Zimmerman’s Chapters 12, 13, 14 and 15 (titled “Irenaeus on Original Sin”, “Pioneer theology of Irenaeus:, “Pre-Augustine Fathers”, and “The Genius of St. Augustine”) turn on the previous blog.  That blog reflects the ancient model of human nature: Soul – anima – is joined to flesh – caro – through an immaterial – spiritus – principle.

After reading quite a few books by Henry Corbin (one of the first Westerners to write about Iran, the soul of Persia), I have an inkling of how the human being comes into this world:  The anima is joined to the caro through spiritus.  Sound familiar?

The question is how?

Plato had a model that reflected the pagan world.   The anima descends to the caro.  The spiritual principle is “descent”.

If you imagine a symbolic order congealing around this model, you might think that the motif of “return” or “ascent” would be prominent.  How does the anima ascend back to the source?  By ridding itself of the earthly burden – the earthly distractions – of the caro.   In the extreme, you might get the world according to Mani, where the good, beautiful, life-filled anima endeavors to escape the bad, ugly, dying caro.  Or you might get hundreds of prescriptions designed to accomplish the ascent through ritual action.  Or you might die ao your soul would get recycled.

Now, enter the Jews (and Christians) with all that Adam and Eve business.

Would it not be perfectly sensible to fit the Story of Adam and Eve into the descent model?  The pre-lapse Adam would be like anima (good, beautiful, life-filled) and the post-lapse Adam would be like the rest of us after the soul’s descent (trying to escape the bad, ugly, and dying caro).

“The Fall” would fit its billing and parallel the familiar – pagan – model of human nature.

Zimmerman continued Chapter 12 with a presentation of St. Irenaeus’s view of Paradise and Original Sin, found in Proof of the Apostolic Preaching.

The fashioning of Adam: Adam’s body – his caro – was “godlike” in appearance; his soul – his anima – was “godlike” (durable, immortal, and forever alive); and the breath of life that God insufflated into Adam – his spiritus – was divine inspiration.

One needs only to gaze at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel to see what he means.

Or maybe the question should be: Can we construct a symbolic order that will not destroy us?

How would Iranaeus’ perspective on Christ as the focal point – the “recapitulator” – of all Creation fit the synthesis in An Archaeology of the Fall?  Like a hand fits a glove.  Or like the body and blood of Christ fits the artifice of bread and wine.  Or, if you despise Jesus, like the animating spirit bringing Eve’s reified doubts to life.

Let us run with the latter similitude for a moment:  Why civilization?  Is Civilization not Nature’s way of recapitulating itself, of finding a “head” for its agency?  The moment that our genus came into being as the primate hominid that talked (in hand talk), Civilization was in the cards, because Civilization – as social order founded on unconstrained complexity – emerges from the purely symbolic (semiotic) nature of talk, and is potentiated through the adoption of the purely symbolic speech-alone talk.

It is as if Nature itself proposes the question that Christ himself asked:  Who am I?  You cannot answer the question without a symbolic order.

Chapter 12 of Zimmerman’s now traditional commentary concerns the views of St. Irenaeus (125 to 202 more or less) on the Story of the Fall.  At this point, his synthesis of the Story of Adam and Eve with the evolution of Homo sapiens and existence of the triune brain, recedes.

St. Irenaeus is so close to the time of Jesus that he can trace his mentors back to the apostles.  Born in Anatolia, he moved to Gaul where he eventually became Bishop of Lyons.  His most famous surviving work is Adversus Haereses (Against Heresies).

St. Irenaeus saw Christ’s role as the “re-capitulator” (“re”=”again”, “capit”=”head”, “-ulator”=”agent”) of the human race.  The Old Testament speaks of this agency.  The events that allowed the Old Testament to come into existence (that is, the play of all the nations dispersed since Adam) pay tribute to this agency.  The animal nature of the first man set the stage for this tribute.  The cosmos itself is the raw material that goes into the stage.

Zimmerman wrote that Irenaeus said: All lines of the cosmos focus on Christ.  Christ is not an afterthought conceived in response to the sin of Adam.  Christ is the Alpha and Omega in the first place.  Adam fits the cosmic plans as the strategic gateway through which Christ will enter it.  … Christ is the raison d’etre of all creation.

An Archeaology of the Fall never uses the words “Original Sin”, at least not intentionally.   Instead, the last half of the novel labors to show that the image of the semiotic transition from hand-speech talk to speech-alone talk parallels the image of the mythic transition inherent in the text of Genesis 2:4 on.  The parallels are evocative and work both ways.

For example, the image of the serpent coming into existence as a projection of Eve’s own doubt (gelling, as it were, with a spiritual being) does not have a corresponding image in the semiotic transition.  Perhaps it should.

In a similar fashion, Zimmerman’s section on the “sin of the world” that thwarts God’s plan and is an unbroken continuation of the transgression of Adam and Eve has a corresponding image in regards to the semiotic transition in An Archaeology …, but one that is not developed as much as it could be developed.  We are all swimming in seas of symbolic orders.  All these symbolic orders are – to some degree – exclusive.  How do we describe our fractured treading?  How do we describe the individual’s and the institution’s perspectives?

Reading Chapter 11 of Zimmerman’s work (on the propagation of Original Sin), with An Archaeology of the Fall in mind, leaves me with the impression that Christians may be on the verge of discovering that the long-held traditional idea that “Baptism washes away Original Sin” contains insights never before imagined.  Pieces of a mosaic will suddenly fall into place.

Baptism is all about opportunity.

A complication comes by way of the sacraments, particularly, Baptism.

If Baptism removes a Sin transmitted through generation itself, then one can understand why a mother would be desperate to have her dying child baptized.  How can she allow her infant to die already stained by sin?

If Baptism re-establishes the opportunity for the child to become like Adam and Eve before the Fall, then a mother might not be so distraught.  Baptism speaks to a potential to avoid the same fate as Adam and Eve through the intervention of Jesus the Christ.

So why insist that infants and children get baptized well before their phenotypic developments are complete?  If you wait until children are developed, you might was well start with an exorcism.  Wait.  Baptism does start with an exorcism of sorts.  That must be for the parents and God-parents, who may have already become like Adam and Eve after the Fall.

Here, An Archaeology of the Fall may serve the theologian. Perhaps, Baptism is like innoculation against the dark principalities that reify the symbolic orders that we are immersed in.  Baptism could be like giving the little one a boat instead of leaving her to tread the choppy waters.  After all, even with Baptism, we often “eat the fruit” (now popularly replaced by, courtesy Jim Jones, with “drink the kool-aid” (see Ann Coulter’s book Demonic for seamy details).

In Chapter 11, Zimmerman dealt with the question of how Original Sin was propagated.  He started by admitting that even the Catechism of the Catholic Church has not figured this question out.

There seems to be a material substrate that depends on genetic traits: the triune brain.  Then there are phenotypic expressions with innate biases: concupiscence.  Finally there is an acquired aspect: whatever is necessary to interpellate pride, to define one’s own “reality” independent of connectedness, to enter into the madness described above.

Consequently, one cannot say that transmission is exclusively through generation (genetic & phenotypic) or contagion (acquired).

Pride(concupiscence(death)).  Wow.

Accuse me of over-interpretation.  Zimmerman actually does not present the thesis, aesthetic relation and question that I project upon his text.  At least I used the word “unwitting”.

Maybe I should have used the word “crypto-“, like “Zimmerman’s text supports a cryptothesis that becomes evident from the perspective gained in An Archaeology of the Fall.”

Accuse me of postmodernism.   What can be projected onto the text often turns out to be as relevant as the text itself.

Unwittingly, Zimmerman may have introduced to us a thesis that a certain type of madness is equivalent to the consequences of Original Sin.  The person who is crazy but has a perfectly functioning reptilian brain has the nested characteristics of the person fried on Original Sin: A sense of invulnerability, wayward members, shamelessness & pride(naiveté, concupiscence, dissociation from law, & addiction(maintenance of consciousness, physical performance & mood)) parallels neocortex(midbrain(brainstem)).

Even more unwittingly, this implied thesis presents the “reptilian brain” as the only intact feature, thus providing an aesthetic “concatenation” to the “serpent” in the Story of Adam and Eve.  In An Archaeology of the Fall, one of the characters put on the costume of the “serpent”, so that, when Eve spoke, her doubt came alive.  In a sense, the character acted as a reptilian brain supporting a human brain acting as a wayward member and exhibiting a sense of invulnerability, shamelessness & pride and playing on Eve’s mammalian brain’s naiveté, concupiscence, dissociation from law, and addictive thoughts.

Note the implied relation, using the terms of the triune brain: A neocortex without a midbrain interpellates the midbrain of the unprepared recipient, who then senses through her brainstem that some reasoning of her own neocortex has come alive (not all of it, mind you, but the reasoning that resonates with the interpellation), so she reacts to the originating neocortex as if it were a real entity, and adopts its point of view, thus bringing her midbrain and neocortex into alignment (some sort of positive feedback loop).

The alignment is then destroyed by its own beautiful, sublime and monstrous unintended consequences.

Or maybe we can put the implied relation in terms of Augustine and non-Augustine:  An entity, the serpent, exhibiting a sense of invulnerability, inappropriateness, shamelessness and pride appeals to the naiveté, concupiscence, dissociation from law, and addictive thoughts of Eve who (while maintaining consciousness, physical performance and mood) chooses to eat the fruit, as does Adam.

Then they feel the consequences: a sense of vulnerability, loss of control to the passions, shamefulness, and humiliation.   They realize that they are naked.

So we may ask: Is this implied relation one of the necessary features of Original Sin?

If so, then Original Sin – the propensity to “madness that entertains the possibility of rebellion from God” – is a nested relation that mimics the structure of the triune brain, neocortex(midbrain(brainstem)), and can be described as “whatever Augustine said”(“whatever those who did not agree with Augustine said”(the natural functionality of the human body)) or perhaps, pride(concupiscence(life)).

To envision one primordial image of Original Sin, imagine substituting the word “death” for “life” in the last nested heirarchy.  The consequences of Original Sin become apparent once the word “life” has been erased, at the moment that the word “death” is written.