Original Sex (The End of the Empire 2)

And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed. Genesis 2:25  ESV

Naked – While Jewish thought pays fairly little attention to the claim that the original couple were naked, Christian thinking has used this innocent passage to create an entire sexually-oriented prohibitive theology that, as I will attempt to show, provides a sense of essential guilt which explains much of contemporary societal destruction.  But before we get there, we should know a few things about this Hebrew word and its subsequent misrepresentation in early Christian thinking.

The root word is ʿārôm.  While it can mean “without clothing,” it typically has a metaphorical/symbolic nuance and should probably be rendered “open,” “transparent,” “without concealment,” especially since a variant is used to describe the serpent in the very next verse where it clearly implies a hidden agenda.  What matters in this story is not physical nudity but rather personal transparency.  But the early Church didn’t read it this way.  Augustine read this verse as a description of innocence before sexual experience.  One time in the distant past, human beings were created without the sense of personal shame about being naked, but all that changed with the Fall, and especially with sexual experience.  In Augustine’s view, the Fall wasn’t just a choice to sin.  It was a change in the very nature of humanity—and it was intimately connected to sex.  From the Fall forward, every human being born through sexual encounter carried a stain, the stain of the original sin that altered the human soul so that it came into the world already guilty.  Thus, thousands of years later, the play write Pedro Calderón de la Barca could pen the famous words, “Since man’s greatest crime on earth Is the fatal fact of birth —Sin supreme without appeal.”[1]  In other words, by misunderstanding the Hebrew nuance and associating ʿārôm with sex, Augustine gave us the doctrine of original sin, a doctrine that meant every human being ever born came into the world with an inevitable propensity to sin, guilty from the moment of conception.

We examined this doctrine several years ago.  You might want to refresh your thinking before I continue (CLICK HERE).  The net result of this doctrine can be summarized in a single thought: man’s greatest crime is to have been born.  And since there is nothing you can do about being born, only a few solutions present themselves.  The first, of course, is to not be responsible for continuing this ontological tragedy.  How?  Simple.  Be celibate.  Don’t propagate the disaster.  The result?  Monasteries and convents.  Not just places of spiritual retreat and dedication but theological protests designed to put an end to the tragedy of birth.  Of course, the ultimate logic of this solution is the end of the human race, but if that should occur, at least God’s curse on humanity would end as well—a consolation prize of ultimate proportion.  Of course, overcoming the sexual drive required enormous spiritual discipline (and usually didn’t work), especially in ages where birth control was the guesswork of timing and the Church itself also promoted the idea that the purpose of sex was procreation.  Embracing this contradiction should have provided a clue to its instability, but it didn’t.

The theological fallout of the doctrine of original sin created two subsequent essential theological absurdities.  We will briefly consider these before we look at the societal damage caused by Augustine’s idea.

Of course, if every human being is born stained because the guilt of the original sin is sexually passed to offspring, then this implies Jesus is also subject to this original guilt.  How does the Church avoid this?  On the father’s side, there is no problem because Mary was impregnated by the Holy Spirit.  But what about the mother’s side?  If Mary is subject to the sinful nature passed to her at her birth, how does Jesus’ birth avoid the consequence of her original flaw?  The Church invented the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, which is not about Jesus but rather about Mary’s birth.  Somehow she was born without a sinful nature because her conception did not occur through sexual propagation.  Exactly how this happened isn’t clear, nor is the logical conundrum of the infinite regress of sexual propagation, but the dogma is strong enough to exempt Jesus from the otherwise fatal human flaw.

The second theological absurdity is what this maneuver implies about Jesus himself.  He is, of course, not human in any meaningful sense of the term as understood concerning all of the rest of us.  He does not share one of the ontological characteristics of all humanity, namely, an original connection to Adam and the subsequent guilt that follows.  In this sense, Jesus is not like us at all and therefore he can hardly be our model, much less our savior.  In fact, he is God in disguise.  If there is anyone in this circle who is like us, it must be Mary and therefore it is Mary who is the real intercessor between us and the Godhead.  If you want to be saved from your inherent flaw, you better pray to Mary.  At least she understands the problem.

Now we will explore the social/political fallout of Augustine’s idea, eighteen centuries later.

Topical Index: original sin, Augustine, Immaculate Conception, naked, ʿārôm, Genesis 2:25

[1] Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Life Is a Dream.