The mysterious frailty of our natures
Edward Norman
ADAM, EVE, AND THE SERPENT by Elaine Pagels
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, f14.95, pp.189
It is one of the least happy features of contemporary Christianity that the ethical dimension has been raised so high above the spiritual. The leaders of the Churches expend their energies in the pursuit of issues which, doubtless admirable in them- selves — at least from certain perspectives — scarcely begin to touch the basic faults of human nature or to appreciate the gravity and permanence of human sin. They regard 'sin' as a matter of wrong choices by people who, if adequately pre- sented with moral rectitude, might have chosen better; they see human life as flawed, not by the facts of our natures, but by incidents of 'injustice' and the group selfishness of the powerful against the socially powerless. It is a presentation of Christianity which indicates its accelerating approximation to the secularised values of existing society, and which in some large measure fails to comprehend the nature of religion itself. Evidence to suggest that modern churchmen are becoming moralists rather than the teachers and pastors of timeless spiritual insights is generously presented to the eye of the beholder: but when churchmen themselves are informed that this is the case they dismiss the suggestion with searing reference to the evils of 'other-worldly spirituality'.
The doctrine of 'Original Sin' is not an accidental addition to the Christian under- standing of the world. It is a key concept; a cornerstone of the.temple of faith. By their own efforts men and women are seen, in its illumination, to be quite incapable of engineering their own salvation. For it is a description of how even their most earnest attempts at altruistic actions are flawed by the layered realities of motivation; it is a guide to the hopelessness of seeking perfection in the world and to the shod- diness, sometimes known only to God, of human intentions. It makes human gdod- ness, when it is authentic, a pearl of great price, and human evil a pervasive presence which envelopes life in an apparently friendly atmosphere of benevolence. Reli- gion, as known in traditional societies — and as still, after their dissolution, properly understood — is directed to the very things the world cannot amend. Religious faith concerns the unknowable and the myste- rious, and explains how corrupted human- ity may yet be raised by the great love of God to transcend the ambiguities of the flesh and to attain blessedness. Contem- porary Christianity, in contrast, seems often to be preoccupied with the all too attainable: with social justice, with racial equality, with 'peace', and with desired levels of collectivist benefits. The enemies of these goals are depicted as wrongly- motivated human agents, and the centre of religion is removed from the mysterious frailty of our natures to become fixed upon the task of moral reformation. The idea of original sin is quite the contrary. The wrongdoing of humanity is, in its light, seen as a normal condition of the lot of men, more or less permanently present, though located, perhaps, in different pre- ferences at different times. Here there are no sharp contrasts of the good and the bad — as exist among the moralists of this generation — but weak creatures depen- dent for such goodness as they can manage on spiritual forces outside themselves. It is actually a very comforting scheme of things: salvation is offered to all who seek it, and not just to those who, by some accident of personal psychology, family background, or moral discernment, appear kindly disposed. Christ came into the world to save sinners, and he rather noticeably avoided the company of the righteous of his day.
A study of original sin which makes scholarly reflection on these weighty mat- ters available to general readers is greatly to be welcomed, and it must be said at once that Professor Elaine Pagels's book does exactly that. She writes with clarity and precision, and her great importance is to have constructed a lucid essay on the relativity of ideas. The book, indeed, is a kind of application of original sin — it shows how even the most earnest attempts of saints and scholars to create and to preserve a stable understanding of a single key doctrine have in reality been moulded and reformed by contact with human cul- ture so that what looks of timeless pedigree from one perspective can actually be seen to be the resolution of issues put by a particular man or a particular theological need when viewed from another. Religion is deposited by God with the creation of his own creation; it exists, unavoidably, in a dynamic relationship with culture and changes with it. Professor Pagels shows all this with distinction and perception in the given enclosure she has made.
The one significant reservation, and it is rather a large one, is that she associates the doctrine of original sin too closely with sexual morality. This is partly the result of becoming involved with the struggle of St Augustine to fashion a satisfactory theolo- gy of human sexuality. Augustine did, as she correctly points out, stamp the suc- ceeding centuries with his view of these matters, but he was very far from defining original sin, as such, in sexual categories as she does not actually do — but gets very near to doing. For most people, and certainly for people in traditional societies, the stewardship of the body of another, sexual relationship that is to say, is the
most common way in which their under- standing of religious law has to be given reality. The inherent frailty of our natures is expressed in that as in everything else to which flesh is given during the brief so- journ on the earth. But original sin is diminished if it is identified too closely with merely one aspect of human life, and its enormously larger conditioning of our hu- man responses in general may be left undetected — as by the contemporary churchmen, for all their weighty and solemn concern with the issues of the day.
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