Pelagius was a well-regarded British monk full of self-improvement platitudes and a “you can do it” attitude.  So he went to Rome in order to spread his good news.

His news was that he found a principle in which humans could work their way to salvation.  He had figured out that the immaterial principle that bound anima to caro could be moulded by reason and good practice, which he had by the bushel and was ready to sell to the highest bidder.

He was selling “free will without grace” or maybe, “good works without grace”.  Good works were the way to earn passage to heaven.

This upset the Bishop of Carthage, whose previous career as a scam artist – er, Manichean philosopher – allowed him to smell a rat.  He countered forcefully.  There could be no salvation without grace, no good works without grace, nothing without God’s inspiration.

But did Augustine have a model for how the person comes to be?  Drawing on the resources of his previous career, he proposed a model very similar to the pagans: The anima – created for each person by God – joined the caro – from the union of man and woman – by way of spiritual descent.

The caveat: Because of Adam’s transgression, the “landing point” was lower than Adam and Eve as they were created by sanctifying grace, lower than humans in their natural state of animalistic freedom, lower than the imaginary humans chained inside of Plato’s cave.  Every human was born into Original Sin.

Help.  I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.

The only way to get up is to get baptized.  Baptism is the first, crucial installment of divine grace, the remission of Original Sin.  That remission will allow the solution: an ascent to the Father through his divine grace.  Jesus is the minister of that grace.  Jesus will lift you up.

With this caveat in mind, Augustine’s apparently stupid proposals begin to make sense.  Augustine did everything he could to make the Fall such a huge transition that, when it was coupled to the (formerly pagan) model of descent of the soul, the end point was so deep that emergency steps had to be taken to get out of the hole.

Tertullian (155-220 AD) had a clever idea that would fit the notion that Adam and Eve were the first Homo sapiens 200,000 years ago.  (Zimmerman was not twisted enough to imagine this possibility, thank God.)

Here is the set-up:  Adam and Eve were the first parents.  As such, they generated the potential for all the bodies and the souls of future humanity.   Both caro and anima were fallen.  Both contain evil substances.

What happens when this is put into the model of human nature as “amina joined to caro by way of spiritus”?   We can conjure “sexual intercourse” as the spiritual principle whereby the fallen soul is inseminated into the fallen body.   Consequently, sex is pernicious.  The very act is bathed in Original Sin.  Evil substances are involved.  The product is corrupt.

“The Fall” contaminates “the joining of anima to caro” and makes material the immaterial principle – the spiritus.  The spiritus becomes the principle of sexual intercourse in all its Thing-filled aspects – its monstrous carnality – its sublime overwhelming of the senses – its beautiful grossness.

So what is the solution to be?

Fortunately, the Christian tradition did not adopt Tertullian’s views as definitive.

Enter Irenaeus (125-202 AD) who saw that Genesis 2.4-on actually presented a different model for the creation of humans.  The anima is breathed into the caro by God.  The spiritual principle is “inspiration”

With this discovery, he could argue against many pagan syncretic symbolic orders – so called “heresies” – especially those who configured Adam as a gnostic angelic emanation or those who saw Adam as a piece of clay imprisoning a soul.

What about the Story of the Fall?  Adam and Eve’s disobedience showed a lack of awareness and that lack of awareness created a lack of appreciation for their circumstances.

Their fortune was to be hanging out with God in Paradise.  Their fate was what – in the USA – we could call “teen spirit”.  The modern movie plot would be something like this: Two teenagers end up sharing a house with the smartest, wisest, and most powerful person on Earth.  Then they do the one thing that he told them not to.  They have to leave.  He drops them off in east L.A.

The solution to the Fall is to gain the awareness and appreciation that comes from Jesus the Christ.  Grace is needed to do this.  Grace increases awareness and appreciation.  That is why the Sacraments make sense.  We will be judged on our awareness and appreciation.   What is the end of our awareness and appreciation?  Jesus is the Alpha and Omega.  All goodness passes through Him.

When you die, your anima is not washed of memories then recycled, it is judged then given a new caro.

No doubt, to pagans, that sounded completely nonsensical.  It did not belong to their symbolic orders.

Zimmerman’s Chapters 12, 13, 14 and 15 (titled “Irenaeus on Original Sin”, “Pioneer theology of Irenaeus:, “Pre-Augustine Fathers”, and “The Genius of St. Augustine”) turn on the previous blog.  That blog reflects the ancient model of human nature: Soul – anima – is joined to flesh – caro – through an immaterial – spiritus – principle.

After reading quite a few books by Henry Corbin (one of the first Westerners to write about Iran, the soul of Persia), I have an inkling of how the human being comes into this world:  The anima is joined to the caro through spiritus.  Sound familiar?

The question is how?

Plato had a model that reflected the pagan world.   The anima descends to the caro.  The spiritual principle is “descent”.

If you imagine a symbolic order congealing around this model, you might think that the motif of “return” or “ascent” would be prominent.  How does the anima ascend back to the source?  By ridding itself of the earthly burden – the earthly distractions – of the caro.   In the extreme, you might get the world according to Mani, where the good, beautiful, life-filled anima endeavors to escape the bad, ugly, dying caro.  Or you might get hundreds of prescriptions designed to accomplish the ascent through ritual action.  Or you might die ao your soul would get recycled.

Now, enter the Jews (and Christians) with all that Adam and Eve business.

Would it not be perfectly sensible to fit the Story of Adam and Eve into the descent model?  The pre-lapse Adam would be like anima (good, beautiful, life-filled) and the post-lapse Adam would be like the rest of us after the soul’s descent (trying to escape the bad, ugly, and dying caro).

“The Fall” would fit its billing and parallel the familiar – pagan – model of human nature.

Zimmerman continued Chapter 12 with a presentation of St. Irenaeus’s view of Paradise and Original Sin, found in Proof of the Apostolic Preaching.

The fashioning of Adam: Adam’s body – his caro – was “godlike” in appearance; his soul – his anima – was “godlike” (durable, immortal, and forever alive); and the breath of life that God insufflated into Adam – his spiritus – was divine inspiration.

One needs only to gaze at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel to see what he means.

Or maybe the question should be: Can we construct a symbolic order that will not destroy us?

How would Iranaeus’ perspective on Christ as the focal point – the “recapitulator” – of all Creation fit the synthesis in An Archaeology of the Fall?  Like a hand fits a glove.  Or like the body and blood of Christ fits the artifice of bread and wine.  Or, if you despise Jesus, like the animating spirit bringing Eve’s reified doubts to life.

Let us run with the latter similitude for a moment:  Why civilization?  Is Civilization not Nature’s way of recapitulating itself, of finding a “head” for its agency?  The moment that our genus came into being as the primate hominid that talked (in hand talk), Civilization was in the cards, because Civilization – as social order founded on unconstrained complexity – emerges from the purely symbolic (semiotic) nature of talk, and is potentiated through the adoption of the purely symbolic speech-alone talk.

It is as if Nature itself proposes the question that Christ himself asked:  Who am I?  You cannot answer the question without a symbolic order.

Chapter 12 of Zimmerman’s now traditional commentary concerns the views of St. Irenaeus (125 to 202 more or less) on the Story of the Fall.  At this point, his synthesis of the Story of Adam and Eve with the evolution of Homo sapiens and existence of the triune brain, recedes.

St. Irenaeus is so close to the time of Jesus that he can trace his mentors back to the apostles.  Born in Anatolia, he moved to Gaul where he eventually became Bishop of Lyons.  His most famous surviving work is Adversus Haereses (Against Heresies).

St. Irenaeus saw Christ’s role as the “re-capitulator” (“re”=”again”, “capit”=”head”, “-ulator”=”agent”) of the human race.  The Old Testament speaks of this agency.  The events that allowed the Old Testament to come into existence (that is, the play of all the nations dispersed since Adam) pay tribute to this agency.  The animal nature of the first man set the stage for this tribute.  The cosmos itself is the raw material that goes into the stage.

Zimmerman wrote that Irenaeus said: All lines of the cosmos focus on Christ.  Christ is not an afterthought conceived in response to the sin of Adam.  Christ is the Alpha and Omega in the first place.  Adam fits the cosmic plans as the strategic gateway through which Christ will enter it.  … Christ is the raison d’etre of all creation.

An Archeaology of the Fall never uses the words “Original Sin”, at least not intentionally.   Instead, the last half of the novel labors to show that the image of the semiotic transition from hand-speech talk to speech-alone talk parallels the image of the mythic transition inherent in the text of Genesis 2:4 on.  The parallels are evocative and work both ways.

For example, the image of the serpent coming into existence as a projection of Eve’s own doubt (gelling, as it were, with a spiritual being) does not have a corresponding image in the semiotic transition.  Perhaps it should.

In a similar fashion, Zimmerman’s section on the “sin of the world” that thwarts God’s plan and is an unbroken continuation of the transgression of Adam and Eve has a corresponding image in regards to the semiotic transition in An Archaeology …, but one that is not developed as much as it could be developed.  We are all swimming in seas of symbolic orders.  All these symbolic orders are – to some degree – exclusive.  How do we describe our fractured treading?  How do we describe the individual’s and the institution’s perspectives?

Reading Chapter 11 of Zimmerman’s work (on the propagation of Original Sin), with An Archaeology of the Fall in mind, leaves me with the impression that Christians may be on the verge of discovering that the long-held traditional idea that “Baptism washes away Original Sin” contains insights never before imagined.  Pieces of a mosaic will suddenly fall into place.

Baptism is all about opportunity.

A complication comes by way of the sacraments, particularly, Baptism.

If Baptism removes a Sin transmitted through generation itself, then one can understand why a mother would be desperate to have her dying child baptized.  How can she allow her infant to die already stained by sin?

If Baptism re-establishes the opportunity for the child to become like Adam and Eve before the Fall, then a mother might not be so distraught.  Baptism speaks to a potential to avoid the same fate as Adam and Eve through the intervention of Jesus the Christ.

So why insist that infants and children get baptized well before their phenotypic developments are complete?  If you wait until children are developed, you might was well start with an exorcism.  Wait.  Baptism does start with an exorcism of sorts.  That must be for the parents and God-parents, who may have already become like Adam and Eve after the Fall.

Here, An Archaeology of the Fall may serve the theologian. Perhaps, Baptism is like innoculation against the dark principalities that reify the symbolic orders that we are immersed in.  Baptism could be like giving the little one a boat instead of leaving her to tread the choppy waters.  After all, even with Baptism, we often “eat the fruit” (now popularly replaced by, courtesy Jim Jones, with “drink the kool-aid” (see Ann Coulter’s book Demonic for seamy details).