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From the chapter "The Politics of Paradise" in Adam, Eve, and the Serpent by Elaine Pagels (Vintage Books, 1988) The experience of arousal apart from any action taken, Augustine insists, itself is sin: "Such disobedience of the flesh as this, which lies in the very excitement, even when it is not allowed to take effect, did not exist in the first man and woman." Augustine admits, however, that the trouble with the hypothesis of a passionless procreation controlled by the will, as I am here suggesting it, is that it has never been verified in experience, not even in the experience of those who could have proved that it was possible. In fact, they sinned too soon, and brought upon themselves exile from Eden.But Augustine believes that each person can verify from experience the radical leap to which his own inner turmoil impelled him the leap that identifies sexual desire itself as evidence of, and penalty for, original sin. That each of us experiences desire spontaneously apart from will means, Augustine assumes, that we experience it against our will. Hence, he continues, sexual desire naturally involves shame: "A man by his very nature is ashamed of sexual desire." What proves the truth of such assertions, Augustine believes, is the universal practice of covering the genitals and of shielding the act of intercourse from public view. One might, of course, ask the obvious question: Is it not possible to experience desire in accordance with the will (as, for example, when engaging in intercourse for the purpose of procreation)? . . . Augustine's very definition of sexual desire excludes that possibility. Having entered into human experience through an act of rebellion against the will, desire can never cooperate with will to form, so to speak, a coalition government. For Augustine, "lust is an usurper, defying the power of the will, and tyrannizing the human sexual organs." Augustine believes that by defining spontaneous sexual desire as the proof and penalty of original sin he has succeeded in implicating the whole human race, except of course, for Christ. Christ alone of all humankind, Augustine explains, was born without libido being born, he believes, without the intervention of semen that transmits its effects. But the rest of humankind issues from a procreative process that, ever since Adam, has sprung wildly out of control, marring the whole of human nature. |