In secondness, the realm of actuality, the Stoic “body” parallels “acts of moral impotence”.

The parallel makes sense in terms of the Pagan Worldview.  The Platonic “body” was not so much “the temple of the soul” as it was the “prison of the soul”.  The Divine World was good and immaterial.  Earthen Matter was evil and a thing to escape.  The goal of the individual was to ascend, to return to the source, and to leave this body behind.

Thus, Augustine’s parallel resonated with his listeners, who had converted from various Pagan religions.  Yet, there was a twist.

He introduced his own version of “concupiscence”.  Instead of the person’s weaknesses coming from the hard knocks of a descending soul accreting a body, they came from a prior descent, the Descent of Adam and Eve.

This removed the spirit-descent and replaced it with “the readily observable consequences of a historical moment”.

It also removed the “soul” as the normal context that animates the “body”.   Concupiscence is “soul-less”.  As soon as one puts an animating principle over “the moral impotence that is the body”, one is constructing a delusion.

The parallels in firstness explain why Augustine struggled to depict a huge Fall, a Fall so big that it would feel like a descent.

At the top, before the Fall, Adam and Eve were in the state of Original Blessedness, where even their sexual organs were at the command of reason.

Of course, this is impossible, given the nested form of “concupiscence”.  I put “no normal context” instead of “Original Sin” because, well, the workings of the sexual organs have a way to avoid contextualization.  This fact made Augustine the butt of jokes by rowdy agnostics for centuries.

Still, Augustine’s logic defying claim served a purpose.  It elevated the perception of height for the start of the Fall.  “Original Blessedness” had to be at least as high as “the Blissfulness of the Platonic Soul before its Descent”.

A literal “descent from Adam and Eve” deepens the pit of the Fall, far deeper than “the Platonic Body that Receives the Soul”, for now the poor babe – that sweet innocent – comes from the reason-less heaving of body parts plus, some sort of flaw in the seed.  That babe comes from concupiscence itself.

Baptism was needed just to get back to innocence.

Today, this makes no sense.

However, it makes sense if Augustine was speaking in a world of Greek and Roman Paganism.  The conversion of the Empire to Christianity did not provide a remedy for the collapse of the Western Roman Civilization.  It gave a shelter for people desperate enough to abandon their ancestral ways.

The parallels in firstness show that Augustine took the Platonic model and re-oriented it.  The axis of descent was no longer set by gravity, but by a Celestial Axis; the Axis between the Father and the Son; the Axis that is the Holy Spirit; plus another Earth-based Axis; between Adam and Jesus; the Transgressor and the Redeemer; the Fallen and the Savior.

Augustine altered the heights and depths of the Platonic model.

The “union of spirit with descent” that allowed the soul to animate the body was thus transformed.  At the same time Augustine spoke to the Platonists and Stoics, he was taking their model from them.

The resulting model was evocative and stunningly superior to more primitive explanations carried into the West by the invading tribes.  Thus Augustine preserved the soul of a dying civilization by drawing it into his own Christian perspective.

Now, I want to explore a deeper slight of hand that I see in Wiley’s discussion of Augustine’s thought.

Recall the widespread Stoic and Platonic idea that the human came into being when the soul descended into the body.  Here, the soul, the principle of animation, belongs to the realm of thirdness; the body to secondness, the spirit-descent to firstness.

Let me compare the Pagan idea to the nested forms presented in previous blogs on Augustine; concupiscence and Original Sin:

Soul( body (spirit-descent) )    Stoic

No context (acts of moral impotence (this flaw – this spirit – in human nature that allows me to desire the good while at the same time drawing me away to my own gratification which is the consequence of the Fall))

Original Sin (acts of moral impotence (descent from Adam and Eve))

In the next three blogs, I will talk through these parallels.

Impulsive acts of self-gratification should not be contextualized because they are, for wont of a better word, stupid.

But so many try to make sense out of stupidity.  In doing so, they create symbolic orders that hide certain varieties of concupiscence beneath veils of normality.  Some become “blind” to the very real consequences.  Others address the “issues” in the same symbolic order (that is fancy-talk for “the blame game”).

Both result in death, ignorance and loss of integrity.

Now, let me look at this in terms of nestedness:

In terms of actuality, Augustine focused on acts of moral impotence.

This pattern of moral impotence situates humans as descended from Adam and Eve and thereby sharing the consequences of the Fall.

In terms of possibility, Adam’s transgression potentiates our moral impotence.

Acts of moral impotence(the consequences of Adam’s transgression) defines “concupiscence”.

“Con” is Latin for “with”.  “Cupere” is Latin for “to desire”.  “Scence” stands for “the condition of”.  “Acts of moral impotence” situates “this flaw – this spirit – in human nature that allows me to desire the good while at the same time drawing me away to my own gratification”.

Augustine’s concept of Original Sin puts the above discussion into context as:

Original Sin(acts of moral impotence(descent from Adam and Eve))

Original Sin(concupiscence())

Original Sin(acts of moral impotence(a flaw – a spirit – in human nature that allows me to desire the good while at the same time drawing me away to my own gratification)

Only the greatest philosophers can perform such slights of hand.

Through the term “concupiscence”, “descent from Adam and Eve” equaled “a flaw in human nature”.

This suggests the possibility that “concupiscence” may be an “empty term” that stands for “a thing that cannot be contextualized” because it is purely situational.

Does that not sound like the nature of self-gratification?

Augustine’s answer (that we are literally descended from Adam and Eve) anticipated a very important technical question: “Why Baptism?”.

The imputation of “descent” (with all those seamy and twisted details that never can be fully dissociated from the idea) suggested that Baptism “washed clean” this connection to Adam’s transgression plus all that dirty stuff in between.

Thus, to change metaphors, the person’s body became a temple capable of housing sanctifying grace.

Chapter 3 of Wiley’s book covers St. Augustine and the tradition that followed. St. Augustine lived at a critical juncture in Western history.  Between 400 and 700 AD, the sword ended the entire Western world, from England to Persia.  Augustine lived at the beginning of the end.

Augustine defined Original Sin.  The question he addressed was: “Why Jesus the Messiah?”

His answer, supported by his own life story, was: “To redeem our own moral impotence.”   (This contrasted with the Pelagius, who argued, in concert with many Pagan philosophers, that we had moral potency.)

The next question was: “Who is responsible for our moral impotence?” (Because, if we were responsible, then the ‘Donatists’ were right to humiliate those who had wavered in the face of the intimidating yet waning Roman ideologues).

Augustine’s answer was: “Not us.  And yes us.  Because we share the consequences of Adam’s transgression, we are both not responsible and responsible.  We are not responsible for the fact that we need the sacraments.  But we are responsible for what we do once we are given sanctifying grace.

Then the question became: “Why do we share the consequences of Adam’s transgressions?”

Augustine’s answer was: “We are descended from Adam and Eve.  We are their descendants … er, children.”  Here, Augustine proposed an instrumental rather than a formal cause.  The instrument was whatever causes descent, er, children.

“Whatever” included copulation, as well as all the seamy machinations that induced the partners to commit the act.  How “material” and “twisted”.

Human sexuality is so twisted that the machinations may be more significant than the act itself.  Hey, I don’t mean “may be”.  I mean “are”.

Some Pagan cults associated sex with “death, ignorance and difficulty” and restraint with “immortality, knowledge, and integrity”.  Other Pagan cults relied on ritual sex in order to convert “death, ignorance and difficulty” into “immortality, knowledge and integrity”.

Does this fit the definition of “twisted”?

Why did the early Christians link infant Baptism and the Story of the Fall? From the point of view of Moderns, the link makes no sense at all.

Why would infant Baptism have anything to do with the Stories of Adam and Eve?

Why would people demand infant Baptism?

From the point of view of the ancient Pagans, however, the reason must have been obvious.  Here is my guess:

Women had ears.  Each mother knew that her helpless babe was once a beautiful immaterial good soul that now had descended into an innocent-appearing but material, hence “evil”, body.

They wanted to do whatever it took to bring appearance in line with form, innocence with innocence, and the Christians had a way to do that.  Baptism took the evil of the body away and gave the soul – the animating principle – sanctifying grace.

Baptism was Good News from the perspective of those raised in ancient worldviews of the descent of the soul.  Yet no one could explain why within the nascent Christian symbolic order.

Of course, the Fathers of the Church had none of the analytic tools that we have today.  Also, they had churches to run.

Nevertheless, we can see some of the Fathers wrestling with the nested result from the previous blog.  For example, (it seems to me that) Tertullian substituted “sex” for the “spirit-descent”.

No doubt the struggle went both ways, since the stories of Jesus could be trimmed to fit a “descent of the soul” model. (Except, of course, for the Resurrection business.)

I imagine that Genesis 1-11 became more and more important in the struggle against the appropriation of name of Jesus the Messiah by Gnostic (Pagan) thinkers.

The Story of the Fall of Adam and Eve works against the purely vertical and non-historical axis of the descent of the soul.  The Story of the Fall adds a horizontal and historical axis.  At the same time, this axis raises questions of its own.

Now, let me put this doctrine into a nested format.

At first, one would think that the spirit-descent is what puts the soul and body into context.  That is, it belongs to thirdness.  Then the “soul” belongs to the realm of possibility and “body” belongs to the realm of actuality.  The nested result is:

Spirit-descent (body (soul))

I prefer an alternate to the obvious.  The “soul as animating principle of the body” puts the “body” into context.  Then the “spirit-descent” is the possibility that makes the “body” possible.  The nested result is:

Soul(body(spirit-descent)

I prefer this alternative because it captures the sensibilities of many Pagan traditions.  For example, the Stoics tried to train the soul to discipline the body.  Why did the body need to be disciplined?  The flawed nature of the body was made possible by its descent.  Similarly, some Ascetics attempted to “peel the soul away from the body” through various techniques, thereby undoing the attachments to the body accrued by the descent.

In sum, instead of spirit-descent acting to bring the soul into the body, spirit-descent makes the accrual of the material body by the immaterial soul possible.  The spirit-descent acts like trapdoor that sends the good blissful soul crashing down to earth.  The spirit-descent is as unpredictable as any natural or divine phenomena.

And more horrifying, the spirit-descent defines the person’s fate.