Adam, Eve, and the Serpent:

...The problem with the book lies in her phrase "among other things...

...In the Pelagian view, as Augustine understood it, each human being starts fresh, unbound by the past, fundamentally unaffected by the communal history which produces him or her...

...She has interesting comments to make on all of them, but in a book which is both brief and diffuse, no one theme is adequately treated...

...Important elements of his theological anthropology are found in earlier Christian writers, pre-eminently Ambrose...

...Misapplication of such categories confuses the reading of classical authors...

...The kind of religious temperament which would find the one attractive would be likely to sympathize with the other as well...

...Theological classics go in and out of fashion, and currently (Cardinal Ratzin-ger is an exception) Augustine is very "out...

...In her extremely compressed summary of the complex issues at stake in the Pelagian and semi-Pelagian controversies, Pagels misses a key issue...

...Professor Pagels attempts to relate these themes to one another, I think unsuccessfully...

...Sexual practices may have remained the same but their meaning was transformed...

...Further, an important factor affecting some Christians' attitudes toward marriage and family that appears in various guises in patristic sources goes unmentioned: the classical ideal of otium, leisure, a necessary constituent of the truly happy life of contemplation and study...

...the shift in the attitude of Christians to the Roman state from the period of persecution to the post-Constantinian era...

...The title of the book and the inclusion of the text of the first three chapters of Genesis, presumably for easy reference, would lead the reader to expect a careful examination and comparison of early Christian exegeses of the Creation and Fall stories...

...Augustine was fascinated (perhaps appalled) by the reality of time...

...But the lack of focus and the attempt to cover too many, too important, and too complex issues in too brief a space undercut the book's value...

...The dust jacket predicts that this book "will prove a landmark of historical thought and profoundly affect all future interpretations of the meaning of Christianity...

...and the claim that Augustine's theory of original sin marked a decisive change, indeed, a reversal of the theological anthropology of the first four centuries...

...Frequently, Christians of the fourth and fifth centuries advanced this ideal as a motive for sexual restraint in general and celibacy in particular...

...Michael J. Himes Elaine Pagels writes in her introduction that her book "explores, among other things, how . . . Christian interpretations of Genesis emerged in the first four centuries, and how Christians invoked the story of Adam and Eve to justify and establish their beliefs...

...Rome was the embodiment of what we mean by a culture...

...I cannot fathom how one can claim to examine Christian reading of Genesis 1-3 without mentioning the commentaries of Origen, Basil, Ambrose, or Jerome...

...I doubt it.ty...

...I am not at all sure that the concept of'' state'' can be applied to the Roman empire, and I am certain that Clement of Alexandria does not fit comfortably under the description "egalitarian...

...For example, it was to such a life that Augustine intended to devote himself after his baptism and for the sake of which he believed continence necessary...

...The untroubled life devoted to intellectual and literary pursuits was, however, a value shared by Christians and pagans in antiquity, and sexual abstinence was seen as an important step in realizing that value...

...Even in the case of Augustine, who plays an important role in her book, Pagels relies principally on the anti-Pelagian works and never once cites any of his four principal commentaries on the opening chapters of Genesis...

...how they saw their own situations, their sufferings, and their hopes mirrored in the story of the creation and the fall...

...As a study of early Christian interpretation of the Creation and Fall stories this leaves a great deal wanting...

...Pagels notes that one cannot seek "true" Christianity by searching out its earliest forms, and that consequently it would be simplistic to depict Chrysostom (whom she contrasts with Augustine) and the Pelagians as the "real" Christians and Augustine as the distorter of the tradition...

...Pelagianism was ahistorical, not unlike Gnosticism...

...Undoubtedly there are political resonances to theological positions which are unintended by those who hold them, and so Augustine's insistence on the radical insufficiency of human freedom to achieve moral goodness could have been employed to justify a paternalist government at the expense of individual liberty...

...Propagandists for submission to authority in the fifth century would have found far more support in Eusebius and the"imperial theologians" than in Augustine who directed much of De civitate Dei against those who identified the city of God with any earthly commonwealth...

...Rather, her question is, "Since the representatives of Christian orthodoxy, from Justin through Irenaeus, Ter-tullian, Clement, and Origen, had denounced gnostic interpretations of Genesis in the name of moral freedom, how could the majority of Christians in the fifth century be persuaded to give up this primary theme of Christian doctrine- or, at least, to modify it radically- following Augustine's reinterpretation of Adam's sin...

...Augustine-bashing is popular among many, especially with writers on spirituality and historians of sexual attitudes...

...In the Confessions, De civitate Dei, De Genesi ad litteram, and sermon after sermon, he wonders at how deeply marked we are by our personal and communal pasts...

...But she develops only one response in any detail: Augustine's treatment of human freedom and original sin coincided with the changed political situation of the Christian church, which found itself after Con-stantine no longer a persecuted movement but a privileged institution...

...Pagels is too astute to answer this question with a single cause...

...And to that culture of which he was a product, Justin was very warmly complimentary, even to the point of placing its cultural heroes, the philosophers, beside the Hebrew prophets as those who had lived in accord with the Logos before the coming of Christ...

...Pagels writes clearly and crisply...

...But for Justin, as for classical authors generally, Rome was not a "state" in the modern sense...

...No less than four major themes are taken up: the development of Christian exegesis of Genesis 1-3...

...Pagels stresses such practice as instances of Christian opposition to the values of Greco-Roman society...

...In looking at the change in Christian attitudes toward the Roman state, Professor Pagels gives insufficient attention to the important shift which occurred when the eschatological expectations of the earliest generations of Christians went unfulfilled and the recognition set in that the community was here for the long haul...

...I doubt it...

...But Augustine did not completely recast the Christian tradition...

...Thus, even after noting that Robert Grant has cited Justin as an example of "Christian devotion to the monarchy," Pagels cites Justin's denunciation of the gods as demons as an instance of Christian hostility to Rome...

...But so could the Pauline epistles...

...the origins and growth of a Christian sexual ethic related to but distinct from both Jewish and classical pagan attitudes...

...By contrast, he understood the Pelagian position as discounting the weight of our temporality, for Augustine always the first characteristic of creatureliness...

...There are a number of troubling anachronisms in the discussion of Christian political attitudes...

...Augustine's influence has been vast, and some effects of that influence have been unhappy...

...It is surprising, therefore, that Pagels never makes a single reference to the major commentaries on Genesis produced by Christian authors in the first four centuries...

...There are too many "other things," and in a volume of less than one-hundred-and-sixty pages of large-printed text the treatment is necessarily thin...