Augustine on what Adam and Eve Signify: A brief response to Steve Kepnes
Chad Pecknold
Cambridge University
Steve Kepnes reads Adam and Eve as signs,
signifying 'two modes of being in the world,' and also 'two different
styles for scriptural reasoning,' leading him to reflect upon, amongst
other things, the nature of scripture and the goals of scriptural
reasoning. I want to briefly respond to Kepnes by comparing his
figural reading with the one Augustine offers in Book 12 of De
Trinitate concerning the significance of Adam and Eve.
I.
In
Book 12 of De Trinitate, Augustine asks us an interesting question: 'why does scripture make no mention of
anything besides male and female in the nature of man made to God's image?' (De
trin. 12.8) He says that 'what was
made to the image of God is the human nature that is realized in each sex.' (De
trin. 12.10) But he wants to look
towards 'something more mysterious in the obvious distinction of sex between
male and female.' (De trin. 12.10) In fact, he takes Adam and Eve as powerful signs, pointing us to the
truth about God (and worries that if we don't understand Adam/Eve as such
powerful signs, then 'they will remain quite pointless'). In an interesting aside, he even writes that
such signification is not only necessary, it is pleasing to the angels! What Adam/Eve signify as the image of God is
a particular dynamic whole, one that he wants to liken to our minds, to the way
we reason, or perhaps better, the spirit of our reasoning. He wants to read the image of God in Adam and
Eve as the human capacity to recognize God, and wants to help readers renew
this spirit of reasoning.
Augustine begins by reading Adam and Eve figurally, as
parts of a whole, alternatively the inner and the outer functions of the mind,
or the private and the public, wisdom and knowledge, and also the dyad Kepnes
suggests, the contemplative and the active. At times, these distinctions seem fairly straightforward and even hierarchical;
one is eternally directed and the other temporal. But at other times, Augustine is keenly aware
of how inadequate these distinctions are. His ironic tone in this regard comes out even in the opening lines of
the book: 'let us see where we are to
locate what you might call the border between the outer and the inner
man.' (De trin. 12.1) He is fully aware of how difficult, nigh
impossible, it is to locate 'what you might call the border.' At times Adam and Eve signify something like
the faith/works distinction that corresponds to Kepnes' contemplative/active
distinction, but implicit in Augustine is a trinitarian concern to move beyond
the dyad and say something akin to the Pauline phrase 'faith works through
love.' (Gal. 5.6) This scriptural way
of reasoning through a dyad is like Kepnes' suggestion that the contemplative
and active are both needed. But what
bridges them, and makes the two into one without obliterating difference?
There is something else about the tselem of God
that is transcendent and mysterious, as well as earthly and
immanent, and that third something, Augustine teaches, points us to the truth
about God. The truth that the signs
[Adam/Eve] teach us, according to Augustine, is that our capacity to
recognize God is dependent upon our responsibility to the one who is different
in being the same (however we understand this identity). It is from this primal responsibility to the
other who is in some sense the same that our responsibility for all of creation
flows (the responsibility for creation is generated by this relation). In fact, renewal and restoration depend upon
the ability to work together in the Garden, discovering that our best resource
for change, transformation, and new life are available only in our joint, communal
recognition of God with the neighbor who is other, whose difference
seems to go all the way down to core of our created and creative identities
(or, if you prefer, images).
First, he considers the capacity of our reasoning to
recognize God. Augustine cites
Colossians 3.9, saying that it is 'with his actions' that 'the spirit of the
mind is renewed for the recognition of God according to the image of him who
created him.' (De trin. 12.12) It
is a kind of reasoning that is also a kind of labor; it is 'with his
actions.' Here I would suggest that
something much more than the Enlightenment understanding of reason is intended,
and this is obvious just from the way Augustine qualifies the mind and the
intellect with things like spirit and considers not simply 'the rational
mind,' but the mind 'which is capable of recognizing God.' (De trin. 12.12) So the reasoning that Augustine has in mind
is much more akin to 'faith,' but a faith that works.
Next he considers the relationship between faith (the spirit of
the mind) and good works by a meditation on what Kepnes calls 'the fissure' which 'appears precisely in
[Adam and Eve's] nakedness.' Augustine writes: 'Thus they are both
stripped naked of the enlightenment of truth, and the eyes of conscience
are opened to see what a shameful and indecent state they have left
themselves in. So they sew together as it were the leaves of delightful
fruits without the fruits themselves, which is to say, they sew
together fine words without the fruit of good works, in order while
living badly to cover up their baseness by speaking well.' (De
trin. 12.13) Augustine ascribes this fissure not so much to
nakedness, however, as to greed, which is the beginning of sin and
'strives to grab something more than the whole and to govern it
by its own laws' (De trin. 12.14) rather than understanding
by God's laws (torah). In this sense, Augustine is a kind
of Christian socialist, abhorring the notion of 'private property'
for instance, and seeing anything true as irreducibly public
(including 'faith'). He writes that 'enjoying something as one's
very own private good and not as a public and common good…is like
the serpent addressing the woman. To consent to this temptation
is to eat of the forbidden fruit.'(De trin. 12.17)
What he thinks has happened in this 'fissure' is that the
'secret couple' has been 'shut off from the reasoning of wisdom.' (De trin.
12.17) Somehow, the dyad of knowledge
and wisdom has become just a bridgeless chasm, and the tree of life
seems 'shut off' from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the
Garden. Augustine is looking for ways to
renew our reasoning in such a way that we can 'unite the two so long
dis'joined,' and find our way back to the tree of life, find a way of bridging
our knowledge towards wisdom, of uniting the private and the public, the inner
and the outer, faith and the toil of labor for the sake of the common
good. And this is another way of saying
that 'faith without works is dead,' (James 2.17) or in the terms of our
scriptural reasoning, 'theory without practice is useless.' Therefore the 'secret couple' should become
an open couple who work together to overcome the dyad of reasoning that has
been shut off from wisdom, and from life
itself.
Public, communal recovery and restoration, then, is a
theme that strongly unites Kepnes' reading
of the signs [Adam/Eve] and Augustine's reading of the signs. Adam and Eve sinned together and together
they would 'return' to face the One in whose image they were formed. But what unites the two without obliterating
their difference? Kepnes'
words could have easily been Augustine's: 'so we have been looking for a kind
of rational couple of contemplation and action in the mind of everyman.'
(De trin. 12.19) This coupling is
also a 'bridging' that does not obliterate the difference. Following Paul, Augustine wanted 'to use the
distinction of sex between two human beings to signify something that must be
looked for in every single human being.' (De trin. 12.19) Despite
Augustine's frequent contextual difficulties with axiomatic issues in contemporary feminist thought, Augustine is
arguing here for an egalitarianism that he thinks only a semiotic exploration
can provide in thinking through the sign: /Adam and Eve/. He thinks a literal reading of the text
delivers an unbearable hierarchy between men and women, and this suffering
alone is a sign that we need another way of reading. This kind of bridging makes texts readable,
it allows us to recover from the Fall, the fissure that shut us off from the
tree of life.
Ultimately, Augustine does not always achieve the
'bridging' that his theology requires. His logic about these things can frequently remain dyadic even if
he is obviously reaching out for something 'more than' what he says. But he just as frequently does convert the
reader to think in triadic terms, and in this case, the Spirit plays the
central role, as does something like 'mutual love.'
II.
Augustine's
comments are more of a footnote to what Kepnes has offered us in
his paper concerning the contemplative and active dimensions of
scriptural reasoning. But Kepnes also suggests that our resources
for renewal are to be found in the gift of Torah.
He says that the Torah is an antidote to sin, to that evil inclination,
to the yetzer ha-ra. And I agree with him, but still ask
how? How is the Torah an antidote to sin? How is torah
an abundant resource for transformation and renewal rather than
simply another source for conflict? How can our engagements with
scripture, and one another, be sure to bear fruit and multiply?
I think Augustine would answer something along the lines above,
that we need to work together to recognize God, and out of
this will flow our responsibility both to each other and to the
entire created world.
In
John 15.1-17 we discover Jesus teaching along similar lines as the texts from
Genesis and the Song have taught us. Jesus reads his own life in relation to a fruitful vine (call it a
grapevine), and reads his Father as the vinedresser. It is imagery that drinks deeply from the
wells of Israel's story, speaking of Israel in terms of its
faithfulness to God as a prerequisite for fruitfulness. Here Jesus reads himself as a figural
extension of Israel, and thinks deeply about this question of keeping
commandments, of torah observance, not least of which is the one to
Adam: "Be fruitful and multiply." This
does have something to do with 'Torah being an antidote to sin,' as Jesus says,
"You are already made clean by the word which I have spoken to you. Abide in me, and I in you. As the
branch cannot bear fruit by itself,
unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me.' (Jn
15.3-4) This abiding (meinate),
this remaining, this inhabiting 'the word which I have spoken to you,'
means something like 'friendship,' or whatever name we give to that
relationship that inscribes trust, mutual love, and long-suffering into the hills
and valleys of everyday life. As others
might have it, it means listening to and learning through 'the word
which I have spoken to you.' Jesus says
that this is not only an antidote to sin, but is a recipe for bearing fruit,
and by doing so, he says we will prove the quality of our friendships
together (Jn 15.8). But the ordering is
important to Jesus, and matters for how a Christian understands what it might
mean to listen to and learn from the command to Adam, "be fruitful and
multiply":
"If you keep
my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father's
commandments and abide in his love. These things I have spoken to you, that my
joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full. This is my commandment, that
you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no man than this,
that a man lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what
I command you. No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know
what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have
heard from my Father I have made known to you. You did not choose me, but I
chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your
fruit should abide; so that whatever you ask the Father in my name, he may give
it to you. This I command you, to love one another." (Jn 15.10-17)
Perhaps it is better to speak about renewing the spirit
of the mind, or the spirit of our reasoning, or to speak in terms of a return
to wisdom, rather than simply to speak of loving one another. But surely friendship has become a central
category for the way we think about our ethics as scriptural reasoners. And as we thicken our descriptions, the one
thing needful is the bridging that allows us to recognize God together. We locate the recognition of God in our study
of the scriptures, where we participate in ancient traditions of precisely this
practice of recognition (which Augustine would call 'faith'). Proving this, however, means nothing less
than a response to God's command to 'be fruitful and multiply,' and this will
entail border crossings (if we can even locate the border) between faith and
works, between knowledge and wisdom, between private and public, or whatever
signs signify fundamental differences as 'modes of being in the world.'
The obvious corollary of all this, for scriptural
reasoning, for children of Abraham, is a scriptural calling of 'deep to deep,'
of one to another - as we
already recognize God together in our collective reading of our scriptures,
even in our differences. But as children
of Adam and Eve, the corollary demands our engagement with all humans who are
both different and the same in Adam. The
scriptures provide that public location, that open space where we can
make these boundary crossings. Our
friendships provide us with that mutual love, that spirit of reasoning that
repairs real fissures, makes scripture readable and enables us to
contribute to the repair and renewal of the cities and societies in which we
live. But the love that nourishes our
friendships comes from God alone, and it is in this that the spirit of our
reasoning must abide.
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