Augustine sometimes referred to Adam and Eve as “our first parents,” and the phrase is emblematic of two significant shifts in his theology. First, a new willingness to engage with the literal sense of Scripture: that is, as a narrative or history of events. Second, a growing clarity in his mind, rooted in the first shift, of the continuity of human life from creation until today. This last shift in Augustine’s approach was formative in its influence on Western Christianity and its understanding of sex and marriage.
“Our first parents” speaks of continuity between the first human beings and today’s generation. The usage has the force of marking kinship that is proximate but qualified: not our parents, but ancestors nevertheless. We did not grow up in the household of “our first parents” but we are still related and in continuity with them. They are the first in a series that now includes us.
First, the shift in scriptural interpretation. Augustine notes at the beginning of his Literal Commentary on Genesis that in Holy Scripture “one ought to note what eternal realities are there suggested, what deeds are recounted, what future events foretold, what actions commanded or advised.” Augustine reflects the earlier understanding of the fourfold sense of a biblical text: allegorical (spiritual), literal (narrative), anagogical (the last things), and tropological (moral). For Augustine, a text can have both a figurative signification and be “a faithful account of what actually happened” (I.1.1, in On Genesis, New City Press, 2002, Edmund Hill, O.P., translator).
But in his earlier commentary, On Genesis Against the Manichees, Augustine showed a marked reluctance to engage with the literal meaning of the text, preferring a more figurative interpretation. As Augustine notes, the scriptural narrative can always be taken as history, an account of what happened; but a figurative interpretation may make the meaning of the text more readily apparent (II.2.3). Manichean criticism of the Old Testament texts, in their literal sense, had played no small role in Augustine’s falling away from the Church. When Augustine was exposed to the preaching of Ambrose, with its figurative interpretation of the Old Testament, it was a moment of intellectual and spiritual liberation. Augustine knew firsthand the difficulty of understanding the literal sense of Scripture without falling into error.
In understanding the Genesis texts relating to the creation of humanity, the early commentary moved quickly to a figurative signification. In the interpretation of Genesis 1:27-28, Augustine was most concerned about the command to “increase and multiply”:
Is it to be taken according to the flesh or according to the spirit? It is quite legitimate, you see, for us to take it in a spiritual sense as well, and believe that it was turned into a blessing of fertility in the flesh after sin. Before that, you see, there was a chaste coupling of male and female, accommodated to his directing and her complying; and a spiritual brood of intellectual and immortal joys filling the earth; that is to say, giving life to the body and dominating it, that is, holding it in such subjection that the spirit suffered no opposition from it, no vexation. (I.19.30)
In the second chapter, Augustine sees the creation of Adam and Eve as a further elaboration of what has been said in the first chapter about male and female, to be interpreted figuratively as well (II.1.1). Eve was made from Adam’s rib to signify that “rational mastery” is one thing, what is obedient to reason another, and that the two belong together (II.12.16). Adam pronounces Eve to be “bone of his bones, flesh of his flesh” possibly because fortitude and temperance “belong to the lower part of the spirit, which is governed by the prudence of reason” (II.13.18). Augustine can find no way to ascribe a literal sense to the “two in one flesh” of Genesis 2:24, “except that this is what usually happens with the human race,” and prompted by St. Paul understands it principally as a prophecy of Christ and the Church (Eph. 5:31-32).
In this earlier commentary, Augustine consistently gives a figurative reading of the texts. Adam and Eve were symbols, either of the spirit directing the body, or of reason governing the lower part of the spirit (that part in neo-Platonic psychology that was concerned with the world of sense). When it comes to our first parents as actual parents, Augustine defers any such possibility to a time after the Fall. The obvious inference, one that Augustine pointed out later in his Retractions, was that if Adam and Eve had not sinned there would have been no need for procreation (I.10.2).
A few years later, Augustine attempted a literal commentary on Genesis, ultimately abandoning it and leaving it unfinished just before reaching Genesis 1:28, pleading in his Retractions his lack of scriptural expertise. The commentary on the beginning of Genesis embedded in Confessions from this period is also strictly figurative. Only after these works, over ten years later, did Augustine take up the task again.
It is important to note how innovative Augustine’s new interpretation was, and how it marks the second shift in his thought. According to Peter Brown in The Body and Society (Columbia University Press, 1988), it “made plain the extent to which he was prepared to shift the center of gravity of Christian thought on the human person.” Brown notes that Gregory of Nyssa and Jerome, and even Augustine’s mentor, Ambrose, took a different tack on the creation story. “All three had shared an instinctive, largely unanalyzed, assumption about the origins of marriage and of sexuality. Marriage, intercourse, and Paradise were as incompatible, in their minds, as were Paradise and death” (399).
In his new commentary, Augustine took the view that Genesis 1:27-28 described the creation of men and women, distinguished by bodily sex; and that “increase and multiply” involved sexual intercourse between them. But Augustine had not yet resolved precisely how procreation fit in a yet unfallen world, populated by immortal human beings (III.21.33-22.34). What role would it play in a world without mortality? By the ninth book, and the interpretation of the second chapter of Genesis, Augustine had resolved that before the fall, Adam and Eve were not immortal, yet had the capacity to become so. In the absence of the fall, according to Augustine, our first parents and their progeny after them would have become parents, until a complete number was made up and all were changed into spiritual bodies (IX.3.6).
In On the Good of Marriage, described in the Literal Commentary on Genesis as having been recently issued by him (IX.7.12), Augustine had left unresolved the interpretation of Genesis 1:28. “Many different opinions have been held on this topic; and if we had to consider which of them accords best with the truth of the divine scriptures, it would be a task requiring long drawn-out discussion” (2.2). Limiting himself to the description of marriage in our current mortal state, Augustine described marriage as good, with its purpose as procreation, fidelity, and sacramental union. Yet, even with the interpretive issue still unresolved, Augustine described the first human beings as husband and wife (1.1).
Now, having resolved the interpretive issue, the Literal Commentary on Genesis underscored the threefold good of marriage: fidelity, offspring, and sacrament.
What fidelity means is that neither partner should sleep with another person outside the marriage bond; offspring means that children should be welcomed with love, brought up with kindness, given a religious education; sacrament means that the union should not be broken up, and that if either husband or wife is sent away, neither should marry another even for the sake of having children. This is, so to say, the set-square of marriage, good either for embellishing the fertility of nature, or putting straight the crookedness of lust. (IX.7.12)
It is interesting that both of Augustine’s references to “our first parents” (On the Trinity XI.5.8; Sermons on the Psalms 103(1).8) and a single reference to Adam as the “first parent” (Sermons 294.5) occur in the context of the Fall: Adam and Eve’s original fault. Part of the kinship that binds the human race together is its propensity to sin, and the way in which every person is implicated in the consequences of the sin of the first parents. Conjuring with the related etymology, we might say that kinfolk are prone to unkindness; they have a solidarity in sin. For Augustine, even in the face of the discontinuity of the Fall, significant markers of coherence remain.
Peter Brown notes again the significance of these developments:
From around 400 until the end of his life, Augustine invariably wrote of Adam and Eve as physical human beings, endowed with the same bodies and sexual characteristics as ourselves. God had created them for the joys of society … They had been set in Paradise to found a populus; and to found a populus implied more than the disembodied meeting of like-minded souls. It involved physical intercourse, childbirth, and the rearing of children. (400)
These groundbreaking shifts in scriptural interpretation and marriage were closely related. “Our first parents” is emblematic. Like so much else in Augustine’s work, his understanding shaped the world we live in, and makes him one of its most significant founders.
The Rt. Rev. John Bauerschmidt, D.Phil. is Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Tennessee, having served parishes in Western Massachusetts, North Carolina, and Louisiana. He served in the Church of England from 1987 to 1991 while a student at Oxford. His writings span patristics, especially Augustine, the Caroline Divines, and the Oxford Movement. Bishop John is married to Caroline, and they are the parents of three adult children.
