Where It All Went Wrong: 'Original Sin' by Alan Jacobs

When the psalmist laments, "I am a worm, and no man," virtually every reader, on the basis of hard experience sometime in life, can identify with the feeling. But when the psalmist pursues the theme of human weakness and inadequacy to the point of saying, "In sin did my mother conceive me," he crosses into contentious territory, with a statement that contradicts the positive assessment of human nature that has characterized Western thought — and Western life — since the Enlightenment.

In "Original Sin: A Cultural History" (HarperOne, 304 pages, $24.95), Alan Jacobs devotes some attention to the Book of Psalms, but his work focuses on the Christian doctrine, above all as it was articulated by St. Augustine. Two themes have typified Western thought ever since Augustine developed them. First, he insisted with consummate clarity that human beings are not only inclined to sin, but that our very natures involve us in sin, moment by moment, both individually and collectively. Second, Augustine taught that our constitutional involvement in sin derives from the time of our conception, when lust was necessarily implicated in the production of life. Mr. Jacobs recognizes the cultural chasm that separates post-Enlightenment attitudes from the ancient awareness of sin and its consequences; in response, he crafts his cultural history to show that the biblical and Augustinian conceptions of sin are not outliers to our culture, but express a powerful awareness — in the era of their formulation, and in ours — of the human condition and its weakness.

Mr. Jacobs's ambition throughout "Original Sin" is to revive Augustinian teaching, and yet at the same time to retool its language and presentation, without fully acknowledging the adjustments that are involved. He believes we must, as a matter of the health of human culture, confront "peccatum originalis, the belief that we arrive in this world predisposed to wrongdoing — that this world is a vale of tears because we made it that and, somehow, couldn't have made it anything else." Mr. Jacobs is a skilled writer, and he takes us through an extraordinary range of material at a quick but agreeable pace. He shows that Homer was no less struck than were the biblical authors by how human arrogance can lead to dreadful consequences for generations, and he discovers the essence of that insight in several ancient civilizations. Perhaps the most effective example he cites comes from the Confucian tradition; Xun Zi (310 B.C.E.-237 B.C.E.) taught that people are evil by nature and can only become righteous by learning the wisdom of sages.

But the purpose of Mr. Jacobs's survey is not merely to indicate the historical ubiquity of the awareness of constitutional human sin, but also to deal with Augustine's particular contribution, the contention "that the mark of original sin in us today is to be found, primarily and most obviously, in our uncontrollable sexual desires." Augustine's reading of the psalms became so sexualized that he saw intercourse as producing the very contagion of sin that must, absent baptism, damn every infant born. The fact of lust's involvement in sexual conception, he argued, inevitably means that the human products of desire bear the burden of sin. For this reason, Augustine's teaching came to be known during the Reformation as "birth sin."

Mr. Jacobs guides the general reader competently through Augustine's disputes with his principal opponents, Pelagius and Julian. He is less sure-footed in assessing Augustine himself, quietly backing away from the sexual focus of Augustine's thought. This retreat is provoked by the criticism, voiced in antiquity and popular today, that when Augustine addressed the topic of sex, his past as a Manichaean shone through. (The Persian Gnostic Mani had seen this world and the flesh as under the control of the devil, rather than God.) Devoted though he is to the basic gist of Augustinian thought, Mr. Jacobs seems embarrassed to admit that "for Augustine every involuntary erection reenacts Adam's disobedience." Instead, he emphasizes Augustine's teaching that human nature as such has fallen into sin, which is the aspect of Augustine's thought that is consonant with those of his predecessors, from Homer to Xun Zi.

Alan Jacobs teaches English at Wheaton College, one of the pre-eminent evangelical institutions in America. His experimental and interesting book is part of a new intellectual movement within American evangelicalism, to distance itself from the excesses of fundamentalism by assessing how the teaching of the Christian Bible may be understood within Christian tradition and how it fits within the broader scope of ancient and modern thought. In that task, his book shows that evangelicals will need to be alert to two constraints of pursuing history of any type, "cultural" or not. First, claims of uniqueness need to be tested by a thorough investigation of context; simple assertion and argument from personal experience are not sufficient. Second, if investigation makes a researcher shift ground, in this case away from a fully Augustinian conception of original sin, he ought to acknowledge the fact, rather than try to change the definition of what he alleges is unique.

Mr. Chilton's most recent book is "Abraham's Curse: The Roots of Violence in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam."