Judaism differ radically in their interpretations of the obligation to forgive
(Wiesenthal 1998, 225 ff). It should be evident, from what has been said
above, the extent to which the two traditions are intertwined with respect to
their teaching on forgiveness. But the differences are real, too. And those
differences, expressed especially in contemporary authors, have helped us
define more clearly what is distinctive in the Christian view of forgiveness.
Perhaps that difference can be stated most simply by saying that in Christian-
ity one finds an impulsion toward forgiveness, almost a reckless abandon, a
preference to err on the side of forgiving rather than risk a hardening of the
heart. And the deepest motive for that propensity is God’s own prodigality
in forgiving, illustrated in the New Testament through Luke’s story of the
Prodigal Son (really the prodigal father). Earlier in his Gospel, Luke portrays
Jesus as promising his followers that if they forgive their enemies and do
good to those who persecute them they will be “children of the Most High; for
he is kind to the ungrateful and the selfish. Be merciful, even as your Father
is merciful” (Lk. 6:35–36). Yet even here we find ourselves returning to the
God of the Hebrew Bible, whom the reluctant prophet Jonah fled because he
was “a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast
love . . .” (Jon. 4:2).
NOTES
186 Chapter Six
2. I will be following the excellent study of Boyd Taylor Coolman, “Hugh of St.
Victor on ‘Jesus Wept’: Compassion as Ideal Humanitas,” Theological Studies, vol
69, 2008, 528–557. Hugh’s Latin text is not, as far as I know, translated. Translations
for the Latin text are my own.
3. The word “piety” that would seem to be the most natural translation of pietas
is misleading in this context. Piety in English, and also sometimes in Latin, means
a relation of respect of a children to parents, of citizens to the state, or of believers
toward God. A pious person in English is one who demonstrates an attitude of devo-
tion to God. But the Latin pietas can also mean compassion as it clearly does in this
treatise of Hugh of St. Victor.
Chapter Seven
René Girard
Original Sin as Covetousness
You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your
neighbor’s wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything
that belongs to your neighbor.
—Exodus, 20: 17, NRSV1
We have already considered what the inner structure of original sin might be.
I suggested in the chapter on forgiveness that the wounding of four intimacies
that define our relations to self, God, one another, and nature is one approach
to analyzing the malaise we call original sin. The distortion of these intima-
cies gives rise to a seemingly infinite proliferation of evil choices. Another
systematic distortion of our willing that seems to come out of our wounded
intimacies is covetousness. René Girard, probably best known for his 1972
work, Violence and the Sacred, has elaborated a theory on the origins of
religion in mimetic rivalry, the desire for what the others possess precisely
because they possess it. This is what the Bible calls covetousness. Girard sees
mimetic rivalry as equivalent to original sin. Mimetic violence, which arises
from mimetic rivalry, leads to using mechanism of the scapegoat. Girard
also argues that the way Greek mythology deals with this violence and its ef-
fects on society differs dramatically from the biblical treatment. This chapter
will follow Girard’s exploration of two texts, Sophocles’ Oedipus the King
and the biblical story of Joseph, to illustrate the difference between mythic
and biblical approaches to violence and then turn to his interpretation of the
crucifixion of Jesus. Finally, we will look at the theological significance of
Girard’s work, especially its relevance to the doctrine of original sin. A look
at the general lines of Girard’s thought will serve as background.
187
188 Chapter Seven
Though he claims that his studies are anthropological rather than theologi-
cal, Girard also admits at certain points that his analysis brings him to a point
where theology has to enter in to provide explanations not available through a
study of the human. For instance, to explain the turnabout of Jesus’ disciples
after the Resurrection when before the Resurrection they had been almost
completely overwhelmed by the violent contagion that led to Jesus’ death,
Girard admits that he must for the first time move beyond “a purely com-
monsensical and anthropological context” (Girard 2001, 189). We will come
back to the connection between methods of anthropology and theology. For
now, it is enough to say that the development of an anthropology of original
sin—this, in effect, is what Girard is doing—provides a useful foundation for
theological reflection.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF GIRARD’S THOUGHT
In a 1996 interview with James G. Williams, Girard speaks of “three great

moments in the process of my thinking and writing” (Williams 1996, 262).
The first of those moments was “mimetic desire and rivalry.” The second
was “the discovery of the scapegoat mechanism.” The third moment was, in
Girard’s words, “when I began to see the uniqueness of the Bible, especially
the Christian text, from the standpoint of the scapegoat theory” (Ibid., 262).
A word about each of these “moments” offers the necessary foundation for
understanding Girard’s comparison/contrast of Oedipus and the Story of
Joseph in Genesis and his analysis of the meaning of Gospel accounts of
Jesus’ Passion. An important clarification at this point will serve not only
to put Girard’s thought in its proper perspective but also to provide a help-
ful reminder of the place of a doctrine of original sin in the whole scheme
of Christian anthropology and theology. The issue is a proper understanding
of the term “desire.” Though Girard begins with the notion of desire, in par-
ticular mimetic desire, he is himself not completely satisfied with the phrase.
The word “desire,” he says, tends, because of Freud, to connote “the sexual
or erotic” (Williams 1996, 268). In his 1996 interview with James Williams,
Girard suggests some possible substitutes for the phrase, “mimetic desire”:
“I don’t know, perhaps ‘drive,’ or elan vital, or even Sartre’s ‘project.’ Al-
most any word that could express the dynamism, the dynamics of the entire
personality” (Ibid., 268). Cautious about using Sartre’s term too exclusively,
Girard also suggests that Kierkegaard’s idea of subjectivity as passionate
inwardness and choice might be helpful. “. . . Whatever the term,” he says,
“something bigger and other than ‘desire’ should be used” (Ibid., 268). The
important point here is that desire need not designate something negative. At
René Girard 189
the root of the human spirit is desire, longing for fullness of life, a dynamism
toward human realization. This distinction of a desire that lies at the heart of
being human from what has traditionally been called inordinate or disordered
desire, concupiscence, addictive attachment (May 1998, 3) is crucial for an
appreciation of the doctrine of original sin. Original sin does not name what
is deepest in the human being. The name for the deepest is original goodness;
it entails longing for God.
In spite of these qualifications, it is still the phrase “mimetic desire” that
Girard uses in his works as the foundational concept of his thought, even
after this 1996 interview with Williams. So we need to understand its mean-
ing. Human beings, according to Girard, are motivated less by the desire for
certain objects in themselves than by the desire for those objects precisely as
possessed by someone else. This is the “mimetic” half of the phrase “mimetic
desire.” According to Girard, we desire what the other has precisely because
the other has it. In itself, this desiring of what the other has and what the
other desires, especially if we understand mimetic desire as the fundamental
dynamism of the human spirit, is a good thing. We become human precisely
by imitating the qualities of persons who are our role models as human be-
ings, parents, teachers, and all those who offer examples of human realiza-
tion. By mimetic desire, the desire to mimic the achievements of others, we
learn language, civilized customs, morality and everything that makes up the
human world. Mimetic desire is paradoxically even the source of creativity.
We not only imitate the objects produced by our models, we also imitate their
creativity and, often enough, end up surpassing them in originality. Girard
gives several examples, the Germans vis-à-vis the English, the Americans
vis-à-vis Europe, Japan vis-à-vis the west (Girard 1994, 70–71). Mimetic
desire becomes problematic when we desire to have what the other has, but
cannot or will not give to us.
Girard’s interpretation of Freud’s famous Oedipus complex exemplifies
mimetic desire. Freud says that the son is sexually drawn to his mother. Gi-
rard says that the son desires his mother, not directly as an object, but only
through the mediation of the father whose wife she is. So it is a triangulated
desire. But, though the father can share his language and his virtues with his
son, he cannot share his wife in the way that the son wants her because that
belongs only to the father and cannot be given to the son. This desire for what
belongs to the other in such a way that it cannot be shared is the mimetic
desire that gives rise to rivalry, and ultimately, when it becomes epidemic in
society, to the “war of all against all.”
The Bible, both Hebrew and Christian Testaments, calls this covetousness.
Paul speaks of it in Romans. Girard cites the tenth commandment, which rec-
ognizes the destructiveness of mimetic desire precisely by forbidding it: “You
190 Chapter Seven
shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s
wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs
to your neighbor” (Exod. 20:17). Covetousness names the form of mimetic
desire that gives rise to violence. The sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth com-
mands name in particular and forbid the forms of violence that lie behind the
tenth commandment’s prohibition of covetousness. “You shall not murder.
You shall not commit adultery. You shall not steal. You shall not bear false
witness against your neighbor” (Exod. 13–16). We murder, steal, commit
adultery, and bear false witness because we covet. And, of course, these
five negative commandments follow on five commands about right worship,
honoring God’s name, respect for parents, and keeping holy the Sabbath.
Covetousness is both the originating sin that gives rise to other sins and the
originated sin that resides in us as a condition. This mimetic desire, when
it becomes generalized in society, gives rise to violent contagion, everyone
wanting what the other has and doing whatever they need to do to get it.
The Discovery of the Scapegoat Mechanism

The issue then is how to control the violent contagion that comes from gen-
eralized mimetic desire. When violence becomes generalized, giving rise to
the war of all against all, some mechanism must be found to resolve the crisis.
That mechanism is sacrifice, human or animal. Sacrifice can be made for al-
most any purpose, to induce rain, for instance, or bring fine weather (Girard
1977, 8). But there is, says Girard “a common denominator that determines
the efficacy of all sacrifices and that becomes increasingly apparent as the
institution grows in vigor. This common denominator is internal violence—
all the dissensions, rivalries, jealousies, and quarrels within the community
that the sacrifices are designed to suppress. The purpose of the sacrifice is
to restore harmony to the community, to reinforce the social fabric” (Ibid.).
As long as the sacrificial mechanism works, society remains at peace.
When the sacrificial mechanism breaks down and the sacrificing of ritual
victims no longer keeps violence at bay, the result is a sacrificial crisis. The
sacrificial crisis is resolved by the mechanism of scapegoating. Since the gen-
eralized violence threatens to destroy the social fabric, someone is designated
as uniquely responsible for the breakdown and killed or exiled, carrying away
with him or her the guilt of the whole society. The scapegoat can be an indi-
vidual or a group. Mythology is full of examples, the story of Oedipus being
one of them. So is modern history. The extermination of the Jews during the
Nazi regime is an example, as is the false accusation of Dreyfus in nineteenth
century France. Girard mentions Joan of Arc, regarded as a demon by the
English and a quasi-divine being by the French. The Church’s canonization of
René Girard 191
Joan “acknowledges another form of relationship to the supernatural which is

different from the demonized-divinized scapegoat” (Williams 1996, 263). It
is crucially important in Girard’s analysis that in mythology the scapegoat is
never seen as a scapegoat, never seen, that is, as someone arbitrarily chosen
to be sacrificed in order to restore calm in society. Mythology always presents
the scapegoat as actually guilty. We will see that as we look at the example
of Oedipus. In fact, the scapegoat mechanism always needs to be hidden
whether in mythology or in social life.
In mythology we find a second moment in the scapegoat mechanism; the
scapegoat, once sacrificed, becomes divinized because of the healing value
his death or exile has had for the community. So the scapegoat goes from
being the unique cause of violence in the community to being the savior who
restores peace. Since the scapegoat has saved society by being ejected from
it, he becomes a savior figure.
The Uniqueness of the Bible with Respect to Violence

The final “moment” in Girard’s intellectual development was his recogni-
tion of the uniqueness of the Bible with respect to the scapegoat mechanism.
Whereas mythology disguises the scapegoat mechanism, the Bible brings it
to light and shows the scapegoat for what he or she is, someone arbitrarily
accused and loaded with guilt in order to draw off the infection that the com-
munity is experiencing. We will see this difference between mythology and
the Bible illustrated in the stories of Oedipus and Joseph. Girard’s thought
in this respect also allows him to interpret the sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross
in a way that rescues it from certain Christian interpretations that transform
it into yet another example of the scapegoat mechanism. Girard claims to be
searching “for the anthropology of the Cross, which turns out to rehabilitate
orthodox theology” (Williams 1996, 288). We will return to Girard’s treat-
ment of the Passion of Jesus in considering the theological implications of his
thought. Now we turn to Girard’s treatment of the myth of Oedipus and the
biblical story of Joseph as illustrations of his theory concerning the difference
between mythical and biblical treatments of violence.
Perhaps it is already obvious to readers that Girard’s approach to myth
differs significantly from Ricoeur’s. We are dealing with a difference not a
contradiction. Ricoeur, as we have seen, in an attempt to recover the truth of
the Adamic Myth, contrasts mythical narration with historical. Myth deals
not with events that happened in a particular times and places that we can
coordinate with our historical chronology and the geography of our globe.
For Ricoeur, myth uses symbols to reveal meaning. Ricoeur regards myth in a
positive light. The truth of myth is just as true as the truth of history. In some
192 Chapter Seven
ways it is more true, because it deals with meaning and not just facts. And of
course myth and history overlap in such a way that it is sometimes difficult
to distinguish them. That is the task of historians. Without ever denying the
point of Ricoeur’s comparison of history and myth, Girard takes a different
approach. For him, myth serves as a way of disguising the truth of mimetic
rivalry by disguising the scapegoat mechanism as a justifiable punishment of
persons seen as responsible for the evils afflicting their societies. In reality,
these persons, no more guilty than anyone else, are arbitrarily selected as
victims and punished in order to restore harmony in society. Our examples
will illustrate how it works.
OEDIPUS THE KING AND JOSEPH
Oedipus the King

Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, as a tragic treatment of an earlier myth, is
already a transformation of that myth. The myth on which the tragedy is
built tells the story of how the king and queen of Thebes, learning through
an oracle that their infant son is fated to kill his father and marry his mother,
expose him to die on a mountain top. But their scheme is frustrated without
their knowledge when a shepherd finds the baby and gives him to another
shepherd who takes him to the home of the King and Queen of Corinth where
Oedipus grows up thinking that he is their natural son. When Oedipus grows
up, learning from the oracle that he will kill his father and marry his mother,
he flees his home in Corinth. On the road, he meets a man with a retinue who
prevents him from passing. Enraged, Oedipus kills the man who is actually
his father though he does not know it. As Oedipus is approaching Thebes,
he hears of the riddle of the Sphinx, solves it, and, as his prize, receives the
reward of marrying the widowed queen of Thebes, his mother. All of these
events have already taken place before the action of Sophocles’ play. The
play begins in the midst of a plague afflicting the city of Thebes. Oedipus
promises to find the cause and sends to the oracle to find out how to proceed.
Sophocles’ tragedy, built on this myth, tells of how the adult Oedipus, now
king of Thebes, comes to find out that he is the guilty party causing the plague
infecting his kingdom, guilty not only of having killed his father but also of
marrying his mother. The story of the myth and the story of the tragedy are
different but intertwined narratives. There is in fact a tension between the in-
ner logic of the myth and the inner logic of the tragedy. According to Girard,
Sophocles’ tragic interpretation of the Oedipus myth represents “a progress in
the direction of mythical dismantling” (Girard 1977, 84). But it is a disman-
René Girard 193
tling that never, according to Girard, fully exposes the scapegoat mechanism
disguised by the myth.
Let us explore a little further the tension between the tragedy and the myth.
The myth presents Oedipus as uniquely guilty of the terrible crimes of patri-
cide and incest. True, Oedipus has been predestined to these violations and
in that sense we might think of him as innocent. But, according to the myth,
he is the cause of the city’s plague. What never appears in the myth is any
suggestion that Oedipus might have been a scapegoat, no guiltier than anyone
else, who has been arbitrarily designated as a substitute victim whose death
will rid the community of the violence of all against all. This is the logic of
the myth. It disguises the scapegoat mechanism. The logic of the tragedy,
says Girard, introduces a dismantling tension that moves in the direction of
exposing the hidden logic of the myth. It goes in the direction of exposing,
without actually achieving the exposure toward which it tends.
What does the tragedy reveal that the myth conceals? This is the crucial
point of Girard’s analysis. Sophocles, through the dialectic of discovery that
is the subject of his tragedy, reveals the generalized violence infecting the so-
cial fabric, a generalized violence that lies hidden in the myth. That violence
emerges in the exchanges between Tiresias and Oedipus and between Creon
and Oedipus. Sophocles’ story also shows a certain reciprocity between two
manifestations of violence: on one side, the murderous intent of Laius, Oedi-
pus’ father, in exposing his son to death on a mountain top as well as Laius’
violent thrusting aside of the stranger—who is actually his son—at the cross-
roads and, on the other side, the act of murder committed by Oedipus against
the person who has treated him so rudely, a person who is actually his father.
Both men are guilty of violence.
An important aspect of the violence is the destroying of distinctions es-
sential for the social order; the characters in Sophocles’ Oedipus mutually
violate the distinctions, among them: the distinction between the seer and or-
dinary citizens, between the king and his subjects, between a husband and his
brother-in-law. Oedipus disrespects the seer Tiresias and hurls insults at him;
Tiresias responds with rage at Oedipus the King; Oedipus treats his bother-
in-law with suspicious contempt, and Creon reciprocates with angry words.
This violating of established differences is the heart of the sacrificial crisis
which can be defined as “a crisis of distinctions—that is a crisis affecting the
cultural order” (Girard 1977, 49). These distinctions are for Girard essential
for the cultural order which is “nothing more than a regulated system of
distinctions in which the differences among individuals are used to establish
their ‘identity’” (Ibid.).
Thus, a close look at Sophocles’ tragedy makes it clear that Oedipus is not
the only one guilty of violence. But his is the only violence that is punished
194 Chapter Seven
and we are left at the end of the play with the conviction that Oedipus got
what he deserved and the others are vindicated. In other words, Sophocles
does not push the indications of generalized violence evident in his play to
their logical conclusion, namely that Oedipus is no guiltier than anyone else,
that, in fact the plague under which the city is suffering is not just physical
disease, but a breakdown of culture, a breakdown to which all the key players
contribute. The crucial point here for our purpose is that the myth hides the
fact of the epidemic quality of violence in society and designates one charac-
ter alone, the scapegoat, as uniquely guilty.
The Story of Joseph

A look at the biblical story of Joseph reveals how differently the Bible ap-
proaches the scapegoat mechanism. In a 1985 essay, “The Myth of Oedipus,
the Truth of Joseph,” Girard compares and contrasts the two stories. He is at
pains to note similarities and differences. The stories are similar in that “Both
heroes were rejected by their families, Oedipus by his parents, Joseph by his
brothers” (Girard 2004, 107). Both were cast out of the community to which
they belonged by birth and the community into which they had been adopted.
Oedipus and Joseph both became “highly successful immigrants” (Ibid.)
through their skill in interpreting riddles. Oedipus saved the people of Thebes
from the plague and became their leader by solving the riddle of the Sphinx.
Joseph interpreted Pharaoh’s dream and became the leader of the Egyptians, a
position that enabled him to save both Egyptians and Israelites from the disas-
ter of famine. Though Joseph, unlike Oedipus, never committed a crime, his
brush with seduction at the hands of Potiphar’s wife describes a situation that,
for Girard, at least invokes comparison with Oedipus’ crime of incest. Even
though Joseph rebuffs the advances of his Egyptian master’s wife, he ends
up in jail because Potiphar believes his wife’s false accusations rather than
Joseph’s denial. So both Joseph and Oedipus more than once undergo a kind
of expulsion, once from their native land, once from their country of adoption.
Having set out the points of comparison, Girard poses a simple question
whose answer leads to a clear statement of the difference between the two
stories: “Do the communities to which Oedipus and Joseph belong act justly
when they expel these heroes from their midst” (Ibid., 108)? The question
never really comes up in the tragedy of Oedipus because the answer, com-
ing from the mythical account on which the tragedy rests, is always taken
for granted; yes, the community is justified. It is equally clear in the story of
Joseph that the hero is unjustly punished. For Girard the difference is crucial.
Though both stories might be considered mythical in that they do not narrate
historically verifiable facts, both are not mythical in terms of their ethical
René Girard 195
content. The ethical content of the myth of Oedipus is the presumption of a

unique burden of guilt on the hero’s part. The ethical content of the biblical
story, whether historical or fictional, is the unjust suffering of the hero. Bas-
ing his categories on this ethical difference, Girard distinguishes between
“mythical” and “biblical” stories. Girard finds in the story of Joseph a de-
liberate critique of myth (Girard 2001, 112). The story not only manifests
the dynamic of persecution against the hero but, at the end, presents the only
response capable of stopping the spiral of violence, Joseph’s pardon of his
brothers. That pardon, as we have seen, comes about not because the brothers
deserved it, but because Joseph saw the redemptive hand of God at work in
their evil deed: “But now do not be distressed, and do not reproach yourselves
for having sold me here. It was really for the sake of saving lives that God
sent me here ahead of you” (Gen. 45:5). Mimetic rivalry and scapegoating
work against forgiveness; they are its opposite. The scapegoat temporarily
relieves the tension cause by generalized violence in society but ultimately
gives rise to a cycle of violence that never ends. Forgiveness heals mimetic
rivalry at its root.
One might ask about the significance of this difference between mythical
and biblical accounts. Girard’s answer is resoundingly clear:
Far from being minor, the divergence of the biblical account and the myth of
Oedipus, or whatever other myth, is so great that no greater difference could
exist. It’s the difference between a world where arbitrary violence triumphs
without being recognized and a world where this same violence is identified,
denounced, and finally forgiven. It’s the difference between truth and decep-
tion, both of them absolute. Either we succumb to the contagion of the mimetic
snowballing effect and fall into the lie of victimization, with mythology, or we
resist this contagion and rise into the truth of the innocent victim with the Bible
(Girard 2001, 114).
THE THEOLOGICAL RELEVANCE OF GIRARD’S THOUGHT
Girard’s Anthropology as Foundation for Theology

The difference between the way myth and scripture treat the scapegoat mecha-
nism is admirably illustrated by the stories of Oedipus and Joseph. More
central to Girard’s thought is the role of Christ’s Passion as a reversal of the
tendency of myth to disguise society’s penchant for scapegoats. The examples
of Joseph and Jesus take Girard up to the realm of theology, if not into it. Gi-
rard is always respectful of the difference between anthropology and theology,
but he also claims that his anthropological approach offers something valuable
196 Chapter Seven
to theology. While acknowledging that what makes Jesus’ suffering unique

“is not the violence, but the fact that the victim is the Son of God, which is
certainly the main thing from the standpoint of our redemption” (Girard 2001,
43), Girard affirms at the same time that “if we neglect the anthropological
substructure of the Passion, we will miss the true theology of the Incarnation,
which makes little sense without this anthropological basis” (Ibid., 43–44).
Girard sees his thought as giving specific content to an idea of Simone Weil:
“She held that even before presenting a ‘theory of God,’ a theology, the Gos-
pels offer a ‘theory of man,’ an anthropology” (Ibid., 44). Girard summarizes:
“My research is only indirectly theological, moving as it does across the field
of a Gospel anthropology neglected by theologians. To increase its effective-
ness, I have pursued it as long as possible without postulating the reality of the
Christian God. No appeal to the supernatural should break the thread of the
anthropological analysis” (Girard 2001, 192–93).
But though Girard’s thought is mainly anthropological, his anthropology
leaves room for theology, even points to the theological and never presents
itself as a substitute for theological categories that are always breaking in to
the openings provided by his anthropology. We have already seen Girard’s
admission that to explain the disciples’ return to and faithful following of Je-
sus after their poor showing during the time of the Passion he had to move be-
yond “a purely commonsensical and anthropological context” (Girard 2001,
189). Other examples of theological categories appear in Girard’s work.
In his essay on Proust, for instance, that serves as an introduction to a work
he edited, Proust: A Collection of Critical Essays, referring to the conversion
experienced by the hero of Proust’s great novel, In Search of Lost Time, a
conversion described entirely in secular terms by Proust himself, Girard com-
ments that “The only possible analogy for the Proustian experience has been
noted by Georges Poulet, and it is that of Christian grace” (Girard 1962, 11).
In answer to those who object to such an interpretation, claiming that Proust
himself “never made any effort to live according to Christian morality and
probably did not even believe in God,” Girard answers: “This biographical
fact does not, however, alter the aesthetic one, which is simply that, although
Proust was an agnostic, his masterpiece espouses the Christian structure of
redemption more perfectly than the carefully planned efforts of many consci-
entious Christian artists” (Ibid.). We now turn to some areas where Girard’s
anthropology has relevance for theology.
Mimetic Rivalry as Original Sin

We considered earlier in this chapter the important distinction between mi-
metic desire as a fundamental dynamism that, on the one hand, opens the way
René Girard 197
for basic human achievements, such as learning language and developing the
skills that belong to civilized life and includes a restless longing for the vi-
sion of God, and, on the other hand, mimetic desire as distorted into mimetic
rivalry or covetousness, as Scripture calls it. Girard’s work is concerned prin-
cipally with the second kind of mimetic desire, the kind that leads to the war
of all against all and, ultimately, to the mechanism of scapegoating.
The question I raise here is how we are to understand the difference be-
tween these two kinds of mimetic desire, one positive and constructive, the
other divisive and destructive. To answer this question, we have to look more
closely at Girard’s characterization of mimetic rivalry. The key point here
is connected with Girard’s own conversion and with the conversion process
he came to recognize as necessary for the writing of a really great work of
literature. In responding to a question about his own conversion experience,
to which we will return, Girard admits that he began work on his first book,
Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, “very much in the pure demystification mode:
cynical, destructive, very much in the spirit of atheistic intellectuals of the
time” (Williams 1996, 283). He was engaged in “debunking.” The recogni-
tion of mimesis “is a great debunking tool because it deprives us moderns
of the one thing we think we still have left, our individual desire” (Ibid.,
283–84). Girard attributes to this debunking character of his first book the lin-
gering feeling on the part of some that his concept of mimesis is destructive.
At this point in his interview with Williams, Girard makes a cryptic state-
ment that he develops more fully in other places. “Yet I like to think that if
you take this notion [the concept of mimesis] as far as you possibly can, you
go through the ceiling, as it were, and discover what amounts to original sin”
(Ibid., 284). In other words, the difference between mimetic desire as ordered
to the human good and mimetic desire as destructive rivalry is another name
for the distortion of human nature traditionally called original sin. As we have
seen, original sin is the Christian conception of a shared guilt or, better still,
a solidarity in sin that can be traced back to the disobedience of Adam and
Eve described in chapter three of Genesis. Girard points out that the Hebrew
word translated as “covet” in the tenth commandment—“You shall not covet
your neighbor’s house,” etc. (Exod. 20:17)—simply means desire. The same
word, says Girard, “designates the desire of Eve for the prohibited fruit, the
desire leading to original sin” (Girard 2001, 7). Girard makes it clear he be-
lieves that this “desire” is universal: “The notion that the Decalogue devotes
its supreme commandment, the longest of all, to the prohibition of a marginal
desire reserved for a minority is hardly likely. The desire prohibited by the
tenth commandment must be the desire of all human beings—in other words,
simply desire as such” (Ibid., 8). Girard makes it clear that he is not referring
to the good desire that grounds human achievement, but to the desire that is
198 Chapter Seven
rivalry. “If individuals are naturally inclined to desire what their neighbors
possess, or to desire what their neighbors even simply desire, this means that
rivalry exists at the very heart of human social relationships” (Ibid., 8). And,
indeed, the text of Genesis 3 presents the serpent’s temptation of Eve as an
incitement to mimetic rivalry; “. . . your eyes will be opened and you will be
like gods who know what is good and what is bad.” And the scapegoating
mechanism follows. When God confronts Adam and Eve after they have both
eaten of the fruit, Adam shifts the blame to Eve, who, in turn shifts it to the
serpent.
We can easily recognize the scapegoat mechanism at work in others, catch-
ing them in the act of laying blame on others; it is not so easy to recognize it
at work in ourselves. Thus, the concept of mimetic desire itself can be falsi-
fied by finding in it something that affects others but does not affect me. This
possibility of self-deception regarding mimetic desire is based on the fact
that the phenomenon, in order to be effective, depends on remaining hidden.
The exposing of mimetic rivalry and the mechanism of scapegoating that ac-
companies it is also a disarming of these practices. The genius of the Bible,
especially the New Testament, is that, whereas myth disguises the scapegoat-
ing mechanism, the Bible exposes it for what it is.
Girard’s appeal to the theological notion of original sin complements his
anthropological analysis and subjects it to a more comprehensive interpreta-
tion. In another book length interview, Girard professes his belief that mi-
metic rivalry constitutes a significant component, un bon morceau, of original
sin. (Girard 1994, 54). His view of original sin and its function in society
occupies the center of Girard’s thought. Responding to the accusation made
against him that he is frenetique, because he has no illusions à la Rousseau
about the natural goodness of man, Girard says: “nothing teaches moderation
like the theory of original sin, which is always just the opposite of what its
critics say of it” (Girard 1994, 69). It is in fact belief in the natural goodness
of man, a belief always disappointed in the real world, that ends up in the
search for scapegoats (Ibid.).
Girard’s thought here might remind us of those earlier believers in the natu-
ral goodness of man whom we have considered before, Donatus and Pelagius,
both of whom fell into controversy with the great articulator of original sin,
Augustine of Hippo. As comforting as their theories seemed at first glance,
affirming as they did the capacity of humans to do whatever they knew to
be good and set out to do, both of these men turned out to be harsh critics of
human weakness. We have already considered Augustine’s theory of original
sin. It seems at first to be needlessly pessimistic, but turns out to be deeply
compassionate toward human weakness. Augustine can be compassionate
precisely because he knows the weakness that afflicts all humans. We have
René Girard 199
already seen Peter Brown’s contrast of Pelagius’ thought with Augustine’s.

To Pelagius’ claim that all sins are a form of pride, Augustine responds,
“Many sins are committed through pride, but not all happen proudly . . . they
happen so often by ignorance, by human weakness; many are committed by
men weeping and groaning in their distress” (Brown 2000, 350–351).
Anthropology of the Cross as Foundation

for Theology of the Cross
Just as Girard provides an anthropological foundation for the doctrine of origi-
nal sin, he offers an anthropology of the Cross. For some time, Girard resisted
the notion of taking Jesus as a scapegoat, but by the time of his interview with
James Williams he was willing to see Christ as a sacrificial victim (Williams
1996, 280). But Girard posits a difference between Jesus as scapegoat and
other scapegoats. He agrees that Jesus is a scapegoat for all, “except now in
reverse fashion, for theologically considered, the initiative comes from God
rather than simply from the human beings with their scapegoat mechanism”
(Ibid.). Girard clarifies what he means by citing Paul’s Second Letter to the
Corinthians: “For our sake [God] made him to be sin who did not know sin,
so that we might become the righteousness of God in him” (2 Cor. 5:21). This
position that Girard came to later in his life can only be understood by setting
it in the context of his earlier resistance to seeing Jesus as scapegoat. Taking
Jesus as a scapegoat for the sins of humans, as some Christian interpretations
suggest, places God the Father in the position of an instigator of the scapegoat
mechanism, like the Greek gods. For Girard, Jesus’ death is rather the unveil-
ing of the mechanism of scapegoating itself. The leaders of the people made
a scapegoat of Jesus, accusing him of trying to incite the crowds. God’s will
was that Jesus should submit to this process, allowing himself to be a victim
rather than victimize others. But the Father of Jesus did not initiate or approve
the process. “There is nothing in the Gospels,” says Girard, “to suggest that
God causes the mob to come together against Jesus. Violent contagion is
enough” (Girard 2001, 21). A recent work influenced by Girard expresses the
same idea: “Jesus’ crucifixion in Jerusalem was neither a historical accident
nor a death wish on Jesus’ part to fulfill God’s need for a victim-substitute to
discharge divine wrath” (Heim 2006, 101). God the Father is not the origina-
tor of the scapegoat mechanism or its ally; the God of the Bible always takes
the side of the victim.
Just as Paul had seen the obedience of Christ as the reversal of the disobe-
dience of Adam and Eve, Girard sees the Passion of Christ as the undoing of
the scapegoat mechanism. Jesus’ submission to violence as a way of over-
coming the cycles of violence played out in the human tendency to blame and
200 Chapter Seven
punish others for our own sins, shows how deeply rooted this original sin is
and how radical must be the redemptive action that frees us. Jesus’ teaching
is, of course, rich in warnings against the scapegoat mechanism—judge not
and you will not be judged, do not condemn and you will not be condemned,
forgive and you will be forgiven (Matt. 5:21–26, 38–48; Lk. 6). But Jesus’ ac-
tions are more powerful than his words. His willingness to be a victim rather
than to victimize, to suffer death rather than to inflict it, not only gives us an
example to follow but brings about our redemption.
The Resurrection
Girard’s references to the resurrection occur at each stage of his intellec-
tual development. In the first stage, presented above, Girard’s discovery of
mimetic rivalry through his analysis of literature, resurrection is identified
with a kind of conversion experience undergone by authors. In fact, conver-
sion and resurrection become virtually identical in Girard’s thought. James
Williams, during his interview with Girard published in 1996, responds to
Girard’s discussion of his own conversion that culminated at Easter time,
by a comment: “So resurrection and conversion are difficult to distinguish
. . .” To which Girard responds, “Conversion is Resurrection.” Though these
two topics are intimately connected in Girard’s thought, it seems to me more
convenient to develop them separately. We will come back to this aspect of
resurrection in the discussion on conversion below.
Girard identifies the second phase of his thought as the discovery of the
scapegoat mechanism. In this stage, resurrection consists of the transforma-
tion of the victim after the violence inflicted on him or her. It is a “return of
beneficence following the paroxysm of malevolence” (Girard 1977, 247).
One can see this in the case of Oedipus. Once exiled from the community,
he undergoes a restoration, described in Oedipus at Colonnus, that turns him
into a benevolent force. But it is not only the victim who is transformed. The
death of the victim is for the community. “The surrogate victim dies so that
the entire community, threatened by the same fate, can be reborn in a new or
renewed cultural order” (Ibid., 255). Of course, the renewal is never defini-
tive because the blaming of the sacrificial victim only disguises the general-
ized violence that exists in the community. Sophocles’ Antigone tells the
story of Oedipus’ children and his brother-in-law, now become king, in which
violence has again emerged. But at least we find a temporary resurrection that
restores peace for a time. Girard’s discussion of the ritual violence of sha-
manistic initiation in certain cultures also belongs to this second phase. The
shaman submits to ritual violence that imitates the violence done to mythic
characters important to the shaman’s culture. “Dismemberment [which the
René Girard 201
shaman undergoes ritually] is emblematic of triumph and resurrection. . . .”

The neophyte experiences the same metamorphosis as the mythical creatures
whose help he will later require in the exercise of his shamanistic functions”
(Ibid., 286).
Finally, in the third phase of his intellectual development—the recognition
of the difference between mythical and biblical treatments of violence—
Girard discusses the resurrection that is a central doctrine of Christian faith.
Two elements are important in Girard’s treatment, first the truth of the resur-
rection, then its meaning. For Girard, the resurrection of Jesus is an objective
fact, even if “it is visible or comprehensible only to those who are converted
or in the process of converting . . .” (Williams 1996, 280). Girard disagrees
with Bultmann and others who interpret the resurrection as an event that oc-
curred only in the subjective consciousness of the apostles (Ibid., 280). So,
for Girard, the “truth” of the resurrection lies in its objectivity as an event that
occurred outside the consciousness of those who witnessed it.
As he enters into the discussion of meaning of the resurrection, Girard
acknowledges that he is passing from anthropology to theology. “Until now I
have always been able to find plausible responses to the question posed in this
book [I See Satan Fall Like Lightning] within a purely commonsensical and
anthropological context. This time, however, it is impossible” (Girard 2001,
189). It is clear also, in spite of what Girard says here, that his interpretation
retains its anthropological significance even as it enters the realm of theology.
First, the resurrection has a cosmic significance. “It is the spectacular sign of
the entrance into the world of a power superior to violent contagion” (Girard
2001, 189). The resurrection is the only power able to break the power of
violent contagion. This is the first aspect of the meaning of the resurrection,
its cosmic power against victimization.
The second aspect of its meaning, this one not cosmic but occurring in the
smaller sphere of a particular community, appears in the effect of the resur-
rection on the disciples themselves. Very simply, it transformed them from
reluctant witnesses to the Passion into courageous preachers of the Gospel.
They had fallen asleep in the Garden of Gethsemane, Peter three times denied
any association with Jesus, and the others were barely visible during their
master’s ordeal. The Resurrection “enables [the disciples] to recognize what
they had not recognized before and to reproach themselves for their pathetic
flight in the preceding days” (Ibid., 189). The power that awakened the dis-
ciples was the Holy Spirit. “It would be false . . . to say that the disciples ‘re-
gained possession of themselves’: it is the Spirit of God that possesses them
and does not let them go” (Ibid.). Girard focuses on the examples of Peter
and Paul, both of whom went through a conversion experience that broke
their connection with the contagious force of violence and liberated them for
202 Chapter Seven
compassion and forgiveness. In these instances, Girard’s phrase, “conversion

is resurrection” has an obvious and literal meaning. We now turn to Girard’s
wider discussion of conversion, including his own. The connection with res-
urrection is always an aspect of conversion, metanoia, turning away from sin,
escaping from the hidden influence of mimetic rivalry.
The Necessity of Conversion for a

Correct Understanding of Mimetic Rivalry
Girard’s idea of conversion relates closely to his concept of original sin, for
mimetic rivalry in Girard’s thought is original sin. For Girard, essential notes
of original sin are its universality and its hiddenness. Original sin afflicts ev-
eryone. We cannot say that some people are guilty of mimetic rivalry and oth-
ers not. No one escapes the web. Yet, though this universality belongs to the
internal logic of mimetic rivalry, we do not want to acknowledge, even once
we have recognized the idea conceptually, that we too are guilty of putting it
into practice. It takes a conversion to awaken people to the reality of disor-
dered affection in themselves. Girard describes conversion as an awakening
to the realization that I am not a completely righteous person, as the Pharisee
of Luke’s Gospel thought he was, condemned to live with the unrighteous:
“God, I thank you that I am not like other people, thieves, rogues, adulterers,
or even like this tax collector” (Lk. 18:11). Rather, we should make our own
the prayer of the tax collector: “ . . . who would not even look up to heaven,
but was beating his breast and saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner’”
(Lk. 18:13).
Girard came to this insight, as a kind of intellectual conversion, when he
was working on the last chapter of his first book, Deceit, Desire, and the
Novel. He noticed that some great novelists moved from an earlier conception
of their work to a later one. The first draft was “an attempt at self-justification”
(Williams 1996, 184) either focusing on “a wicked hero, who is really the
writer’s scapegoat, his mimetic rival or “a knight in shining armor, with whom
the writer identifies” (Ibid., 284). This first project fails somehow and the
author realizes that “The self-justification he had intended in his distinction
between good and evil will not stand self-examination. The novelist comes to
realize that he has been the puppet of his own devil. He and his enemy are truly
indistinguishable” (Ibid., 284). This realization is “shattering to the vanity and
pride of the writer” (Ibid.). This experience, which Girard calls “an existential
downfall,” is often enough “written symbolically, as illness or death, in the
conclusion” (Ibid.).
Girard illustrates his point through Marcel Proust’s monumental novel, In
Search of Lost Time, which corresponds to what Girard calls above a “later
René Girard 203
conception” of his work. The “earlier conception” was Proust’s never finished
Jean Santeuil, in which the hero is an idealized figure exempt from the ills
that Proust finds present in the society of which he is writing. But, says Gi-
rard, “Jean Santeuil’s apparent health and rationality stem from Proust’s own
failure to perceive the irrational and magical elements of his own approach to
reality” (Girard 1962, 8). The later conception embodied in the seven-volume
novel recognized as Proust’s paramount achievement, In Search of Lost Time,
is expressed in the last volume of that work, Le Temps Retrouvé, in a kind of
mystical experience the hero undergoes. Following on a period of deep deso-
lation in which the narrator/hero of Proust’s work doubted not only his own
vocation as a writer, but even the whole project of literature itself, the hero
experiences a moment of enlightenment that completely restores his confi-
dence. In the passage that follows this “conversion” experience, Proust comes
to see the vanity of the social upper classes that he has been cultivating all
through his life up to this moment. In exposing the vanity of the aristocracy
and upwardly-mobile bourgeoisie, Proust is also exposing his own vanity
for having invested so much of his time with them. His “conversion” has a
double effect: it opens up for him the deepest source of his own inspiration
and, at the same time, reveals the mechanisms by which he has been escaping
the responsibility of living out of that inspiration.
Important to note is the fact that the last volume of Proust’s In Search of
Last Time, the volume that contains the definitive conversion experience—
other versions of this experience had occurred in earlier volumes—was writ-
ten before the volumes that precede it in the novel. Thus, the experience of
enlightenment described in Time Regained took place before the writing of
the novel as a whole. It seems clear that his deep sadness at the death of his
mother in 1905, three years before he began work on the work that estab-
lished him as a great writer, was part of the malaise out of which his conver-
sion drew him. Moreover, Proust was deeply discouraged that as he was near-
ing his fortieth birthday he had still not even begun to achieve his life-long
dream of becoming a great writer. This profound discouragement in Proust’s
own life provides the background for the despair followed by liberating hope
described in Time Regained.
Girard found similar experiences in the work of Dostoyevsky and Cer-
vantes’ Don Quixote. “And so,” he concludes, “the career of the great novelist
is dependent on a conversion, and even if it is not made completely explicit,
there are symbolic allusions to it at the end of the novel” (Williams 1996,
284). Such allusions are “at least implicitly religious” (Ibid.). As he wrote
the last chapter of this his first book, Girard realized that he himself was
undergoing the kind of experience he had found in the novels he was discuss-
ing. This “intellectual-literary conversion,” though enjoyable, did not lead to
204 Chapter Seven
any change in his life until he found out that he had some cancerous tissue,
which he had removed. So his intellectual conversion, which he called “a
very comfortable experience, self-indulgent even” (Ibid., 285), turned from
being an aesthetic experience to a religious one. He went to confession, had
his children baptized, and had his marriage blessed by a priest. Girard gave a
longer account of his conversion in his 1994 interviews with Michael Treguer
(Girard 1994).
Compassion and Forgiveness

Finally, we return to the theme that forms the leitmotiv of this book, the
connection of original sin with compassion and forgiveness. We return for a
moment to two examples Girard uses to make clear the essential difference of
the mythic and biblical approaches to violence: the stories of Oedipus and Jo-
seph. As we saw earlier in this chapter, the myth of Oedipus, and Sophocles’
tragedy based on it, conceal the injustice of punishment Oedipus undergoes.
The story of Joseph, on the other hand, makes the injustice clear from the
beginning, unmasking the scapegoat mechanism. The principal point at this
stage of our analysis is that Joseph’s story not only manifests the injustice of
Joseph’s treatment by his brothers, but reveals the redemptive moment that
arises from this manifestation. The difference between the mythical and bibli-
cal stories, says Girard, is a difference between worlds: “It’s the difference
between a world where arbitrary violence triumphs without being recognized
and a world where this same violence is identified, denounced, and finally
forgiven” (Girard 2001, 114). The redemptive moment, the moment that puts
an end to the cycle of violence, is forgiveness.
As in all genuine forgiveness, Joseph’s exoneration—literally, taking away
the burden—of his brothers entails compassion. What the text gives us is Jo-
seph’s expression of compassion that implies forgiveness. After revealing to
his brothers who he is—“I am your brother Joseph”—Joseph reassures them.
“But now do not be distressed, and do not reproach yourselves for having
sold me here” (Gen. 45:5a). Joseph’s exoneration is the exact opposite of
the scapegoat mechanism. The scapegoat mechanism concentrates fault and
lays it on the shoulder of one person. Compassion mitigates fault. In this case
the mitigating factor is Joseph’s recognition of God’s providential intention,
which Joseph’s brothers carried out even through their unjust treatment of
their brother: “It was really for the sake of saving lives that God sent me here
ahead of you” (Gen. 45:5b).
Girard refers to an even more compelling example, this one from the New
Testament, of compassion as an antidote to the scapegoat mechanism. The
story from John 8 of the woman taken in adultery shows how Jesus reverses
René Girard 205
the violent contagion that would have produced a stoning. It is crucial, says
Girard, that Jesus prevents the throwing of the first stone. That first stone is
what unleashes the contagious violence that follows on the first act of vio-
lence. After writing on the ground—probably the sins of those who wanted
to throw stones—Jesus says, “Let the one among you who is without sin be
the first to throw a stone at her.” Here we have the “identification and denun-
ciation” of the scapegoat mechanism at work in the situation. Jesus exposes
the hypocrisy of the accusers. Then, when all have gone away without con-
demning her, Jesus manifests his compassion and forgiveness: “Neither do I
condemn you. Go [and] from now on do not sin any more” (Jn. 8:11b). The
text seems to imply that Jesus’ command carried with it the power to carry
it out. This empowerment would be the subject of Augustine’s prayer in the
Confessions, “Give me the grace to do as you command, and command me
to do what you will” (Conf. X, 29).
And, following the example of Girard’s claim that “conversion is resurrec-
tion,” we can assert that forgiveness is resurrection. It is resurrection for the
one who gives and the one who receives. The parable that offers the clear-
est support for this claim is Luke’s Prodigal Son. The father of the prodigal
comes to life when he sees his son approaching and runs to meet him, much
as the disciples ran to see for themselves after Mary Magdalene announced
that the stone had been removed from the tomb (Jn. 20:3–10). Luke’s text
reveals the connection with the resurrection in the brief dialogue between the
father and the older son. To the reluctant brother the Father says: “But now
we must celebrate and rejoice, because your brother was dead and has come
to life again . . .” (Lk. 15:32). Up to this point in the story the older brother,
by his inability to be compassionate and forgive, has refused to enter the joy
of his father’s and brother’s resurrection experience.
CONCLUSION
Girard offers an intriguing version of the inner dynamism of original sin. He

finds it first in the mimetic rivalry that emerged from a study of literature
published in his first work, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel. Through stud-
ies in cultural anthropology, he discovered the related phenomenon of the
scapegoat mechanism. Finally, through a gradual conversion experience that
began in the writing of the last chapter of his first book, Deceit, Desire, and
the Novel, Girard came to recognize the unique contribution of the Bible to
the issue of violence. We have examined these main stages of Girard’s work
but considered more in detail the last phase, the discovery of the difference
between mythical and biblical approaches to violence, by presenting his
206 Chapter Seven
treatment of the stories of Oedipus the King and Joseph. As Girard moved
more securely into the realm of faith, he came to recognize that his literary
and anthropological studies provided a basis for Christian theology. Theo-
logians have for a very long time built upon the thought of philosophers. In
modern times, the range of disciplines on which theology can build is vastly
expanded. Anthropology, as the study of the human, can contribute signifi-
cantly toward understanding the theology that reflects on the one who became
human so that we might become divine. Girard calls his work an “evangelical
anthropology” (Girard 2001, 182). He cites, in support of his claim for the
necessity of an anthropology of the Cross, Simone Weil’s observation that
the Gospel itself is an anthropology before it is a theology (Girard 2001, 44,
182). John’s Gospel confirms them both when it says of Jesus that he “would
not trust himself to them because he knew them all, and did not need anyone
to testify about human nature. He himself understood it well” (Jn. 2:24–25).
NOTES
Part III
THE WORD BECOMES FLESH:

FROM THEORY AND
DOCTRINE TO LITERATURE
Chapter Eight
Perceval
Compassion Awakened through Conversion
A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands
of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half
dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw
him, he passed by on the other side.
—Luke 10: 29b–31, NRSV1
The previous chapter explored the thought of René Girard, especially his
identification of mimetic rivalry or covetousness with original sin and his
contention that only forgiveness enables individuals and groups to move
beyond the cycle of violence that arises from mimetic rivalry. Ricoeur began
his life-long investigation of mimetic desire and its consequences through a
study of literature. I will now move, in the next chapters, to an examination
of four literary texts that illustrate in various ways the thesis of this book, the
medieval romance of Perceval by Chrétien de Troyes,2 the Revelations of
Julian of Norwich, Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, and Georges Sime-
non’s Maigret stories.
Chrétien de Troyes’ Perceval describes the process by which mimetic
desire clouds the consciousness of a good but naïve hero, crowds out com-
passion, blinds the hero to an opportunity for healing, and eventually invites
its own reversal through conversion, thus opening the door to wisdom. The
story was written during a period still fascinated by the story of Adam and
Eve,3 and we can legitimately see in this romance a “modern” analogue of
the Genesis account. As a much longer and more elaborate description of
human passage from innocence through sin toward redemption, the story of
Perceval also provides fuller insight into the inner dynamics of original sin.
The twelfth century, in which this story was written, one commentator notes,
209
210 Chapter Eight
experienced a significant development in the “capacity of the age to deal

with the inner life and to see the mechanics of the soul in sharp definition”
(Muscatine 1953, 1168; cited by Fowler 1959, 7).
Commentators acknowledge Perceval as one of the great literary works of
the Middle Ages. Its twelfth century author, Chrétien de Troyes, “created the
Arthurian romance as a literary genre” (Cline 1985, ix) out of elements that
existed before it became literature. A review of the commentaries reveals a
variety of interpretations, all of them describing various forms of the spiritual
quest. “Perceval is the naïve laborer of the French forest carried away by a chi-
valric vocation, he might also represent an intellectually weakened (intellectu-
ellement infirme) humanity, slow to understand and yet seeking for (en quête
de) perfection” (Frappier 1979, 71). For David Fowler the quest for perfection
takes place through a conflict between the ideals of “prowess ( proesce) and
charity.” “That these two ideals were inimical and that charity must ultimately
prevail over prowess together constitute Chrétien’s theme” (Fowler 1959, 3).
Robert A. Johnson says of the Holy Grail myth that “Its Christian content, its
recent origin, and its source in the European soil make this legend particularly
meaningful to the spiritual situation of Western man” (Johnson 1974, 2). Us-
ing Jungian analytic categories, Johnson interprets Perceval as an example of
individuation, “the lifelong process in which a person increasingly becomes
the whole and complete person God intended him to be” (Ibid., 2–3). Leon-
ardo Olschki claims that “The idea of sin and redemption was at the ideologi-
cal core of the whole of [Chrétien’s] epic” (Olschki 1966, 34). Brian Murdoch
relates the story of Perceval and its literary milieu to the story of Adam and
Eve. “Adam and the divine economy,” says Murdoch, have provided “literary
models in various ways.” He calls Perceval or Parzifal (Wolfram Von Eschen-
bach’s later version of the story), the Grail King, “another unlikely Everyman,
searching for the lost Paradise and for God in the hostile world into which he
has been ejected . . .” (Murdoch 2000, ix). And T. S. Eliot found in the Grail
legend the inspiration for his poem “The Wasteland.”
All these interpretations, revolving around the theme of full human devel-
opment, seem to me valid expressions of the inner meaning of Perceval. I
will focus on the affinity this medieval romance has with the story of Adam
and Eve and particularly on the movement from naїveté to wisdom. A crucial
element of the naïveté, and an image of original sin, is the failure of compas-
sion manifested by the hero at crucial points in the story. Other elements that
I have named as constitutive of original sin will also appear in this story:
Girard’s mimetic rivalry; the loss of intimacy with self and others; alienation
from his own creative powers; and ambition cut off from compassion.
Perceval 211
THE STORY OF PERCEVAL
The story begins when the hero is young, before he has left his home and
mother.4 One morning in the forest, Perceval sees some knights on horseback.
Dazzled by their appearance, he longs to become one of them and decides
to follow his newly awakened ambition for chivalry. Perceval’s mother is
devastated. As he parts from her and passes through the front gate, she faints
from grief and, as we find out later in the story, dies.
At first Perceval goes from success to success, overcoming older, more
experienced knights and rescuing the maiden Blanchefleur by defeating the
evil knight whose armies had besieged her properties. Then, during a visit at
a noble castle situated in a beautiful valley, Perceval encounters a challenge
beyond his resources. During the meeting between Perceval and the lord of
the castle, a young man walks by carrying a lance from which runs a single
drop of blood. Perceval is curious about what the lance means and where it
is being carried but does not turn his curiosity into a question because his
mentor, Gornemant, warned him not to talk too much. Then a young maiden
carrying a grail containing a communion host walks by the table. Again,
Perceval is curious but does not ask a question because he does not want to
talk too much. The lance and grail are carried in procession before the young
man several times during the evening, but each time he lets the questions go
unasked (3300–3308), thinking that he will get an answer later. The meal
ends and everyone retires for the night.
The next morning, surrounded by an ominous and unfriendly silence,
Perceval leaves the castle, hoping to find some squires to question about the
lance and the grail, for he is still curious. After proceeding a short distance
from the castle, Perceval comes upon a maiden weeping under an oak tree
for her love who has been killed. The maiden informs Perceval that the
castle where he stayed the night before is the home of the Fisher King and
that the King, maimed in battle, cannot move himself. Then the maiden asks
Perceval if he had seen the lance that bled and the grail and questioned their
significance.
When Perceval answers that he had seen the objects but asked no ques-
tions, the maiden tells him the consequences of his omission. Had Perceval
asked the questions, the maimed king would have been cured, recovered the
use of his limbs, and been able to rule his lands with great benefit for the
people.5 Now great misery will come upon Perceval and many others. The
cause of his failure to ask the questions, the maiden informs Perceval, was the
sin against his mother who died grieving him.
212 Chapter Eight
After recounting several more adventures, among them the visit to the
court of King Arthur and the appearance of the loathsome damsel who con-
fronts Perceval with the meaning of his unasked questions, the author tells
us that “Perceval . . . Had so lost his memory that he had forgotten God,” for
five years never entering a church to adore God or His saints” (6218–25).
Then Perceval runs into a group of penitents observing the passion and death
of Christ on Good Friday, and learns from them of a holy hermit. Follow-
ing their directions he finds the hermit, his mother’s brother, to whom he
confesses his sins. After telling the hermit what happened at the castle of the
Fisher King, Perceval is informed once more that his inability to ask the ques-
tions was connected in some way with the sorrow he caused his mother in
leaving home. The hermit assigns a penance to Perceval and gives advice on
how to live a life of virtue in the future. Here Chrétien’s version of the story
ends without being completed
Perceval Compared with the Story of Adam and Eve

A comparison of this romantic myth of Perceval with the myth of Adam and
Eve, reveals, along with obvious differences, a striking similarity of basic
structure. An obvious difference is that Adam and Eve are a couple, Perceval
a single man. They are the first humans, and he one of their many descen-
dants. Their sin, as the tradition has interpreted it, was passed along as a
congenital weakness in the human will, “original sin.” The effects of his sin,
though devastating and widespread, are limited to the social milieu he inhab-
ited. But we can find similarities in structure. Both stories begin with a state
of “innocence.” The short-lived innocence of Adam and Eve is expressed
symbolically in the brief note ending the account of their creation, “The man
and his wife were both naked, yet they felt no shame” (Gen. 2:25). Chrétien
expresses Perceval’s innocence by describing the pure joy with which he en-
tered the springtime: “He entered the forest, / And the heart deep inside him
Leapt with joy at the sweet Season and the happy sound / Of birds singing
from trees All around” (85–90). But in neither story is the innocence absolute
or unconditioned. The innocent states—of Adam and Eve, and of Perceval—
were qualified by a prohibition meant to protect them. God forbids Adam to
eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and names the consequence
of eating: “From that tree you shall not eat; the moment you eat from it you
are surely doomed to die” (Gen. 2:17b). The protective restriction in Per-
ceval’s case is less categorical. It comes from his mother’s anxiety. She had
worked hard “to keep him from ever seeing knights or learning about them”
(316–322). With a little exaggeration, one could turn the mother’s anxiety
into a command: “You shall not eat of the fruit of knighthood.”
Perceval 213
In both stories, temptation in the form of mimetic rivalry, the desire to

have what the other has, to be what the other is, to be, in fact, like God, leads
to the violation of the prohibition. We are familiar with the path the serpent
laid out for Adam and Eve—you will be like God knowing the difference
between good and evil—and the desire that motivated them to follow it.
Perceval, too, was tempted by a desire to be like God. When he first heard
the sound of knights “Riding through the forest And making an immense
racket” (102–103), he concluded that they were devils and naїvely resolved
to “stick the biggest / And strongest with one of these wooden Spears and
none of the others / Will come anywhere near me” (121–124)! But when he
saw them, with “Their gleaming mail shirts and bright, Shining helmets, and
such shields / And spears as he’d never seen In all his life . . . (129–132), he
concluded that they were angels and even exclaimed of the greatest of them,
“That one must be God” (149). And Perceval wanted to be like them (180),
asking them endless questions about their equipment, so preoccupied by his
intense curiosity that he never answered the question they kept putting to
him concerning the whereabouts of five knights and three young girls. Just
as Adam and Eve obeyed their desire rather than God’s command, Perceval
followed his desire rather than his mother’s cautious will.
After learning from one of the knights in the forest where the king lives
“who makes people knights” (333), Perceval returned home to tell his mother
the vision of angels he had seen in the forest. After listening to many protests
from his mother and receiving the advice she gave him when she realized he
was determined to become a knight, Perceval disregarded his mother’s wishes
and set off to find the king who made knights. The core of Perceval’s sin was
not disobedience, but a failure of compassion toward his mother. As he was
leaving home, before he had yet gone “as far as a pebble could be thrown”
(621), he looked back and saw “that his mother, On the other side of the bridge,
Had fallen to the ground, unconscious, And lay as if stone dead, But he bent
and whipped his horse . . . And the animal stretched his legs And carried him
. . . Into the dark forest” (622–630). This is the originating sin that brings disas-
trous consequences suggested by the “dark forest” into which he rides. The sin
is a violation not primarily of his mother’s will to keep him from knighthood
but of the care owed a mother by her son. Perceval’s failure of compassion
will be repeated when he fails to ask the questions that would have healed the
Fisher King. Thus, the “original sin” is played out in two stages: one a failure
of compassion toward his mother; the other, derived from the first, the missed
opportunity to ask the questions that would have healed the Fisher King.
The consequence of Adam’s and Eve’s disobedience was the loss of their
innocence. The serpent had told them, “. . . your eyes will be opened and
you will be like gods who know what is good and bad” (Gen. 3:5b). Instead,
214 Chapter Eight
“ . . . the eyes of both were opened and they realized that they were naked;
so they sewed fig lives together to make loincloths for themselves” (3:7).
Then, embarrassed by their nakedness, they hid from God. Finally, they
heard God pronounce the judgment of hardship that would affect them and
their descendants because of their disobedience; this included expulsion
from the Garden. Theirs is a punishment with cosmic consequences. The
consequences of Perceval’s lack of compassion toward his mother unfold
more slowly but are just as devastating. Just as surely as Adam’s and Eve’s
disobedience brought about a cosmic “fall,” Perceval’s lack of compassion
brought about a fall that had consequences not only for himself, but for the
social situation of a whole kingdom. Perceval’s failure, noted above, to ask
the questions about the lance that bled and the grail containing a single host,
a failure caused by the sorrow he caused his mother on leaving home, was a
lost opportunity for healing.
Two denunciations, both from women, announce to Perceval the conse-
quences of his omission. First, the young woman whose lover has been killed
speaks: “You’re Perceval The Unhappy, the Miserable, the Unfortunate! Ah,
how unlucky you are, For had you asked those questions You could have com-
pletely cured The good king of all his wounds: He would have become entirely
Whole, and ruled as he should” (3583–3590). Sometime later, “on the third day
of his coming to [Arthur’s] court,” a girl, terrifying in appearance—“No crea-
ture has ever seemed So awful, not even at the bottom Of Hell” (4619–20)—
repeats the denunciation in even more horrible terms. She tells Perceval that the
Fisher King will not be healed and be able to rule his kingdom, with the con-
sequence that “Ladies will lose Their husbands, countries will be ruined, Girls
will have no guidance And be forced to linger as orphans, And a host of knights
will die, And all because of you” (4679–4684). These cosmic consequences
compare with the description of hardship—pain in childbearing, the resistance
of the soil to cultivation—that followed the disobedience of Adam and Eve.
In both stories, the sin committed is matched by a corresponding grace.
But in the case of Adam and Eve the rehabilitating grace does not emerge in
their own lifetime—at least we are not told that it did—but only as the his-
tory of sin unfolds in their descendants. The story tells us of God’s gesture,
noted earlier, of making leather garments for Adam and Eve to cover their
nakedness (Gen. 3:21), but nothing more. Perceval, on the other hand, expe-
riences a grace of renewal in his confession to his uncle and the advice his
uncle gives him, advice very similar to what his mother had told him before
he left home. The difference is that now Perceval receives the advice with an
awakened consciousness.
We have been examining the structural parallelism between the stories of
Adam and Eve and Perceval. To see the pattern of sin and grace at work in
Perceval 215
Perceval, we now look more closely at the description Chrétien gives us of

this extraordinary knight who moves from naïveté, through shattering failure
to wisdom. What is the exact nature of his “original” sin? What are its symp-
toms? What is the meaning of his downfall and how does it move him to a
place of healing?
FROM NAЇVETÉ TO WISDOM
Perceval’s Naïveté
The core of Perceval’s sin, what is original in it, the originating original
sin, is his naïveté.6 Naïveté is different from innocence. Innocence, though
sometimes equated with naïveté, simply means freedom from guilt. Naïveté
denotes a lack of awareness, understandable and even attractive in children,
but annoying, or merely comical in adults, or tragic. To use Jungian lan-
guage, naïveté indicates the absence of integration between the two sides of
consciousness. For Jung, that would mean the integration of the masculine
and feminine sides of the personality. The text of Perceval itself suggests a
not-yet-achieved integration of ambition—the desire to become a knight—
and compassion. Chrétien’s description of the young Perceval confirms this
interpretation. Most young people are marked by innocence and lack of guile.
Perceval was more naïve than most. Though edifying and inspiring at times,
his naїveté is merely ridiculous at others and Chrétien capitalizes on the
humor. At the beginning of the story, Perceval insistently questions one of
the knights he meets in the forest about his armor and weapons, refusing to
answer the question the knight puts to him. Finally, the author tells us, “The
boy who had little sense, said: ‘Were you born like this (in other words, with
all this armor)?’” The knight is patient in his response: “Not at all, young sir,
no one can be born like this” (282–84). But when the knight’s companions
rode up to ask him what he had learned from the youth, he says of Perceval:
“As God is my witness, his wits Are distinctly scattered. Whatever I ask him,
point blank, he answers Sideways, and off the mark, Asking the names of
thing and how they’re used” (236–41). This side of Perceval’s naїveté makes
us want to laugh at him.
Still later, after he had left home, Perceval developed the habit of an-
nouncing that he had heard certain things from his mother. When his men-
tor, Gornemant of Gohort, advises him to go to the church and “pray to the
Maker of us all To bless your soul with his mercy And, here in this worldly
life, Protect you as the Christian you are,” Perceval responds that this is what
he had once heard from his mother. “‘Please, good brother,’ the nobleman
216 Chapter Eight
[Gornemant] Said, ‘don’t explain That your mother told you this Or that. I’m
not offended Hearing such things. But others, If you keep announcing the
fact, . . . are sure to take you for a fool”’ (1665–1684). And Perceval, be-
ing docile, accepts the advice and resolves never to say a single word about
the lessons he had learned, “except to declare That his host had been his
best teacher” (1689–1693). Perceval’s slavish following of an earlier piece
of advice from Gornemant, that he should not talk too much (1648–1656),
prevents him from saying anything when he meets the lovely Blanchefleur
whose devastated realm he will restore. “But among themselves, in whispers,
the lady’s Knights had a great deal to say: ‘Good Lord,’ they said ‘I wonder
if this knight can talk at all. What a shame that would be: no better-Looking
knight has ever Been born’” (1859–1866).
But if Perceval’s naïveté has its comic side, it has a dark side too. Up until
the time of his downfall, he doesn’t seem to know his own given name. Dur-
ing his first encounter with the knights in the forest, before he left home, one
of them asks him what name he should know him by (345). Perceval answers
that he is known as “Dear Son” (347). After further probing by the knight,
Perceval volunteers two more names, “Dear Brother” (350), and “Good
Master” (354). Finally, when the knight asks him if he has no other name,
he answers, “I’ve never had any other” (357). Up to this time in his life, the
hero of the story seems to have no way of designating his own proper iden-
tity apart from the relationships that define him in his home environment.
This may seem comic from one point of view, but it offers a clue to the lack
of self-consciousness that will make him stumble. Later in the story, after his
failure to ask the questions about lance and grail—his existential downfall—
the young woman who reveals to him the meaning of his failure asks for
his name. Perceval’s remarkable answer reveals a dawning consciousness
of identity: “And then, not knowing his name, He somehow knew, and said
He was Perceval from Wales, Not knowing if he spoke the truth, But he did,
though he did not know it” (374–378).
Finally, after his tragic failure in the Grail Castle, the two dramatic revela-
tions of the meaning of the failure, and five years of engaging in “the wildest
exploits, Savage, and cruel, and hard” (6228–6229), Perceval finds himself
in a wilderness (6240). In this state, on Good Friday—he didn’t know it was
Good Friday—he comes, as we have seen, upon five knights and ten ladies
in the forest who point him to a holy hermit who will hear his confession.
Perceval confesses the whole sorry story of his failure to ask the questions
and the five years of wandering that followed. When Perceval has finished
his confession but before the hermit responds, the hermit asks him his name.
And now, for the first time, he answers with full confidence, “Perceval, sir”
(6390). Perceval’s confident statement of his own name, after years of not
Perceval 217
knowing it at all or saying it tentatively without being sure it really was his
name, signals the hero’s emergence from naïveté to maturity.
On two occasions, Perceval’s extraordinary lack of awareness of anything
outside the sphere of his chivalric ambition keeps him from responding in a
fully human way. First is the sin of galloping away after he looks back and
sees his mother fallen, and for all he knows dead, at the gate of their house.
This originating sin will precipitate the failure that will, in its turn, shock
Perceval into awareness and set him on the road to healing. That failure is his
naїve suppression of the questions that arise in his mind when he sees the lance
from which a single drop of blood runs down and the grail dish containing the
host. The suppression is naїve because it comes from a literal-minded interpre-
tation of the advice his mentor had given him not to ask too many questions.
It amounts to a kind of over-obedience that becomes a failure to listen or hear
properly. The suppression of the questions produces more than a comic situa-
tion. This is the fall comparable to Adam’s and Eve’s disobedience.
Perceval’s Naïveté Moves Toward Its Own Reversal

If Perceval’s naïveté is a limitation from one point of view, it has a positive
side, too. He may be literal minded in following the advice given to him,
but he is open to advice and eager to learn. His naïve wonder and desire to
understand everything possible about chivalry is admirable and makes him
a quick learner, both within the sphere of his chosen career and the sphere
of knightly ethics. When his mentor, Gornemant, advises him to have mercy
on those he overcomes in battle when they are unable to defend themselves,
he accepts the advice and consistently puts it into practice. The very naїveté
that makes Perceval foolish also makes him teachable and, step-by-step, he
moves from naїveté to wisdom. Perceval’s naїveté is most complete and
unchallenged when he is still in the protective atmosphere of his mother’s
home. Here he is truly innocent, inexperienced, untutored, ignorant, and un-
formed. Perceval’s passage from naïveté to wisdom begins when he sees the
vision of the knights in the forest. The vision awakens him to the possibility
of a greatness he did not know existed. Though he is still naïve, Perceval is
at least aware of a glorious world outside the protective atmosphere of his
mother’s home.
The movement from naïveté continues with Perceval’s separation from the
protective atmosphere of home and mother and his setting out on the search for
greatness. He develops physical courage, prowess, as it is called in the tradi-
tion of chivalry, and the code of ethics, which comes through the advice given
by Perceval’s mother and his mentor, Gornemant. Perceval also learns from
Gornemant the proper use of the equipment of chivalry and the techniques of
218 Chapter Eight
battle. And, as we have seen above, Gornemant directly challenges Perceval’s

naїve habit of referring to his mother’s advice.
Up to this point, the path from naïveté to wisdom has lead from one suc-
cess to another. Then comes the moment of failure. Perceval does not ask the
questions that occur to him when he sees the lance and the grail, and thus he
misses the opportunity to bring about the healing of the Fisher King and the
restoration of his kingdom. Failure itself becomes Perceval’s tutor, assisted
by the women who reveal his fault to Perceval after he leaves the castle of
the Fisher King. The revelation is repeated later at the court of King Arthur.
There follows the quest for understanding of his failure and repentance for
the sin that caused it. Perceval joins the penitents in their spiritual quest and
gains deeper understanding and peace in confessing his sins to the priest, his
uncle. As a sign of his repentance, he receives a penance. Though Chrétien
de Troyes’ account of Perceval ends at this point without telling us what
becomes of the hero, it seems Perceval has made a new beginning and dis-
covered a spiritual dimension to his life. He is prepared to be a true knight in
the fullest Christian sense of the word. The very naїveté that made Perceval
foolish in the eyes of other knights contains a dynamism that moves him to
a deeper level of existence. How this is true will be clearer as we look at the
stages of Perceval’s development.
THREE VISIONS, THREE TRANSFORMATIONS
These, then, are the stages of Perceval’s journey from naïveté to wisdom:
(1) the vision of greatness embodied in the knights he meets in the forest,
(2) separation from his mother’s house, (3) meeting a mentor who teaches
him the arts of chivalry and its moral code, (4) the successful pursuit of a
chivalric career including the liberation of Blanchefleur’s realm, (5) the
consistent practice of the moral code of chivalry, (6) failure to ask questions
about lance and grail, (7) the revelation of the failure, and (8) repentance and
conversion. Implicit in these stages of Perceval’s journey are three visions
and three corresponding transformations that move our hero from naïveté to
wisdom. Taken together, these visions and transformations mark the stages
of Perceval’s education to wisdom, an education that occurs in two ways:
through what he learns from others and through his own experience after
leaving his mother’s home and embarking on his career as a knight. Though
Chrétien de Troyes does not refer to three visions, I believe a careful reading
of the text uncovers the elements that I am suggesting belong to these three
stages of Perceval’s development.
Perceval 219
First Vision: The Awakening of Mimetic Desire

The first vision takes place at the beginning of Perceval’s career. It is a
young man’s vision, full of naïve wonder and enthusiasm. Awakened in his
encounter with the knights in the forest, Perceval is fascinated with each
piece of their equipment. More than anything, he wants to be like the angelic
characters he has met and asks one question after another without bothering
to answer the questions put to him. He wants to know about the lance and
its use. He asks about the shield and the coat of mail. This is the vision of a
profession, invested with all the wonder young people can experience. Per-
ceval’s mentor, Gornemant of Gohort, fills out the picture given by the knight
in the forest by instructing Perceval in the use of arms and the skills necessary
for a knight. Gornemant advises Perceval, “Every craft requires Clear eyes,
and effort, and heart: These three conditions are all one needs” (1466–1469).
From the beginning, Perceval is successful in realizing this vision. From the
moment he slays the Red Knight just after his first visit to Arthur’s court,
through all the contests he wins against oppressing knights, Perceval mani-
fests the courage and skill necessary for knighthood.
Second Vision: The Education of Ethical Concern

The second vision is ethical, not in a philosophical sense, but as practical
wisdom about how to act nobly. It is expressed in the story through the advice
given to Perceval by his mother and his mentor, Gornemant, and by his own
conscientious following of that advice. From his mother, Perceval learns that
he is to aid maidens in distress if they ask for help. He may take a kiss from
a maiden if she offers it, but nothing more; and if she gives him her ring, it
will be proper for him to wear it. Perceval should never keep company long
with someone before asking his or her name. From his mentor, Gornemant,
Perceval learns that when he gains the upper hand against another knight in
battle, and the other is not able to defend himself further, Perceval should
have mercy on him and not kill him. He should also beware of talking too
much and gossiping, advice which he was to follow too literally. If he finds
a man or woman in distress and is able to help, he should do so. And, like
Perceval’s mother, Gornemant advises prayer: “Remember to go to church
And pray to the Maker of us all To bless your soul with his mercy And, here
in this worldly life, Protect you as the Christian that you are” (1666–1670).
Except for the last piece of advice from his mother and his mentor, advice
that is really spiritual rather than ethical, Perceval faithfully does everything
he has been counseled to do. Each time he conquers a knight, he has mercy
and sends the knight to Arthur’s court. Several times he helps maidens in
220 Chapter Eight
distress. After finishing his lessons with his mentor, he asks his name, just as
his mother had told him to do. But Perceval does not pray and has, in fact,
forgotten God during the five years since he left his mother’s home, a fault he
acknowledges when he confesses to his uncle. In the professional realm and
the ethical realm, Perceval is an outstanding success. And each of these suc-
cesses moves Perceval further from naïveté and closer to wisdom. For in the
practice of his profession and the observance of its moral code, he is forced to
abandon the self-absorption that naïveté entails. And yet, Perceval’s growing
sophistication coexists with a continuing deep naïveté, which though not al-
together negative, keeps him from achieving wisdom. As faithful as Perceval
is to the requirements of this vision, it is not sufficient to bring the integration
he requires to be fully human.
Third Vision: Awakening of Spiritual Consciousness

The third vision has to do with the realm of sin, suffering, and redemption,
the realm of the spiritual, the realm of wisdom. Perceval does not easily
enter this realm. His failure to do so is the core of the story. We have seen
that Perceval did not pray to or even remember God. The full significance of
Perceval’s spiritual failure is revealed in the encounter with the Fisher King.
Though his curiosity is aroused when the lance that bleeds and the grail pass
before his eyes, he asks no questions. If he had, the Fisher King would have
been healed and able to govern his realm with wonderful effects for all his
people. By holding back from asking, Perceval misses an opportunity. Why
does Perceval hold back? The superficial reason he himself gives is that he
has been told by his mentor not to talk too much. The real reason, as Perceval
learns first from the maiden who weeps under the oak tree—the one who
first hears him pronounce his name—lies in an unknown sin, the sorrow he
caused his mother on leaving home. “You’re being punished for the sin You
committed against your mother, Who died sorrowing for you” (3594–3596).
Much later in the story, when he confesses to his uncle, the hermit confessor,
after his five years of absence from self and God—now finally knowing his
name—he received the revelation a second time: “Brother, this comes From
a sin of which you know nothing. It happened the day your mother Heard you
say you were leaving, And she fell to the ground in a faint, near the bridge, in
front of the door, And there she died of her sorrow. And that was the sin that
caused you Later to ask no questions About the grail or the lance; Everything
followed from that” (6393–6403).
Perceval’s failure to enter easily into the third realm is all the more strik-
ing when contrasted to his success in the first two realms. Even though he
had had no experience in the art of chivalry, he learned quickly. And he was
Perceval 221
easily able to follow the ethical advice he had been given, yet in the realm of
the spirit, he seemed to be out to sea. Something is mysterious in Perceval’s
failure, mysterious and catastrophic. The most bitter accusation against Per-
ceval and the most eloquent recital of the evils which will result from his
failure come from an unbelievably ugly girl who rides into Arthur’s court on
her tawny mule. The damsel’s intervention comes at a moment of triumph
for Perceval and of great joy for King Arthur and his court. For Perceval,
whom Arthur has long sought, has just returned to the court amid rejoicing.
“The king and queen and all / The barons with them rejoiced / At Perceval the
Welshman’s Coming, and led him back to Carlion that very same evening. /
They celebrated all night, / And the next day too . . . “(4604–4610). The con-
trast between the joy at court over Perceval’s return and the grim message
about to be delivered could not be more stark.
On the third day of his coming to court A girl came riding up On a tawny mule,
her right hand Holding a whip. She wore Her hair in two black, Immense, and
ugly braids, And if the book that tells us About her are [sic] truthfully written
No creature has ever seemed so awful, not even at the bottom Of Hell. You’ll
never see Iron as black as her neck And hands, but her hands and neck Were
not her ugliest parts. He eyes were two deep caves, Smaller than the eyes of a
rat, And her nose was a monkey’s, or a cat’s, With a donkey’s ears—or cow’s.
Her teeth were as yellow as an egg, But darker, more like rust, And she wore
a beard, like a goat A hump grew in the middle Of her chest, and her back was
crooked, And her thighs and shoulders were perfectly Made for dancing—oh
the hump On her back and her twisted legs Were beautifully made for leading
A ball! (4621–4638).
It is hard to imagine the dance for which this damsel was so well suited.
Why does the author introduce such a ghastly character into this otherwise
joyous scene? What does she symbolize? Robert Johnson suggests that the
girl represents Perceval’s “anima gone absolutely sour and dark” (Johnson
1974, 67). David Fowler follows an interpretation that considers the “Hideous
Damsel” as “a messenger from the other world” (Fowler, 46). “Certainly,”
Fowler says, “she reminds us of the widespread motif of the supernatural
being, beautiful in her own realm, but horribly ugly in this world.” Fowler’s
conclusion is that Chrétien uses this repulsive figure for two purposes. First,
she is “a projection of Perceval’s conscience” which he would like to ignore
but cannot (46). Her second function is to give more information about the
meaning of the unasked questions (47). These two explanations converge in
suggesting that the message of the loathsome damsel represents an eruption
into Perceval’s consciousness of a hidden, shriveled part of the hero’s spiri-
tual life.
222 Chapter Eight
We might also understand this episode in terms of the function of original

sin in consciousness. Original sin is a condition rather than a specific act, a
condition that sets us in the direction of specific sinful acts. We can call it
naïveté, ignorance, lack of integration, concupiscence, mimetic rivalry, addic-
tion, or forgetfulness of the self. It functions at an unconscious level until some
kind of awakening brings it to consciousness. For Perceval, the undeveloped
side of his consciousness was compassion. He could not enter into the suf-
fering of the other in a redemptive way. And this horrible damsel awakens
Perceval from his spiritual slumber. Since this is a crucial episode in the story,
we take a moment to look more closely at the damsel’s message to Perceval.
After a general greeting to the King and his court, the loathsome damsel
addresses Perceval alone:
Ah, Perceval, my friend, Fortune is bald behind, But hairy in front! May curses
Fall on whoever greets you Or wishes you well, or prays For your soul: you
found Fortune But didn’t know how to keep it. The Fisher King made you His
guest, you saw the bleeding Lance, but you couldn’t be bothered To open your
mouth and speak, Asking why that drop Of blood came rolling down From the
point of that shining spear! You saw the grail carried In, and never asked For
what great lord it was borne! Those who see their chance But never grasp it,
hoping For a better, must suffer for their failure (4646–4665).
The damsel continues her bitter recital: “You’re that unlucky man Who
watched opportunity Arrive, and held his tongue. What an unlucky fool! How
wrong to sit there, silent, When just a simple question Could have cured that
rich And noble king of his suffering, Allowed him to rule his kingdom In
peace” (4666–4675). If the question had been asked, according to the damsel,
the king would have been completely cured and would have been able to rule
his land in peace. Since he will never rule his land again and is not healed of
his wound, “Ladies will lose Their husbands, countries will be ruined, Girls
will have no guidance And be forced to linger as orphans, And a host of
knights will die, And all because of you” (4679–4684).
It is a stinging condemnation since the failure seems on the surface so
trivial. Perceval certainly did not know that so much depended on whether or
not he asked the questions that occurred to him. It does not seem fair to im-
pute guilt to him and to be angry when he had had no idea what was at stake.
Yet the damsel is angry and she does judge him harshly, and we instinctively
know there is truth in her judgment. We are, of course, in the realm of myth
and symbol. Perceval’s failure represents far more than the simple omis-
sion of a question about objects that pass in front of him. Perceval’s deeply
ingrained ignorance, rooted in naïveté, is somehow culpable. This hero,
otherwise so admirable, noble, and successful, manifests a kind of blindness
Perceval 223
in the spiritual realm that keeps him from wisdom and leads him to miss the
opportunity for healing the king and restoring his kingdom.7
But we should not overlook another aspect of Perceval’s failure. With all
its disastrous consequences, his omission prepares the path for his entrance
into a realm of wisdom from which he had thus far been excluded. In this
sense, it is a “happy fault.” The story ends just at a point where Perceval’s
new life begins, and we do not know what sort of person he will become;
yet it is evident that the successful but naïve hero has been profoundly trans-
formed by what has happened. The nature of the transformation is indicated
in Perceval’s confession and in the prayer for repentance given to him by his
uncle-priest to whom he confessed his failure. Perceval begins his confession
with the sweeping admission, “for five years I have not known where I was. I
did not love God nor believe in Him, and I have done nothing but evil” (84).
The admission is surprising because we have up to this point learned only of
Perceval’s failure to ask the questions about lance and grail. But now it seems
Perceval sees his own life as a spiritual wasteland. The penance assigned by
Perceval’s priest-uncle is intended to put Perceval on the path of spiritual re-
newal. It contains the last advice the hero will receive in the story. Every day
Perceval is to go to the monastery church before any other place, when the
bell rings, or earlier if he has already risen. If the Mass has begun, he is to stay
until the priest has finished his prayers and chants. “If your heart is sufficiently
willing, It’s not too late: return To grace, and then to Heaven!” (3457–3459).
Perceval’s uncle concludes with the last words of advice Perceval will receive:
Love God, adore Him, believe In Him. Honor good men And women. Stand
when the priest Enters: it costs you little, But truly God loves to see it As the
sign of a humble spirit. If a girl asks for your help, Give it, and help yourself.
Or a widowed lady, or an orphan. These are acts of absolute charity. Help whom
you can, as you should. Be careful, never fail them! These are the things I wish
you to do, to reclaim God’s grace As, once, you used to have it (6460–6474).
The hermit ends as he had begun with a reference to a willing heart, but
now in the form of a question: “Tell me: is your heart willing” (6475). This
is really the turning point of the whole story. Perceval’s future hangs on his
answer to this question. The advice his uncle gives is really no different from
what the “good son” had received from his mother. Between his mother’s
advice, and his uncle’s, lie his chivalric achievements and, most importantly,
the failures that led him into the wilderness. Now he can respond with his
whole heart because, for the first time in his life, he knows his name and
possesses his heart. “Entirely willing,” said Perceval. What his life will actu-
ally be we can only imagine, for the story ends abruptly at this the beginning
of Perceval’s new life: “And Perceval learned, once again, That Our Lord
224 Chapter Eight
had died that Friday, Crucified high on the Cross. He made his Easter com-
munion, Humbly, and in perfect simplicity. And here the story breaks Away
from Perceval, About whom the tale turns silent: . . .” (6510–6517). Then
Chrétien tells us that he “will speak a good deal of Gawain Before Perceval
is mentioned again” (6518–6519). As a matter of fact, Chrétien never does
return to Perceval after the long section on Gawain.8
THEOLOGICAL REFLECTIONS
I have interpreted Perceval as a story analogous to the Genesis account of

Adam and Eve. If this interpretation is justified, Chrétien’s medieval romance
should offer some insight into the nature of original sin, and I have suggested
it does. Leonardo Olschki pursues the issue of Perceval’s “sin” in his The
Grail Castle and Its Mysteries (Olschki 1966). His conclusion is directly op-
posed to what I propose here. Olschki’s view is a convenient beginning point
for these theological reflections. After looking at the nature of Perceval’s sin,
we will look at the role of failure and conversion in his return to grace.
Perceval’s Sin: Free Will or Fate?

Playing on the similarity of the two Old French words, pescheor (fisher) and
pecheor (sinner), Olschki considers both Perceval and the Fisher King as
“two living symbols of a sin that is not caused by their will or by any perver-
sion, but by a destiny that persecutes them” (36). That Perceval was a sinner
becomes clear in the denunciations of the two women, his own repentance,
and the words of the hermit to whom Perceval confesses. These events are
vividly recorded in the text. That the Fisher King might have been a sinner
comes entirely from this play on the Old French words for fisher and sinner.
Olschki offers his theory as a possibility, convinced that medieval readers of
this story would have been aware of the pun. What is of interest relative to
the theme of this study is the theology of original sin that Olschki suggests.
The notion of “a destiny that persecutes them” suggests the kind of fatalism
that we saw earlier in the Greek tragedy of Oedipus, and in the Manichaean
teachings that entangled Augustine in his early adulthood. Olschki refers to
a version of the Manichee teaching prevalent in southern France at the time
Chrétien was writing, the Albigensian or Catharist heresy. The Council of
Tours gave this heresy its name and condemned it in 1163, about twenty years
before the writing of Perceval. According to the Albigensians, the origin of
the world is dualistic, brought about by a good god, the god of spirit, and an
evil god, the god of matter. The evil god brings about everything evil in the
Perceval 225
natural and moral spheres. Sin is caused, not by the will of the sinner but by
the evil principle at work in the sinner’s life. In this view, freedom of the will
does not exist.
We have already seen that Augustine, after a long struggle, came to recog-
nize the falseness of this position, as he realized that he had a will. Augustine
also rejected a completely opposite position—Pelagianism—that he encoun-
tered later in his life, and which seemed to him to exaggerate the freedom of
the human will. Augustine’s doctrine of original sin lies between these two
extremes. The will is free, and we are responsible for our faults but our will
is not completely free. The disobedience of Adam and Eve at the beginnings
of our race, damaged the will and inclined it to evil in such a way that it can
never be fully free except through the grace of Christ. Olschki, fully aware
of Augustine’s orthodox position regarding original sin (37, note b), finds in
Perceval an expression of the neo-Manichean position of the Albigensians.
His principle evidence seems to be the absence of liturgical symbols such as
the Eucharist and the crucifix.
Without trying definitively to settle the issue of whether Perceval expresses
an orthodox or heretical view of original sin, I will point to some indications
that suggest that Chrétien’s theology of sin is closer to Augustine’s than to
the Albigensians. The whole treatment of Perceval’s failure, and its cause,
presume a free, but defective will. The first bit of evidence comes during the
episodes in which the two women and the hermit reveal Perceval’s “sin.”
The first girl—Perceval encounters her just after he leaves the Grail Castle—
informs Perceval: “You’re being punished for the sin You committed against
your mother, Who died, sorrowing for you” (3594–3596). A failure instigated
entirely by an evil spirit inhabiting the one who failed would hardly be a sin
deserving of punishment.
The horrible damsel who appears suddenly on the third day of celebrations
in Arthur’s castle is even more withering in her denunciation. After listing
the sufferings that will come because of Perceval’s failure, the damsel ends
by laying the blame on Perceval, “And all because of you” (4684). Another
translation has “And you will be the one to blame” (Cline 1985, 128). This
expression imputes personal fault. Finally, as we have seen above, the hermit
uncle of Perceval, after the hero’s many years of wandering, during which he
“Had so completely lost His memory he’d even forgotten God” (6219–6220),
hears his nephew’s confession. After Perceval confesses what happened in
the Grail Castle, the hermit discloses the cause of the failure: “Brother, this
comes From a sin of which you know nothing” (“Uns pechiez don tu ne sez
mot,” 6393–6394). Then the hermit recounts what Perceval has already heard,
that his mother died of sorrow as he was leaving. The hermit reveals two
important truths: the cause of Perceval’s failure was a sin and it was a sin of
226 Chapter Eight
which he knew nothing. These are the two components of original sin as it
first manifests itself. It is sin, but it is largely unconscious and not culpable.
A second indicator that Perceval’s “sin” was a personal fault and not the
action of an evil principle beyond his will, is his own humble acknowledg-
ment of fault, his sadness at missed opportunity, and finally his repentance.
When his mentor Gornemant asks Perceval to continue as his guest “For a
month. Or a year, if he cared to” (1574–1575), Perceval’s concern for his
mother keeps him back. He remembers her fallen at the gate as he left and
realizes it was because of him: “She fainted from sadness, because I was
leaving, I know she did” (1587–1588). So Perceval continues to look for his
mother. This humble admission suggests the stirrings of repentance. From
now on, until he learns that she has died, Perceval’s quest will be for his
mother, not for the grail. This kind of humility makes sense only if some kind
of personal responsibility is involved. Later, when his beloved Blanchefleur
begs him to stay with her and her people after he has saved them from Clama-
deu, he would have liked to stay but “his heart pulled him away, Tugging in a
different direction: He remembered his mother, and the sight of her Fainting
and falling to the ground, And more than anything else In the world he longed
to see her Again” (2918–2924).9 Perceval seems to be admitting on his own
the accusation that will be brought against him by those who reveal his sin to
him, the girl and the hermit, seeking to repair something broken through his
own fault. This does not square with the notion that Chrétien was following
the Manicheans’ “the evil principle made me do it.”
Theology of Sin
The final expression of Perceval’s recognition of fault comes in the last epi-
sode: his meeting with the knights and ladies in the forest on Good Friday,
his repentance, and his confession to the hermit. Following the directions to
the holy hermit indicated by the knights and ladies, “Perceval followed their
path, Sighing from the bottom of his heart For all the sins against God He’d
committed, which he now repented” (6334–6337). Then, Chrétien tells us,
arrived at the hermitage, Perceval enters a tiny chapel as the hermit with a
priest—apparently the hermit was not a priest—and an altar boy was “Just
beginning the most beautiful, The sweetest service the sainted Church can
celebrate” (6346–6348). Perceval dropped to his knees as he entered the cha-
pel. “But the holy hermit called to him, Seeing the honest tears Rolling down
his cheeks All the way to his chin. And Perceval, deeply afraid Of having
offended God, Clasped the hermit’s feet And, bending low, his hands Joined
in supplication, Begged for help, for his need Was great” (6351–6361). This
moving description of Perceval’s repentance coming to full expression has a
Perceval 227
distinctly Augustinian flavor to it and nothing of the Manichean attribution

of sin to an alien principle.
Then the hermit hears Perceval’s confession. After confessing his silence
in the Grail Castle during the procession of the lance that bled and the grail
dish containing the single host, Perceval reveals to the hermit “And ever
since I’ve felt Such sadness that I wished to die; I forgot about God and
never Prayed for his grace and mercy Or did what I should to deserve it”
(6383–6387). When the hermit asks the penitent his name and learns that he is
Perceval—son of the hermit’s sister—he understands the cause of Perceval’s
silence in the Grail Castle. The hermit tells Perceval it is “a sin of which you
know nothing” (6394). Though he has in fact heard the same explanation
earlier from the maiden who told him of his mother’s death, we suspect that
Perceval really hears the truth for the first time when the hermit reveals it
after his repentance and confession: “It happened the day your mother Heard
you say you were leaving, And she fell to the ground in a faint, Near the
bridge, in front of the door, And there she died of sorrow. And that was the
sin that caused you, later, to ask no questions About the grail or the lance;
Everything followed from that” (6395–6403).
The Role of Failure in Perceval’s Career

We have been looking at the nature of Perceval’s sin and have concluded that
it was something for which he was responsible, not merely something carried
out by an alien principle dwelling in him. But though he was responsible,
he was not fully responsible because the sin was largely unconscious. Only
gradually does Perceval become aware of the original, that is, the originat-
ing, sin in his life, the sorrow he caused his mother. We can, of course, ask
if another even more original sin lies behind the sorrow Perceval inflicted on
his mother. Maybe it was, as I have suggested, his ambition cut off from any
connection with the compassionate side of himself. But the story says the sin
was the sorrow he caused his mother, a sin of which you know nothing, as
the hermit tells him. The question now is how does Perceval’s sin move from
unconscious to conscious? By now, the answer should be clear: through his
failures beginning with his silence in the Grail Castle and continuing in his
five years of wandering far from God, five years that left him in a wilderness.
The full awareness of his failure, already indicated in his lingering sadness,
but heightened by the denunciations pronounced by the women, produced a
crisis in the root sense of that Greek word, a judgment and a turning point.
The first meaning of the Greek word, krisis, is “judgment.” The two women
have rendered the judgment on Perceval’s behavior and even his own sadness
already implies a judgment on his part. He is sad because he senses something
228 Chapter Eight
amiss. Another meaning of krisis is “turning point of a disease, sudden change

for better or worse” (Liddell and Scott, Greek English Lexicon). That Perceval
is suffering from a disease seems evident from what we have seen. Now, in the
light of the judgment pronounced against him that clearly states his failure, he
could either get better or worse. It is important to realize that failure does not
of itself produce healing or growth; that is why it is a crisis.
A turn for the worse would have taken place if he had refused to accept
the judgment or had blamed others for what happened. This is the Manichean
temptation: “it was not my fault.” Perceval did not do that. He could turn away
through distraction. In fact, his five years of chivalric adventure without any
consciousness of God seem to be precisely a diversion from facing up to the
meaning of his failure. Despair would have been a third way of turning away,
or cynicism, which is basically a form of despair, but Perceval does not choose
that path. The change for the better was that the failure actually opened the door
to healing. Perceval’s uncommon humility, part of the same naïveté that in its
first level set him on the path to unconscious sin, left him open to healing when
the opportunity came. Sadness over his failure to care for his mother, regret over
not asking the questions that his curiosity prompted him to ask, and, finally, sin-
cere repentance as he comes to the end of five years in the wilderness—all of
these lead him to healing. During the assigning of a penance, the hermit spoke
these words that we have considered earlier: “If your heart is sufficiently will-
ing, It’s not too late: return To grace, and then to heaven” (6457–6459). When
he finished assigning a penance, the hermit asked him “is your heart willing?”
(6475), and Perceval could answer “entirely willing” (6476).
Conversion
And so Perceval experiences a change of heart, metanoia and sets his life in a
new direction. The text of Chrétien’s poem leaves off at the beginning of Per-
ceval’s new life. Most commentators believe the text came to an end because
Chrétien died, but Robert Johnson suggests that “he stopped where he was.
He couldn’t say any more” (Johnson, 72). Some of those who continued the
story after Chrétien’s death, have Perceval return to the Grail Castle and heal
the Fisher King. But Chrétien himself only tells us that “Perceval learned,
once again, That Our Lord had died that Friday, Crucified high on the Cross.
He made his Easter communion Humbly, in perfect simplicity” (6510–6514).
And here the story of Perceval ends, just at the beginning of what promises
to be a new life. Perceval’s conversion recalls René Girard’s conviction that
conversion is necessary for people to recognize in themselves the presence of
mimetic rivalry, the term by which Girard designates original sin. Conversion
is necessary precisely because the sin is unconscious, what Perceval’s uncle
Perceval 229
had called, “the sin of which you knew nothing.” Conversion, for Girard, is
also resurrection. Like the Prodigal Son of Luke’s Gospel, Perceval was dead
and has come back to life (Lk. 15:32).
CONCLUSION
In her book, From Ritual to Romance (1920), Jessie Weston addresses vari-
ous attempts made to explain the origin of the Grail legend that “consists of a
congeries of widely differing elements—elements which at first sight appear
hopelessly incongruous, if not completely contradictory, yet at the same time
are present to an extent, and in a form, which no honest critic can afford to
ignore” (Weston 1920, 2). Weston mentions two ways that scholars have tried
to make sense of these differing elements and adds a third of her own that
would clarify elements not explained by the other interpretations. “Thus it
has been possible for one group of scholars, relying on undeniably Christian-
Legendary elements, preponderant in certain versions, to maintain the thesis
that the Grail legend is ab initio a Christian and ecclesiastical legend, and to
analyse the literature on that basis alone” (Ibid.). Another group has seen the
tradition as having mainly Celtic origins that were only later “worked over by
ecclesiastical writers in the interests of edification.” (Ibid.). This group main-
tains that the “story itself is non-Christian, and Folk-lore in origin” (Ibid.).
After showing elements of the grail legend that neither of these interpreta-
tions explains, Weston proposed to look at certain “Nature Cults” described
by J. G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough, cults that once had a close union with
Christianity (Ibid., 35).
To follow Weston through the detailed presentation of her position would
take us away from our subject, but her book produced an effect in the world
of literature that itself throws light on the story of Perceval. Weston’s book
influenced T. S. Eliot in the writing of “The Wasteland” (1922). At the end
of the poem, in his “Notes on ‘The Wasteland,’” Eliot tells us that “Not only
the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem
were suggested by Miss Jessie L. Weston’s book on the Grail legend: From
Ritual to Romance” (Eliot 1952, 50). Eliot is so indebted to this book, he tells
us, that it “will elucidate the difficulties of the poem much better than my
notes can do” (Ibid.) and he recommends that for those interested in under-
standing the poem, the book is worth reading. What is important here is not
the elucidation of Eliot’s difficult poem nor the study of Weston’s book, but
the theme of “The Wasteland” that owes its origin to the Grail legend. That
this legend would inspire a poet of Eliot’s stature indicates the continuing
relevance of its central symbolism.
230 Chapter Eight
I have taken Perceval, The Story of the Grail, as a medieval symbolization

of original sin, and Eliot’s image of the wasteland, taken from the medieval
romance, is a modern symbol. The wasteland in Eliot, Cleanth Brooks tells
us, symbolizes a “Life devoid of meaning . . .” (Brooks 1991, 88). In Per-
ceval’s early disregard for his mother’s sorrow, we have, as the story makes
clear, an “originating” sin. The sorrow he caused his mother brought about
the failure to ask questions about the meaning of lance and grail. And, in its
turn, the failure to ask the questions brought about a condition that we can
call the wasteland, reminiscent of the hardship that came about after the dis-
obedience of Adam and Eve. The wasteland, then, becomes a symbol of the
human condition after the fall.
The wasteland imagery comes up in two contexts in Perceval. First is the
personal wilderness in which Perceval finds himself at the end of five years
of wandering away from God. The second—the one on which Weston and
Eliot focus—is the wasteland that will follow from Perceval’s failure to ask
the questions in the Grail Castle, the wasteland predicted by the “dreadful
damsel.” “Ladies will lose Their husbands, countries will be ruined, Girls
will have no guidance. . . .” (4679–4684). Maybe if Perceval could come back
after his conversion experience he could undo these consequences, but for the
moment these sad consequences follow his sin. The imagery of a wasteland
is dark but the paradox of Christian faith is that this somber symbol may be
a prelude to redemptive grace, a grace that for St. Paul outweighed the sin
that produced it: “. . . where sin increased, grace overflowed all the more”
(Rom. 5:20b). The end of Perceval’s story leaves us with the impression of
overflowing grace.
Perceval’s education has taken him from naïveté through wilderness to wis-
dom, or at least to the threshold of wisdom. A world, including his own name,
has opened up for him whose existence was unknown before his failure. What
a long distance he has come from the haven of his mother’s home. On the way,
he has been liberated from his child’s naïveté by entering into and practicing a
profession, by accepting and carrying out an ethical code, and by accepting a
failure which opened the realm of spiritual wisdom. At the end of his journey
he has found his mother, not alive but dead from the sorrow he caused her in
leaving home. He has learned that this sorrow, which had a crippling effect on
him as well, involved a rupture of some sort in him, was a sin. And this sin
kept him from asking the questions about the lance and grail. In repenting and
accepting the penance imposed on him, he has been healed and has recovered
the naïveté that is proper to a man, not a child. He has discovered his own
name, found God again, and entered a realm of wisdom whose existence he
had not suspected before. Now he is ready to begin again.
Perceval 231
What will his life be now? How will the transformed Perceval act? Chré-
tien de Troyes does not tell us. But, in the penance assigned by Perceval’s
hermit uncle we have some clues from which to sketch a conclusion.
Perceval’s uncle gives some advice meant to help him “return To grace
and then to heaven” (6468–6469). During the course of assigning Perceval
his penance after confession, Perceval’s uncle says: “Now repent! If you care
for your soul as you should, You’ll open yourself to repentance. The first
thing you’ll do each day, The first place you’ll go, will be church, Where
soul and body will prosper” (6440–6445). Perceval is to “Love God, adore
Him, believe In him. Honor good men And women” (6460–6462). As he was
about to leave home in search of knighthood, still in his first naïveté, Per-
ceval had heard the same advice from his mother. Perceval’s response to his
mother shows the extent of his naïve ignorance: “Mother,” he asked, “What’s
a church?” (573). His last words to his mother were that he would be happy
to go to churches and monasteries (595–598). The young Perceval, that is the
“old” Perceval, did not follow the advice but Chrétien leaves us with the hope
that the newly awakened Perceval will.
NOTES
2. Chrétien de Troyes probably wrote this last and most important of his romances
in the mid–1180s. He died before it was finished.
3. See, for instance, Le Mystère d’Adam: An Anglo-Norman Drama of the Twelfth
Century, edited by Paul Studer, Manchester University Press, 1918.
4. Chrétien de Troyes. 1999. Perceval: The Story of the Grail. Translated by
Burton Raffel, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1999. All references to the story
in the present text come from Raffel’s translation.
5. Olschki discusses how the questions that Perceval should have asked would
have cured the King. The questions would not have functioned, Olschki suggests,
like a magic word found in folk tales, but would rather have drawn some sort of
confession from the King that would have freed him from his curse. See The Grail
Castle, 32. This interpretation is based on Olschki’s conviction that, through a word-
play based on the similarity of the French words for “fisher” ( pêcheur) and “sinner”
( pécheur), Chrétien means to suggest that the King’s wound comes from a sin he
committed. However one interprets the King’s wound or explains how the questions
from Perceval would have healed the King, it seems evident from the story that, with-
out knowing it, the naïve Perceval has wandered into the realm of sin and redemption.
He does not know where he is or what to do. And so he fails to act.
232 Chapter Eight
6. Irenaeus of Lyon (130–202) treats Adam and Eve as children vulnerable to

temptation rather than fully mature adults who would have sinned out of pride
(Against the Heretics, IV, 38; V, 23, 5). When he sinned, Adam “lost his natural dis-
position and child like mind, and had come to the knowledge of evil things” (Ibid.).
Irenaeus says that God could not have made humans perfect from the beginning since
they were created and not uncreated. Even if we maintain that God could have created
humans perfect, says Irenaeus, they would not have been able to receive the perfec-
tion any more than infants can receive substantial nourishment (IV, 38, 1). Irenaeus’
position differs dramatically from Augustine’s who says that Adam and Eve sinned
out of a pride that paved the way for their disobedience. “It was in secret that the
first human beings began to be evil; and the result was that they slipped into open
disobedience. For they would not have arrived at the evil act if an evil will had not
preceded it. Now, could anything but pride have been the start of the evil will? For
‘pride is the start of every kind of sin’ (Ecclesiasticus, 10:13). For it is a perverse kind
of exaltation to abandon the basis on which the mind should be firmly fixed, and to
become, as it were, based on itself, and so remain” (Augustine, City of God, XIV, 13).
7. We are told in the story only that the king was maimed by a javelin through
the hips in such a way as to lose the use of his legs. Some commentators think it
was a matter of emasculation and that the King had, in fact, lost his fecundity both
physically and spiritually. Leonardo Olschki suggests that the King’s mutilation and
his prolonged martyrdom have a symbolic value and refer to the cause of man’s
damnation. “He [the King] is injured in his virility which lies at the root of all sin.”
The Grail Castle and Its Mysteries (Manchester: Manchester University Press. 1966),
34. Jessie L. Weston, From Ritual to Romance (NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1957), also
takes the position that the Fisher King has somehow been wounded in his virility and
that his wound affects his whole kingdom. “Now there can be no possible doubt here,
the condition of the King is sympathetically reflected on the land, the loss of virility
in the one brings about a suspension of the reproductive processes of Nature in the
other” (23).
8. Though Perceval is clearly the central character of Perceval and the Grail
Castle, the story of Gawain is interwoven with the story of Perceval and actually ends
the poem since Chrétien died before he could get back to Perceval. After Chrétien’s
death the “unfinished Perceval exercised such a fascination that in eleven of the fif-
teen manuscripts it is followed, without a break, by continuations written between the
final years of the twelfth century and around 1230” (Joseph Duggan, “Afterward,”
Perceval: The Story of the Grail, translated by Burton Raffel, Yale University Press,
New Haven, 1999, 300).
9. Robert Johnson makes much of what he calls the “mother complex,” describing
it as “the greatest stumbling block that exists in a man’s psychology. Almost no man
will admit it, which means that he is probably totally eaten up by it. But as a man
grows, he has a chance to make a better relationship with his mother complex. At
every point of growth in the Grail myth, Parsifal [Perceval] turns around to redo his
mother relationship” (Johnson, 46–47).
Chapter Nine
Julian of Norwich
From Blindness to the Vision of Love
First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and

thanksgivings be made for everyone, for kings and all who are in high
positions . . . This is right and acceptable in the sight of God our Savior,
who desires everyone to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth.
—I Tim. 2: 1–5, NRSV1
For to this end we struggle, because we have our hope set on the living
God, who is the Savior of all people, especially of those who believe.
—I Tim. 4:10, NRSV2
Two hundred years after Chrétien de Troyes wrote Perceval (between 1181
and 1190), Julian of Norwich (1342?–1416?) wrote her reflective interpreta-
tion of sixteen revelations that took place May 8 and 9 of 1373, in the thirty-
first year of her life, as she was recovering from a life-threatening illness.
Julian’s elegant prose pushes to its limit both the orthodox belief in the es-
sential goodness of humans, in spite of their sin, and the belief in the mercy
of God. In Julian’s thought, God’s compassion swallows up justice so that
“all things might be well.” Julian’s writings contribute to the argument of my
study in three ways, by their very original interpretation of the story of Adam
and Eve, by their conflation of that story with the event of the Incarnation,
and by their dramatic presentation of divine compassion.
Julian is considered the first woman to write a work of literature in the
English vernacular. Her reflections, to which she gave no title, now appear
variously as Showings or Revelations of Divine Love, or simply The Revela-
tion of Love. Over a period of many years, Julian explores, in a “Short Text”
(ST) and a “Long Text” (LT), the sixteen visions. Though Julian probably
233
234 Chapter Nine
wrote ST shortly after the “showings,” or at least before 1388 (Bauerschmidt

1999), she waited almost twenty years to compose the LT, which one au-
thor calls “the most remarkable theological achievement of the English late
Middle Ages” (Duffy 1992, 314, cited in A.C. Spearing 1998, xxiv). Julian’s
revelations led her deep into the dialectic of sin and grace, not as humans
see it but as the infinitely compassionate God sees it. God’s gracious mercy,
the tendency to overlook our sins because of Christ, and God’s will for our
salvation dominate Julian’s thought. Reading her work reminds us of the
“secret increasing power of grace” that Von Rad noted as God’s response to
sin in the Primeval History, or the Old Testament refrain, “you are a gracious
and merciful God, slow to anger, rich in clemency, loathe to punish” (Jon.
4:2b; Ps. 102, 144), or Paul’s proclamation that “where sin increased, grace
overflowed all the more” (Rom. 5:20), or Hugh of St. Victor’s description
of “the will of tender mercy” in Christ and his proclaiming that it belongs to
human nature to be compassionate (Ch 5, 6–7, 11). Julian’s vision of God’s
mercy leads her to suggest the possibility of universal salvation even though
she realizes this is not the Church’s teaching.
Julian’s vision is troubling, magnificent, and profoundly challenging. The
Revelations of Divine Love pushes our understanding of human sin and God’s
mercy beyond anything we have seen thus far in this study, perhaps beyond
a place we would be willing to go. Still, her writings continue to inspire
contemporary readers and thinkers. One author even finds in Julian the foun-
dations for “imagining the political” as ideally dominated by compassionate
love rather than naked power (Bauerschmidt 1999, Ch. 1).
Julian’s texts are profoundly relevant to the study we have undertaken
in this book. We will first consider compassion as the unifying principle
of Julian’s work and then look at her extraordinary retelling of the story of
Adam—she does not mention Eve, but takes Adam as the representative of
all human beings—as the central theological presentation of God’s grace and
mercy in the Long Text. We will then examine Julian’s writings to see if we
can discover her idea of original sin. The revelations Julian received of a
divine grace that outstrips sin, bringing about a condition better for us than if
we had never sinned, moves her toward the affirmation of universal salvation.
We will examine this controversial aspect of Julian’s thought in some detail.
We will also explore Julian’s relations to the tradition that has preceded
her, especially the aspects of that tradition that have been part of this study.
Finally, there is the question of the importance of Julian’s thought for those
who have, through a meditative reading of her work, brought to life again in
succeeding generations the vision of this fourteenth century anchoress.
Julian of Norwich 235
COMPASSION AS THE UNIFYING

PRINCIPLE IN JULIAN’S WORK
In her reflections on the 13th revelation, Julian posed the meta-moral question
that parallels Heidegger’s metaphysical question, “Why is there being rather
than nothing?” (Heidegger, Intro to Metaphysics). It is the non-being of sin
that troubles Julian. She does not ask why human beings commit sin—we will
consider her answer to that question in a later section of this chapter—but
why God allows sin. Our Lord has reminded her of her great longing to see
God and she realized that nothing kept her from the vision of God but sin.
“And I thought that if sin had never existed, we should all have been pure
like himself, as God made us and so I had often wondered before now in
my folly why, in his great forseeing wisdom, God had not prevented sin; for
then, I thought, all would have been well” (ST 13, par. 4). In the LT, Julian
wonders why God had not prevented “the beginning of sin” (LT 27, par. 1).
God’s surprising answer leads to a further question that will introduce us
into the heart of Julian’s message, or rather of God’s message to Julian. “But
Jesus, who in this vision informed me of all that I needed to know, answered
with this assurance: Sin is befitting, but all shall be well, and all shall be well,
and all manner of things shall be well” (Ibid.). How can God say that sin is
befitting? This is the question we will be pursuing throughout this chapter.
For now, it is enough to say that God’s answer to Julian’s question takes us
further into the mystery of the divine compassionate love that makes of sin
nothing at all or, even more amazingly, turns it into a source of glory. We
will come back to this puzzling answer to Julian’s question, but first it will be
helpful to explore what it means to say that compassion serves as the unifying
principle of Julian’s life-work.
The term “work” applies to three interconnected levels of Julian’s activity.
First and most obvious is the “work” Julian produced and that we are study-
ing, The Revelations of Divine Love. Behind the work of writing, and revealed
to us through the written work, is the work of Julian’s life, a work that began
before the writing of this book and continued after it. Julian discloses this
life-work, which precedes the “revelations,” at the beginning of both the ST
(Chapter 1) and the LT (Chapter 2). “I asked for three graces of God’s gift.
The first was a vivid perception of Christ’s passion, the second was bodily
sickness and the third was for God to give me three wounds” (ST 1, par. 1).
These requests relate to a “life work” because they express not some inciden-
tal petition such as, “please heal my asthma!” but the longing for a gift that
would give meaning to Julian’s whole life. Reflection on these three requests
236 Chapter Nine
reveals that Julian is, in fact, asking for compassion in three forms. First,
Julian “longed by God’s grace to feel [the Passion of Christ] more intensely”
(ST 1, par. 1) than she ever has before, though she already felt it strongly. “I
thought how I wished I had been there at the crucifixion with Mary Magda-
lene and with others who were Christ’s dear friends, that I might have seen
in the flesh the Passion of our Lord which he suffered for me, so that, I could
have suffered with him as others did who loved him” (Ibid.).
The second gift, bodily sickness to the death, entails compassion in a dif-
ferent sense for it came out of Julian’s longing “to be soon with my God” (ST
1, par. 3). She wanted a real sickness, affecting both body and soul, serious
enough that she and the others around her would think she was dying and that
she would receive the rites of the Church. Julian even wants “all the terror
and turmoil of the fiends and all other kinds of torment . . .” (Ibid.). But she
did not want to die: “. . . except for giving up the ghost” (Ibid.). Julian makes
this request, as she tells us with a little more detail in LT, “because I wished
to be purged by the mercy of God and afterwards to live more to God’s glory
because of that sickness; and that I should die more quickly, for I longed to be
soon with my God” (LT 2, par. 2). This request manifests a desire for compas-
sion, not in the ordinary sense of suffering-with, but as suffering-in-order-to-
be-with. Julian knew, even before she suffered, that suffering has a privileged
role in opening up the human spirit to union with God. Most people learn this
by going through sufferings they have not chosen or wished for. We have seen
this in Perceval whose stunning and unanticipated failure helped lead him to
wisdom. Julian asks for the suffering of a life-threatening illness.
Julian asks for these first two gifts, feeling the Passion of Christ more
intensely and experiencing a life-threatening illness, with one reservation,
saying, “Lord, you know what I would have, if it is your will that I should
have it, and if it is not your will, good Lord, do not be displeased, for I only
want what you want” (LT 2, par. 2; ST 1, par. 4). But, Julian tells us, she
asked for the third gift without any reservation and that “The first two of the
longings just mentioned [to feel the Passion and to suffer illness] passed from
my mind, and the third stayed with me continually” (ST 1, par. 6). Moved
by a story of St. Cecelia according to which the saint “received three wounds
in the neck from which she died,” Julian “conceived a great longing, pray-
ing our Lord God that he would grant me three wounds in my lifetime: that
is to say, the wound of contrition, the wound of compassion, and the wound
of an earnest longing for God” (ST 1, par. 5). Because they are “wounds,”
all these gifts involve suffering, contrition as suffering in the form of sorrow
over pain caused by her sin; compassion as suffering with those who suffer;
and the “earnest longing to be with God” as the desire to be with Christ in his
suffering for us on the cross.
Besides the work that Julian did, asking earnestly for three gifts and writ-
ing this book of reflections, we have the work of God in her through the
revelations. What the revelations reveal is the love of God expressed in the
sufferings of Christ and in Christ’s extraordinary mercy towards us in our sin
in the form of super-abounding grace, God’s compassion in Christ. Julian’s
life-work that begins before the writing of the Revelations but is known to
us only through that text, the work itself of writing the text, and the work of
God in Julian that constitutes the principal content of that text—these are
the three aspects of Julian’s activity united by the principle of compassion.
And, if we can, through the window of the text, discern something of Julian’s
life before the writing of the Revelations, we can also through the same text
glimpse a future work that it points to. “This book was begun by God’s gift
and his grace, but it seems to me that it is not yet completed” (LT 86, par. 1).
The completion of the book, Julian tells us in this last chapter of her Revela-
tions, will take place in her own life and in the lives of those who will read
her work. In the last paragraph of the Revelations, Julian prays that:
this book come only into the hands of those who want to love him faithfully, and
to those who are willing to submit themselves to the faith of Holy Church and
obey the sound understanding and teaching of men of virtuous life, grave years,
and profound learning; for this revelation is deep theology and great wisdom, so
it must not remain with anyone who is thrall to sin and the Devil (LT 86, par. 4).
In expressing this hope for the future, Julian is praying that those who read
her book will also be drawn into the saving mystery of God’s compassion in
Christ.
THE PARABLE OF THE LORD AND THE SERVANT
“[Julian’s] most penetrating insight into this mystery of salvation comes in

the parable of the lord and the servant, expounded in LT chapter 51, by far
the longest chapter she wrote . . .” (A.C. Spearing, 1998, xxvii). Nicholas
Watson calls this story, which came to Julian twenty years after the original
revelation, i.e., 1393, “the heart of the entire work in LT” (Watson 1993,
638). Julian herself says of the parable, “. . . it gives me some teaching, as if it
were the beginning of an ABC, through which I may have some understand-
ing of God’s purpose, for the mysteries of the revelation are hidden in it . . .”
(LT 51, par. 17). Through this parable, Julian found at least a partial resolu-
tion of the tension she had been struggling with between two judgments, one
the Church’s teaching on human sin, the other the content of her revelation
according to which God assigns no blame to us. Though God’s personal
238 Chapter Nine
revelation to her was “sweet and delectable,” she “could not quite be freed
from anxiety” (LT 45, par. 2) because of the Church’s judgment according
to which she was bound to acknowledge herself a sinner and to recognize
that sinners deserve blame and anger one day; “and I could see no blame
or anger in God, and then I felt a longing greater than I can or may tell; for
God himself revealed the higher judgement at the same time, and therefore I
was bound to accept it; and the lower judgement had been taught me before
by Holy Church, and therefore I could in no way abandon the lower judge-
ment” (106). This tension between the teaching of the Church, which Julian
accepted with her whole heart, and the truth of her revelations, is the place
we must enter with her if we are to appreciate the meaning of the lord and the
servant. Julian’s theological method is to hold the Church’s teaching firmly
in place and to hold the truth of her revelation equally firmly and attempt a
resolution of the tension.
Here is the story. The lord sits with dignity and the servant waits reverently
ready to do the lord’s will. The lord sends the servant on a mission. “The
servant does not just walk, but leaps forward and runs in great haste, in lov-
ing anxiety to do his lord’s will. And he falls into a slough and is very badly
hurt” (LT 51, par. 2). The servant’s greatest problem, Julian tells us, was that
he had no help to get out of the slough “for he could not turn his face to look
at his loving lord” (Ibid.). According to Julian’s interpretation, given three
months short of twenty years after the vision, the lord is God, and the servant
is Adam—she does not mention Eve—who represents all human beings. It is
important to note the differences between the servant and the Adam and Eve
of the Genesis account and of Christian tradition. The servant, unlike Adam,
fell into the slough not through disobedience or any other fault, but through
an excess of zeal. “And I watched carefully to see if I could perceive any fault
in him, or if the lord would blame him at all; and in truth there was no fault
to be seen, for his good will and his great longing were the only cause of his
fall; and he was as willing and inwardly good as when he stood before his
lord ready to do his will” (Ibid.).
And God’s attitude toward the servant’s misfortune is different, too. In
Genesis, God reproves Adam and Eve for what they have done and assigns a
punishment. Not so in Julian’s version of the story. “But in the sight of God
[the servant’s] purpose remained undiminished; for I saw our Lord commend
and approve his purpose . . .” (par. 7). God finds no fault with Adam; it is
Adam who has lost his sense of purpose: “but the man himself was obstructed
and blind to the knowledge of this purpose, and this causes him great sorrow
and grievous misery; for neither can he see his loving lord, who is most gentle
and kind to him, nor can he see truly how he himself appears to his loving
lord” (Julian, Ibid.).
Thus Julian transforms the story of the fall in pushing to their limits both
the orthodox belief in the essential goodness of human beings, what Paul
Ricoeur calls “primordial goodness,” and the Christian conviction about
God’s mercy. “And this,” says Julian, “was the beginning of the teaching re-
vealed to me at this time, through which I might come to know God’s attitude
to us in our sin. And then I saw that only suffering blames and punishes, and
our kind Lord comforts and grieves; he always considers the soul cheerfully,
loving and longing to bring us to bliss” (Ibid.).
Continuing her reflection on God’s infinite tenderness and mercy, Julian
arrives at a striking conception of the identity of Adam and Christ that pro-
vides the clue to the parable’s meaning and at the same time introduces a
note of confusion. “In the servant is comprehended the second person of the
Trinity, and in the servant is comprehended Adam, that is to say all men”
(par. 13). Even Paul did not go this far in identifying Christ and Adam. Julian
identifies Adam’s fall and the Incarnation of the Word: “When Adam fell,
God’s son fell; because of the true union made in heaven, God’s son could not
leave Adam, for by Adam I understand all men” (Ibid.). Adam fell into “the
valley of this wretched world,” and “God’s son fell with Adam into the valley
of the Virgin’s womb” (Ibid.). Julian’s “servant” represents Christ and Adam
as one man, the “strength and goodness which we have” coming from Jesus
Christ, “the weakness and blindness which we have” coming from Adam.
Julian identifies Christ with the longing of humans to be saved and with all
who will be saved: “for the wish and the craving of all mankind that shall be
saved appeared in Jesus; for Jesus is all who shall be saved and all who shall
be saved are Jesus; and all through God’s love, along with the obedience,
humility and patience, and other virtues which pertain to us” (LT 51, par. 16).
Julian continues in chapter 52 with the Pauline notion of grace abounding.
It seems highly likely that Julian was familiar with this teaching of Paul,
twice citing his words on other issues explicitly (ST 9, par. 2; 10, par. 1),
and on other occasions expressing ideas that are typically Pauline, especially
the notion of grace abounding more than sin and the corollary that both she
and Paul reject, namely that we should sin more so that grace will abound
even more (Rom. 6:1–2; ST 18, par. 1). In Chapter 52, Julian speaks both
of “Adam’s woe” and the “exalted magnificence” to which humanity is des-
tined: “In the lord was shown the sorrow and pity of Adam’s woe; and in the
lord was shown the exalted magnificence and endless glory to which mankind
attains through the power of the Passion and the death of God’s much-loved
son” (LT 52, par. 4). And for this reason, she continues, “he rejoices greatly
in his fall, because of the great exaltation and fullness of bliss that mankind
attains, surpassing what we should have if he had not fallen; and so it was to
240 Chapter Nine
see this surpassing magnificence that my understanding was led into God at
the same time that I saw the servant fall” (Ibid.). This vision, breathtaking in
Paul, is even more breathtaking in Julian. Julian’s profound relativizing of
human sin through the comparison with God’s grace is comprehensible only
if we assume the vantage point of God as Julian’s revelations allowed her to
do: “. . . only suffering blames and punishes, and our kind Lord comforts and
grieves” (LT 51, par. 7).
Julian’s conflating of the fall of Adam and the incarnation into one and
the same event and her identification of the servant as both Adam and Christ,
as the most original and consequential element of the parable, requires some
elaboration. Julian took twenty years to come to an understanding of this
showing (LT 51, par.6); for us to work out its implications will take some
careful reflection. When we first read that the master sends the servant on
a mission, which the servant eagerly runs to fulfill only to fall, through no
fault of his own—into a slough from which he cannot get out—we do not yet
know who the master and servant are. Soon Julian tells us that the servant is
Adam, but not only Adam, “for in the servant who represented Adam, as I
shall explain, I saw many different properties which could in no way be at-
tributed just to Adam. And so for the moment I was in a state of great bewil-
derment; for a full understanding of this marvelous parable was not given to
me at this time” (LT 51, par. 4). Julian now explains the three stages in which
her comprehension unfolded. “The first is the early stage of teaching which
I understood from it while it was being shown to me; the second is the inner
learning which I have come to understand from it since then; the third is the
whole revelation from beginning to end, as set out in this book . . .” (par. 5).
The “properties which could in no way be attributed just to Adam,” Julian
tells us, are attributed to Christ. But Julian does not tell us so until after she
has let us think for several pages that this Adam is the one we read about in
Genesis 3. Two differences between Julian’s Adam and the Adam of Genesis
seem to fly in the face of the traditional interpretation. Genesis presents Adam
and Eve as falling, not through eagerness to carry out a mission from God, but
as disobeying God’s prohibition against eating of the fruit of the tree of the
knowledge of good and evil. Julian’s Adam falls through no fault of his own;
Julian does not even suggest that Adam’s eagerness was excessive, a kind of
impetuous rushing off before thinking of what he was doing. The Adam and
Eve of Genesis, as Genesis describes them and the tradition has interpreted
them, commit the originating fault that has brought about the condition we
call original sin.
The notion of a faultless fall becomes clearer when Julian tells us that the
servant is both Adam and Christ. “In the servant is comprehended the second
person of the Trinity, and in the servant is comprehended Adam, that is to say,
all men. And therefore when I say ‘the Son,’ it means the Godhead, which is
equal with the Father, and when I say ‘the servant,’ it means Christ’s Human-
ity, which is truly Adam” (par. 13). We have here not only the Father and the
Son but the Holy Ghost “which is the equal love which is in both of them”
(Ibid.). Not only is the servant both Adam and Christ, but the fall of Adam
is simultaneous with the incarnation of Christ: “Adam fell from life to death
into the valley of this wretched world and after that into hell. God’s son fell
with Adam [italics added] into the valley of the Virgin’s womb . . . in order
to free Adam from guilt in heaven and in earth; and with his great power he
fetched him out of hell” (Ibid.). Note that God’s son has come to “free Adam
from guilt.”
For the first time in this parable, Julian has attributed guilt to Adam,
which makes us wonder whether, when she spoke of the servant falling into
a slough through no fault of his own, she might really have been speaking of
the servant as Christ and not as Adam. Though Julian had spoken earlier of
the servant’s eagerness in carrying out the master’s mission, she now speaks
of human “guilt,” but only to say that Christ has taken it on himself so that
“our Father neither may nor will assign us any more guilt than he does to
his own son, dearly loved Christ” (par. 15). Our suspicion that when Julian
spoke of “the fall” she was speaking of the Incarnation is confirmed as we
come to the end of the parable. The servant is both strong and weak, strong
as the Son of God, weak as Christ and Adam. “The wisdom and goodness in
the servant represent God’s son. That he was poorly dressed as a labourer and
standing near the left-hand side [of the master] represents Christ’s humanity
and Adam, with all the consequent trouble and weakness; for in this parable
our good Lord showed his own son and Adam as but one man. The strength
and goodness which we have come from Jesus Christ [as son of God], the
weakness and the blindness which we have come from Adam, and these two
are represented in the servant” (par.14).
Julian becomes even more explicit in teaching that the mission given to
the servant, which the servant eagerly carried out and, through no fault of his
own, fell into a slough, is the Father’s sending of the Son into the world for
the redemption of human beings and not the disobedience of Adam and Eve.
And the fall is the Son’s fall into our humanity with all its troubles. “Thus
the son was the servant before he came to earth, standing ready before the
Father, waiting until the time when he would send him to do that glorious
deed by which mankind was brought back to heaven . . .” (par. 15). Julian
leads us to believe that this is the meaning of the parable: “Therefore what
was conveyed was in respect of the Manhood of Christ; for all mankind who
shall be saved by Christ’s precious Incarnation and blessed Passion, all are
Christ’s Manhood” (par.16). The phrase “all mankind who shall be saved” is
242 Chapter Nine
important and we will return to it in discussing Julian’s suggestion that all

people will be saved. Julian repeats the points she has made: “all those under
heaven who shall come there shall do so by longing and wishing; and this
wish and longing was shown in the servant standing in front of the lord, or to
put it differently, in the Son standing in front of the Father in Adam’s tunic;
for the wish and the craving of all mankind that shall be saved appeared in
Jesus; for Jesus is all who shall be saved and all who shall be saved are Jesus”
(Ibid.). Not only is the fall of the servant identical with the incarnation of the
Son entering into the womb of the Virgin, but the eagerness in carrying out
the mission belongs not to Adam and Eve as we know them from Genesis,
but to the Son responding to God’s determination to send him to earth to free
humans from guilt. “[The servant’s] leaping up belonged to the Godhead [in
the Son] and his running to Christ’s manhood; for the Godhead leapt from
the Father into the Virgin’s womb, falling when he took on our nature; and in
this fall he was grievously hurt; the hurt he received was our flesh in which
he soon felt deathly pain” (par. 17).
We can summarize the parable in five key points: First, the lord’s commis-
sion to the servant; second, the servant’s eagerness in carrying out the commis-
sion; third, the servant’s fall and consequent distress, including the inability to
see God; fourth, the absence of blame on God’s part for the servant’s fall; and
fifth, the identification of the servant as Adam and Christ and of the servant’s
fall as Adam’s fall and Christ’s fall, each in different ways. That the parable
does not contain any account of the “sin” of Adam and Eve surprises us since
Julian presents it as the story of Adam and the fall. Throughout this study, we
have interpreted the story of Adam and Eve according to the tradition that sees
in it an account of the origin of sin. The parable is, as Julian calls it, “wonder-
ful,” but for us problematic in that it leaves sin out of account.
ORIGINAL SIN IN JULIAN’S REVELATIONS
Given the problematic character of the parable of the lord and the servant
with respect to determining an origin of sin, we need to look elsewhere in
Julian’s writings for some account of the fundamental or originating fault to
which every other sin can be reduced. As we have already seen, this originat-
ing fault can be viewed temporally, as when we think, following the tradition,
of the disobedience of Adam and Eve as being first in time of a long succes-
sion of sins. We can also think about original sin in a structural sense as a sin
that lies at the root of other sins much as, on the physical level, a defective
immune system leaves us vulnerable to opportunistic diseases or anemia can
lead to tiredness and depression. By omitting an account of the temporally
first sin in the parable of master and servant, where it would most naturally
have occurred, Julian forces us to look elsewhere in her texts to see if we can
find either a temporal or a structural beginning point of sin, the originating
fault through which other sins enter in and flourish.
Chapter 47 of the Long Text, falling between Chapter 45 in which Julian
first expresses her struggle to resolve the tension between the Church’s judg-
ment about sin and punishment and Chapter 51 that contains the “only an-
swer” she received to satisfy her longing to understand, “a wonderful parable
of a lord and a servant, very strikingly shown” (45, par. 3), provides just the
sort of account we are looking for. Julian here speaks not of a temporal origin
of sin, but a structural one. In statements that hold the opposed perceptions
together, each truth undiluted by the presence of its opposite, Julian tells us
what she saw: “And from all that I saw it seemed to me that it was necessary
for us to see and to acknowledge that we are sinners . . .” (47, par. 2). Our
sins, says Julian include both the evil things we do and the good deeds we
leave undone. This would seem to merit God’s anger but, for Julian, it does
not. “And in spite of all this I saw truly that our Lord was never angry and
never will be angry, for he is God: goodness, life, truth, love, peace; and his
loving kindness does not allow him to be angry, nor does his unity. . . . God
is the goodness that cannot be angry” (Ibid.).
In this same Chapter 47, Julian spells out her teaching about original sin.
First, Julian tells us what she was looking for based on what she had “already
learned” (par. 1), presumably from the teaching of the Church, namely that
the mercy of God would consist in the “remission of his anger after our time
of sin” (Ibid.). Yet, however much she looked, she “could not see this any-
where in the showing” (Ibid.). What Julian did see was the deepest source
of human sin. She saw that humans “are changeable in this life and through
frailty and accident we fall into sin” (47, par. 2), that humans are “naturally
weak and foolish” and their “will is smothered; and in this world [they suffer]
storm and sorrow and woe, and the cause is [their] own blindness” (Ibid.).
This blindness seems to be the root of other sins. We do not see God; for “if
[we] saw God continually, [we] would have no evil feelings, nor any sort of
impulse towards the craving which leads to sin [italics added]” (Ibid.). The
“craving which leads to sin” suggests what the Bible calls “covetousness”
(Exod. 20:17; Rom. 6:7–8) and what René Girard calls “mimetic rivalry.” But
Julian finds something deeper than craving, the blindness that keeps us from
seeing God’s goodness. We might well say that Adam and Eve were blind
before they fell for the serpent’s temptation to eat the fruit and become like
God. The blindness was a failure to recognize God’s goodness to them, a lack
of gratitude for their existence that made them susceptible to the enticement
the serpent offered.
244 Chapter Nine
In Chapter 48, Julian helps us to further understand what she means by

“original sin” by extending her presentation of the blindness to God’s love
that causes sin and the contrariness into which we fall when the vision of God
is absent. God is not angry over sins, humans are, and God forgives even that,
“for anger is nothing but contrariness and antagonism to peace and love, and
it comes from lack of strength—and it is not God who lacks these things but
we who lack them . . .” (48, par. 1). What is amazing in all this is the extent
of God’s mercy and grace, which Julian distinguished from each other: “For
I saw the property of mercy and the property of grace, which have two ways
of working in one love. Mercy is a pitiful [i.e., pity-filled—see translation by
John Julian, Love’s Trinity, 48, par. 3] property which belongs to motherhood
in tender love, and grace is an honourable property which belongs to royal
lordship in the same love. . .” (Revelations, 48, par. 2). The work of mercy is
to protect, tolerate, revive, and heal; the work of grace is to raise, reward, and
go infinitely beyond what our love and our effort deserve.
In Chapters 49 and 50, Julian continues her build-up to the parable of the
lord and the servant, reaffirming in Chapter 49 that in God no anger exists
and that therefore he cannot forgive—“it would be an impossibility” (49, par.
1). Julian seems to imply that anger is what makes forgiveness necessary.
Without anger, forgiveness is not necessary, not even possible. And God
takes away our anger which proves that he himself must be without anger:
“It must needs be that he who wears away and extinguishes our anger and
makes us gentle and kind is himself always consistently loving, gentle and
kind which is the contrary of anger . . .” (Ibid.). Julian saw “no kind of anger
in God, neither for a short time nor for a long one . . .” (Ibid.). In Chapter 50,
Julian repeats the question she first posed in Chapter 45 about the opposition
between the two truths of which she was equally convinced. First the real-
ity of sin: “For I knew through the universal teaching of Holy Church and
through my own experience that the guilt of our sin weighs us down continu-
ally, from Adam, the first man, until the time when we come up into heaven
. . .” (Ibid.). The reference to her own experience in this formulation does not
appear in the earlier statement of Chapter 45, where Julian simply says that
“According to this judgement [of the Holy Church] it seemed to me that I had
to acknowledge myself a sinner . . .” (45, par. 2). This means that Julian’s
amazement at God’s mercy, the second truth of which she was convinced
through her revelations, comes from its contrast not only with the teaching
of the Church but with her own experience of sin. “Then this is what amazed
me,” says Julian, “that I saw our Lord God blaming us no more than if we
were as pure and as holy as angels in heaven” (49, par. 1).
At the end of Chapter 50, Julian again expresses her deep anguish, as she
had in Chapter 45, at not being able to resolve a contradiction at the very cen-
ter of her faith. Throughout these six chapters (45–50), Julian has repeated in
various ways the contradiction between our sin and God’s lack of anger. The
tension has become more and more difficult for her to bear. “And between
these two contraries my reason was greatly tormented by my blindness, and
could not rest for fear that God’s blessed presence should pass from my sight
and I should be left not knowing how he regards us in our sin . . .” (50, par.
2). Either of two responses would satisfy her: “for either I needed to see in
God that all sin was done away with, or else I needed to see in God how he
sees it, so that I might truly know how it befits me to see sin and what sort of
blame is ours” (Ibid.). “I cried inwardly with all my might,” Julian tells us,
“beseeching God for help, thinking as follows: ‘Ah! Lord Jesus, king of bliss,
how can I be helped? Who can show me and tell me what I need to know if
I cannot see now in you?’” (Ibid.).
The intensity of Julian’s anguish reminds us of Augustine’s on the brink
of his conversion. “I was in torment,” says Augustine, “reproaching myself
more bitterly than ever as I twisted and turned in my chain. I hoped that my
chain might be broken once for all, because it was only a small thing that held
me now. All the same it held me” (Conf., 8, 11, par. 1). But a great differ-
ence separates Julian’s anguish from Augustine’s that makes it more difficult,
not easier, to understand. Augustine’s was a moral anguish; he longed to be
set free from habits of sin that bound him as if in chains. Julian’s torment
seems metaphysical. By the time we come to this stage in Augustine’s life,
having followed him through the circuitous path3 of his struggles, it is easy
to appreciate his intense longing to be free. But apart from the cryptic phrase
mentioned above, “from my own experience,” we have no way of knowing
the source of Julian’s metaphysical anguish. We can only note that the revela-
tions of God’s extraordinary forbearance and mercy seem to have profoundly
challenged the way the Church’s teaching and her own experience had led
her to regard sin. She was trying to come to terms with God’s mercy, caught
between the guilt and fear of punishment that she had learned and this new,
amazing revelation of benevolent love.
Recognition of Julian’s struggle is essential if we are to avoid the tempta-
tion of seeing only sweetness in her account. Paradoxical as it might seem,
her own guilt and fear may have been easier for her to accept, as she says it
is for all of us, than the overwhelming graciousness of God, and she knew
she was more likely to lose sight of the vision of mercy, as she herself points
out, than the sense of guilt. We are more likely to be ignorant of God’s love
than of our own sufferings caused by sin.: “. . . for many men and women
believe that God is almighty and has power to do everything, and that he is all
wisdom and knows how to do everything, but that he is all love and is will-
ing to do everything—there they stop” (ST 24, par. 2). The evidence for this
246 Chapter Nine
lack of confidence lies in the fear that good people experience “when they
begin to hate sin and to mend their ways” (Ibid.). Though people take this
fear for humility, it is really “foul ignorance and weakness” (Ibid.). “So of
all the properties of the Trinity,” Julian concludes, “it is God’s wish that we
should place most reliance on liking and love; for love makes God’s power
and wisdom very gentle to us; just as through his generosity God forgives our
sin when we repent, so he wants us to forget our sin and all our depression
and all doubtful fear” (Ibid.).
We have already considered the parable of the lord and the servant, set
forth in Chapter 51, which was given to Julian as the “only answer” (45, par.
3) to her insistent questioning. And when, in Chapter 45, Julian first tells us
of this “wonderful parable of a lord and a servant” which she promises to
recount later, she also recognizes that this story will not completely satisfy
her. “And yet,” she says, “I still long, and shall until my dying day, through
God’s grace to understand these two judgements as they apply to me; for all
heavenly things and all earthly ones which belong to heaven, are included in
these two judgements” (45, par. 3). Julian had asked either “to see in God
that all sin was done away with,” or “to see in God how he sees it” (50, par.
1). God did not show her that sin had been done away with; he did show her
how he regards it, that is, without blame. The heart of the parable, as I have
already said, is the identification of Christ and Adam and it is because of this
identification that God regards us without attributing guilt: “And thus our
good Lord Jesus has taken upon himself all our guilt; and therefore our Father
neither may nor will assign more blame to us than he does to his own son,
dearly loved Christ” (51, par. 15).
In chapter 13 of ST, when Julian had asked why God had not prevented
sin, God had informed her “of all that I needed to know” (ST 13, par. 4),
not that she needs no further teaching, “for our Lord, in this revelation, has
left me to Holy Church . . .” (Ibid.). Then Julian tells us of God’s enigmatic
response: “‘Sin is befitting.’ With this word ‘sin’ our Lord brought to my
mind the whole extent of all that is not good: the shameful scorn and the utter
humiliation he bore for us in this life and in his dying, and all the pains and
sufferings of all his creatures, both in body and in spirit . . .” (ST 13, par. 5).
God showed Julian all this “along with all the pains that ever were and ever
shall be; all this was shown in a flash, and quickly changed into comfort; for
our good Lord did not want the soul to be afraid of this ugly sight” (Ibid.).
And why should we not be afraid of this “ugly sight”? Because sin has no
independent reality: “But I did not see sin; for I believe it has no sort of
substance nor portion of being, nor could it be recognized were it not for the
suffering it causes” (par. 6).
Julian had begun her questioning with the conviction that if sin had never
existed, “all would have been well” (13, par. 4). Now she sees that sin has
no independent reality and that we are even protected against the suffering
it causes by the Passion of our Lord. “He supports us willingly and sweetly,
by his words, and says, ‘But all shall be well, and all manner of things shall
be well.’ These words were shown very tenderly, with no suggestion that I
or anyone who will be saved was being blamed” (13, par. 6). Julian chooses
words carefully. She says that “sin has no sort of substance nor portion of
being;” she does not say it has no reality. In saying that sin has no substance,
Julian is following a long tradition in Christian theology that denies any
independent reality to evil. Augustine firmly teaches that only what is good
exists. “Therefore, whatever is, is good; and evil, the origin of which I was
trying to find, is not a substance, because if it were a substance it would be
good” (Conf., VII, 12, par. 2). Augustine applies this teaching to the turn-
ing of the will from God that we call sin: “And when I asked myself what
wickedness was, I saw that it was not a substance but perversion of the will
when it turns aside from you” (VII, 15, par. 2). Thomas Aquinas follows Au-
gustine in denying independent reality to evil: evil is the absence of a quality
in an existent that ought to have that quality (Aquinas, De Malo, Q. 1, Art 1,
“Whether evil is any-thing”). For instance blindness in a human being is a
physical evil because sight is an attribute that naturally belongs to humans.
In a stone, blindness is not a defect. To attribute an independent existence to
evil was the heresy of the Manichees from whom Augustine worked so long
to extricate himself. The same confusion about the substantiality of evil sur-
faced again in the Albigensian heresy that the Church dealt with about two
centuries before Julian. Sin is real, but not substantial. Just as sin is real, it has
real consequences and the merciful compassion of God alone keeps us from
suffering these consequences.
We can summarize Julian’s teaching about sin. First, the teaching comes
from three sources, the doctrine of the Church, her own experience, and her
revelations, and it contains some oppositions that she herself cannot resolve.
Second, sin is real and has real consequences. Third, sin is not substantial,
i.e., it does not have independent existence. Fourth, the root of sin, the origi-
nating sin, is human blindness to God’s love. Fifth, God does not blame and
is not angry at the sins of “those who will be saved.” This last phrase, “those
who will be saved,” raises a question that we must now explore in some
depth. The phrase seems to imply that some will be saved and some not, in
which case Julian’s teaching seems consistent with Church teaching as she
would have known it. But Julian, in some places, suggests that all will be
saved. How can we reconcile these two ideas?
248 Chapter Nine
“ALL SHALL BE WELL” AND

THE QUESTION OF UNIVERSAL SALVATION
Julian expresses the consequence of Christ’s merciful compassion in the

famously recurring refrain “All shall be well,” which in all its variations,
functions as a kind of leitmotiv in Julian’s two texts, especially the Long
Text. These reassuring words act as an antidote to the anxiety that arises in a
faithful soul concerned about the consequences of sin. Even where the refrain
does not occur in the context of an explicit mention of sin, it always assumes
that context and only makes sense in light of sin and its effects. Some have
taken the frequent reiteration of this refrain in the LT as evidence of Julian’s
belief in universal salvation as if she is saying “all will be well for everyone,
believers and unbelievers, good and bad, in spite of everything they have
done or not done.” Before affirming that conclusion, we need to look care-
fully at the texts, and particularly at another phrase that recurs regularly, “for
all those that shall be saved.” This refrain implying that perhaps some will
not be saved seems to restrict the scope of “all shall be well;” all shall be
well for some, but not for all. However, at least two passages seem to suggest
universal salvation.
A passage in Chapter 9 of the LT shows the ambiguity introduced by the
phrase “all who shall be saved.” Julian begins this chapter by humbly affirm-
ing that her visions have not made her a better Christian than those who have
not had visions “but only the normal teaching of Holy Church, and who love
God better than I do” (LT 9, par. 1). The passage that follows immediately
introduces some confusion. I will italicize expressions that introduce a note
of ambiguity.
For if I look solely at myself, I am really nothing; but as one of humankind in

general, I am, I hope, in oneness of love with all my fellow Christians; for upon
this oneness depends the life of all who shall be saved; for God is all that is
good, as I see it, and God has made all that is made, and God loves all that he
has made, and he who loves all his fellow Christians for God’s sake, loves all
that is; for in those who shall be saved, all is included: that is to say, all that is
made and the Maker of all; for in man is God, and God is in everything (Ibid.).
The first part of the passage suggests a narrowing of Julian’s focus from the
phrase “as one of humankind in general” to the more restrictive “oneness of
love with all my fellow Christians.” The last part of this passage seems to
move in the opposite direction, from the restrictive phrase, “those who shall
be saved” to the universal, “all is included.” In spite of its ambiguity, this pas-
sage does open up the possibility that Julian is affirming universal salvation.
Chapters 31 and 32 suggest a Trinitarian work that may well involve the
salvation of all people, though some ambiguity still exists even here. Chapter
31 contains Julian’s most elaborate expression of the “all will be well” refrain
in which she connects various forms of the phrase with the persons and work
of the Trinity.
And thus our good Lord answered all the questions and doubts I could put
forward, saying most comfortingly, ‘I may make all things well, I can make all
things well, and I will make all things well; and you shall see for yourself that
all manner of things shall be well.’ I take ‘I may’ for the words of the Father,
I take ‘I can’ for the words of the Son and I take ‘I will’ for the words of the
Holy Ghost; and where he says ‘I shall,’ I take it for the unity of the Holy Trin-
ity, three persons, one truth; and where he says ‘You shall see for yourself,’ I
understand it as referring to the union with the Holy Trinity of all mankind who
shall be saved [italics added] (LT 31, par. 1).
The italicized phrase indicates something less than universal salvation, but
the passage as a whole expresses a profound theological awareness of the
involvement of the Trinity in the work of salvation, at least for those who
will be saved.
In Chapter 32, Julian carries forward the image of the Trinity at work in
the world for its salvation and takes a significant step beyond where she left
us in Chapter 31.
It appears to me that there is a deed which the Holy Trinity shall do on the last
day, and when that deed shall be done and how it shall be done is unknown to
all creatures under Christ, and shall be until it has been done. . . . This is the
great deed ordained by our Lord God from eternity, treasured up and hidden in
his blessed breast, only known to himself, and by this deed he shall make all
things well; for just as the Holy Trinity made all things from nothing, so the
Holy Trinity shall make all well that is not well (LT 32, par. 2).
And what is the great deed? It is a deed that, as Julian recognizes, pro-
foundly challenges our faith: for “. . . it is part of our faith that many will be
damned—like the angels who fell out of heaven from pride, who are now
fiends, and men on earth who die outside the faith of Holy Church . . . and
also any man who has received Christianity and lives an unchristian life and
so dies excluded from the love of God” (par. 3). Given this teaching of the
Church, Julian “thought it impossible that all manner of things should be
well, as our Lord revealed at this time” (Ibid.). That all should be well seems
clearly, from the context, to mean that all shall be saved. The only answer
Julian received to her perplexity was that “What is impossible to you is not
250 Chapter Nine
impossible to me. I shall keep my word in all things and I shall make all
things well” (Ibid.).
Just as in the case of the parable of the lord and the servant, we saw Julian
maintaining two opposed truths, one the Church’s teaching about blame and
guilt, the other the content of her revelation that showed no blame of Adam
relative to his fall, now we see the opposition between the doctrine that some
will be damned and the revelation that all will be made well. The revela-
tion about universal salvation explicitly instructs Julian to hold the opposed
truths without knowing how the contradiction might be resolved: “Thus I was
taught by the grace of God that I should remain steadfastly in the faith, as I
had previously understood, and at the same time that I should firmly believe
that all things will be well as our Lord God revealed on the same occasion”
(par. 4). How this shall be accomplished “no creature under Christ . . . knows
or shall know until it is done” (Ibid.). It seems clear, then, that Julian holds the
doctrine of universal salvation, but she holds it as an incomprehensible mys-
tery of God’s compassionate love, revealed to her in her showings and not
derived from her own reasoning or the teachings of the Church, not from any
work she might have read or from her own experience outside the showings.
To properly evaluate Julian’s position, we must enter the same space
opened up for Julian between these two opposed truths. It may not be a space
Julian’s readers want to enter, not just because of the Church’s traditional
teaching, but because of some personal resistance to the possibility that God’s
justice might be so thoroughly swallowed up by God’s compassion. Like
Julian, her readers might find themselves suspended between opposed truths
and, perhaps, even between conflicting tendencies of their own personalities,
their mind’s longing for justice on one side and the pull of their heart toward
compassion on the other. The divine respect for human choice seems to ne-
cessitate God’s allowing some to freely reject the offered gift of salvation.
That the gift might be given, willy-nilly, to individuals who have steadfastly
refused it up to and including the moment of their death suggests a benevolent
kind of predestination that renders human choices inconsequential. Such are
the thoughts that might occur to those trying to enter into Julian’s vision. But
then she herself did not understand.
JULIAN’S RELATION TO THE

TRADITION THAT PRECEDED HER
In this chapter, I have noted textual resonances between Julian’s Revelations

and the thought of other authors and works explored in this study. These simi-
larities of thought patterns enable us to use Julian as a summary of what we
have already seen. We might be inclined to speculate, as some commentators

have, about how various elements of the Christian tradition come to have a
place in Julian’s thought. Some have concluded that, in spite of her claim that
“These revelations were shown to a simple, uneducated creature” (LT 2, par.
1), Julian was in fact highly educated. Colledge and Walsh, for instance, in
the introduction to their critical edition of Showings, call Julian’s claim to be
ignorant as “nothing but a well-known, often employed rhetorical device, ap-
pealing for benevolence from the reader by dispraising the writer’s abilities”
(Colledge and Walsh, 19), and that, in fact, Julian had a “profound knowledge
and flexible use of the Latin Vulgate text, and she seems to have been familiar
with a wide range of the classical spiritual writings that were the founda-
tions of the monastic contemplative tradition” (20). Marion Glasscoe, on the
other hand, takes Julian at her word and concludes that Julian’s concern is
to achieve “a depth of insight into the inner realities of human existence as
perceived in Christian terms” (Glasscoe, 223; cited in Bauerschmidt, 205)
rather than Christian doctrines about God, sin, and salvation. Bauerschmidt’s
middle position between these two extremes seems most reasonable: “On the
whole I would argue that Glasscoe’s presentation of Julian as illiterate in the
modern sense is implausible, and Colledge and Walsh’s thesis that she was
highly educated is unnecessary” (206).
Without being able to resolve the question of Julian’s education, we can
point to key passages that seem to locate her in the mainstream of Christian
tradition. Her identifying the servant in her parable as Adam, for instance,
and other references to Adam, suggest a familiarity with the story of Adam
and Eve in Genesis. And Julian does, as we have seen, refer specifically to
the words of Paul: “Nothing shall separate me from the love of Christ” (Rom.
8:35), and “But every soul, as Saint Paul says, should feel in himself what
was in Jesus Christ” (Phil. 2:5, Julian ST 9, par. 2), and Peter, “Lord, save me,
I perish” (Matt. 14:30, Julian, ST 10, par. 1). We can, then, safely assume that
Julian had some familiarity with Paul and the Gospels. She must have been
aware of Paul’s identification of Christ as the second Adam, when she took a
creative step beyond Paul in identifying Christ as the first Adam. And Julian’s
references to the superiority of redeemed human condition in comparison to
the human condition before the fall (LT 39, par. 2; 51, par. 3) as well as the
related caution not to let God’s abundant grace tempt us to sin (LT 40, par.
3) seem clearly Pauline.
Certain passages in Julian also echo church Fathers and early medieval
scholastics. In the parable of the lord and the servant, pursuing the identity
of Christ with Adam and our humanity, Julian describes the glorious clothing
worn by the Son as he stands before the Father (the lord of the parable) and
concludes with a passage strongly reminiscent of Irenaeus’ “God’s glory is
252 Chapter Nine
human being fully alive” (Irenaeus, 4, 20, 5–7), “. . . for it was shown that
we are his crown, and that this crown is the Father’s joy, the Son’s glory,
the Holy Ghost’s delight . . . (LT 51, par. 15). We have already seen the
striking similarity between what Julian’s revelations showed her about the
insubstantiality of sin and Augustine’s declaration that “evil . . . is not a sub-
stance” (Conf., VII, 12, par. 2). Aquinas, following Augustine, teaches that
“evil of itself is not something, but the privation of some particular good”
(De Malo, question 1, article 1, Response). Julian’s claim that “God is nearer
to ourselves than our own soul” (LT 56, par. 2) evokes Augustine’s “God is
more inward (interior) to me than my inmost self (intimo meo, Conf., III, 6,
par. 5). For Julian, the indwelling of God in us meant that “it is easier for us
to attain certain knowledge of God than to know our own soul; for our soul
is so deeply grounded in God, and so eternally treasured, that we cannot
attain knowledge of it until we first know God” (par. 2). Finally, and most
important, for this study, is Julian’s participation, conscious or unconscious,
in the renewed emphasis on compassion represented by Hugh of St. Victor
(1096–1141) and his followers in the Victorine tradition.
Boyd Taylor Coolman’s 2008 Theological Studies article, “Hugh of St.
Victor on ‘Jesus Wept’: Compassion as Ideal Humanitas,” speaks of Hugh’s
emphasis on compassion in Christ: “. . . it is in fact Hugh’s high estimation
of compassion as the proper and signature feature of Jesus’ humanity that
prompts him not only to make Christological sense of Jesus’ tears, but also
to hold up Jesus as exemplar of such human activity” (Coolman, 532–33).
Hugh, as a canon of the order of St. Augustine teaching other canons, “en-
joins the feeling of compassion especially on clerics and prelates” (548). He
urges them to follow Paul’s injunction “to rejoice with those who rejoice and
to weep with those who weep” (Rom. 12:15), “and in a striking illustration,
he links these two facets of fellow-feeling with the ‘breasts of maternal af-
fection’ . . .” (549), thus anticipating Julian’s striking references to Christ as
our mother. “And our Saviour is our true mother,” says Julian, “in whom we
are eternally born and by whom we shall always be enclosed (LT 57, par. 4).
In one of those striking lyrical passages in which Julian ties together the vari-
ous agents of our salvation, she tells us that Jesus manifests his motherhood
by doing good for evil and that the wisdom of his motherhood balances the
power and goodness of his fatherhood:
Thus Jesus Christ who does good for evil is our true mother; we have our being
from him where the ground of motherhood begins, with all the sweet protection
of love which follows eternally. God is our mother as truly as he is our father;
and he showed this in everything and especially in the sweet words where he
says, ‘It is I,’ that is to say, ‘It is I: the power and goodness of fatherhood. It is
I: the wisdom of motherhood. It is I: the light and the grace which is all blessed
love. It is I: the Trinity. It is I: the unity. I am the sovereign goodness of all

manner of things. It is I that make you love. It is I that make you long. It is I:
the eternal fulfillment of all true desires’ (LT 59, par. 2).
For Julian, motherhood means tender mercy. “But now it is necessary to say a
little more about . . . how we are redeemed by the motherhood of mercy and
grace . . .” (LT 60, par. 1). Julian plays on the theme of Jesus’ motherhood
in feeding us: “The mother can give her child her milk to suck, but our dear
mother Jesus can feed us with himself, and he does so most generously with
the holy sacrament which is the precious food of life itself ” (par. 2). In her
tenth revelation, Julian was shown that “The mother can lay the child tenderly
to her breast, but our tender mother Jesus, he can familiarly lead us into his
blessed breast through his sweet open side” (par. 3). Julian does not speak of
tender pity only in the context of motherhood. In the parable of the lord and
servant she speaks of Jesus as “most comely and handsome, appearing full of
tender pity” (LT 51, par. 8).
Coolman observes that the theme of compassion “has vast contemporary
currency in diverse discussions of ethical, religious, and political theory,” but
notes that “these discussions rehearse a summarized history of compassion in
Western thought that begins with classical antiquity (especially Aristotle and
the Stoics) and then leaps to the early modern period, when, after long ne-
glect (it is implied), the theme emerges prominently in thinkers such as Adam
Smith, Rousseau, Kant, Schopenhauer, and Neitzsche” (Coolman, 556). And
yet Coolman sees a growing dissatisfaction with the omission of the Christian
account of compassion in the middle ages. “Recent scholarship signals an
interest in developing a philosophically sophisticated, profoundly Christian
‘theology of compassion’ that draws deeply from the resources of the Chris-
tian tradition” (Ibid.). Hugh of St. Victor and Julian of Norwich would both
have contributions toward such a theology of compassion.
CONCLUSION
Julian’s elegant prose, both complex and seductive at the same time, has
drawn readers into her thought ever since her work was first published in
1670, just three years short of the second anniversary of her revelations. Once
inside her imaginative and conceptual world, readers may find themselves
wrestling with the power and subtlety of her thought. People inhabiting
worlds utterly different from hers in terms of time and range of interest con-
tinue to find inspiration in her work. I will mention only two.
Contemporary British theologian and eco-feminist Mary Grey finds in
Julian a source of hope in which to ground her own interest in issues of
254 Chapter Nine
social justice. Grey notes “the apparent clash between the promise that all
will be well—and the deep-seated problems that affect culture and society
today” (Grey 2009, 1). Yet she finds in this visionary who lived the last half
of her life in an anchoress’ cell a source of inspiration for people committed
actively to the work of social transformation. After exploring in some detail
the mystical grounding of Dorothy Day and Dorothy Soelle, and mentioning
several influential figures grounded in mystical life—Thomas Merton, Jean
Vanier, and Ghandi—Grey turns to Julian’s prayer for three wounds—contri-
tion, compassion, and longing for God and concludes: “In our contemporary
context I understand these as of vital importance for a spirituality of justice”
(Grey, 18).
Frederick Bauerschmidt goes beyond Grey’s affirming of the mystical life
as a source of hope for practitioners of liberation and finds in Julian’s vision
the roots of a political system. “Julian,” Bauerschmidt tells us, “should be
read as one who theologically imagines the political. This means that my chief
concern is not with Julian as a writer of inherent theological and sociological
interest, nor as a devotional writer, but with Julian as a resource for thinking
about the relationship between theology and social theory and practice” (Bau-
erschmidt, 3). Following Bauerschmidt through his elaboration of this basic
thesis would take us beyond the limits of this chapter. I mention his work to
show the scope of inspiration modern thinkers draw from Julian’s thought.
I draw three principal conclusions from the short account of Julian’s
thought contained in this chapter. The first is that her thought unfolds ac-
cording to the famous definition of theology used by Augustine and Anselm,
“faith seeking understanding.” By this expression I understand the dynamic
quality of faith that pushes it to comprehend what it believes. Anselm says
that those who believe and do not try to understand what they believe are
lazy. Julian’s choice to remain grounded in her faith, the faith of the Church,
is a constant feature of her reflections on the revelations she received and is,
in fact, reinforced by those revelations. Julian expects her readers to remain
grounded in faith as they read her work. She makes it clear, as we have seen,
that she intends her book for future readers, but only for those who share
deeply enough in the tradition and with enough purity to appreciate what
they read. In the last paragraph of the last chapter, Julian prays to almighty
God “that this book come into the hands only of those who want to love him
faithfully, and to those who are willing to submit themselves to the faith of
Holy Church . . . for this revelation is deep theology and great wisdom . . .”
(LT 86, par. 4). Julian attributes theological depth and great wisdom, not to
herself, but to the revelations she tried so faithfully to record. That readers of
her book be grounded in the faith of Holy Church is not just a pious wish on
Julian’s part, but the condition of possibility, for her readers as it was for her,
of understanding these revelations that seem to take Julian and her readers to
the outer limits of the faith and beyond.
The second point is that Julian’s showings are thoroughly grounded, not
only in the attitude of faith, but in the content of that faith as taught by the
Church and revealed to her in her showings; that faith is Christological, Trini-
tarian, and sacramental. The Incarnation of the Son of God for our salvation,
his suffering, death, and resurrection, his identification with humanity, and
his participation in the life of the Trinity form the core of her thought. And
Julian admonishes her readers to take the whole of her revelations: “And
beware that you do not take one thing according to your taste and fancy and
leave another, for that is what heretics do” (LT 86, par. 4).
Finally, Julian puts her faith, as we have seen, in two convergent but
by no means identical sources, the faith of the Church passed down in the
tradition and the sixteen revelations she received on those two days in May
1373. Because the two sources of revelation were convergent, the revelations
confirming the teaching of the Church, she could accept them without any
temptation to reject her faith. But where the revelations stretched beyond the
limits of defined faith, as in the showing of universal salvation, she continued
to trust those revelations on the basis of God’s assurance to her: “What is
impossible to you is not impossible to me. I shall keep my word in all things
and I shall make all things well” (LT 32, par. 3). For us who read her work,
Julian’s courage to live in the uncomfortable space between two opposed
truths gives us confidence to live in that same space, trusting God even when
we do not understand. For us to live in the tension between Julian’s showings
and traditional church teaching demands a vastly enlarged imagination that
can see what Julian means by expressions like, “the Lord opened my spiri-
tual eyes and showed me my soul in the middle of my heart” (ST 67, par.
1); an agile intellect comfortable with thinking opposed truths, and, most of
all, an expanded heart large enough to entertain as possible the compassion
her showings reveal, a compassion that might even lead to the unthinkable,
universal salvation. The final word is love: “Do you want to know what your
Lord meant?” Know well that love was what he meant. Who showed you
this? Love. What did he show? Love. Why did he show it to you? For love”
(LT 86, par. 2).
NOTES
256 Chapter Nine
3. David Leigh, S. J., in the introduction to his book Circuitous Journeys: Mod-
ern Spiritual Autobiography, uses Augustine as the prime example of the complex
process Leigh calls “circuitous” that typically describes the life journey of spiritually
transformed people. We would probably find Julian’s journey circuitous if we had a
full description of it.
Chapter Ten
Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure

Compassion in the State
Isabella to Angelo: “. . . go to your bosom, / Knock there, and ask your

heart what it doth know / That’s like my brother’s fault; if it confess /
A natural guiltiness such as is his, / Let it not sound a thought upon your
tongue / Against my brother’s life.”
—Measure for Measure II, ii, 136–41
Julian of Norwich left us with the dialectical tension between the Church’s
teaching that human beings sin and deserve punishment and the clear teach-
ing of her revelations that God does not impute fault. Love resolves the ten-
sion. Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure presents a different dialectic with
a similar solution. The play begins with moral chaos in the city of Vienna,
moves toward its dialectical opposite, strict justice, and resolves the tension
first through mercy, then through unitive love. Most importantly, for the ar-
gument I have been developing in the preceding chapters, Measure for Mea-
sure dramatizes the intimate connection between awareness of sin (original
and actual), in one’s self, and the practice of compassion. A brief summary
of the story shows the elements of the dialectic at work. A look at various
interpretations of what some have considered “a problem play,” but which
others see as a Christian parable, will help situate the play in the context of
the questions being considered in this book. The main characters in the play
allow us to see how the dialectic of chaos, justice, mercy, and love unfolds
dramatically, and illustrate the central thesis I have been developing—that
compassion is the middle term between offense and forgiveness. A compari-
son of the play’s final act with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s
work in South Africa following Nelson Mandela’s election, will highlight the
elements of restorative justice carried out by the Duke.
257
258 Chapter Ten
THE STORY
The place is Vienna; its ruler, the Duke, has decided to leave the city for a
time and turn its governance over to his vice-regent Angelo. The circum-
stances of the Duke’s leaving are important. The city has fallen into moral
laxness. In the Duke’s words, “. . . Liberty plucks Justice by the nose; The
baby beats the nurse, and quite athwart Goes all decorum” (I, iii, 29–31).
The Duke picks Angelo to rule in his absence, with the hope that this “man
of stricture and firm abstinence” (I, iii, 12), will restore order in the city. The
Duke’s misleads his noblemen about his destination, leaving them with the
impression that he has gone to Hungary to resolve political issues. In fact, he
has withdrawn to a nearby Franciscan monastery where he dons a cowl and,
disguised as a monk, observes everything that happens in Vienna while he is
away and even arranges affairs so that they will turn out according to his in-
tentions. Angelo quickly goes to work, seeing that the brothels are razed as a
way of eliminating Vienna’s rampant lechery, and punishing violations of the
law. A particular case arises to test Angelo’s new authority: Claudio, against
the law, has gotten his own betrothed pregnant before marriage. Angelo con-
demns him to death as an example. Lucio informs Claudio’s sister, Isabella, a
Franciscan novice, of her brother’s fate and begs her to intercede, which she
does without success. In the course of his interactions with Isabella, Angelo
finds himself attracted to her. He agrees to spare her brother if she will sleep
with him and instructs her to come back the next evening with her answer.
Isabella informs her brother of Angelo’s wicked strategy and explains why
she cannot go along even to save her brother’s life. The Duke, disguised as a
Franciscan friar, overhears the conversation between brother and sister and,
coming out of hiding, assures them that Angelo is only testing Isabella’s
virtue. The Duke suggests a stratagem that will preserve Isabella’s virtue and
leave Angelo thinking she has given in to his request. At the last moment,
Marianna, to whom Angelo was betrothed but whom he has never married
because of questions over her dowry, will take the place of Isabella in An-
gelo’s bed. Isabella and Marianna carry out the plan, but Angelo, though he
thinks he has slept with Isabella, does not honor the bargain he has made
with her and refuses to release Claudio. A second stratagem of substitution,
suggested again by the disguised Duke, leaves Angelo thinking that he has
executed Claudio when, in fact, another head, the head of someone who has
already died, has been presented to him as Claudio’s. In the last act of the
play, the Duke and Marianna persuade Isabella, even before she knows her
brother is actually alive, to pardon Angelo. She does so, reasoning that “A
due sincerity governed his deeds, Till he did look on me” (V, 447–450). And
Angelo, before he realizes that he has been duped, repents of his insistence
Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure 259
on the death of Claudio. Claudio appears alive. The Duke, after professing
to condemn the guilty, forgives all. At the end of the play, the Duke asks for
the hand of Isabella.
INTERPRETATIONS
In the four hundred years since its first performance at the king’s court on the
day after Christmas, 1604, Measure for Measure has given rise to conflicting
interpretations. For many it has seemed a “problem play.” Roy Battenhouse
lists critics who have found the play, “strange and puzzling,” “the despair
of commentators” (T. M. Parrott) or have “registered . . . a pained dislike”
(Coleridge).1 “Complaints against the play’s subject, its plot, its hero, or its
heroine have been heard from critics as eminent as Hazlitt, Sir Arthur Quiller-
Couch, and Sir Edmund Chambers” (Battenhouse 1946, 1029). A 1984 article
by Marcia Riefer applies a feminist critique to the character of Isabella. Ear-
lier critics have tended to focus on “one implicit question: is she [Isabella] or
is she not an exemplar of rectitude?” Riefer turns to what she calls “a more
important point, namely that through her [Isabella] one can explore the nega-
tive effects of patriarchal attitudes on female characters and on the resolu-
tion of comedy itself.” 2 According to Riefer, Isabella is uncharacteristically
passive and submissive compared to other Shakespearean heroines. Christy
Desmet finds the Duke’s abdication of power and his “adoption of another
identity as friar” problematic.3
Once on the trail of problems, it is easy to find them. Why, for instance,
does the Duke, having presided over the city’s moral decline, suddenly leave
town and appoint a man he should have known would apply a rigid standard
of morality that the Duke himself does not believe in? Why does he recom-
mend that Marianna sleep with her betrothed Angelo as a substitute for
Isabella when this sleeping with one’s betrothed before marriage is the very
sin that has brought Claudio to the point of execution? But the identifying
of problems, as fruitful as it might seem to the deconstructing intelligence,
does not bring us closer to the meaning Shakespeare might have intended in
writing the play.
Interpreting the play as metaphor might be more useful. Critical analysis
can lock the interpreter in the realm of what Hegel called “understanding,”
as opposed to “reason.” Understanding finds antinomies, contradictions, and
inconsistencies. Reason reconciles by finding a higher truth that lies under the
contradictions. Kierkegaard distinguishes between “ethical” and “spiritual”
levels of interpretation. Metaphor opens the door to the spiritual. Roy Bat-
tenhouse cites authors who have interpreted Measure for Measure in terms
260 Chapter Ten
of the Christian inspiration evident in the play’s title. Measure for Measure
refers to the Gospel teaching about judgment: “Stop judging, that you may
not be judged. For as you judge, so will you be judged, and the measure with
which you measure will be measured out to you” (Matt. 7:1–2). Luke’s fuller
version of this text adds the notion of forgiveness: “Stop judging and you will
not be judged. Stop condemning and you will not be condemned. Forgive and
you will be forgiven. Give and gifts will be given to you, a good measure,
packed together, shaken down, and overflowing will be poured into your lap.
For the measure with which you measure will in return be measured out to
you” (Lk. 6:37–39).
Several authors look for the “spiritual” meaning of Measure for Measure
by interpreting it as allegory or parable. Battenhouse finds in Measure for
Measure “a parable of the Atonement” (Battenhouse 1946, 1053), that is the
Christian story of redemption. In this interpretation, the Duke becomes the
equivalent of God, who, though “he is the Lord of Men, . . . condescends to
become their brother. Acting incognito, he sows within their history the pro-
cesses whereby they may be reconciled to him in a just and happy kingdom”
(1032). Within this overall framework of the doctrine of the Atonement,
Battenhouse draws out the Christian meaning of numerous passages in the
play. Most important for our purposes are references to original sin, judg-
ment, mercy, and love. We will return to them. G. Wilson Knight, one of the
authors to whom Battenhouse refers as a Christian interpreter of the play,
points out the “clear relation existing between the play and the Gospels. . . .
(Knight 1949, 157). For Knight, as for Battenhouse, the play is dominated by
a Christian ethical vision. “The play,” says Knight, “tends towards allegory
or symbolism” (158). Focusing too literally on the plausibility of individual
characters can distract the reader from the overall vision. The play’s theme,
says Knight, expressed in its title, takes shape in concrete exemplars of judg-
ment and mercy, condemnation, and forgiveness.
More recently, John D. Cox has argued that the medieval morality play can
help us understand the meaning of Measure for Measure. While acknowledg-
ing that this is a thoroughly renaissance play, Cox points out that medieval
plays dealing with sexual conduct “raise many of the issues that are also
raised in Measure for Measure, particularly the necessity to temper justice
with mercy, the need for charity and self-examination in judging the faults of
others, the problem of slander, the hypocritical abuse of authority, the prefer-
ability of forgiveness over harsh punishment, a contrast between the ‘old law’
and the ‘new,’ and the nature of true sovereignty” (Cox 1983, 2). Cox does
not try to prove that these mystery plays are a source for Shakespeare’s play,
but points out that medieval religious plays were “a living dramatic tradition
in parts of England until the mid-1580s” (2). Seeing them would have made
an impression on “an imagination as poetically and theatrically receptive as

Shakespeare’s” (2).
Without denying the problems that Measure for Measure presents, I
choose to follow the direction set by these commentators who interpret Mea-
sure for Measure as a Christian parable. The evidence of Christian inspiration
is too overwhelming to neglect. If we take the play as a Christian parable of
judgment and mercy, the characters, like the Prodigal son, his father, and his
brother of Luke’s famous narrative, embody vice and virtue and the dynamic
interplay between them.
THREE MAIN CHARACTERS,

ANGELO, ISABELLA, AND THE DUKE
Angelo
We begin with Angelo, the “angel,” and “fallen angel.” This is the man the
Duke chooses to rule the city in his absence. The Duke admits that he himself
has “for this fourteen years let slip” the city’s “strict statutes and most biting
laws, The needful bits and curbs to headstrong weeds” (I, iii, 20). Angelo,
is possibly the most interesting character in the play, perhaps because evil
is often more interesting than good. We look first at this “angel” before his
fall, then after. The Duke, in conversation with Friar Thomas, describes his
vice-regent: “Lord Angelo is precise, / Stands at a guard with envy, scarce
confesses / That his blood flows, or that his appetite / Is more bread than stone
. . .” (I, iii, 50–53). That the Duke has his doubts about Angelo’s true char-
acter is clear from what follows: “Hence we shall see, / If power change
purpose, what our seemers be” (I, iii, 53–54). In the eyes of the irreverent wit,
Lucio, “Lord Angelo is a man whose blood / Is very snow-broth; one who
never feels / The wanton stings and motions of the sense, / But doth rebate
and blunt his natural edge / With profits of the mind, study, and fast” (I, iv,
57–61). Angelo’s rigidity becomes clear in his condemnation of Claudio. As
various characters try to (I, iv, 57–61) dissuade him from his course, he ar-
ticulates the cold logic that governs his actions. The elder statesman, Escalus,
points out to Angelo that he might have erred as Claudio has if his affections
had led him and the circumstances been right. Angelo replies, “Tis one thing
to be tempted, Escalus, / Another to fall. I not deny, / The jury, passing on the
prisoner’s life, / May in the sworn twelve have a thief or two / Guiltier than
him they try” (II, I, 17–21). Angelo’s sense of justice is, at this point before
his fall, impartial. He puts himself on record with Escalus that if he should
offend he would expect to be punished (II, 1, 17). In defense of Angelo, but
without much feeling, Escalus responds to the Justice’s comment that Angelo
262 Chapter Ten
is “severe” by pointing out, “Mercy is not itself, that oft looks so; / Pardon is
still the nurse of second woe. / But yet, poor Claudio! There is no remedy”
(II, I, 283–84).
We are still with Angelo before his “fall.” He is still “very snow-broth;
one who never feels / The wanton stings and motions of the sense . . .” (I, iv,
57–61), one for whom justice is supreme. In the face of Isabella’s entreaties,
Angelo continues to argue his rationale for condemning Claudio. He appeals
to the impartiality of the law: “It is the law not I that condemn your brother.
/ Were he my kinsman, brother, or my son, / It should be thus with him; he
must die tomorrow” (II, ii, 80–82). When Isabella appeals for pity, Angelo
identifies justice and pity: “I show it most of all when I show justice, / For
then I pity those I do not know, / Which a dismissed offense would after gall;
/ And do him right that, answering one foul wrong, / Lives not to act another”
(II, ii, 100–104). This is the case for law and order, which, after all, the Duke
wishes Angelo to restore.
Then, something begins to happen in Angelo. It could be a movement of
grace. If grace, it is a grace he turns aside. An opening occurs in him that turns
out to pave the way for his fall. From being merely rigid, Angelo becomes
evil. Isabella’s words have entered his inner sanctum. To himself he says,
“She speaks, and ’tis / Such sense that my sense breeds with it” (II, ii, 142),
and then bids her farewell. The admission is ambiguous. “My sense breeds”
could simply mean that he sees the logic of her argument. But Angelo’s sub-
sequent reflection reveals a sensual stirring, a melting of “the snow broth,” a
waking of “the wanton stings and motions of the sense.” To Isabella’s part-
ing wish, “Heaven keep your honor safe” Angelo replies, “Amen: / For I am
that way going to temptation, / Where prayers cross” (II, ii, 157–58), i.e.,
where prayers are at cross purposes. Angelo is moving in a dangerous direc-
tion away from heaven. When Isabella has left, Angelo enters an extended
reflection on what is happening to him, finally goes within himself, becomes
a problem for himself, as Augustine professed he was for himself (Conf., X,
16). He is now, at least for a moment, Kierkegaard’s “self that relates itself to
itself,”4 and so stands on the threshold of becoming more fully human. The
cold judge who has looked only at the law now looks inward to the human
heart, his own. “What dost thou, or what art thou, Angelo?” (II, ii, 173).
Angelo’s soliloquy begins as a response to Isabella’s ritual parting com-
ment, “Save your honor” (II, iii, 161), to which he responds to himself “From
thee and from thy virtue!” (162). It is precisely Isabella’s virtue that tempts
him, yet his desire goes beyond a Platonic admiration: “Dost thou desire
her foully for those things / That make her good?” (173–74). Then Angelo
acknowledges a connection he has not made before, and will, unfortunately,
not make again. Weakness in oneself, he has always argued, should not enter
into one’s judgments of others when one is entrusted with administration of

the law. Now he sees differently, “O, let her brother live: / Thieves for their
robbery have authority / When judges steal themselves” (174–76). Angelo
closes the soliloquy reflecting on the paradox of his being tempted to sin by
virtue: “What is’t I dream on? / O cunning enemy, that, to catch a saint, / With
saints does bait thy hook! Most dangerous / Is that temptation that doth goad
us on / To sin in loving virtue. Never could the strumpet, / With all her double
vigor, art and nature, / Once stir my temper; but this virtuous maid / Subdues
me quite” (178–185). In the closing line, Angelo acknowledges the profound
change that has taken place in him. “Ever till now / When men were fond, I
smiled and wond’red how” (185–86). Now his own experience has betrayed
his Platonic ideals.
When we next hear Angelo, he is still torn between heavenly and earthly
desire: “When I would pray and think, I think and pray / To several subjects:
heaven hath my empty words, / Whilst my invention, hearing not my tongue, /
Anchors on Isabel; heaven in my mouth, / As if I did but only chew his name,
/ And in my heart the strong and swelling evil / Of my conception” (II, iv,
1–7). The “swelling evil” prevails. Angelo’s experience of temptation, which
might have opened him to mercy toward Claudio, impels him instead to make
a wicked bargain with Isabella, “Give up your body to such sweet unclean-
ness / As she that he has stained” (II, iv, 54). At first, Isabella does not under-
stand. Angelo makes his intention clear: “‘Redeem thy brother / By yielding
up thy body to my will” (163–64). Isabella cannot accept such a proposition,
at least not in the form offered. She will go along with the strategem the Duke
proposes, to substitute Angelo’s betrothed, Marianna, for Isabella herself. But
even though Angelo thinks Isabella has fulfilled her half of the bargain, he
does not honor his. Angelo’s evil multiplies itself. Not only does he try to
seduce Isabella, he betrays her even when he thinks she has given in.
In this play, even Angelo is not beyond redemption. Perhaps the opening
he has experienced in his attraction to Isabella prepares him for the repen-
tance of the “final judgment” of Act V. For Angelo does repent. Once it
becomes clear the Duke has seen everything, Angelo confesses and asks for
death: “When I perceive your Grace, like power divine, / Hath looked upon
my passes. Then, good prince, / No longer session hold upon my shame, / But
let my trial be mine own confession. / Immediate sentence then, and sequent
death, / Is all the grace I beg” (V, 372–375). Marianna and Isabella intercede
for Angelo, but the Duke remains firm. Finally, before it becomes evident
that Claudio is still alive—thanks to the Duke’s ruse of substituting another
head for Claudio’s—Angelo offers full repentance: “I am sorry that such
sorrow I procure, / and so deep sticks it in my penitent heard, / That I crave
death more willingly than mercy; / ’Tis my deserving, and I do entreat it”
264 Chapter Ten
(477–480). Angelo’s repentance may be part of his redemption; the Duke’s

final pardon is another part. The final restoration of Angelo is his marriage to
his betrothed, Marianna, who clearly loves him: “I crave no other, nor no bet-
ter man” (429). The marriage to Marianna is a condition of the Duke’s pardon
which he seals in his final speech with words of exhortation to Marianna and
Angelo, “Joy to you, Marianna. Love her, Angelo; / I have confessed her, and
I know her virtue” (529–30). Shakespeare’s presentation of redemptive love
through marriage may be less psychologically satisfying than his presenta-
tion of the reflection occasioned in Angelo by his temptation toward Isabella,
but it contains the redemptive solution to the conflicts that have arisen in the
play. Here, in the final stage of the play, the symbolic and allegorical takes
precedence over the psychological.
Angelo has followed a path from cold virtue untested by temptation,
through the stirring of his flesh in sensual attraction, and the fall into a double
sin of sexual transgression and betrayal of a promise, to final repentance,
pardon, and redemption through love. This is precisely the path laid out by
the Hegelian dialectic, from abstract undifferentiated beginning, through ne-
gation, to final reconciliation.
Isabella
If Angelo’s development unfolds through dialectical stages in his own life,
that development also includes a dialectical relation with Isabella. Her pleas
for mercy oppose his rigid demand for justice. And, as we have seen, her at-
tractive embodiment of virtue tempts him from his character as “very snow-
broth; one who never feels / The wanton stings and motions of the sense
. . .” (I, iv, 57–61) and introduces him to the reality of human weakness
even in himself. In a way, the two characters Angelo and Isabella are polar
opposites, but not entirely. He is administering justice with the impartiality
of the head of state; no one has offended him personally. Claudio is not his
personal enemy. Angelo makes it clear he would act in the same way with
his own kin (II, ii, 80–82). Isabella cannot afford to be so detached; her own
brother is condemned. Having noted these qualifications, we can still see
in the rationale for mercy enunciated by Isabella the dialectical opposite of
Angelo’s stern justice.
Like Angelo, Isabella develops as a character in the course of the play.
Just as Angelo moves from a detached purity that puts him above temptation
into a fall that shows his own capacity for sin and, finally, toward repentance,
pardon, and reconciliation, Isabella’s development shows marked stages.
Isabella’s purity has something of the naïve in it. She has chosen chastity as
a religious of St. Clare, a choice that puts her outside the normal testing that
life in the world provides. She may be holy, at least on the way to holiness;
she is not yet fully human. Even the pleas for her brother’s life begin in a
half-hearted, hesitant way, without the passion we would expect from a sister
trying to save a brother from death. She seems torn between condemning the
sin her brother has committed and pleading for his life. “There is a vice that
most I do abhor, / And most desire should meet the blow of justice; / For
which I would not plead but that I must; / For which I must not plead, but
that I am / At war ’twixt will and will not” (II, ii, 29–33). Isabella seems torn
between wanting to see justice done toward the “vice that most I do abhor”
and saving her brother’s life. Under Lucio’s goading to be more passionate,
Isabella warms to her task and speaks with passion for her brother.
What Knight calls Isabella’s “ice-cold sanctity” (Knight 1949, 180), and the
naïveté that accompanies it, leaves her at first unable to respond appropriately
to Angelo. When Angelo proposes his gruesome bargain, Claudio’s life in
exchange for Isabella’s virtue, the aspiring novice does not understand. She re-
sponds with pious platitudes, “Sir, believe this: I had rather give my body than
my soul” (II, iv, 55). Realizing that she has missed his point, Angelo suggests
to Isabella that she is either naïve or crafty: “Your sense pursues not mine;
either you are ignorant. / Or seem so, crafty; and that’s not good” (II, iv, 74).
Finally realizing what Angelo asks of her, Isabella reacts decisively: “Better
it were a brother died at once / Than that a sister by redeeming him, Should
die forever” (II, iv, 106–108). In a sense, Isabella has “fallen” too, fallen from
her untested virtue into the reality of temptation. In a way, she is like Christ,
exposed to temptation, but firm in rejecting it. She is becoming human as well
as saintly. In the final act, the judgment scene created by the Duke when he
abandons his disguise and returns as himself to expose the balance of vice and
virtue and effect reconciliation among the injured parties, Isabella manifests
the integration of sanctity and humanness in her pardon for Angelo.
I have argued from the beginning of this book that compassion unlocks the
door to forgiveness and that, in human beings, consciousness of one’s own
tendency to sin can make one compassionate. Isabella, in the play’s final act,
manifests a different kind of sympathy. She recognizes goodness in someone
who has shown her only evil. It is important that she pardons even before
she knows that her brother is actually alive. In interceding with the Duke for
Angelo’s life, Isabella shows sympathy for this man who might well have
appeared to her as totally evil: “Most bounteous sir, / Look, if it please you,
on this man condemned, / As if my brother lived. I partly think / A due sincer-
ity governed his deeds, / Till he did look on me” (V, 447–50). Isabella sees
Angelo, not as a devil, but as a human being with a sincere desire for justice,
tempted by the weakness of the flesh. But in appealing for mercy toward her
brother, Isabella asks Angelo to look, not at some virtue in Claudio that might
266 Chapter Ten
recommend clemency, but at the weakness in Angelo himself that should

make him merciful to another sinner.
Now we turn to the “case” that Isabella makes for mercy. From her first
encounter with her brother’s judge, Isabella articulates a mature, finely nu-
anced theology of mercy. Even though she grows personally, becoming more
passionate, more human as she goes, Isabella enunciates the Gospel logic of
mercy with impressive subtlety and comprehensiveness from the beginning.
First, she begs Angelo to condemn her brother’s fault, not his person (II, ii,
35). Then Isabella argues that mercy becomes a king and judges more than
crowns, swords, “marshall’s truncheon, nor the judge’s robe” (II, ii, 59–63).
She keeps going deeper, into the heart of Christianity, into Angelo’s heart.
To Angelo’s claim that he could not pardon Claudio even if he wanted to,
Isabella responds, “But might you do’t, and do the world not wrong, / If so
your heart were touched with that remorse [compassion] / As mine is to him”
(II, ii, 53–54). Isabella is trying to take Angelo from his head to his heart. She
is aware of the solidarity in sin that Christianity teaches, the mercy of Christ
toward sinners that should teach us mercy. “Alas, alas! / Why all the souls
that were were forfeit once; / and He that might the vantage best have too /
Found out the remedy. How would you be, / If He, which is the top of judg-
ment, should / But judge you as you are? O think on that, / And mercy then
will breathe within our lips, / Like man made new” (II, ii, 73–78).
Isabella vainly tries to bring to Angelo’s consciousness his own personal
share in universal sin and redemption as a motive for mercy: “. . . go to your
bosom, / Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know / That’s like
my brother’s fault; if it confess / A natural guiltiness such as is his, / Let it
not sound a thought upon your tongue / Against my brother’s life” (II, ii,
136–41). Isabella does not succeed in awakening Angelo’s conscience. On
the contrary, she awakens his sensual appetite. Such an awakening might
have made him more merciful. Instead, as we have seen, it compounds his
evil, adding the sins of seduction and betrayal to the weakness of harsh judg-
ment. Isabella’s articulation of the Gospel argument for mercy is crucial to
an understanding of Measure for Measure. So is the Duke’s embodiment of
mercy in the movement of the play.
The Duke
The Duke’s character is complex, godlike in some ways but still human and
imperfect. If we treat Measure for Measure as a kind of Christian parable,
Angelo is the negation of mercy, Isabella is the voice of mercy, and the Duke
is the architect of mercy in the form of pardon and reconciliation. Through
his omniscient observation and clever stratagems, the Duke brings Angelo to
repentance. He guarantees that Angelo’s evil intentions will not have their in-
tended effects and brings him, along with all the other characters in the play,
to the place of restoration through love, symbolized in the marriage bonds.
The development of the Duke’s character may at first seem less marked than
Angelo’s and Isabella’s. He functions as a stabilizing force throughout the
play. Angelo, once exposed in the final scene, realizes the Duke has exercised
a kind of divine scrutiny: “O my dread lord, / I should be guiltier than my
guiltiness, / To think I can be undiscernible, / When I perceive your Grace,
like pow’r divine, / Hath looked upon my passes” (V, 371–375). But we
would be mistaken to overlook the Duke’s defects even though Angelo finds
in him something “like power divine.” If we look behind the Duke’s decision
to leave town and turn the government over to Angelo, we find a man trou-
bled by the condition of his city and convinced that he cannot restore order
by himself. And if we compare this initial troubled stage of the Duke’s rule
to his confident authority in the final scene, we discover a clear development.
And so, though he acts in a kind of god-like way, first behind the scenes as
the plot unfolds, then openly in the final act as he uncovers the evil that has
taken place secretly and brings about a healing of all the wounds caused by
the characters’ sins, he is human and therefore capable of development.
The Duke’s development as a human being shows us something of the
dialectical character of justice and mercy. The Duke’s chief imperfection,
a defect hard to hide since it is so crucial to the launching of the plot, is
a certain acknowledged laxity in enforcing the laws of the city. “We have
strict statutes and most biting laws, / the needful bits and curbs to headstrong
weeds, / Which for this fourteen years we have let slip . . .” (I, iii, 20–21).
The consequence of the Duke’s laxity is, as we have seen above, chaos in
the city: “And Liberty plucks Justice by the nose; / The baby beats the nurse,
and quite athwart / Goes all decorum” (I, iii, 29–31). If moral chaos caused
by the Duke’s laxity is the first level of the dialectic, the given situation from
which the play begins, the Duke’s decision to pick the overly-rigid Angelo to
put things right might seem merely a failure of judgment. But we can also see
Angelo as representing the second stage of the dialectic, the polar opposite of
laxity, which is necessary as a first step toward overcoming the city’s moral
chaos. Angelo’s legalism goes in the opposite direction of the Duke’s own
judgment about how to rule the city but it is a necessary opposite direction
if the play is to have its desired outcome. The third stage of the dialectic,
represented by the Duke’s deepest instincts not yet realized in the opening
scenes of the play, consists in the reconciling power of forgiveness and love
expressed in the final act. The contradiction between the final act and the
opening scenes that set the plot in motion finds its resolution in a dialectal
progression from laxity through justice to mercy.
268 Chapter Ten
Justice is an antidote to laxity. But mercy is an antidote to the excesses of

a justice too strictly applied. Just as justice does not take the place of mercy,
mercy does not replace justice. Mercy is not the same as laxity. It goes be-
yond both laxity and justice. Angelo’s claim in answer to Isabella’s plea for
mercy contains some truth: “I show it [mercy] most when I show justice”
(II, ii, 100). His justice shows mercy to those who would be scandalized by
letting faults go unpunished (101–102). And he shows mercy to the one con-
demned by making sure he commits no further faults (103–104). These might
seem like weak arguments, but they draw strength from the Duke’s admission
that chaos has come from his not enforcing the laws. Still the contradiction
exists between the Duke’s mercy and Angelo’s harshness. Perhaps the Duke
wants to restore balance in the city by using a means he knows will fail so that
he can show how true mercy transcends both laxness and harshness. Mercy
has to pass through justice before it can be authentic mercy. And justice has
to be complemented by mercy before it becomes true justice. We can imagine
the Duke setting this dialectic in motion quite consciously, knowing from
the beginning where everything will end up. The defect of this suggestion is
that it makes the Duke appear to be above the action of the play rather than
a part of it.
Another possibility, one that makes the Duke less omniscient, comes from
Daniel Massey, a Shakespearean actor who has played the Duke and writ-
ten about the experience of entering into the Duke’s character. An actor’s
interpretation adds a valuable perspective because acting requires enter-
ing the inner world of the character and bringing it to life. Massey rejects
G. Wilson Knight’s casting of the Duke as “some sort of Christ figure moving
gently through the play dispensing pastoral wisdom” (Massey 2010, 202) in
favor of an interpretation that attributes to the Duke “a deep and existential
humanity” (202). With this deep humanity in view, Massey explains the dis-
sonance between the opening chaos of the city, brought about by the Duke’s
lax enforcement of the laws, and the final harmonious resolution of Act V
as the manifestation of a character who grows into his true authority and
gradually comes to the see the wisdom of mercy in government. The Duke is,
according to Massey’s interpretation, genuinely troubled by the sorry state of
his city and chooses Angelo with the hope of restoring order. This interpreta-
tion is appealing because it recognizes that the Duke, like the other principal
characters in the play, develops.
But the Duke is not naïve. He recognizes that his choice of Angelo carries
some risk. On the one hand, he expects Angelo to model the same combina-
tion of qualities that he himself brings. “Hold, therefore, Angelo: / In our
remove be thou at full ourself; / Mortality and mercy in Vienna / Live in thy
tongue and heart” (I, i, 42–44). On the other hand, the Duke recognizes that
Angelo may not be the solid man of virtue he appears to be. In an important
conversation with Friar Thomas at the monastery where he plans to disguise
himself as a monk and observe events in the city, the Duke gives us insight
about the state of his thinking. He reveals both the dilemma he finds himself
in and his doubts about Angelo. After listening to the Duke’s plans, Friar
Thomas suggests that the Duke could have restored order more effectively
himself: “It rested in your Grace / To unloose this tied-up Justice when you
pleased, / And it in you more dreadful would have seemed / Than in Angelo”
(I, iii, 31–33). “I do fear, too dreadful” responds the Duke, “Sith ’twas my
fault to give the people scope, / ’Twould be my tyranny to strike and gall
them / For what I bid them do; for we bid this be done / When evil deeds
have their permissive pass, / And not the punishment” (34–38). This is the
dilemma; a show of authority now would punish the people for a situation the
Duke has himself set in motion. Angelo does not share the blame for bringing
on the laxity. Therefore he may “in the ambush of my name, strike home, /
And yet my nature never in the fight / To do it slander” (41–43). That is the
hope: Angelo uncompromised by complicity in the city’s moral chaos can
bring it to order.
But under the hope lies a doubt that makes the Duke choose to disguise
himself as a monk and observe his substitute in action. Angelo, observes the
Duke, “scarce confesses / That his blood flows, or that his appetite / Is more
to bread than stone. Hence shall we see, / If power change purpose, what our
seemers be” (51–54). And the duplicity the Duke sees in Angelo from his
monastic observation post confirms his doubts. What is lacking in Angelo is
not a sense of justice but the personal virtue that makes the administration of
justice credible. A sinful man holding others to account for sins less evil than
his own, mocks justice. In a conversation of Act III with the wise Escalus,
the Duke makes clear the qualities of one who bears responsibility to exer-
cise judgment. “He who the sword of heaven will bear / Should be as holy
as severe. . . . Shame to him whose cruel striking / Kills for faults of his own
liking” (III, ii, 264–65; 270–71).
The Duke, then begins with a recognition of his own failure to provide
the right balance of justice and mercy. Fearing to suddenly bring down the
full force of the law himself, he chooses someone who stands on the side of
rectitude with the hope of seeing a better balance achieved in the city’s life.
But the experiment with Angelo confirms his worst fears about the hypocriti-
cal exercise of justice and moves him toward a balance that transcends both
his earlier easy going ways and the cruel and inconsistent standard of justice
exercised by Angelo. By the end of the play, the Duke enters fully into the
exercise of his true authority, conscious of the need for justice but justice
tempered by mercy.
270 Chapter Ten
The Duke’s actions throughout the play reinforce the notion that he rec-
ognized the importance of dialectic, not only between justice and mercy but
between truth and deception, the simplicity of doves and the cleverness of
serpents (Matt. 10:16), outrage at evil deeds and clemency in dealing with
them. The Duke’s double role through the unfolding of the plot, allows him
to take contradictory attitudes to what is happening. As a friar he is both
merciful and full of intrigue. In one of the more tender scenes in the play,
the disguised Duke visits Juliet, pregnant by Claudio, eliciting from her both
repentance for wrong done and a sincere love for the man who wronged her
and for herself. Duke: Love you the man that wronged you? Juliet. Yes, as
I love the woman that wronged him” (II, iii, 24–25).5 Soon after, in Act III,
the Duke is proposing to Isabella the ruse by which she may seem to be giv-
ing into Angelo, while in fact she is preserving her virginity. Another of the
Duke’s stratagems is to substitute the head of a man already dead for Clau-
dio’s, so that Angelo will think his order has been carried out. In the final act,
in a speech that cites the title of the play, the Duke mimics Angelo’s harsh-
ness, threatening him with the same stern judgment he carried out against
Claudio: “The very mercy of the law cries out / Most audible, even from his
proper tongue, / ‘An Angelo for Claudio, death for death!’ / Haste still pays
haste, and leisure answers leisure / Like doth quit like, and Measure still for
Measure” (V, 410–414). Then the Duke condemns Angelo to death, knowing
that he will pardon him, thus reversing the law of retribution to which Angelo
subscribes. The Duke pivots between harshness and mercy. But the harshness
is feigned, the mercy real.
THE FINAL ACT
Act 5 recapitulates the whole action of the play and brings events to their
conclusion. The Duke, returned from his sojourn in the monastery, gathers
the characters in the story and delivers final judgment. The action unfolds in
four phases. First, the Duke returns to take up where he left off at the begin-
ning of the play, apparently still full of confidence in Angelo, not trusting
Isabella who accuses Angelo. Then, in a series of swift movements, comes
the revelation of the truth about the characters. The Duke’s judgments on the
guilty follow, a skillful blend of justice and mercy. Finally, the Duke pardons
all and effects reconciliation. A look at each of these stages in turn will help
us appreciate the movement of the play as a whole.
First the Duke’s return. He seems naïve, greeting Angelo and Escalus
warmly with signs of gratitude, “Many and hearty thankings to you both” (V,
4), as if they both deserved praise. The Duke is back at the beginning when
he designated Angelo as his regent. But not really. Underneath his cordiality
lies knowledge of the truth, which he chooses to draw out bit by bit through
the testimony of the players in the drama. The Duke knows now who Angelo
is, but chooses not to act. When Angelo observes to the Duke that Isabella
“will speak most bitterly and strange” (36), Isabella responds that it is strange
but true that Angelo is “forsworn,” “a murderer,” “an adulterous thief,”
“an hypocrite,” and “a virgin violator” (37–42). The Duke pretends not to
believe Isabella’s accusations, dismisses her complaint, recommending that
she take her case to Angelo (27–28), to which she replies “You bid me seek
redemption of the devil” (29). The Duke is unmoved. Probably because he is
pretending not to believe, he is all the more harsh with her, ordering her to
prison for her impudence. The Duke argues against Isabella’s allegations, rea-
soning that Angelo, had he been guilty, would have had compassion, “would
have weighed thy brother by himself ” (111). The Duke speaks ironically, of
course, knowing that Angelo’s sin has not made him compassionate. Then
comes Marianna’s testimony that Angelo is actually her husband and has,
unknown to himself, consummated their marriage. Angelo protests, alleging
that behind these women’s accusations lurks “some more mightier member
/ That sets them on” (237–38). The Duke argues against Marianna’s impu-
dence in accusing someone “sealed in approbation” (245). The Duke sends
for the mysterious “Friar Lodowick,” the Duke’s other self, to get to the root
of things.
Now the revelation of sin that has begun in Marianna’s disclosure about
her husband, Angelo, becomes generalized. All that has remained hidden up
to now comes into the light. The Duke leaves for a while and Friar Lodowick
is brought in, wondering where the Duke is: “’Tis he should hear me speak’”
(295). Friar Lodowick (the Duke) accuses the Duke of being unjust for turning
judgment over to Angelo, the very man who is accused. An angry dialogue
ensues between Escalus and the Friar/Duke. Lucio confirms that this is indeed
the friar who has put the women up to their accusations and adds that the friar
has spoken ill of the Duke himself, calling the Duke “a flesh-monger, a fool,
and a coward” (335–336). The friar alleges it was Lucio who said these things,
protesting “I love the Duke as I love myself ” (343). Finally, in exasperation,
Lucio pulls the cowl back from the friar’s head revealing the Duke. Now
Escalus, Angelo, and Lucio stand revealed. The sins of Angelo have been
revealed but not the stratagems by which the Duke has preserved the virginity
of Isabella and the life of her brother Claudio. Sin is revealed, not redemption.
Now follows the phase of judgment, which combines both justice and
mercy. The Duke pardons Escalus immediately for his rash comments and
Isabella for her intemperate accusations of Angelo when the Duke first re-
turned to the city. Now that he stands revealed, Angelo repents before the
272 Chapter Ten
Duke: and asks for death: “Then, good prince, / No longer session hold upon
my shame, / But let my trial be mine own confession. / Immediate sentence
then, and sequent death, / Is all the death I beg” (372–77). To which the Duke
responds by sending off Angelo and Marianna to be married. When they re-
turn, now married, the Duke makes a double move that combines mercy and
justice. First, in an act of mercy, the Duke counsels Isabella: “. . . this new-
married man . . . you must pardon / For Marianna’s sake” (403). But, though
he counsels Isabella to pardon, the Duke himself, in an exercise of justice,
holds Angelo accountable for the “double violation, / Of sacred chastity, and
of promise-breach . . .” (407–408). He passes sentence on Angelo in language
reminiscent of Angelo’s own earlier response to Isabella’s pleas for pity
toward her brother. Angelo had said, “I show it most when I show justice”
(II, ii, 100). Now the Duke proclaims “The very mercy of the law cries out /
Most audible, even from his proper tongue, / ‘An Angelo for Claudio, death
for death!’ . . . Like doth quit like, and Measure still for Measure” (410–414).
Though the language is similar, Angelo and the Duke actually appeal to a
different logic. Angelo was claiming a certain mercy in the impartial exer-
cise of judgment. The Duke’s “Measure still for Measure” clearly refers to
the Gospel teaching found in Matthew, “Stop judging, that you may not be
judged. For as you judge, so will you be judged, and the measure with which
you measure will be measured out to you” (Matt. 7:1–2). Matthew asks the
question that strikes directly at Angelo’s harshness, “Why do you notice the
splinter in your brother’s eye, but do not perceive the wooden beam in your
own eye?” (Matt. 7:3). Isabella and Escalus as well had tried to get Angelo
to recognize in himself the same weakness that led Claudio to have relations
with Juliet. But even when he fell into temptation, Angelo did not let the sin
in himself soften his judgment toward Claudio. Now the Duke is applying the
Gospel logic, “as you judge, so you will be judged.” The Duke pronounces
judgment: “We do condemn thee to the very block / Where Claudio stooped
to death, and with like haste. / Away with him” (417–19).
But the Duke’s harshness, unlike Angelo’s, is a prelude to pardon and
reconciliation. He wants Angelo to feel the stern logic of the judgment he
has exercised toward Claudio. It is important that Angelo be held account-
able. Justice must have its moment, even this passing moment. But the Duke
knows a crucial circumstance that will make the act of pardon more plausible.
Due to the Duke’s own intervention, Claudio has not died. Angelo’s harsh
judgment has not had its intended consequence. The Duke also knows some-
thing else that probably moves him to a reconciling act even before he grants
Angelo pardon. Another “sin” lurks in Angelo’s background, his dismissal of
Marianna simply because she could not produce the dowry she had promised
(III, i, 216–227). In a conversation with Isabella, the Duke was suggesting
that Marianna take Isabella’s place in Angelo’s bed to fulfill the bargain he
has made with Isabella, to free Claudio if she will sleep with him. The Duke
needs to explain to Isabella why it would not be sinful for Marianna to sleep
with Angelo; they had in fact been betrothed. When the Duke explains to
Isabella that the loss of Marianna’s dowry brought an end to her relationship
with Angelo, Isabella is amazed: “Can this be so? Did Angelo so leave her?”
(III, 1, 228). The Duke replies in words that leave no doubt about his view
of Angelo’s character: “Left her in her tears, and dried not one of them with
his comfort; swallowed his vows whole, pretending in her discoveries of dis-
honor: in few, bestowed her on her own lamentation, which she yet wears for
his sake; and he, a marble to her tears, is washed with them, but relents not”
(III, 1, 229–34). In other words, Angelo treated cruelly the woman who loved
him because she had lost her dowry.
So now that everything has been revealed and Angelo has repented, asking
only “Immediate sentence . . . and sequent death” (V, 376), the Duke responds
with an unexpected “sentence” that reveals the core of his sense of justice.
Asking Angelo if he was ever “contracted to this woman” (378), and receiv-
ing Angelo’s affirmative answer, the Duke “sentences” him to marriage:
“Go take her hence, and marry her instantly” (380). The notion of marriage
as a sentence, implicit in the Duke’s command to Angelo, becomes explicit
toward the end of Act V when the Duke orders Lucio to marry the woman he
has “begot with child” (514). “Marrying a punk, my lord” responds Lucio, “is
pressing to death, whipping, and hanging” (525). The sentences pronounced
by the Duke on Angelo and Lucio are healing sentences. The Duke’s justice
is restorative justice not retributive, to use terms from modern criminal justice
theory,6 to which we will return.
The newly completed bond between Angelo and Marianna then becomes
the basis of a surprising command made by the Duke to Isabella. At this
point, the revelation that Claudio lives has not yet taken place. The Duke
expresses his sympathy toward Isabella over the death of her brother and
consoles her with pious sentiments about the “better life, past fearing death”
(400) that Claudio now enjoys. Then comes the Duke’s command: “For
this new-married man, approaching here, / Whose salt imagination yet hath
wronged / Your well-defended honor, you must pardon / For Marianna’s
sake” (403–405). This command is all the more surprising in light of what
follows immediately, the harshest words we will hear from the Duke.
The Duke’s command to Isabella—it is a command, “You must pardon”—
is followed immediately by a “but. . . .” The “but” is a pivot by which the
Duke turns from his command that Isabella pardon Angelo to his own judg-
ment against Angelo. I have already referred in treating of the Duke to the
logic of his condemnation here. Angelo must feel the backlash of his own
274 Chapter Ten
severe judgment. He must understand what “measure for measure” means

before he feels the weight of pardon. The weight of pardon is that we must
forgive just as we have been forgiven. Isabella appealed to this teaching as
she was pleading for her brother, but Angelo was not willing to learn at that
moment.
The final phase of Act V consists of reconciliation, effected symbolically
through marriage. First Angelo and Marianna marry (V, 380–83). The text is
clear about the healing effect of the marriage for Angelo. He has already been
married to Marianna by the time that Claudio appears alive, giving assurance
of safety to Angelo: “By this Lord Angelo perceives he’s safe” (496). Now he
can enjoy the restorative power of the marriage. “Methinks I see a quick’ning
in his eye,” says the Duke. “Well, Angelo, your evil quits you well; Look
that you love your wife; her worth, worth yours. I find an apt remission in
myself ” (497–500). Then the Duke orders Lucio to marry the mother of his
child (514–15) and then be whipped for his insolence (514–516). It is clear
that for Julio as for Angelo, the real “punishment” is marriage, for the Duke
forgives everything else: “Upon my honor, thou shalt marry her. / Thy slan-
ders I forgive; and therewithal / Remit thy other forfeits” (521–23). The Duke
next asks Isabella for her hand. She has not really sinned, but as we have
seen, some dissonance in her sexual life needs healing. She has gone from
the chastity of the convent to the humiliation of an attempted seduction. Now
the Duke offers her the fullness of love in marriage. Finally, the Duke, hav-
ing pardoned Claudio for his sin (492–93), now urges him to marriage: “She,
Claudio, that you wronged, look you restore,” i.e., marry (528).
A COMEDY THAT COULD HAVE BEEN A TRAGEDY
Measure for Measure began with a chaos in Vienna’s sexual mores and ends
with the reconciling love of marriage. This comedic ending could easily have
been tragic. What keeps the story from ending tragically? I don’t mean to ad-
dress the difference between comedy and tragedy in general but to answer the
question about why this play in particular does not turn out tragically, which
it could so easily have done. To answer that question, we have to look at how
the plot develops. The play begins with an ominous decision by the Duke to
put in charge of the dissolute city a man he knew to be rigid. The regrettable
situation came, by his own admission, from fourteen years of lax enforcement
by the Duke. Rather than address the situation himself, the Duke decides to
take a leave of absence from his role as leader and appoint a man of strict
self-control and acknowledged integrity. But, as we have seen, the Duke did
not entirely trust Angelo, wondering to Friar Thomas whether power might
corrupt Angelo (I, iv, 54). The Duke’s doubts prove well-founded.
His experiment would have ended tragically if he had not decided to ob-
serve events as they unfolded and see at each step along the way that the neg-
ative consequences of Angelo’s actions did not come to pass. Had the Duke
not remained close to the events, observing and intervening, the story would
have ended tragically. At least Claudio would have died. Isabella would ei-
ther have seen her brother die and regretted her inability to act on his behalf
or she would have acted, lost her virtue, and lost her brother as well. Angelo
would have remained imprisoned in his rigidity; he might have awakened and
despaired. Perhaps he would have taken his life. The processes put in motion
by the Duke tended in this direction, but the tragedy did not occur.
The Duke took charge in his absence in a way he never did while visibly in
charge, as if to reverse the laxness and detachment he had shown during the
past fourteen years. He alone, in his monastic retreat, knew all that was hap-
pening. He alone could intervene just in time to keep the tragic consequences
at bay. He alone had the power of judgment. He could exercise it according
to his own understanding. His absentee rule allowed him to rise above his
own earlier laxity to show the impotence of justice divorced from mercy and
mercy divorced from justice. The Duke resolves to heal the wounds brought
about by sexual license, not by rigidly punishing the activity, but by giving
sexuality its full expression in marriage. He brings to completion what had
been incomplete. Claudio’s “sin” is redeemed by his marriage. Angelo’s re-
jection of Marianna that had both left him sexually unsatisfied and confirmed
him in cruelty was reversed in his marriage to his betrothed. In spite of his re-
sistance, Lucio takes a step into maturity by marrying the mother of his child.
Isabella moves from the protective chastity of the convent to the fullness of
married love. And the Duke himself, who has “ever loved the life removed,
/ And held in idle price to haunt assemblies / Where youth and cost, witless
bravery keeps” (I, iii, 7–10), breaks out of his isolation to share his goodness
with an equal partner, Isabella. One has the impression that the Duke will no
longer live “the life removed.” Mercy and the reconciling power of marriage
triumph over the detachment of a lax ruler, and the harsh judgment of his
substitute.
A LESSON IN GOVERNANCE
Measure for Measure deals not only with virtue and vice, justice and mercy,
sin and forgiveness in personal relations, but with these same polarities
276 Chapter Ten
in administration of the state. The overall good of the state is ultimately

reducible to healthy relations among the various groups that constitute it.
But the rulers of states have as their principal obligation the preservation
of the common good. At the beginning of Measure for Measure, Vienna as
a whole was afflicted with a moral breakdown. And the reconciliations of
the final act restore, we must believe, not only relations between individu-
als, but the harmonious working of the city as a whole. The play focuses
on sexual matters, but rampant sexual license seems to be an expression of
the overall chaos in the state where “Liberty plucks justice by the nose” (I,
iii, 29). In Act III, the Duke articulates the obligation of those who exercise
judgment in the state: They must combine complementary qualities, be “as
holy as severe,” a model of grace when virtue has broken down around
them, “Grace to stand, and virtue go” (III, ii, 265–66). They must have
knowledge of their own faults and take their own weakness into account
in judging others: “Shame to him whose cruel striking / Kills for faults of
his own liking” (270–71). The Duke directs his sketch of the “holy” ruler
specifically at Angelo: “Twice treble shame on Angelo, / To weed my vice
and let his grow. / O what may man within him hide, / Though angel on the
outward side” (272–275).
If Angelo exemplifies the absence of the qualities in one “who the sword
of heaven will bear” (264), the Duke exemplifies their presence. The Duke
has weaknesses. His laissez faire attitude in enforcing the laws has brought
about the situation of chaos in the city that requires a solution. As I have
mentioned above, the Duke seems a rather detached person. Perhaps his de-
tachment manifests the weak side of virtue. The Duke in acknowledging that
he has “ever loved the life removed,” adds something we might be inclined
to admire: “And held in idle price to haunt assemblies / Where youth and
cost, witless bravery keeps” (I, iv, 8–10). But the Duke is also magnanimous.
The Duke’s greatness lies in the humility that allows him to acknowledge
his weakness and seek a solution to the negative consequences it has brought
about. The Duke also has a vision of how the city should be ruled and moves
towards its realization step by step. First he appoints the over-rigid Angelo
to rule in his absence, he then prevents the negative consequences of An-
gelo’s rule and, finally brings about a harmonious resolution of the evils
in the city. I referred above to this harmonious resolution as “restorative
justice.” The term comes from modern criminal justice theory. As often
happens, literature anticipates theoretical ideas that come to expression in
later developments. A brief exploration of restorative justice in its modern
manifestation, anticipated by Shakespeare, can shed light on the conclusion
of this Elizabethan play.
RESTORATIVE JUSTICE
Like Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, modern restorative justice theory

comes from Christian roots. One can find the basic insight expressed in Mat-
thew 18. “If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault between
you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have won over your brother. If he
does not listen, take one or two others along with you, so that every fact may
be established on the testimony of two or three witnesses” (Matt. 18:15b–17).
Howard Zehr, exploring the implications of biblical teaching, describes the or-
igins of the restorative justice movement. “On May 28, 1974, two young men
from Elmira, Ontario, pleaded guilty to vandalizing 22 properties” (Zehr 2005,
158). “No one would have guessed,” says Zehr, “that their cases would lead to
a movement of international dimensions” (158). It seems that a few days ear-
lier, during a discussion among a small group of Christians about a Christian
response to shoplifting, a probation officer remarked, “Wouldn’t it be neat for
these offenders to meet the victims” (158). The probation officer dropped the
idea but others involved with the Elmira case suggested this very approach to
the presiding judge of the two men accused in the above case. The judge at
first rejected the idea but at the time of sentencing ordered the young men to
visit the homes of all but the two victims who had moved (159). “Restitution
was negotiated, and within two months repayment had been made” (159). This
was the beginning of the “victim-offender reconciliation movement” (VORP)
in Canada. The movement began in the United States through a project started
in Elkhart, Indiana in 1977–78 (159). “Although approaches and names vary,”
says Zehr, over a hundred such programs exist in the United States today and
several dozen in Canada. One can find examples of restorative justice in the
criminal justice systems of New Zealand and Northern Ireland as well.
To highlight the elements of restorative justice in Measure for Measure, I
turn to the dramatic case of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC)
of South Africa that took place from 1996–1998. This case, like Measure for
Measure, has to do with justice in the state. Shakespeare’s play and Nelson
Mandela’s post-liberation South Africa are experiments in government. Des-
mond Tutu, appointed chair of the Commission by Nelson Mandela shortly
after his election in 1994, tells the story in his book No Future Without For-
giveness. Tutu claims that restorative justice is characteristic of traditional
African jurisprudence. “Here the central concern is not retribution or punish-
ment. In the spirit of ubuntu, the central concern is the healing of breaches,
redressing of imbalances, the restoration of broken relationships, a seeking to
rehabilitate both the victim and the perpetrator, who should be given the op-
portunity to be reintegrated into the community he has injured by his offense”
278 Chapter Ten
(Tutu 1999, 54–55). If we look at the relation between Angelo and Marianna,
broken by Angelo’s cruel rejection of his betrothed when she lost her dowry,
we can see an example of restorative justice in the marriage between them
ordered by the Duke. Both the victim, Marianna, and the perpetrator, are re-
stored. If we look at the whole of Act V of Measure for Measure, we see the
“truth” of crimes revealed, restoration of the moral integrity of the state and
the reconciliation of broken relationships through the multiple marriages the
Duke brings about. Perpetrators and victims meet face to face. Angelo faces
Isabella and Claudio. Claudio meets up with Juliet whom, at least in the eyes
of the law, he has wronged as she has wronged him. Lucio meets the mother
of his child. In each case the truth of injury is followed by reconciliation.
The large-scale TRC effort helps us appreciate Shakespeare’s genius in
expressing, within the limits of a simpler case, the idea of restorative justice
in the state. Measure for Measure deals with one kind of decay in state, ram-
pant sexual immorality that grew over a period of fourteen years, and shows
the superiority of love over law in restoring integrity. The TRC dealt with a
vast system of injustice that had flourished for many years under the regime
of racial discrimination. The release of Nelson Mandela from prison in 1990
after twenty-seven years in prison and his subsequent election as president of
South Africa under a new constitution that gave freedom to South Africa’s
black population, presented the nation with a profound challenge. How was
the new state to avoid the violent consequences of pent-up rage in a long-
oppressed majority and still hold the oppressive minority accountable without
turning them into a newly oppressed class?
Nelson Mandela’s new government rejected the Nuremburg-type system
of justice and chose a new way. Tutu expresses the choice in the title of his
second chapter: “Nuremburg or Amnesia? A Third Way” (Tutu 1999, 15–32).
“Our country’s negotiators rejected the two extremes,” Tutu tells us, “and
opted for a ‘third way,’ a compromise between the extreme of Nuremburg
trials and blanket amnesty or national amnesia” (30).
And that third way was granting amnesty to individuals in exchange for a full
disclosure relating to the crime for which amnesty was being sought. It was the
carrot of possible freedom in exchange for truth and the stick was, for those
already in jail, the prospect of lengthy prison sentences and, for those still free,
the probability of arrest and prosecution and imprisonment (30).
The law establishing the Commission stated the conditions for amnesty. The
TRC would address crimes committed between 1960, the year of the Sharpe-
ville massacre, and 1994, the year of Mandela’s inauguration as president.
Only political crimes qualified. The applicant had to disclose “all the relevant
facts relating to the offense for which amnesty was being sought. The law
did not require that the applicant show remorse for crimes committed but, as
a matter of fact, Tutu tells us, most applicants did express sorrow. The logic
of the process seemed to evoke profound regret from perpetrators once they
faced their victims and families of victims and looked at what they had done
in the clear light of the pain they had caused.
Another element in the restoration hoped for under the TRC was reparation,
paying back something of what they had lost to those who had suffered op-
pression. This presented a huge challenge because the losses were enormous,
incalculable really, and the resources to make amends were limited. South
Africa’s black population had lost family members, bread-winners, husbands,
sons and daughters, parents. Families had been broken up through relocation
to bantustans. Whole generations had been denied access to good education.
Reparation, says Tutu, was necessary to balance amnesty. According to the
rules of amnesty, perpetrators of crimes avoided both criminal prosecution
and civil suits against them which meant, in turn that the victims were denied
the normal means of redress. So the state was responsible for reparation (58).
But the state did not have adequate means and so symbolic gestures in the
direction of reparation had to be sufficient. What was important was that the
state recognize the principle that some kind of reparation was an integral part
of justice for victims.
Measure for Measure illustrates in miniature how forgiveness and re-
storative justice can work in the state. The tribunal of the last act, under the
direction of the Duke, presents truth, reconciliation, and restoration. The truth
of Angelo’s evil deeds comes out when the Duke’s disguise is unmasked. An-
gelo confesses and repents, and receives pardon, but only after he has agreed
to marry Marianna. The fortunes of the women who have been wronged are
restored through marriage, Marianna first, then the woman Lucio had made
pregnant and afterwards abandoned. The victims and all the parties are rec-
onciled. Both the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and Measure for
Measure show how compassion, forgiveness, and reconciliation can work
in the political realm through the reconciliation between individuals. Nelson
Mandela wanted to present a model of how a victorious opposition move-
ment could transcend the usual dialectic of oppressor and oppressed changing
places through revolution. The future of the new South Aftrica lay in moving
toward reconciliation through an honest confrontation with the truth about
crimes committed against the individuals and families that make up the state.
Reconciliation took place, or did not take place—attempts were not always
successful—instance by instance, through the TRC. Other gestures of recon-
ciliation were important, too. For instance, Mandela surrounded himself with
white bodyguards from the former regime as well as black Africans from his
own movement.
280 Chapter Ten
CONCLUSION
Measure for Measure is about compassion, more specifically, about compas-

sion in the ruler of the state. It is also about the recognition of sin in oneself
as a motive for compassion. Isabella’s words to Angelo as she pleads for her
brother’s life, call Angelo to such a recognition: go to your bosom, / Knock
there, and ask your heart what it doth know / That’s like my brother’s fault;
if it confess / A natural guiltiness such as is his, / Let it not sound a thought
upon your tongue / Against my brother’s life” (II, ii, 136–41). In his attrac-
tion to Isabella, Angelo does come to recognize in himself something like
Claudio’s fault, but the recognition leads him not to compassion but to a
vicious bargain and a betrayal once the terms of the bargain are fulfilled. In
the passage just cited, Isabella tries to persuade Angelo that recognizing a
“natural guiltiness” in himself like Claudio’s, should keep him from harsh
judgment. The Duke, real ruler of Vienna, does show compassion, which, in
him, seems to come from a magnanimous character that manifests a finely
tuned balance between justice and mercy. We might also ask whether his
admission of weakness early in the play—“T’was my fault to give the people
scope” (I, iii, 35)—might have opened him to compassion for the faults of
others. That same compassion would have moved him toward restorative
justice as a better way to heal the evils of the state than the harshness of
justice.
NOTES
1. Battenhouse, Roy W. 1946. “Measure for Measure and Christian Doctrine of
the Atonement.” PMLA. 61:(No. 4):1029–1059.
2. Riefer Poulson, Marcia. “‘Instruments of Some More Mightier Member’: The
Constriction of Female Power in Measure for Measure,” originally published in
Shakespeare Quarterly 1984. 35:157–69, reprinted in the 1988 Signet Classic edition
of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, 153–154.
3. Desmet, Christy. 2009. “Measure for Measure: A Modern Perspective,” pub-
lished in the Folger Shakespeare Library edition of Measure for Measure. New York:
Simon and Schuster.
4. In The Sickness Unto Death, Kierkegaard defines despair as “the disrelationship
in relation which relates itself to itself.” The Sickness Unto Death. 1954. Translated
by Walter Lowrie, New York: Doubleday Anchor. (148). According to Kierkegaard’s
definition, Angelo has really been in despair up until now in the sense that he had no
self-knowledge. Now the possibility of emerging from despair opens to him.
5. Juliet’s enlightened self-love might remind us of the concluding lines of the
priest’s journal in Bernanos’ Diary of a Country Priest, “Grace is to forget oneself.
But if all pride were dead in us, the grace of all graces would be to love oneself hum-
bly, as any of the suffering members of Jesus Christ.”
6. See Howard Zehr’s. 2005. Changing Lenses: A New Focus for Crime and Jus-
tice. Scottsdale PA, Waterloo, Ontario: Heard Press. Chapter 5 is entitled, “Retribu-
tive Justice,” and chapter 10, “A Restorative Lens.”
Chapter Eleven
Detective and Priest

Georges Simenon’s
Compassionate Commissioner Maigret
A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands
of robbers. . . . But a Samaritan while traveling came near; and when
he saw him, he was moved with pity. He went to him and bandaged the
wounds, having poured oil and wine on them.
—Luke 10: 30, 33–34, NRSV1
The detective fiction genre seems an unlikely place to seek insight into
original sin and compassion. Although the crime world presents abundant
examples of human corruption, detective stories tend to maintain a clear dis-
tinction between the guilty and the innocent, victimizers and victims, in short,
the bad and the good. But the doctrine of original sin claims that all human
beings, both the good and the bad, suffer from a radical weakness of will that
disposes them to evil deeds, often when they are least conscious of deviat-
ing from the right path, and most convinced of their innocence. Simenon’s
Maigret, though not a religious character, possesses a remarkable sense of the
ambiguity of good and evil in human beings. Though he recognizes some of
the criminals he deals with as sordid characters (crapules), this unpredictable
detective sees in others examples of a common human weakness that leads
them into compromising situations. Toward this second class of criminals,
Maigret shows compassion. And in the self-satisfied observers who wonder if
he isn’t disgusted with the underworld characters he deals with, Maigret sees
hidden vices that no one suspects. This contempt for others is just what Jesus
condemned in the Pharisees. And, like Jesus, Maigret is more at home with the
manifest sin of criminals than the hidden sin of the self-righteous. The hypoc-
risy of the Pharisees is, in fact, a manifestation of the blindness to God’s love
that appears in the writings of Julian of Norwich as the root of “original” sin.
For the Pharisees rely on their own fidelity to the commandments, especially
283
284 Chapter Eleven
the minute ones, rather than on the power of healing grace. In addition to this
blindness that characterizes hypocrisy, Maigret notes two other forms of origi-
nating sin. In discussing Maigret’s conception of his vocation, we will see his
notion of a certain displacement he has observed in many people, a missing of
one’s true purpose in life that will make Maigret want to become “a mender
of destinies.” I have mentioned in the Introduction to this work Maigret’s in-
sight into the universality of fear, and noted that fear could well be a name for
original sin: “Everyone is afraid” (La Patience de Maigret, 128).
MAIGRET’S DISTINCTIVE TRAITS
What distinguishes the Maigret stories of Georges Simenon (1903–1989)2

from the detective fiction of authors like Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan
Doyle is their attention to the humanity of both the investigator and the inves-
tigated. Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Christie’s Poirot are essentially
problem solvers, “pure logicians of . . . time and space,” as Michel Sirvent
calls them (Marivale and Sweeny, 165). Though Maigret can be as meticu-
lous and persistent in his search for clues as other detectives are, he ultimately
resolves crimes by entering into the humanity of the criminals he pursues.
He is more interested in solving the mystery of broken lives than in finding
the perpetrators of crimes. “There are no great feats of ratiocination” in the
Maigret stories, “and the problems they present are human as much as they
are criminal” (Symons, 150). Commentators have recognized this deeply hu-
man character of Simenon’s Maigret, but they have not noticed a fundamental
paradox: though Maigret is, like his creator, a thoroughly secular man in his
personal beliefs, he manifests a profoundly Christian, even priestly character
in his approach to solving crimes. An examination of Maigret stories will
support my claim by illustrating the sense in which Maigret is priestly, by
exploring his virtues, and, above all, by showing the extraordinary compas-
sion that marked his work as detective.
Maigret’s Vocation
While never using the term vocation, Simenon takes time in several of his
Maigrets to let the reader in on the deeper desire that undergirds Maigret’s
career as detective ( policier). At the root of the police career lies a priestly
ambition. Chapter V of La Première Enquête de Maigret (Maigret’s First
Case)—not the first of Simenon’s Maigrets in spite of its title—bears the title,
La Première Ambition de Maigret, (The First Ambition of Maigret). It seems
that Maigret chose to enter the police because it was closest to the profession
Detective and Priest 285
(métier) he had always desired, a profession that really did not exist. “Even
as a young man, in his village, he had always had the impression that a great
many people (des tas de gens) were not in their rightful place, that they
were following a path which was not their own, simply because they didn’t
know better” (Simenon, La Première Enquète, 1948, 90). And he imagined
a man “very intelligent and full of understanding (“très intelligent et très
compréhensif ) . . . both doctor and priest,” someone “who would understand
at his first glance the destiny of the other person” (90). People would come
to consult such a person as they consult a doctor. He would be in some way
a “mender of destinies” (un raccommodeur de destins). This person would
be a mender of destinies not primarily because of his intelligence—in fact he
might not have to be of exceptional intelligence—“mais parce qu’il était ca-
pable de vivre la vie de tous les hommes, de se mettre dans la peau de tous les
hommes”—“but because he was capable of living the life of all men, of put-
ting himself in the skin of all men” (90). Above all, Maigret puts himself in
the skin of those who suffer, who are driven to crime by desperation, or who
have lived their whole lives as victims. He has no particular sympathy with
the rich or powerful. In his identification with the poor rather than the rich,
Maigret shows himself closer to the priestly role of Christ than to the clerics,
of whom Simenon may have known some in Liége, who prefer the rich to the
poor. If Maigret is priestly, it is according to the model of the compassionate
founder of Christianity.
The idea of trying to enter the lives of others, to become part of their world,
recurs regularly. In Maigret et le Client du Samedi (Maigret and Saturday’s
Customer), Maigret received a strange visitor, Planchon, who is afraid with
good reason that Maigret might take him for a fool. But Maigret was not satis-
fied with the idea that the man was a fool: “Il cherchait à comprendre davan-
tage; à s’enfoncer dans l’univers ahurissant de Planchon” [“He was trying to
understand better, to enter deeply into Planchon’s astounding world”] Sime-
non 1962, 36). In Maigret et l’Homme du Banc (1952), the identification with
the victim takes place in two ways. One way is that elements of a victim’s or
suspect’s experience find a resonance in Maigret’s own experience. A man
assassinated in an alley way is, mysteriously, wearing shoes the color of caca
d’oie, greenish-yellow—literally the color of goose-dung. He had never worn
such shoes at home or work where he was a model of respectability. Maigret,
after getting to know more about the man, concludes that the shoes are an
expression of independence from his domineering wife during the times the
man is away from his family and engaged in criminal activities that provide
income after he has lost his job. Maigret, we find out—and this is the key
point—“had himself, for years, dreamed of wearing greenish-yellow shoes. It
was the style at that time. . . .” (62). He had even bought such a pair of shoes
286 Chapter Eleven
but never wore them after Madame Maigret’s mocking question: “You’re not
going to wear those are you?” (62). A second kind of identification in which
Maigret takes on the characteristics of the victim, occurs later in the novel.
His wife notices that Maigret does not seem to be himself: “You seem like
someone else . . . You are not Maigret” (109). Maigret laughs and realizes
that “he has been thinking so much about Louis Thoret [the victim] that he
has ended up conducting himself as he imagined Louis would have acted, by
taking on the expressions of his face” (109).
The fullest description I have found of this process of entering into the lives
of other people, even letting them take up residence in him, becoming them
in a sense, occurs in Maigret à New York (1946). This passage will also be
important when we look at the third phase of Maigret’s famous “method.”
Though Maigret is in America, having accompanied a young French man who
is worried about his father now living in New York, the author/narrator refers
us to Paris and the Quai des Orfèvres where Maigret’s co-workers would say
of him at a certain point in an investigation, “Ça y est. Le patron est en transes”
[“There it is, the boss is in a trance”] (Simenon 1946, 146). Le Petit Robert
(1985) gives two meanings for the word transe. The first is to be in a state of
worried agitation as in être dans les transes. The second meaning is closer to
the English word “trance,” a state of altered consciousness. En transes, as op-
posed to dans les transes, designates a kind of exaltation or transport as would
be experienced by a depersonalized medium possessed by an alien spirit.
Clearly Maigret’s associates were thinking of the second meaning. It may
have been said in jest, but it still revealed the truth (Simenon 1946, 147). In a
way, Maigret becomes a different person, heavier, having a different way of
clenching his pipe between his teeth and of smoking it “in little short puffs
widely-spaced” (147). This was “parce qu’il était entièrement pris par son
activité intérieur” [because he was wholly taken up by his interior activity”]
(147). In this altered state, as the characters in the drama “had ceased to be
pawns or puppets to become human beings, Maigret put himself in their skin.
He worked at (s’acharnait) putting himself into their skin” (147). Simenon
elaborates further: “What someone like him (ce qu’un de ses semblables) had
thought, had lived, had suffered—couldn’t he think it, relive it, suffer it in
turn? Such an individual, at a moment in his life, under definite circumstances,
had reacted and [for Maigret] it was a matter of making identical reactions
come from the depths of himself (du fond de soi-même) by virtue of putting
himself in the other’s place” (148).3 It would be hard to find a fuller descrip-
tion of the incarnational character of Maigret’s method. We will return to it.
Maigret, then, has conceived his police work in terms of a vocation that
enables him to be a mender of destinies by entering into the experience of
other people. Unable to complete his medical studies (also mentioned in Pi-
eter le Letton, 1931, 127), Maigret had entered the police (Simenon Première
Enquête, 90–91). As it turns out, Maigret continues to reflect, his entrance
into the police may not have been accidental. “Are not detectives ( policiers)
in fact sometimes menders of destinies?” (91). All the previous night, Maigret
had continued to live with members of the family where the crime has oc-
curred, people he scarcely knows, yet they fill his thoughts. In Les Mémoires
de Maigret (Maigret’s Memoirs), in the midst of complaints that his own
reality has been distorted by this young novelist who insists on oversimplify-
ing, caricaturing, and distorting his character, Maigret remarks: “Simenon has
spoken of ‘a mender of destinies,’ and he didn’t invent the word, which is
truly from me and which I must have let drop one day when we were convers-
ing” (Simenon Les Memoires,1950, 69).
So Maigret, at least at the beginning of his career, seems to think of him-
self as doctor, detective, and priest, [médecin, prêtre et policier] (Simenon
Première Enquête, 1948, 90–91). I am particularly interested in the emphasis
on Maigret’s priestly character. It’s not just that both detectives and priests
can be menders of destinies. A significant number of Maigret stories attest
to something priestly about Maigret’s way of being a detective. This is not
surprising given the presumption early in his life on the part of parents and
teachers that Simenon would become a priest. Even though, as we have seen
above, Simenon renounced priesthood after his first sexual encounter, he
was even after that deeply influenced by a young professor of literature at
the Collège St-Servais “who was himself preparing for the priesthood” (As-
souline, 13).
Assouline cites a reference to this professor from a letter Simenon wrote
to Jean Mambrino in 1951: “He is probably the man who had the greatest
influence on me” (13). Patrick Marnham describes Simenon, age 11, at the
beginning of the First World War: “At the outbreak of hostilities he was a
devout child who sometimes experienced mystical interludes; he was an altar
boy, a conformist, and vowed to the priesthood” (Marnham, 38). By the end
of the war, says Marnham, “Georges was still only 15, but had lost his faith,
abandoned all thoughts of priesthood, left school, started work, lost his first
two jobs, and was certain that although he was not yet an adult he was a fail-
ure” (38). Out of this dark beginning developed the Simenon who created the
extraordinarily sympathetic and priestly character of Maigret.
This priestly connection, which occurs repeatedly, has to do with the role
of confessor and sympathetic listener. The same Planchon referred to above,
tempted to kill his wife who has taken a lover, comes to Maigret as one would
to a priest for confession. “If I still went to church as I did when my mother
was still alive, I would no doubt have gone to confession.” [Si je fréquentais
encore l’église, comme du vivant de ma mère, je serais sans doute allé me
288 Chapter Eleven
confesser”] (Simenon 1962, 38). Instead of going to confession to a priest,

Planchon comes to Maigret not remembering how he thought of the detective
and not even imagining in the beginning that he would have the courage to
come find Maigret. “But now that I am here,” he says, “I would like to tell
everything all at once” [“Je voudrais tout dire à la fois”] (38). Later, Maigret
asks Planchon what, had he gone to confession, he thinks the priest would
have said. “I suppose he would have tried to turn me from my project . . . [of
killing my wife]” (50). “And you would too,” Planchon adds.
The conversation continues and it becomes more and more evident that
Planchon has come to Maigret not as a detective but as a kind of priest sub-
stitute. When Maigret suggests that Planchon might be looking for someone
to prevent him from committing the crime, Planchon becomes discouraged,
recognizing that such prevention is not possible and fearing now that Maigret
has missed the point of the visit. Finally, Maigret draws the inevitable conclu-
sion: “What you have come looking for here is a sort of absolution” [“ce que
vous êtes venu chercher ici, c’est une sorte d’absolution”] (51). “You need
to know that you will be understood, that you are not a monster and that your
project is the only solution left you . . .” (51). In another story, Maigret et le
Tueur (Maigret and the Killer, 1969), Maigret says of his country house at
Meung-sur-Loire that it always seemed to him to resemble a priest’s house
(une maison de curé). Maigret is staying there with his wife and tells her he
has received a call from the killer of a young man. “To mock you?” she asks,
“As a kind of challenge?” (Simenon, et Le Tueur, 1969, 152). “No,” answers
Maigret, “he needed comfort (“il avait besoin de réconfort.” “And he came
to you?” asks Madame Maigret.” “He had no one else available,” Maigret
responds (152).
Secular and Christian

The fact that Simenon would inject a priestly quality into Maigret’s original
conception of his calling (métier) and to his way of practicing his profession
is ironic. Although both Simenon and his police detective Maigret came
from Catholic origins, neither remained committed to their original faith.
In L’Affaire Saint-Fiacre (The Saint Fiacre Affair), Maigret investigates a
crime in the town of St. Fiacre near Moulins, in central France, where he
grew up and served Mass in the parish church. Simenon tells us that Maigret
always preferred serving the funeral Masses because the prayers were shorter
(Simenon 1932, 13). The mature Maigret, however, never gives any sign of
a religious commitment or practice. Simenon himself, raised in Liège, Bel-
gium, attended the Jesuit College St. Louis and was deeply religious until
he learned at age fifteen that his much-loved father, whom he considered a
saint, was going to die within a few years. “At that moment, he ceased to be
a Believer and the teachings of the Church became a mockery” (Bressler,
28). Another biographer, Pierre Assouline uses the title “Altar Boy” for his
first chapter that describes Simenon’s life up to age sixteen and tells us that
“his family and his teachers had him earmarked for the priesthood” (Assou-
line, 1992, 12). After his first sexual encounter at age twelve, an event that
launched him on a prodigiously active sexual career, “he solemnly informed
his teachers and parents that he had decided to renounce the priesthood in
favor of—a military career” (12). Still, even after Simenon loses his faith
in this “first chapter” of his life, key elements of Christianity appear, prob-
ably without any explicit intention, in Simenon’s Maigret, especially in his
attitude toward his profession and his pursuit of it, both of which show ex-
traordinary human virtues.
In Christian tradition, of course, the primordial paradox is the Incarna-
tion itself, and Christ is the High Priest. Maigret’s way of operating too is
fundamentally incarnational and in that sense priestly. He solves crimes,
as we have seen, by identifying with the objects of his investigation, by
“living their lives” and “entering into their skin” (La Première enquête de
Maigret, 90). Maigret enters into the criminal world, knows its vocabulary,
and identifies with both its victims and its perpetrators. In Les Mémoires de
Maigret (Maigret’s Memoires), the real Maigret—as opposed to Simenon’s
fictional character—speaks of the familial relation the police inspectors had
with those they were charged to investigate. Simenon has tried to portray it,
says Maigret, without quite succeeding. “The prostitute of the Rue de Clichy
and the inspector watching over her both have bad shoes and sore feet from
walking miles of pavement. They have endured the same rain and the same
freezing wind. Evening and night have for them the same color and both
see, almost with the same eye, the underside of the crowd that flows around
them” (111–112). Maigret identifies with those who suffer. In this he imitates
Christ’s compassion, his willingness to take on human suffering, even sin, as
well as his incarnation.
Not only does Maigret identify with the people whom society looks on
condescendingly as sinners, he recognizes throughout society the universal
tendency toward weakness and immoral behavior that Christians call original
sin. Respectable (bien-portants) people love to look down on criminals, to
treat with contempt the immigrants gathered by the thousands in slums, hop-
ing that the police will discover “their dirty secrets, the vices peculiar (inédits)
to them, and all kinds of sordid behavior ( pouillerie) that will both justify
indignation and provide a source of secret delight” (131). But these respected
citizens are not as worthy of respect as they would like us to believe. They too
cheat and practice little obscenities (saletés) that they carefully camouflage.
290 Chapter Eleven
These are the same people who ask Maigret, “with a slight trembling of their
lips, if he isn’t ever disgusted” by the behavior of the people he deals with
(131). Maigret contrasts this condescending hypocrisy with the “humility that
one scarcely ever finds except among those who have been uprooted from
their origins” [les déracinés] (133).
One is reminded of the prayers of the Pharisee and the tax collector. The
Pharisee prays: “I thank you, God, that I am not grasping, unjust, adulterous
like the rest of mankind, and particularly that I am not like this tax collector
here. I fast twice a week; I pay tithes on all I get.” The tax collector “stood
some distance away, not even daring to raise his eyes to heaven; but he beat
his breast and said ‘God, be merciful to me a sinner.’” And Jesus responded
that the tax-collector went home “at rights with God” whereas the Pharisee
did not: “For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the man
who humbles himself will be exalted” (Lk. 18:9–14). Simenon must have
known this text. Whether it influenced his conception of Maigret, we do not
know. More clear from his biographers is that Maigret, though he is neither
Simenon himself nor Simenon’s father, Désiré, “has flaws and virtues bor-
rowed from both” (Assouline, 1997, 92). Another biographer, Fenton Bresler
(1983), citing a 1955 radio interview with Simenon, sharpens the connection
between Maigret and Simenon’s father, Désiré. “When I wanted to create
a sympathetic person who understood everything, that is to say Maigret, I
gave him without realizing it, certain of my father’s characteristics” (Bresler,
68). Bresler adds his own reflection: “Maigret, like Désiré Simenon, loves
his fellow men, understands and pities them. He believes they have killed
or committed crimes because they are weak or unhappy, because they feel
threatened, because they are frightened” (68).
Bresler’s words evoke the sentiment expressed by Augustine of Hippo to
which I have already referred above (Chapter 4, 109), “Many sins are com-
mitted through pride, but not all happen proudly . . . they happen so often
by ignorance, by human weakness; many are committed by men weeping
and groaning in their distress” (Augustine 1997, 23:241). Maigret’s ability
to enter into the lives of his characters, victims and suspects, correlates with
his sense of universal human weakness and the compassion that follows from
that sense. Maigret himself, as we will see, recognizes his own participation
in the human weakness that gives rise to the crimes he investigates. What
keeps people reading Maigrets is not the intellectual satisfaction of solving
a puzzle, but the privilege of seeing the exquisitely tender rapport between
the investigator and the investigated, the pursuer and the pursued, the hunter
and the hunted. Sometimes we will even see the striking irony of the criminal
object of Maigret’s investigation pursuing Maigret, desiring to be caught
because to be caught is to be known.
THE PARADOXES OF MAIGRET
Within the overarching paradoxes of the Incarnation, the religious manifested

in the secular, and the vocation that combines detective and priest, other para-
doxical relationships emerge. First is Maigret’s famous “method.” It comes
up in almost every novel. The paradox lies in the fact that although Maigret is
famous for his method, he claims not to have a method. The second paradox
is that though Maigret’s function as a detective is by definition to identify and
hunt down criminals—he is the hunter—it often happens that while he looks
for the culprit, the culprit is looking for him. A further irony in this dialectic
of the hunter and the hunted arises from the fact that Maigret himself, because
of his unorthodox methods, sometimes makes himself the object of his supe-
riors’ wrath, becoming a suspect in their eyes. Finally, the deepest paradox
lies in the mysterious combination of policier, médecin, et prêtre, detective,
doctor, and priest (Simenon, La Première Enquête, 1948, 90) to which I have
already referred. I will examine each of these paradoxes.
Maigret’s Paradoxical Method

When Simenon refers to Maigret’s “method,” it is usually to deny that his
chief inspector has a method. In an early story, Le Chien Jaune (The Yellow
Dog, 1931), one of Maigret’s inspectors admits that he does not yet understand
his boss’s methods, but he thinks he is beginning to guess. Maigret looks at
the inspector with laughing eyes and responds that in this case: “My method
has been precisely not to have one” (Le Chien Jaune, 142). An inspector from
the city of Groningen where Maigret is investigating a crime asks Maigret
what he thinks. “That is the question!” answers Maigret. “And there is the
difference between the two of us. You think something, you think all kinds
of things! While I myself—I believe I don’t think anything anymore” (Un
Crime en Hollande [A Crime in Holland ], 85). In a 1950 novel, Maigret et
La Vieille Dame (Maigret and the Old Woman), inspector Castaing, surprised
to see the commissaire “sleepy and indecisive,” asks Maigret in the middle of
their investigation, “What should I do next?” Maigret tells him to do whatever
he wants, poke around wherever. Find out what you can. Maybe something
will come up (123). Maigret knows that in every investigation this moment
comes when he and his colleagues have done all their homework, getting to
know the players, asking questions, believing or not believing the responses
but being slow to form an opinion. At this stage the characters have pretty
clear and simple profiles but remain distant. And then things begin to “come
alive” (grouiller). The characters become more hazy ( flous) and at the same
time more human, and above all more complicated (La Vielle Dame, 124).
292 Chapter Eleven
Passages like these suggest that Maigret, while protesting that he has no
method, does in fact have a method, not a logically rigorous one, but a distinct
way of proceeding of which he is very conscious and very much in charge.
The method has three stages. The first consists in the normal investigative
procedures that any detective would undertake, fingerprint identification,
careful examination of the victim’s body, looking for traces of blood on
clothing, asking questions. Maigret is meticulous about this stage. In one
story, Maigret et Son Mort (Maigret’s Dead Man), the victim was wearing a
beige raincoat when he was found, but Maigret suspects he was not wearing
the coat when he was killed. So Maigret puts the man’s clothes, including the
raincoat, on a mannequin he has in his headquarters, the famous PJ or Police
Judiciare, to see if the tears made by the knife in the raincoat and those in the
suit match. They don’t, so Maigret’s suspicion, that the victim was not wear-
ing this coat at the time of his death but that the assassins wanted the police
to believe he was, is confirmed (Simenon, M. et Son Mort, 1948, 33–34).
But all this careful, highly professional investigation carried on by a team
of collaborators that often crosses national boundaries and involves multiple
police jurisdictions, yields only uncertainty and confusion. Thus begins the
second stage, the stage of doubt on Maigret’s part, sometimes profound dis-
couragement and sluggishness, in which Maigret appears like a lost soul. In
England—his visits there always seem to unhinge him—Maigret waits in a
bar for a young man he hopes to save from committing a foolish crime. “He
felt that everyone was looking at him, that the old gentleman next to him
studied him with a critical eye” (Simenon, Le Revolver de M., 1952, 138).
“His self confidence was slipping away” (138–139). In the gruesome story of
the body without a head (Simenon 1955), Maigret went back to his office and
“began to take on the grumpy (grognon), sullen (maussade) air that almost
always came to him at a certain stage of an investigation” (79), the “certain
stage” being what I am calling the second phase of his method. Whereas
“just yesterday he was making discoveries, accumulating them without ask-
ing where they might lead, he now found himself facing bits of truth that he
didn’t know how to tie together” (79).
In this second stage, Maigret begins a transition from thinking about the
characters inhabiting the world of his investigation to letting them enter his
world. Maigret S’Amuse (Maigret’s Little Joke, 1956 ) describes a Maigret
who really doesn’t know what he is thinking about because his state of con-
sciousness has more to do with feeling than with thinking (raisonnement,
149). He felt (sentait) the truth close at hand, but he was powerless to take
hold of it (la saisir). Another example of this movement from confusion
through feeling to insight occurs in Maigret et le Corps sans Tête (Maigret
and the Headless Body). For Comeliau, the unsympathetic judge in this case,
Madame Calas was “a broken-down drunk who slept with any one” (Le
Corps Sans Tête, 1955, 79). For Maigret, she was something other than that;
he didn’t know exactly what, “and as long as he didn’t know, as long as he
didn’t “feel” (sentirait) the truth, he was subject to a vague malaise” (79). As
Maigret moved from thinking to feeling, the objects of his investigation took
on a different character, too: “It was as if the three characters of the drama
had taken up life in him” (Maigret s’Amuse, 149) and had become no longer
abstract entities but real human beings, but unfortunately “incomplete and
schematic human beings” (149). At this stage as described in Maigret à New
York (Maigret in New York) the commissaire “floundered ( pataugait), did
what he had to do, nothing more, gave orders, gathered information on this
one and that one, with the air of being interested only moderately in the inves-
tigation, sometimes not interested at all” (Simenon 1946, 147). Then, when
one least expects it, when Maigret seems discouraged by the complexity of
the task, “something clicks”—“le déclic se produisait”—(147) and Maigret
moves into the state of trance, discussed above, that allows him to enter the
lives of the characters. This déclic points the way to the third stage of the
investigation, a stage dominated by feeling and intuition rather than logical
reasoning. “Here as in most cases,” the narrator reflects in Maigret s’Amuse,
“there is not only one solution possible, but at least two.” But only one is the
right one, only one is the human truth (la vérité humaine). One does not ar-
rive at the human truth by “rigorous reasoning or a logical reconstitution of
the facts, but by feeling it” (la sentir) (149). The French dictionary Le Petit
Robert (1985) gives as the first meaning of sentir “to have the sensation
or the perception of (an object, a fact, a quality).” The fifth meaning is “to
guess at (deviner), to discern (discerner).” The second phase of Maigret’s
method, then, involves a breakdown of thinking, accompanied by confusion,
ill-humor, and a lack of self-confidence, a breakdown that opens up the way
to feeling or discernment as a way of knowing the truth. Maigret will wait
for the revelatory moment that he has been anticipating in the midst of his
feelings of discouragement
So we come to the third phase of Maigret’s “method,” the phase that dis-
tinguishes him as a detective different from Michel Sirvent’s “pure logicians
of time and space” mentioned earlier. The key to grasping this phase is the
transition from thinking to feeling, a phase that resembles a certain discern-
ment described by spiritual writers. The notion of a trance, used jokingly but
with real meaning, by Maigret’s colleagues in Maigret à New York, suggests
a kind of spiritual—not religious— awareness that disposes the detective to
enter into the other person’s life and thus resolve the issues involved in the
investigation. For Maigret this mode of knowing has a double purpose. First,
it enables him to unravel the mystery surrounding the events in a particular
294 Chapter Eleven
story. In the second place, this discerning attitude allows Maigret to carry
out his vocation as mender of destinies for those who have somehow lost
their way.
Again, Maigret à New York provides a striking example. All that I am
describing here takes place in that trance-like state that Maigret’s colleagues
jokingly, but with a significant measure of truth, would often refer to. This
mode of knowing that I am comparing to discernment opens Maigret to the
existential, human, spiritual truth that lies behind the facts of the case. Little
John is a wealthy man who came to America years ago and, after beginning
life as an entertainer, has moved into the business of making juke-boxes for
restaurants. Little John’s son, Jean, has asked Maigret to come with him to
New York to see if they can solve the riddle of Little John’s changed behavior,
formerly tender now detached, toward his son. After being in New York for a
while, where he feels intensely uncomfortable, and meeting Little John several
times, Maigret makes a startling discovery: “. . . Little John has cold eyes (les
yeux froids)” (Simenon 1946, 41). Taking this material clue as a starting point,
Maigret begins to question what makes John Maura’s eyes cold. Later in the
story, he can say: “There is something in those cold eyes that resembles anger
(exasperation), but resembles something else too” (55). To find out what that
something else was, Maigret had to become Little John (148).
He would not discover the truth by running after it (courir après) as his
American colleague wanted to do, but by “letting himself be impregnated (se
laissser imprégner) by the pure and simple truth” (151). Slowly, step-by-step,
through a sympathetic recreation of Little John’s life, Maigret arrives at the
truth about the cold eyes. It seems that Little John had, in a moment of blind
jealousy, murdered his lover, the mother of his son whom he thinks his friend
may have fathered while Little John was away in France. And now, knowing
that his lover’s son was also his, Little John lived with the regret at killing
the only woman he has ever loved. And, learning this, Maigret knew, as he
now told Little John, “the sorrow that gave these eyes their terrible coldness”
(183). Little John has paid the price of his crime, not through the system of
criminal justice, but through a worse punishment, his own suffering. He had
sincerely wished, for one reason only, he tells Maigret, that the whole affair
would crack open, so that he could rest [à me reposer] (187). Though Sime-
non does not use here the language of priesthood or mender of destinies, it is
clear that his discovery of the mystery behind the cold eyes has given Little
John what he has long sought, rest.
Simenon’s religious origins may well have opened his eyes to this kind of
discernment. His time at a Jesuit high school in Liège would most likely have
engaged him in some version of Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises,
where he might well have been introduced to Ignatian discernment. More-
over, some significant residue of the “religious mysticism” that Bresler and
Marnham note as a manifestation of the young Simenon’s “intense inner life”
(Bresler, 21; Marnham, 38) probably remained in the mature Simenon who
invested Maigret with his acute intuitive sense. In any case, the practice of
Ignatian discernment does shed light on this third phase of Maigret’s method
and at least provides an analogy to help us understand how Maigret proceeds.
Loyola, one of the masters of spiritual discernment, sets out a method for
making decisions in harmony with God’s will. Maigret, of course, is trying to
solve crimes, to determine which is the true solution, not to make decisions ac-
cording to God’s will. But the method is similar. If we look at Ignatius’ “Three
Times When a Correct and Good Choice of a Way of Life May Be Made”
(Ignatius of Loyola 1962, 74), we find in one of these ways a discernment
method that clarifies what I have called the third stage of Maigret’s method.
Ignatius’ first time of making a choice occurs when a person is overwhelmed
by a personal manifestation of God such that “a devout soul without hesita-
tion, or the possibility of hesitation, follows what has been manifested to it”
(74). This kind of immediate certainty, if it occurred, would put an end to any
mystery story since all of them depend on lingering uncertainty as an essential
ingredient. The third time for making a decision is a “time of tranquility” in
which a person can think rationally about his life and come to a sensible deci-
sion in conformity with God’s will. This parallels the first stage of Maigret’s
method, the rational investigation of clues, motives, and circumstances.
Ignatius’ “second time” offers the comparison we are looking for. It is a
time “when much light and understanding are derived through experience of
desolations and consolations and discernment of different spirits” (74). The
moodiness of the second stage of Maigret’s method fits this alternation of
“desolations and consolations.” The closer Maigret comes to the truth, the
more consolation, calmness, and self-assurance replaces ill-humor and doubt.
In Maigret à New York, the narrator speaks of “une force tranquille” (165,
170) that overtakes Maigret as the truth becomes clearer. At times, one can
find God’s will through reasoning but at other times, when thinking breaks
apart, leaving only confusion, doubt, and uncertainty, one is reduced to sort-
ing through the questions that arise from one’s feelings and examining one’s
experience until some insight emerges as a kind of revelation. In this sense,
the third phase of Maigret’s method can be understood as a kind of discern-
ment. The Commissaire is no longer looking for physical clues that will lead
to logical consequences but to human clues. He looks for “une fissure”—a
cast of characters still missing a crucial person (Le Charretier de la Provi-
dence, 1931 [The Crime of Lock 14], 121); the moment for which he searches,
waits, and watches when behind the criminal as playing a role appears the
man (Pieter le Letton, 1931 [Peter the Lett], 57–58). Simeon also speaks of
296 Chapter Eleven
“la fêlure,” a kind of moral flaw that reveals the true character of the culprit
(La Tête d’un Homme, 1931 [A Man’s Head], 169). Sometimes “la fêlure”
consists in a perceptible gap between the words the suspect is saying and
reality (Maigret Hésite [Maigret Hesitates], 169). In Maigret à New York the
cold eyes of Little John raised Maigret’s curiosity. In Maigret et l’Homme
du Banc (The Man of the Park Bench, 1952), Maigret wonders why he has
the impression that the woman talking to him is hiding something (Simenon,
L’Homme du Banc, 1952, 44).
In wondering why he feels that the woman is hiding something, Maigret
reflects on his own experience as a way of coming to the truth outside him.
Again, Ignatius of Loyola traces the origins of his own teaching about dis-
cernment to a similar reflection. In his autobiography, Ignatius describes
reactions to two kinds of reading material. When his memory took him back
to romantic tales of chivalry that he had always loved to read, he experienced
an initial exhilaration that after a time ended in emptiness. But when he read
about the lives of Christ and the saints, he experienced a delight that did not
diminish. For a long time, Ignatius tells us, he paid no attention to these di-
verse reactions “until one day his eyes were opened a little and he began to
wonder at the difference and to reflect on it, learning from experience that
one kind of thoughts left him sad and the other cheerful” (Ignatius of Loyola
1956, 10). He concluded that one sort of thoughts came from the evil spirit,
the other from the good spirit. Like Ignatius, Maigret was a man who trusted
in the power of his own inner experience to reveal the truth. The similarity is
in the method, not in the kind of truth revealed.
Simenon’s comment in Maigret s’Amuse (1956) on the concluding phase
of an investigation illustrates this feature of Maigret’s method. The passage in
question shows both an objective component, a change of behavior in the sus-
pect, and a subjective change in the investigator himself. “Almost always,”
comments the invisible narrator, “after a time more or less long, comes a time
when the resistance suddenly cracks and the detective ( policier) has nothing
before him but a man in desperation (aux abois). For, at this moment, he
becomes once again a man, a man who has stolen or killed but, all the same,
a man . . .” (Simenon 1956, 176). And this transformation of the suspect cor-
responds to a change in the investigator. I have already referred to an earlier
phase of this investigation when Maigret “sensed (sentait) the truth close at
hand (toute proche) and was powerless (impuissant) to grasp it” (149). Now,
in a moment of revelation, the power to grasp the truth is given. He has found
the truth that eluded him. “He has accomplished his work as a detective ( fait
son métier de policier)” (176). His earlier frustration has given way to a
sense that he has done what he can, uncovered the culprit, and can now leave
to others to judge. Maigret repeats often that he aims to understand, not to
judge. He would not want to be a magistrate or a juror in a trial ( juré dans

un procès d’assises) because he would have to judge. “No, I am certain I
would never undertake to judge a human being” (Simenon 1964, 12). Again,
“It is not my role to judge” (Simenon, M. et Le Tuer, 1969, 167) This resting
in the accomplishment of his proper role parallels Ignatius’ sense of peace in
recognizing that God is leading him to imitate the saints rather than to aim
for deeds of chivalry (Ignatius of Loyola 1956, par 8, 10). The contemplation
of chivalrous ambitions led Ignatius to desolation, much as technical, but less
than human, clues led Maigret to ill humor and frustration. Also Maigret’s
sense of completion on seeing the suspect revealed before him as a fully hu-
man, though imperfect, being corresponds with Ignatius’ peace derived from
contemplating the path God revealed to him, that of following the saints.
The three phases of Maigret’s “method” are related dialectically. The first
phase sets the physical, factual, and rational foundation of the investigation.
The second phase negates the first phase; it is a coming-to-nothing of all the
careful examining, a kind of death. The third phase brings to life the facts
that by a revelation emerge for the investigator who is willing to wait. More
reasoning or more data collection could not reveal the facts. This third phase,
since it relies on Maigret’s ability to enter into the lives of others and thus
become a racommadeur de destins, is precisely the place where the priestly
character that the narrator identified with Maigret’s original vocation most
fully finds expression.
The Paradox of the Hunter and the Hunted

This paradox lies in the third phase of Maigret’s method where ordinary
investigative procedures no longer help to resolve an investigation. A clear
example of this phenomenon occurs in Simenon’s Maigret et le Marchand
de Vins (Maigret and the Wine Merchant). Gilbert Pigou, accountant for a
wealthy wine merchant, Oscar Chabut, has shot and killed his boss who had
mercilessly humiliated him in the presence of another employee and even
slapped him across the face, after discovering that the accountant was stealing
small sums of money. The accountant stole because his wife spent more than
he earned and was constantly after him to bring home more money. Pigou is
precisely one of those persons of whom Maigret had always had the impres-
sion “that they were not in their rightful place, that they were following a path
that was not their own . . .” (La Première Enquête de Maigret, 90). Maigret,
after a conversation with the wine merchant’s secretary, now regards the ac-
countant as a suspect. This all occurs through normal investigative processes.
But now, in the final phase of the investigation, something curious begins
to emerge; the suspect is as much interested in Maigret’s investigation as
298 Chapter Eleven
Maigret is in him. He knows more about Maigret’s moves than Maigret does
about his. “Ever since I began the investigation regarding the death of Oscar
Chabut as he was leaving the brothel of Fortuny Street, a man seems to be in-
terested in my every activity. He is intelligent because he seems to anticipate
every movement I make” (144). The mysterious observer, it seems, is clever
at slipping into a crowd once he knows he has been sighted and Maigret has
not yet been able to meet up with him. Maigret is fairly sure, though he has
no proof, that this is the culprit. Maigret is both pursuer and pursued.
The man calls Maigret on the telephone but always hangs up when
Maigret suggests they should meet. “It was almost a game,” comments the
author/narrator, “that so far Pigou is winning” (149). Maigret’s wife notices
in him the discouragement that marks the second phase of his method (151).
Maigret’s mood continues to deteriorate (154). He understands what is hap-
pening without being able to do anything about it; the initiative is in the
hands of the suspect, a man who has been humiliated all his life and now
has become someone important, keeping at bay the whole police force of
Paris. “This,” says Maigret,”is why he hesitates between letting himself be
caught and continuing to play at cat and mouse” (155). The way the suspect
approaches only to draw back reminds Maigret of a squirrel he had played
with years before who would get tantalizingly close only to scamper away
just as it seemed they might make contact.
Finally, outside Maigret’s apartment on the Boulevard Richard-Lenoir,
the drama reaches its climactic moment. Gilbert Pigou appears across from
the apartment, watching timidly like the squirrel. Asked by Madame Mai-
gret if he thinks the man wants to come see him, Maigret responds: “He is
tempted. I think he is afraid to be disappointed. A man like him is very vul-
nerable. He would like for someone to understand him and at the same time
he tells himself it is impossible” (157). Finally, at 2:30 a.m., Pigou knocks
at Maigret’s door and Madame Maigret lets him in. Hesitant at first, like the
squirrel ready to retreat at the first sign of danger, Pigou finally enters. Ma-
dame Maigret prepares two grogs. The two men begin to speak. Their dia-
logue is extraordinary for its human intimacy. “I expected you would come
eventually,” says Maigret. “Did you see me?” asks Pigou, making a tentative
beginning of conversation. Given what we know about Pigou’s character
and his interest in seeking out Maigret, we can legitimately conclude that
his question applies to more than physical seeing. Maigret’s answer, which
implies a “yes” to Pigou’s question, affirms that Maigret did indeed see
something beyond the physical form of the man watching his apartment. “I
even sensed that you were hesitating. You advanced a step then left for the
Rue du Chemin Vert ” (164). Still more revealing is the response of Pigou:
“As for me, I saw your silhouette at the window. Since I wasn’t in the light
I didn’t know if you were able see me and above all to recognize me” (164).
To be seen, to be recognized—Pigou had not experienced this in his entire
unfortunate, misdirected life and now before this police officer who has been
tracking him down, he begins to hope. He isn’t drawn to the police officer
as such but to the “mender of destinies,” the priest to whom one can confess
everything without being judged.
The two men are ill at ease at first, avoiding the inevitable conversation
about practical details like prison and trial. They observe each other. Maigret
doesn’t miss so much as a change of expression on his visitor’s face. “In
the intimacy of the apartment, a grog within reach of his hand, his pipe in
his mouth, [Maigret] had the air of a benevolent older brother to whom one
could tell everything” (165). Maigret is looking for Pigou as a criminal but
even more as a human being who has lost his way. And Pigou is looking
for Maigret, not in his role as detective, but in his role as doctor and priest,
mender of destinies.
The Paradox of Maigret as Detective and Priest

If Maigret sometimes plays a priestly role, it is, as I have noted the role of
priest as confessor and confidant. This role is not that different from “a be-
nevolent older brother to whom one could tell everything.” Le Revolver de
Maigret (Maigret’s Revolver) is even more explicit than Maigret et le March-
and de Vins in asserting this priestly role.
The story begins with the phone call from Madame Maigret telling her hus-
band that a young man is in the apartment to see him. Maigret doesn’t take the
situation seriously and, as he often did, stops for a few minutes at the Bras-
serie Dauphine for a drink with a former colleague. By the time Maigret ar-
rives home, the young man has departed, taking Maigret’s revolver with him.
Maigret’s friend, Dr. Pardon, later tells him of a patient in desperate straits
who would like to meet Maigret, Francois Lagrange who turns out to be the
father of the boy who had stolen Maigret’s revolver. The rest of the story is
spent tracking down Francois Lagrange, who, it turns out, has murdered an
important official, and pursuing the boy himself who has set out to murder the
woman who is blackmailing his father. The father is arrested and Maigret’s
assistant Janvier goes through his apartment looking for clues. He discovers
in a folder several articles on Maigret cut from newspapers. Lagrange has cut
out articles that portray Maigret as the defender of the guilty. One of the ar-
ticles calls Maigret a bon enfant, “good natured”; another is entitled, “The hu-
manity of Maigret” (107). Lagrange has underlined the words “indulgence”
and “comprehension.” Another passage tells the story of a man condemned
to death who had refused the ministry of a priest but asked if he could have
300 Chapter Eleven
a final interview with Maigret (107). This theme of convicted criminals ask-
ing for Maigret as a priestly presence at the moment of death recurs in Les
Memoires de Maigret: “I could cite several [of these convicted criminals],”
says Maigret, “who have begged me to be present at their execution and have
reserved for me their final regard” (Simenon 1950, 151). All these articles
that Lagrange had saved explain why he wanted to meet Maigret.
Toward the end of the story, Maigret—in England where he has followed
the son Alain Lagrange, intent on killing the woman who was the real culprit—
finally enters the hotel room where he knows Alain is hiding. With exquisite
patience and a delicacy that perfectly exemplifies the characteristics described
in the collected newspaper stories of Francois Lagrange, Maigret waits. Here
Maigret is both detective and priest. He knows the young man is armed and
at the end of his wits, capable of doing anything. Maigret has an interest as a
detective in getting the young man to surrender the gun before he becomes a
criminal himself. But he uses a method supplied by his humanity rather than his
police training. He identifies with the young man: “At your age,” says Maigret,
“in your condition, I might have done the same thing” (153). Maigret even
admits it was his fault; if he hadn’t stopped for a drink he would have arrived
home before the young man left.
When the young man finally comes out from under the bed, he asks Mai-
gret “Why are you doing all this?” “All what?” Maigret responds. “You know
what I mean,” Alain replies. “Maybe,” Maigret goes on, “it’s because I was a
young man too. And because I had a father” (158). Later in the same chapter
Maigret becomes more explicit: “I lost my mother when I was very young
and my father raised me” (163). Maigret’s ability to enter into the deepest
experience of those he is tracking, which leads often enough to the apprehen-
sion of the guilty person, in this case prevents a crime and puts on the right
path a young man who has lost his way.
Maigret’s Virtues
The preceding review of the paradoxes of Maigret has revealed a set of
related virtues, humility, the ability to enter into the lives other people, a
determination to understand and not to judge, and, above all, compassion.
These are human virtues and Christian virtues. They are precisely the human
virtues Christ encouraged in the Gospels. Specifically, they are the attitudes
and habits Jesus taught in the famous Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5–7),
including the beatitudes, and the Sermon on the Plain that includes Jesus’
admonition, “Stop judging and you will not be judged. Stop condemning and
you will not be condemned. Forgive and you will be forgiven” (Lk. 6:37).
One of Simenon’s biographers, Lucille Becker, after noting in Simenon’s
work “the repeated references to the Catholic atmosphere of his youth,” com-
ments on Simenon’s and Maigret’s refusal to judge others and its connection
to Church teaching: “The maxim, ‘comprendre sans juger (to understand
without judging), at the heart of Simenon’s philosophy of life—expressed
as Maigret’s moral code—might seem to reflect the Church’s understanding
of and compassion for the sinner” (Becker, 8). Here, too, we find a paradox.
The man who best embodied these virtues and served as a model for Maigret
was Simenon’s father, Désiré, the less religious but probably more Christian
of his parents. Simenon’s overtly religious mother, the one who saw that he
served as an altar boy and attended Catholic schools, was notably lacking in
compassion, particularly toward her husband. Her decision to take student
boarders into the Simenon home as a way of supplementing her husband’s
meager earnings, effectively reduced Désiré to the status of an inmate whose
needs became secondary to those of the paying boarders and awakened a deep
resentment in Georges Simenon against his mother, even though he profited
from the presence of the foreign students in the Simenon home, learned their
language, and used them as the basis of characters in his novels (Bresler,
18–20; Assouline, 10–11). Henriette continued to complain to her husband
about turning down a better job in another city and for not buying an insur-
ance policy even though he was an insurance salesman. As it turned out, the
insurance company had refused to sell a policy to Simenon’s father because
of his precarious health, a fact he hid from his wife. But instead of under-
standing she judged—that trait so foreign to both Simenon and Maigret—and
harbored resentment.
If we want to uncover the roots of Maigret’s virtues in the life of his
creator, we need also to look beyond the model he found in his father and
consider Simenon’s early religious life. We have seen that he suddenly aban-
doned religion at the age of fifteen after learning that his beloved father was
terminally ill. Simenon’s discovery of sex at the age of twelve and his need,
once awakened, for an active sexual life added motivation to renounce the
Church whose strict sexual morality presented the young Simenon with an
impossible burden. But Simenon did not, by his own admission, abandon
certain aspects of the faith he had so fervently followed up until the age of
fifteen. For he was not just an altar boy because his mother wanted it; he
entered into the life represented by serving at the altar. Even when the Friar
Superior of the Institut St. André, Bresler tells us, where Simenon was a stu-
dent, forced him to lie about an incident he and his brother were involved in,
“he remained firmly a believer, bending low before the Cross” (Bresler, 21).
Simenon, again according to Bresler, had an intense interior life of which
religious mysticism was a manifestation (21). Given a common characteristic
of Simenon and Maigret, their “aptitude for living the lives of others and for
302 Chapter Eleven
immersing themselves in a milieu” (Assouline, 93), it is reasonable to sup-

pose that the young Simenon entered deeply into the religious atmosphere of
his first fifteen years.
And so we have an author, Simenon, and his principal fictional creation,
Maigret, who, while not outwardly religious, manifest deeply Christian sen-
sibilities. Augustine himself in the fifth century anticipated this distinction.
In opposing the Donatists who demanded heroic adherence to the Christian
faith, condemning those who had handed over the holy books to avoid per-
secution, Augustine affirmed a truth that seems to apply to Simenon. The
Donatists had a rigid criterion for membership in the Church, perfect fidelity.
For Augustine, it was not so easy to determine who was inside the Church
and who was outside. “For in that unspeakable foreknowledge of God, many
who seem to be without are actually within [the Church], and many who seem
to be within, yet really are without” (Augustine 1979, IV. 27–38, 477, col.
2). Simenon’s mother may have seemed to be squarely in the Church but her
lack of compassion sets her outside. Simenon and, our principal concern here,
Maigret, may seem to be outside, but their compassion brings them within the
sphere of the Gospels’ central teachings.
In chapter six (168–170) we considered the short treatise of Hugh of St.
Victor (1096–1141) on the four wills of Christ in which he develops the
idea of compassion as ideal humanity.4 The Church had long since defined
that Christ had both a divine and a human will. Hugh subdivided the human
will into a rational will (voluntas secundum rationem), the will of the flesh,
(voluntas secundum carnem), and the will of tender pity (voluntas secundum
pietatem). The rational will is that by which Christ followed the Father’s
plan for him, the will of the flesh is the resistance Christ instinctively felt
at the thought of undergoing the passion, and the will of compassion or ten-
der pity is Jesus’ capacity to enter into the sufferings of other people. After
Hugh has elaborated on this quality of compassion in Jesus, he promotes
the idea of compassion as constituting the ideal of humanity for everyone.
Maigret embodies the ideal. We have seen this compassion worked out in
some detail in Maigret’s attitude toward Little John in Maigret à New York,
Pigou in Maigret et le Marchand de Vins, and Alain Lagrange in Le Revolver
de Maigret. Maigret’s compassion appears in some way in all of the novels
discussed here. Compassion is a priestly quality, not as necessarily pertain-
ing to the clergy but to that deeper sort of priesthood that belongs to all
Christians, making them, ideally if not in fact, children of a merciful God
following Jesus’ admonition: “Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful”
(Lk. 6:36). Compassion characterizes people of other religions, too, and many
non-religious people—like Maigret—who come to it through the mysterious
workings of their own inner lives. It sums up what is most appealing about
Simenon’s Maigret.
CONCLUSION
I have developed a view of Simenon’s Maigret based on interconnected

paradoxes that suggest Christian roots even though they appear in a secular
guise. The first paradox is the Incarnation itself, which lies at the core of
Christianity, reflected in Maigret’s habit of entering the lives of those who
inhabit the world he investigates. Another, related, paradox appears in Mai-
gret’s conception of his vocation as a detective, a vocation that is explicitly
priestly.5 Maigret is detective, “mender of destinies, and priest.” He is all
three at once—this is the paradox. Simenon develops this paradoxical voca-
tion using further paradoxes: a method that is not a method, the hunter who
is being hunted, and the policeman who is also a priest. I have argued that
underneath all these particular paradoxes, lies another, the presence of Chris-
tian traits in a hero who does not profess Christianity, an unbelieving hero
created by an author who stopped believing in God at age fifteen. One does
not need to be a Christian to manifest the qualities that Simenon attributes to
his hero, but the fact that both the author Simenon and his character Maigret
began life as devout Christians in Catholic Belgium and France, suggests that
perhaps a residue of their early piety might be traceable in Maigret’s charac-
ter and methodology. Simenon did recognize the profound effect of his early
Christian education, “That education marks you for life, even if you stopped
believing [as I have] all you were taught long ago” (Simenon 1970, vol. I,
125–6, cited in Becker 1999, 8).
Maigret’s encounters with criminals makes one think at times of Jesus’
encounters with sinners in the Gospel. Over and over again, the Pharisees
accuse Jesus of eating and drinking with sinners. Just as Jesus regarded with
contempt the righteousness of the religious establishment of his time, Maigret
separates himself definitively from the judges and investigators whose work
is motivated by a desire to protect privilege rather than a concern to find the
truth, especially the deep human truth of people whose live have strayed from
righteous paths.
René Girard’s criterion for separating great literature from merely good
literature is whether the author can see his characters from the perspective
of their common humanity without raising his heros, alter egos, to a place of
superiority over other humans. Girard came to this insight, as a kind of intel-
lectual conversion, when he was working on the last chapter of his first book,
304 Chapter Eleven
Deceit, Desire, and the Novel. He noticed that some great novelists moved
from an earlier conception of their work to a later understanding. The first
draft was “an attempt at self-justification” (Williams, 284) either focusing
on “a wicked hero, who is really the writer’s scapegoat, his mimetic rival”
or “a knight in shining armor, with whom the writer identifies” (284). This
first project fails somehow and the author realizes that “The self-justification
he had intended in his distinction between good and evil will not stand self-
examination. The novelist comes to realize that he has been the puppet of his
own devil. He and his enemy are truly indistinguishable” (284). This realiza-
tion is “shattering to the vanity and pride of the writer” (284). This experi-
ence, which Girard calls “an existential downfall,” is often enough “written
symbolically, as illness or death, in the conclusion” (284).
Whether Simenon moved from an earlier, more superficial conception of
his work as a writer to a more profound understanding as described by Girard,
I do not know. Perhaps a comparison of Simenon’s 190 pre-Maigret novels,
written under a variety of pseudonyms, with the Maigrets he wrote under his
own name and his later even more serious novels, the so-called roman durs
or hard novels, might provide some clues. Even as a student in the Jesuit high
school in Liége, Simenon would sign his essays “Georges Sim,” saying
that only when he had written something worthy of his real name would he
sign it (Bresler, 26). This suggests that Simenon himself saw in the
post-1930 Maigrets, published under his own name, a form of literature
significantly elevated above the earlier pseudonymous writings.6 What
that superiority consisted in could be the subject of another essay.
Whatever the history of his development as an author, it is evident that, in
his character Maigret, Simenon has achieved a deeply human character who
understands that he is no better and no worse than the people he is charged to
investigate; therefore, he is able to enter their lives as a mender of destinies,
detective, and priest at the same time.
NOTES
2. Georges Simenon (1903–1989) was probably the most prolific author of the
twentieth century. The exact number of his works is difficult to ascertain. Accord-
ing to one of his biographers, he wrote 573 works (Becker 1999, viii), among them
the famous Maigret series. Becker lists 77 Maigrets in her bibliography, Patrick
Marnham lists 76, but Jean Forest has published the names, characters, and plots
of 107 Maigrets. Becker lists 114 romans durs, hard or serious novels, the category
that first won Simenon recognition as a serious novelist. Before the Maigrets and the
romans durs, Simenon’s career began with a series of 190 “potboilers” under various
synonyms that earned him a large amount of money and prepared him for the more
serious Maigrets most of which were published under his own name.
3. Michel Lemoine in his article “The method of investigation according to Mai-
gret : A methodical absence of method? (http://www.trussel.com/maig/lemoine.htm)
notes that this process of identification, though not present in all Maigrets is present
in a significant number. In addition to the novels I have cited, Lemoine adds the fol-
lowing: M. Gallet, décédé [The Death of M. Gallet, Maigret Stonewalled], Un Crime
en Hollande [A Crime in Holland], Le Port des brumes [Death of a Harbor Master],
Le Fou de Bergerac [The Madman of Bergerac], Liberty-Bar, Cécile est morte [Mai-
gret and the Spinster], La Maison du juge [Maigret in Exile], Signé Picpus [To Any
Lengths, Maigret and the Fortuneteller], L’Inspecteur Cadavre [Maigret’s Rival],
Maigret et la Grande Perche [Maigret and the Burglar’s Wife] or Maigret à Vichy
[Maigret Takes the Waters, Maigret in Vichy], and Félicie est là [Maigret and the Toy
Village] (1944) an investigation that drags Maigret to Orgeval and during which he
has many opportunities to get into the skin of the victim, Jules Lapie, known as Peg-
Leg: “Once on being asked to comment on Maigret’s methods by a visiting criminolo-
gist, the Chief Commissioner of the Police Judiciare replied with an enigmatic smile:
‘Maigret? How can I put it? He settles into a case as if it were a pair of comfortable
slippers’” G. SIMENON, Félicie est là, t. XI, 314–316, 374 et 382. [Maigret and the
Toy Village, Harvest/HBJ Ch. 2, 21–23; Ch. 5, 87; Ch.6, 96]
4. See the article “Hugh of St. Victor on ‘Jesus Wept,’” by Boyd Taylor Coolman
in Theological Studies, September 2008, 69 (No. 3)528–556.
5. Many mystery stories feature detectives who are actually ordained priests or
ministers. One can find a list on the website, “Clerical Detectives and some other
crime fiction, selected by Philip Gorsset”: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/philipg
/detectives/contents.html. Some of these stories are written by priests, come feature a
priest or minister as the central character. The list is extensive, One of the best known
is Chesterton’s Father Brown; see G. K. Chesterton, The Father Brown Omnibus,
Dodd Mead and Company, New York, 1943. To see how their priesthood influences
the method of these detectives and to compare these influences with the priestly di-
mension of Maigret’s method would be an interesting study.
6. Lucille Becker comments on Simenon’s stature as a writer. Until the 1970s,
after he had actually stopped writing novels, Simenon was, according to Becker
“dismissed as an author of detective novels, a genre relegated to the status of paralit-
erature” (Becker, vii). Even though he had written more roman durs (“hard” or seri-
ous novels) than Maigrets, Simenon’s fame rested more on the Maigrets, which had
been translated into multiple languages and become the subject of about forty films.
In 2003, the critical evaluation of Simenon’s work changed when his home town
of Liége in Belgium celebrated the centenary of his birth, an event which enabled
him to take his place among the great writers of the modern era. “In May of 2003,”
says Becker, “Georges Simenon took his place in the pantheon of letters, alongside
distinguished writers like Hemingway, Montaigne, Dostoevsky, and Proust, with the
publication of 21 of his novels in two volumes of Gallimard’s prestigious collection,
Bibliotheque de la Pleiade” (vii). Five of the 21 were Maigrets. So it seems that
Simenon’s Maigrets form part of the basis on which his reputation as a great writer
rests. In Maigret, Simenon has created a character comparable to Victor Hugo’s Jean
Valjean or Balzac’s Pere Goriot.
Conclusion
What conclusions emerge from this study that begins with the story of Adam
and Eve in the Hebrew Testament and ends with the detective stories of
George Simenon in the twentieth century? We have explored an alternative
to a common way—perhaps the usual way—of assessing the relation between
good and evil. So the emergent conclusions have to be set over against that
alternative. The normal response to evil done against us is to blame, to judge,
and to seek retribution or even vengeance. Self-blame and self-punishment
offer an alternative response. The possibility of forgiveness also exists, of the
other or of oneself. But forgiveness does not come easily to human beings.
And so we need to look for the condition of the possibility of forgiveness. The
chapters leading up to this conclusion have tried to establish that compassion
is the condition that opens up the possibility of forgiveness and that the per-
sonal consciousness of a common vulnerability of the will, “original sin”—a
vulnerability that each of us shares—can help move people toward compas-
sion. Having stated the default response to evil and the alternative, we will
need to review the alternative way chosen here to see if it is trustworthy. We
will be a little like engineers testing the reliability of a highway or bridge or
airplane we have built. Or like a painter standing back from a painting to see
if it expresses the original inspiration. Augustine did something similar in the
Reviews or Retractrationes, formulated at the end of his long writing career
to set each work in its place and evaluate it. It is not a matter of verifying
a proof but of reviewing a result to see if it meets expectations. Our review
will involve a recapitulation of the three stages through which the study has
progressed, a look at the alternative viewpoints offered by each of the texts
examined, and a review of the hermeneutical principles that have been at
work. We will then be in a position to see if it all comes together in a coherent
view that can be expressed in a few conclusions.
307
308 Conclusion
Before beginning, we need to recall an important distinction implicit in

the choice of texts that make up this study. The chapters of this book trace
an outer and an inner journey. The outer journey consists in the written texts
that set forth biblical narratives, theoretical arguments, and literary formula-
tions. We find these texts in written forms that we can read and interpret.
Sometimes we find references to texts that have been lost in their outward
forms—like the Hortensius of Cicero that had such a profound effect in
the development of Augustine of Hippo. And then we regret the loss of the
outer form that we could enter ourselves. We have in these cases to satisfy
ourselves with the inner transformation that someone like Augustine has re-
corded in his own writings. The inner journey refers to the consciousness that
gives rise to written texts and to the transformation that occurs in those who
read the texts. Without the inner dimensions the texts remain just words on
a page. Some prior inner experience of what we are reading, some curiosity
arising from that experience, and some consequent openness to what the au-
thor writes about conditions our appreciation of a serious work. Rudolf Otto
puts the potential reader on the spot in the first pages of his work, The Idea of
the Holy. If the notion “religious experience” suggests nothing recognizable
in your own life, then don’t waste your time reading this book. If we do have
some idea of the subject matter from our own experience, then we can enter
in and allow the text to expand, correct, confirm, and even transform what
we already know.
This study has progressed through three phases. We began with the arche-
typal images, symbols, and narratives—mythical and historical—that have
grounded the Christian tradition and given rise to various forms of commen-
tary, reflection, and theory through which the tradition has developed. This
first phase has included the Adamic Myth, a comparison of that myth with
other myths of the origin and end of evil, a study of that myth as it appears in
the book of Genesis where we now have access to it, and in the New Testa-
ment where it has been revived to serve as source of Christian thought and
literature. Then, following Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutic principle, “the symbol
gives rise to thought.” We have considered theoretical reflections that inter-
pret and give rational coherence to the generating symbols. This second phase
includes the elaboration of the notion of original sin by Augustine of Hippo,
medieval, Reformation, and modern formulations of Augustine’s theories,
the anthropological theory of René Girard, a summary chapter elaborating
the connection between original sin and compassion. The third phase, in-
spired by a corollary hermeneutical principle according to which theory once
formulated tends to clothe itself again in images, symbols, and narrative, has
explored selected works of literature in the western canon, the medieval epic
of Perceval, the mystically inspired narratives of Julian of Norwich, Shake-
Conclusion 309
speare’s Measure for Measure, and the twentieth century Maigret stories of
Georges Simenon.
In addition to the hermeneutical theory, “the symbol gives rise to thought,”
and its corollary, “thought once formulated moves to clothe itself again in
image, symbol, and narrative,” several other fundamental principles of inter-
pretation have been at work in the chapters of this work. Their significance is
described in detail in the introduction. The first principle, at work in the early
theological reflections of the Christian Church, contains a double truth. The
first truth, explicitly formulated in the New Testament is that only God can
forgive sin (Mk 2:7b). The second truth, formulated by Gregory of Nazianzen
in his dispute with Apollinarius, affirms that Jesus healed human nature by
taking it on as his own, “For that which he has not assumed he has not healed”
(Nazianzen, 1978, 441).
How has this double principle been illustrated in the preceding chapters?
Some examples will suffice to indicate the answer. The first of the two truths
expressing this principle occur throughout the texts from the Hebrew Bible,
the New Testament, the writings of the Fathers of the Church, including Au-
gustine and throughout the literature examined in the principal authors treated
in this study. Pelagius and his followers resisted the truth. Their resistance
provoked the protracted dispute with Augustine that gave rise to his clear
formulation of the doctrine of original sin. For the Pelagians, human failings
were not radical enough to require a special salvific intervention by the Cre-
ator of human nature. In the act of creation itself, they maintained, God has
given us everything we need to live a life of virtue. The second truth included
in this principle that only God can save, belongs particularly to the New
Covenant of Christianity. In this dispensation, the Incarnation of the Word of
God in the humanity of Jesus of Nazareth is the foundation of human heal-
ing. Jesus Christ entered so deeply into our humanity that he even endured
death on a cross. By rising, he overcame the sting of death and opened up the
possibility of life for his followers. Interestingly, these two truths, only God
saves and God only saves what he has taken on, play a role in the secular
Commissaire Maigret of George Simenon. Maigret sometimes appears as a
kind of “God the Father” (La Pipe de Maigret, for instance, 183). Even more
striking is Maigret’s entry into the lives of both victims and criminals. He
becomes one of them, takes on their characteristics., and in this way solves
crimes and sometimes becomes a “mender of destinies.” “He had to become
Little John” (see Maigret à New York, 148).
The second principle of interpretation at work in the preceding pages is
Augustine’s circular description of his own theological method, “I believe in
order to understand; I understand in order to believe more fully” (Sermon 43,
7,9). This study has proceeded from a theological viewpoint, from a position
310 Conclusion
of faith seeking understanding with the hope that understanding will deepen
faith. Most of the authors included have begun in faith with the hope of deep-
ening faith through understanding. I do not know if Shakespeare was a be-
liever. He lived in a culture still pregnant with Christian themes and symbols.
Certainly his Measure for Measure provides dramatic depth for a common
set of Christian beliefs. Simenon clearly did not write from the perspective
of faith. His character Maigret, also not a believer, has a particular value
precisely because he manifested some of the deepest traits of Christian faith
without a personal grounding in the tradition. Simenon seems to write these
detective stories out of a deep humanity that coincides with most profound
teachings of Christianity. Readers of this book may or may not begin from
faith. The texts and themes might well appeal to believers and unbelievers be-
cause of their humanity and might serve as a corrective for certain superficial
convictions about the nature of Christian faith.
The third principle, that liberating truths are revealed to the heart through
conversion, finds ample manifestation in the chapters through which this
exploration has progressed. The writings of Paul and Augustine focus on
conversion. Perceval seems to experience the kind of transformation associ-
ated with conversion. Julian of Norwich speaks of extraordinary revelations
that give evidence of special divine interventions. Even Angelo of Measure
for Measure seems to melt before the incisive but gentle intervention of the
Duke. Angelo confesses and awaits his sentence and the death that will fol-
low; “That is all the grace I beg” (Measure for Measure, 5.1, 370–375). To
speak of religious or moral conversion in the Maigret stories seems a stretch.
But a character like Little John who has killed the only woman he ever loved
out of jealousy, experiences a lightness of spirit after Maigret discovers
the secret of John’s eyes, “the pain that gave them their terrible coldness”
(Maigret in New York, 183). And when Little John discovers the son that he
thought he had lost he, redeems, in a very real sense, the “lost time” of which
Proust wrote so eloquently. “Maigret may not have been an agent of conver-
sion; he was a mender of destinies.”
The fourth principle, that truth is revealed historically, underlies the choice
of texts from the first chapters of the book of Genesis, the Middle Ages, the
Renaissance, and the twenty-first century.
It will be helpful to review the contribution each part of the study has made
to the whole beginning with the Adam and Eve narrative of Genesis and end-
ing with Maigret before drawing a limited number of conclusions to be drawn
from this study.
The Jahwist editor who placed the mythical account of Adam and Eve at
the beginning of the Hebrew Bible must have had a sense of the incongruity
of human life and wondered how it came about. How does it happen, for in-
Conclusion 311
stance, that human beings are ashamed of their nakedness? Or why do people
find it so hard to cultivate the earth and why is the earth so often stingy with
its products? Why do men lord it over women and why do women continue
to be attracted to men? And why do women endure agony to have their chil-
dren? Why do humans find it so difficult maintain terms of intimacy with
God who created them? The Jahwist took none of this for granted, as if it had
always been and must always be. As if these difficulties and contradictions
belonged to the essence of being human. The story of Adam and Eve, placed
at the beginning of the Bible, gives an account of the origins of shame and
hardship and struggle in the human being’s relations with self, with other
humans, and with God. The story also gives an account of the human situ-
ation before the rebel couple decided to take things into their own hands.
“The man and his wife were both naked, yet they felt no shame” (Gen. 2:25).
By implication, all the other hardships and distortions in human life did not
trouble the first couple before their act of disobedience. God’s surprise, for
instance, at not seeing Adam and Eve “at the breezy time of the day” as he
walked about in the garden suggests that usually they would have joined him.
When they did not, God knew that they had eaten the forbidden fruit. The
reduced condition came about partly as the intrinsic result of their acts, partly
as divine punishment.
The Jahwist must also have had a sense of a divine compassion as coun-
terpoint to the punishment divinely inflicted. For he includes God’s tender
gesture of making leather garments for the naked couple, the first manifesta-
tion of God’s compassion. Seeing that they were ashamed by their naked-
ness, God personally clothed them. And God seems to indicate some kind
of salvific intent in his declaration of the eternal enmity between serpent
and the woman and her offspring. So the archetypal story of Adam and Eve
sets in motion the dialectic of sin, and punishment, and compassion, and
forgiveness.
In the chapters that have preceded, we have explored this dialectic as
it has continued to develop in biblical narratives, theoretical speculations,
and literary expressions. Sometimes we have seen variations on the story
of Adam and Eve itself. Though the Hebrew Testament does not pursue the
story of Adam and Eve significantly in its long history, the New Testament,
especially the writings of Paul, revives the story and makes it central to the
Christian faith. Paul accounts for both the condition that has come from the
disobedience and the remedy in the compassionate grace and goodness of
Jesus Christ. Paul enlarges the story by making of Christ the second Adam
who reverses the consequences of the first Adam’s disobedience. Augustine
of Hippo in the fourth and fifth centuries picks up Paul’s version of the story
and develops an extensive theoretical elaboration, including the doctrine of
312 Conclusion
original sin. Augustine’s elaboration, like Paul’s, entails a dialectic of punish-

ment and compassion. Julian of Norwich received a series of sixteen mystical
revelations that included a very original retelling of the story. For her the
fall was the result of an accident not a punishment for disobedience. The
consequence of the fall was that Adam could not get himself out of the ditch.
Julian’s vision involves a mystical identification of Adam’s fall into the ditch
and Jesus’ descent into the womb of the Virgin Mary in such a way that the
fall entailed its own reversal from the beginning.
Some chapters have focused more on the dialectics of sin and compassion,
without direct reference to the story of Adam and Eve. The medieval story
of Perceval, for instance, considers the consequences of the hero’s failure
to show compassion to his mother as he was leaving home. Had Perceval
opened his heart through compassion, he would have been able to heal the
wounded Fisher King and restore the kingdom to health. Shakespeare’s play,
Measure for Measure, shows the disruptive results of Angelo’s rigid, unfor-
giving attitude during his interim rule of the city during the Duke’s absence
and the healing brought about by the compassionate Duke. George Simenon’s
compassionate detective, Maigret, employs compassion as a way of solv-
ing crimes. By entering into the lives of victims and perpetrators, he solves
crimes and even becomes a “mender of destinies.”
As a way of drawing these diverse accounts together, it will help to ex-
amine how each of them regards the wound under which humanity labors
and the nature of the healing available. In the Genesis version of the myth
of Adam and Eve, the wounds, as we have seen, are shame about nakedness,
hardship in cultivating the earth and childbearing, and disruption of relation-
ships. The healing comes through God’s compassion and the promise of sal-
vation in the future. For Paul, the wound afflicts the human will, which seems
impotent to choose the good that it longs for and avoid the evil that it abhors.
Healing comes about through the gracious intervention of Jesus Christ. “Who
will save me from this body of death?” Paul asks and responds, “Thanks be to
God through Jesus Christ our Lord. . . . Hence, now there is no condemnation
for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 7:24b-8:1).
As we move into the realm of theory, we meet Augustine who continued
Paul’s focus on the servile will, describing in the Confessions his own strug-
gle to avoid the evil habits that held him down like a chains and to choose the
freedom he longed for, then systematically elaborating a theological anthro-
pology of sin and grace. And for Augustine, as for Paul, redemption came
through submission of the will to the grace of Christ. Chapter five examines
classical and modern thinkers who have continued to explore the notion of
original sin in their historical contexts. Chapter six elaborates in a systematic
way the relations between compassion and forgiveness, focusing on the four
Conclusion 313
intimacies wounded through sin and their restoration through the inner heal-
ing brought about by grace. Chapter seven presents René Girard’s systematic
elaboration of mimetic rivalry or covetousness and its consequences in the
life of society.
Moving into the realm of literature, we considered the medieval poem,
Perceval, which describes a twofold wound. First we see Perceval’s wound,
a mysterious inhibition about asking questions that would have led to the
healing of the Fisher King and his kingdom. If he had but asked the questions
about the dish containing a single host and the lance that bled carried before
him in the Fisher King’s palace, Perceval would have healed the king. But
Perceval couldn’t bring himself to ask, even though he was curious about
what he saw. And the wound that would have been healed through his ques-
tions was the crippled condition of the Fisher King. Some interpret the King’s
crippled condition as a wound to his sexuality, which would be consistent
with the story in Genesis and with Augustine’s interpretation of it. Whatever
the interpretation, the wound was curable through the posing of the saving
questions about lance and grail. Julian of Norwich symbolizes the wound
as Adam’s inability to turn and see his master who could have rescued him
from the ditch into which he had fallen. Julian generalizes Adam’s inability
to see his master as a human condition of despair about salvation, a chronic
inability to access what is available for us in the loving mercy of God. And
healing comes through that very mercy, which for Julian, accomplishes even
the salvation of the most unrepentant sinner.
Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, locates the wound in the harshness of
judgment that Jesus warns against in the Gospel of Matthew. “Stop judging,
that you may not be judged. For as you judge, so will you be judged, and the
measure by which you measure will be measured out to you” (Matt. 7:1–2).
Angelo, the interim ruler of the city in the Duke’s absence, presents a type of
the harsh judge who is himself afflicted with the very vice against which his
righteous judgment is directed. This tendency toward judgment lies in wait
as a constant temptation for religious and morally upright people. The heal-
ing antidote, of course, is mercy, illustrated in Shakespeare’s Measure for
Measure in the wise and compassionate Duke who not only exposes Angelo’s
hypocrisy, but brings about a reconciliation of all the characters in the play.
Georges Simenon, probably the most secular of the authors we have con-
sidered, discerns, through the eyes of his character, Maigret—also a basi-
cally secular man—a variety of weaknesses afflicting the human condition.
Maigret notes that many human beings never find their proper place in life,
follow a path foreign to them. They are lost. And Maigret’s vocation, as he
saw it, was to be policeman, doctor, and priest who could see at first glance
the destiny of the other person. He would be a mender of destinies. But not
314 Conclusion
everyone is lost. Maigret saw a more universal weakness afflicting human be-
ings, fear in its multiple forms, fear of water, of fire, of darkness, of making
bad choices, of failing to take hold of our lives, of being betrayed. Maigret
imagines these as “the notes of a muffled and tragic symphony: the hidden
fears that one drags behind one, sharp fears that make one cry out in pain,
fears that one dismisses once they have passed, fear of accidents, of sickness,
of the police, of people, what they will say and the looks they give you as they
pass (The Patience of Maigret, 128). And Maigret’s healing method was to
enter into the places in his characters where fear resides, in all the many forms
it takes and in the consequences to which it gives rise, and let these cracks, or
fissures, or weaknesses lead to the solution of crimes.
All these different ways of naming original sin have a certain validity. The
important thing is to uncover and identify quite concretely the way original
sin operates in ourselves as individuals and in our society. We might call
this original sin fear (Simenon), anxiety (Kierkegaard), mimetic rivalry (Gi-
rard), alienation from the self (Proust), lack of confidence in God (Julian of
Norwich), separation of mind and heart (Augustine), selfishness (Domning),
discrimination based on male domination (feminist theologians), or any other
kind of oppressive condition. Original sin under its many names manifests
itself as a kind of polymorphous perversity, appearing in different guises but
always working against the full development of human beings and their world.
All of these wounds can be taken as manifestations of the condition tra-
ditionally call original sin. What is important is that we come to recognize
that all of us are afflicted. We are like the prototypical detective, Oedipus,
King of Thebes, who set out to find the cause of the plague ravaging his city
and found that it was he himself. We look for the speck in our neighbor’s
eye blinded by the beam in our own (Matt. 7:3–5). Throughout the preced-
ing pages, I have argued that a conviction that original sin afflicts all human
beings, including ourselves, tends to open us up to compassion for the weak-
nesses in others. And compassion tends to open us to forgiveness.
The question we spontaneously ask when we see evil done, especially to
ourselves: “How could he (she, they) have done this?” inclines us to be un-
forgiving. If we can come to understand that they did what they did precisely
because they are like us, we are more likely to be both sympathetic and for-
giving. If we think of ourselves as needing to attend to the consequences of
original sin in ourselves—whatever they might be concretely—before we set
out to right the wrongs done around us and to us, we are more likely to end
up as agents of reconciliation than perpetrators of division. Oedipus, having
recognized his crimes and suffered exile, becomes a “defense . . . a bulwark
stronger than many shields” (Oedipus at Colonus, 1724–25) for the city of his
Conclusion 315
final rest, Athens. If we can accept that we belong to “a universal democracy

of sinners” (Prudentius, cited in Jacobs 82), and are consequently divided
selves, we open ourselves to healing and, once healed, to being healers our-
selves. Following the prophetic advice of the Dutch Jewess Etty Hillesum,
who died at Auschwitz, we are well-advised to try to destroy in ourselves
what we think should be destroyed in the other (Hillesum 1996, 199).
But what about those who already begin life with a sense of inferiority?
Those whom Suchocki and other feminists describe as “hiding,” or Georges
Bernanos near the end of his novel, The Diary of a Country Priest, describes
as hating themselves? “It is easier than one thinks to hate (hair) oneself ”
(Bernanos 1936, 316).1 Such people sometimes end up constructing gran-
diose imaginary structures to live in, as was the case for Xavier Marton in
Simenon’s Maigret’s Scrupules (Simenon 1957) who grew up as a ward of
an uncaring state and, as an adult, found his place in an imaginary world of
electric trains. Some simply lead lives of quiet desperation. Are we to say to
them that they should first destroy in themselves what they think should be
destroyed in the other? That they should look for the beam in their own eye
and forget about the speck in the others’ eyes? And if we give the obvious
answer, “no,” does that limit the scope of compassion? I would say rather
that compassion is wider in scope than we might have thought. It includes
not only the other, but the self. The people of whom I have been speaking are
more likely to be unfair in judging themselves than in judging others.
When Bernanos spoke of those who hate themselves, he included the for-
mula for how, under the guidance of grace, we should love ourselves: “It is
easier than one thinks to hate oneself. Grace is to forget oneself. But, if all
pride were dead in us, the grace of all graces would be to love oneself hum-
bly, as any of the suffering members of Jesus Christ” (Bernanos 1936, 316).
Entering into such a life of grace requires conversion. Once we have entered
the path of conversion, recognizing, through grace, the affliction common to
all human beings, we can afford to be compassionate. And being compassion-
ate, we can move bit by bit, again through grace and our own efforts, toward
forgiveness, of others and of ourselves.
NOTE
1. I have cited this passage already at the end of the second chapter of this present
work. That chapter elaborates the thought of Paul Ricoeur who cites the passage from
Bernanos as the “warrant” for his book, Oneself as Another. See reference at the end
of chapter one.
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Index
Abraham, 36, 38, 62, 65–66, 72–74, Adam and Eve, 130, 131, 139;
85, 92, 93, 100, 180; as model for addiction, 133–34; the Church,
justification by faith, 55, 86–87 128, 130; City of God, 18, 116–18,
Adam and Eve, 1, 5, 8, 55, 73, 78, 108, 130–31; compassion, 107, 109, 118,
307, 310, 311, 312; in the context 119, 120–22, 124, 126–28, 134;
of covenant, 61; creation-uncreation Confessions, 120; contemplation,
theme, 64–66; in primeval history, 119, 122; conversion of, 118, 119,
58–59, 61, 62, 81; sin-speech- 122, 123, 129, 132, 134, 173, 245;
mitigation-punishment theme, 61–64; on conversion, 126, 310; counsel
spread of sin, spread of grace theme, of compassion, 120; delight,
64 importance of, 132–33; doctor of
Adamic Myth, 15, 16, 17, 34–42, 52, grace, 107; Donatists, 123, 125–28;
165, 166, 167, 308; as covenant, evil, 124, 125; on forgiveness,
66, 72; not historical, 35; in Paul, 114, 128, 129; free will, 117–18,
36; in Paul’s Letter to the Romans, 124; on freedom, 130, 131, 135;
85–92; primacy of among Ricoeur’s on grace, 18, 107, 108, 109, 110,
four myths, 46; related to Christian 112, 113, 114, 115, 117, 118, 119,
forgiveness, 51 121, 122, 126, 128, 129, 131, 132,
Alison, James, 5, 7 136n2, 136n6; grace in relation to
Alszeghy and Flick: personalism and the law, 129; interiority, 135; Julian
evolution, 153–56 of Eclanum, 119, 123, 125; logic
Aquinas, 19, 147–49, 156, 160–61, of grace, 122–23; Manichees, 118,
164, 253; original sin according to 119, 123, 124, 125, 130, 132, 135;
Aristotle’s four causes, 142–44; memory, 135; Monica, 134; original
original sin, final cause of 144, sin, 107, 109, 117, 118, 128, 131,
163; original sin, material, formal, 139; original sin as origination, 122,
efficient causes of, 143, 158, 163 133; original sin as separation of
Augustine, 78, 107–37, 225, 262, thought and feeling, 132; Pelagians,
290, 308, 309, 311–13, 314; 109, 114, 115–16, 118, 123–24,
329
330 Index
125, 129; Pelagius, 108–9, 115, 223, 224, 225, 226, 232, 240, 243,
117, 118, 125, 129, 130; Platonists, 247, 253, 261, 262, 263, 265, 266,
120; predestination, 108, 110, 267, 283, 306, 312; consciousness
111–12, 114; sin of Adam, 114; of, 66, 67, 68; origin and end of,
Rectractiones, 307 16, 25, 28, 46, 50, 51, 55, 119, 124,
165, 308; as primordial in creation
Bernanos: Diary of a Country Priest and myth, 30; as privation of good, 252;
grace, 174, 180–81n5, 315, 315n1 as substance, 118, 119, 252. See also
Augustine, evil
Clines, David: Adam and Eve in context
of primeval history, 61–66 faith, 9, 21, 35, 54–55, 57, 89, 91–93,
compassion, 1–4, 16, 18, 21, 42, 108, 96–98, 110, 119, 128, 130, 133, 135,
140, 168, 177, 198, 209–10; and 144, 149–50, 154; critical, 34; Israel’s
consciousness of original sin, 8, 15, faith, 5, 29, 59–60, 62–63, 65, 72–73,
107, 109, 164–65; and forgiveness, 85; justification, by, 153; seeking
xi, 1, 2, 8–10, 15, 22, 65, 166, understanding, 11; unverified, 51;
170–73, 176, 204, 307, 312; in working through love, 122
Hebrew Bible, 182–83; and justice, forgiveness, ix, 1–5, 9–10, 14–16, 42,
xi, 181; opposed to violence, 202; 51–53, 62, 64, 84, 114, 128–29, 166–
and original sin, 283–84, 308; toward 67, 169–70, 174–78, 181–85, 187,
self, 174. See also Augustine; Hugh 195, 202, 204–5, 244, 257, 267, 279,
of St. Victor; Julian of Norwich; 307, 311–12, 314–15; in the Adamic
Measure for Measure; Perceval Myth, 33, 53, 168; and compassion,
Coolman, Boyd. See Hugh of St Victor xi, x, 1, 2, 3, 4, 8, 15, 16, 18, 22, 56,
conversion, 11, 20, 108, 118, 119, 122, 163, 165, 166, 170, 176, 204, 265,
123, 126, 127, 129, 132, 134, 135, 312, 314; difference of Hebrew and
173, 178, 196, 197, 200, 204, 209, New Testaments concerning, 181–
218, 224, 228, 229, 230, 245, 303, 83; examples of, 177–78; excluded
310; in Proust, 202, 203; toward in tragic vision, 33, 34, 52, 167; and
authentic love of self, 315; toward grace, 52; in Hebrew Bible, 66, 81;
compassion, 15; toward freedom of impossibility of in creation, tragic,
will, 89; toward habit of forgiveness, and orphic myths, 167; motives for,
15. See also Augustine; Girard, 178–81; as necessity, possibility,
René; Perceval and reality, 167; in New Testament,
98–99, 101, 103–4, 168, 171, 173,
democracy of sinners, 315 175, 176, 260; and resurrection, 205;
as reversal of violence, 20, 209; of
evil, ix, xi, 3, 6, 7, 12, 16–17, 27, 29, self, 315; and solidarity in weakness,
32, 33–34, 38, 42, 44, 45, 46–47, 48, 128; in the state, 275–77; toward
49, 52, 53, 70, 71, 77, 79, 86, 88, a definition of, 183–85. See also
91, 94, 100, 101, 104, 107, 108, 111, Augustine; Girard, René; God; Jesus
116, 125, 136, 146, 147, 148, 150, Christ; original sin
151, 156, 159, 161, 164, 166, 167,
169, 170, 174, 179, 180, 182, 185, Girard, René, 19–20, 163, 308;
192, 195, 202, 211, 212, 213, 221, conversion, his, 197, 303;
Index 331
conversion, necessity of, 196, 92, 101, 107, 108, 109, 110, 112–13,
202–4; conversion, as resurrection, 114, 115–19, 121, 122, 123, 126,
200, 205; cycle of overcome by 128, 129, 136n2, 136n6, 140–41,
forgiveness, 209; development 142, 143, 144, 146, 147, 148, 149–
of Girard’s thought, 188–90; 51, 155, 158, 160, 174, 178, 181, 184
forgiveness as healing mimetic 185, 196, 205, 211, 223, 224, 225,
rivalry, 195; forgiveness as 228, 231, 235, 240, 246, 250, 252,
resurrection, 205; mimetic desire 253, 262, 263, 276, 284, 310, 312,
and rivalry, 188; mimetic rivalry, 313, 315; abounding, 21, 42, 52, 61,
172, 209, 243; mimetic rivalry, as 81, 90, 96, 230, 234, 237, 239, 251;
covetousness, 208, 243; mimetic as delight in the good, 116; of divine
rivalry, as equivalent to original compassion and forgiveness, 14, 66;
sin, 187, 196–99, 209; mimetic and forgiveness, 52; and freedom,
rivalry healed by forgiveness, 195, 130, 131; as healing of the will, 52;
204; mimetic rivalry in Letter of and iniquity, 21; liberation through,
James, 172; Oedipus the King 118; necessity of for salvation,
(myth) and Joseph (Bible), 192–95; 7, 119; as revealing fundamental
scapegoat mechanism, 187, 190–91; goodness, 12; secret increasing
uniqueness of Bible with respect to power of in primeval history, 55, 61,
violence, 187, 191; violence, 187, 66. See also Augustine
191, 209
God: compassion of, 14, 17, 42, 55–56, hermeneutical principles, 10–13, 16,
75, 79–81, 83, 90, 108–9, 165, 311; 20, 307; defined, 10; faith seeking
and forgiveness, 2, 21, 62, 167; understanding, 11, 309–10; only God
intimacy within Garden, 80; as can forgive sin/Jesus saved from
merciful, 112, 233; role in salvation sin by taking on humanity, 10, 309;
according to New Testament, liberation through conversion, 11,
96–102; on the side of human 310; the symbol gives rise to thought,
freedom in Adamic Myth, 52–53; 12, 308, 309; thought returns to
slow to anger, rich in mercy, 80–81, narrative and symbol, 13; truth first
112, 167, 168 articulated in myth and symbol, 12;
good, ix, xi, 6, 7, 12, 15, 28, 31, 35, 38, truth revealed historically, 12, 210
42, 47, 52, 53, 77, 78, 85, 89, 91, 94, Hillesum, Etty, 175, 179, 315
95, 103, 107, 109, 113, 118, 149, 152, Hilton, Walter, 15
169, 170, 173, 179, 180, 181, 185, Hugh of St. Victor:
189, 197, 198, 202, 209, 212, 213, compassion as ideal humanitas, ix,
224, 233, 238, 240, 146, 283, 296, 172; divine will, 168; On the Four
304, 307, 312; common good, 276; Wills of Christ, ix, 168–70, 252, 302;
creation as good, 34, 37, 73, 101, 124, history of compassion, 253; human
151, 157; delight in, 116; fundamental will, 168–70; rational will, 302; will
and primordial in human beings, 12, of tender mercy, ix, 93, 302
15, 48, 52; good works, 147, 149,
150; inability to choose, 115 Ilibagiza, Immaculee, 3–4
grace, x, 2, 7, 6–7, 9, 11–12, 16–17, 33, intimacies, 19, 160, 179, 182; examples,
41, 53, 56, 63, 64, 65, 83–84, 91, 177–78; with God, 96, 104, 175; at
332 Index
nakedness, 75, 76, 311; with nature, Measure for Measure, 310, 312, 313;
96, 176; with neighbor, 96, 104, 175; Angelo, failure of compassion,
with self, 19, 104, 173–75 261–63; and compassion, 257,
265–66, 271, 279–80; the Duke and
Jesus Christ, 107, 163, 309, 312; the dialectic of justice and mercy,
compassion of, 165, 172, 205, 289; 267; Isabella, consciousness of sin
forgiveness of, 172, 204, 205; as as motive for compassion, 264–66;
scapegoat, 199; as second Adam, legalism and compassion in the state,
40–41, 47, 95, 96–98, 104, 311; as 21; restorative justice, 277–80
Son of Man, 40, 41, 47, 96–98, 104;
as Suffering Servant, 40–41, 47, nakedness. See Intimacies, shame at
96–98, 104 nakedness
Julian of Norwich, x, 14, 21, 233–35, Noah: as new Adam, 72
252–55, 312, 313; compassion Noth, Martin, 57
as unifying principle, 235–37; Nussbaum, Martha, 10, 22n3
on forgiveness, 244; original sin,
242–47, 283; parable of Lord and Oedipus, 31, 32, 314. See also Girard,
Servant as retelling of Adam and René
Eve narrative, 237–42; Short Text, original goodness, 189
Long Text, 233; universal salvation, original sin, 188, 189, 312, 313; absence
possibility of, 247–50 from Judaism, 5; connected with
justification: in Council of Trent, evolutionary perspective, 151;
145–46; by faith, 90; by faith in consciousness of as motive for
Jesus Christ, the second Adam, compassion, 2, 107, 165–86, 280;
87–88, 153; by faith as modeled by as covetousness, 187; defined, 157;
Abraham, 86–87; free will and good distinguished from actual sin, 6,
works, 145–46; Joint Declaration by 123; as doubting God, 77; dynamics
Catholics and Lutherans, 149 of, 209; as enigma, riddle, problem,
173; evolutionary perspectives,
Kierkegaard, Soren, 188, 259, 262, 151–59; feminist perspectives,
280n4, 314 161–63; and forgiveness, 4, 307;
and grace, 21; inner constitution
Lancel, Serge, 108, 111, 112, 116, 119 of, 173; Luther and Trent, 144–46;
Lonergan, Bernard, 12, 87, 103, 161 Lutheran context, 142–44; Lutheran
positions, 146–49; original sin,
Maigret, Comissioner: compared with compassion and forgiveness, 1, 15,
Ignatian discernment, 294–96; 21–22, 163, 283, 314; as originating
compassion, 283, 300, 302; as sin, 68, 75, 77, 122, 133, 190; papal
detective, doctor, and priest, degrees and church councils, 140–
284–88; as entering others’ lives, 42; phenomenology, personalism,
285–86, 287; as mender of destinies, cognitional theory, 130; as pride,
21, 284, 285, 287, 294, 309, 310, 77; resistance to notion of, 4–5; as
312, 313; method, 291–94; original source of rivalry and envy, 172;
sin, 283 as violence, 150, 159–61. See also
McGilchrist, Iain, 13, 20 Aquinas; Augustine
Index 333
Paul, St., 18, 85–92, 119, 180, 311–12; Simenon, Georges, 9–10, 14, 283, 287,
unavailability of freedom to itself, 52 288–89, 307, 309, 310, 312, 313–14.
Pelagius: condemned by Council of See also Maigret, Commissioner
Orange, 141–42; optimistic view of sin: and compassion, 312; in Hebrew
human nature, 108; on pride, 109; Bible, 55, 70; as universal according
rigorous moral expectations, 108 to Paul, 85–82. See also original sin
Perceval, 21, 211, 310, 312, 313; suffering, 2, 8–9, 34–35, 41–42, 48–49,
compared with Adam and Eve, 53, 55, 69, 84, 92–94, 98–99, 107–8,
212–15; compassion in, 20, 209, 157, 171, 174–75, 180, 182, 186,
214–15, 222, 227; conversion, 218, 188, 190, 200–201, 225, 227, 231,
224, 228–29, 230; role of failure, 233, 242–43, 245–46, 251–53, 260,
227–28; three visions, 218–24; and 285, 294, 299; as opposed to guilt,
T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasterland,” 51; as source of hope, 97
229–30 symbol, 53, 308, 309
Proust, Marcel, ix, 11, 13–14, 196,
202–3, 314 Trent, Council of, 110, 142, 144–47,
149–52, 154
Ricoeur, Paul, 12, 16, 308, 315; Adamic Tutu, Desmond, 7, 178, 179, 184–
Myth, 34–42; creation myth, 28–30, 85; Truth and Reconciliation
104; cycle of the myths, 46–49, 53; Commission, 277–79
on myths of the beginning and the
end, 27; myth of exiled soul, 42–46, Von Rad, Gerhard, 57–66, 234; genetic
104; on symbol, 27; tragic myth, analysis of Hexatuch, 57–61; sin and
30–34, 104 grace in primeval history, 55, 60–61
salvation: in the creation myth, 30, 52; will: impotence of, 104, 115; as servile or
through faith, 110; from God alone, enslaved, 27, 52, 71, 74, 88, 89, 100,
96; in New Testament outside of 174–75, 312; vulnerability of, 108. See
Paul, 92–103; in the tragic myth, 34 also Augustine; Hugh of St. Victor
Schoonenberg, Piet, 151–52, 158–59 Worthington, Everett, 2–3, 22n2
About the Author
Peter B. Ely is associate professor of theology and religious studies at Seattle

University where he teaches in the area of systematic theology. He received
his doctorate in theology from Fordham University in 1974. Having explored
in his dissertation Hegel’s version of the reconciliation of religion and philos-
ophy, he has developed an interest in the intersection of theology, philosophy,
and literature with reference to the theme of forgiveness.
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Adam and Eve in Scripture,

Theology, and Literature

Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB

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Introduction: Adam and Eve, Original Sin, Compassion,

PART I: SYMBOL, MYTH, AND BIBLICAL NARRATIVE

1 Paul Ricoeur: A Wider Context for the Adamic Myth 25

2 The Adamic Myth in the Hebrew Testament 55

3 The Adamic Myth in the New Testament 83

In a notebook written prior to his monumental novel, In Search of Lost Time,

calls the “involuntary imagination,” until, in an unguarded moment, the no-

connection between forgiveness and compassion, his conclusion about the

I am grateful to Seattle University for granting me academic leave from the

attributed even to God in our anthropomorphic representations, is to hold

pathy as an opening to forgiveness. His mother was brutally murdered in her

RESISTANCE TO THE NOTION OF ORIGINAL SIN

THE BASIC AIMS OF THIS STUDY

My approach to the subject of original sin is fourfold: To illustrate the

SEVEN HERMENEUTICAL PRINCIPLES

Hermeneutical principles name the processes by which thought develops.

The second principle is contained in the famous definition of theology,

A PREVIEW OF WHAT IS TO COME

Proust uses a striking image that can serve as an introduction to my preview

ways, dismissing it as insignificant, rejecting it as harmful, embracing it, or

In his 1967 work, The Symbolism of Evil, the French phenomenologist

THE FOUR MYTHS

The Creation Myth

The Tragic Myth

In return, the immoderation introduces a human movement, a contrast, a tension

The Adamic Myth and the Eschatological Vision of History

history directed by a ‘promise’ and moving toward a ‘fulfillment’” (Ricoeur

10:45) “expresses completely the fusion of the two figures—the Servant of

The Myth of the Exiled Soul and Salvation Through Knowledge

Ricoeur distinguishes between a “myth of situation” which describes the

THE CYCLE OF THE MYTHS

The Primacy of the Adamic Myth

Resonances between the Adamic Myth and the Other Myths

of the Hebrew Testament. “. . . Although the naïve theogony of Babylonia

REFLECTIONS AND THEOLOGICAL RETRIEVAL

Ricoeur claims to be doing neither philosophy nor theology in this herme-

I have called this essay on Ricoeur’s hermeneutic of religious symbol “a

The Adamic Myth in

The primeval history, which the Yahwist constructed from elements of

ADAM AND EVE IN THE HEBREW BIBLE

VON RAD’S GENETIC ANALYSIS

A movement toward reinterpreting the Bible through a return to the original

The Incorporation of the Sinai Tradition

The Extension of the Patriarchal Tradition

The Inclusion of the Primeval History

DAVID CLINES: THE THEME OF THE PENTATEUCH

The Sin-Speech-Mitigation-Punishment Theme

Clines seems to be stretching the hypothesis in designating a mitigation

The Spread-of-Sin, Spread-of-Grace Theme

Convergence of Von Rad and Clines

ISRAEL’S NOTION OF SIN AND SALVATION

Introduction: Adam and Eve, Original Sin, Compassion,

1 Paul Ricoeur: A Wider Context for the Adamic Myth 25

2 The Adamic Myth in the Hebrew Testament 55

3 The Adamic Myth in the New Testament 83