The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve: The Story That Created Us

by Stephen Greenblatt

peccatum, Original Sin. We are all marked from the beginning with evil. It is not a matter of particular acts of cruelty or violence, specific forms of social pathology, or this or that person who has made a disastrous choice. It is hopelessly shallow and naïve to think, as the Pelagians do, that we start with a blank slate or that most of us are reasonably decent or that we have it in our power to choose good. Look around. There is something deeply, structurally, essentially wrong with us. Our whole species is what Augustine called a massa peccati, a lump of sin. No trace of this idea is found in the reported words of Jesus, nor does it exist as a significant theme in the vast body of rabbinical writing that flowed into the Midrash Rabbah and the Talmud or in the comparably vast Islamic tradition. Some anticipations of it can be found—in the strange Hebrew Book of Jubilees from the late second century BCE, for example, and in the writings of the bishop of Lyons Irenaeus (c. 130–c. 202 CE), among others—but no one had given it the power and the doctrinal importance it assumed in the works of Augustine. And no one before Augustine had ventured to offer such proof, the proof that makes itself felt in the stirrings of sexual arousal and in our knowledge that all of us come into the world only through this arousal. We originate in sin, and sin never ceases to manifest its hold over us.