but first let me take this opportunity to express my deep gratitude to Wickliffe and to thorne lo for the honor of this invitation particularly to the Andrews's for having me to stay in their home and offering me such warm hospitality and to members of the Wickliffe fac with faculty especially ephraim Radner and joe mangina for their conversation and welcome and of course to to mark and to his President Robert Darren Becker for making this possible and Steve Hugo for doing all the practical details on which he's absolutely brilliant I'm deeply grateful to you all then by way of brief explanation of what follows in today's lecture I am currently writing volumes two and three of my systematic theology together because they are on sin volume 2 and salvation volume 3 and together of course they're on theological anthropology more generally and they will indeed be a long and complex chapter in volume 2 on Genesis 3 and its interpretation on this deep mystery of what sin is if you think at the start of this ayah that you know what sin is I hope you'll become deeply confused in a few moments but what I'm offering you today is a more philosophical you might say more apologetic spin-off from that project because it's me in my analytic philosophy of religion persona to the four or rather in my role as an exemplar of a new movement that you may know of called analytic theology which was started by Crispin ray in a book of that name which is on your handout whose members subscribe to being analytic philosophers of religion but wish to bring that discourse into much deeper and more richly integrative coherence with biblical exegesis and classical Christian thought and the view is that by doing so it will be able to be possible to probe more deeply and richly the philosophical problems that actually emerge are more ultimately from Scripture so I'm being I'm wearing a hat that you may not be expecting but this is me in my more analytic philosophy of religion analytic theology voice so my the rest of this lecture is going to proceed in three dialectical parts in which my goal is to complexify enrich and to some extent disturb the ways the topic of sin is currently approached specifically in the analytic philosophical discourse in particular I'm interested in the relationship between sin and desire in the original biblical narrative something I believe fundamental to its structure and a matter on which a number of classic Jewish and Christian authors are particularly interesting yet desire is a topic in which analytic philosophy has only recently evident some new fascination after long neglect and the new convergence of interest on this theme may be revealing and fortuitous for our purposes as I shall comment along the way and particularly in closing in the first substantive part of the lecture then that's actually section two on your handout I'm going to do my exegetical work first by returning to some of the mysterious dimensions of the account of the origins of sin in Genesis 3 this undertaking willed to say the least complicate the philosophical task of clarifying the nature of sin beyond what is usually assumed in the current philosophical literature and please note that I'm not assuming any fundamentalist commitments in thus turning back to the biblical text but rather seeking to probe afresh the original Nexus from which a remarkable variety of classic renditions took off in the West we are so steeped in Augustine that we almost take him for granted but you're going to hear about some very different renditions and here indeed we shall not find the immediate answer to our philosophical questions but rather a case of what the anthropologist levy Strauss would have called the characteristically mythical mediation of unbearable contradictions in a narrative which irreducibly holds and yet also generates a plethora of further philosophical puzzles that's what leve Strauss meant by a myth not something that's not true but something that characteristically mediates what he calls impossible or unbearable contradictions in particular what is sin exactly what is its relation to human desire and human freedom why and how is evil already in the world at all in the person of the serpent in the story and why have Adam and Eve been given the particular prohibition that is presented to them in other words what seems to be an explanation of sin and evil in Genesis 3 is in fact a narrative generator of further philosophical problems or a Poirier that is the very nature of its particular mythic narrative and it is important first to acknowledge and understand that rather than resist it in the next section section 3 I shall wear my historical theologians hat and reflect on how certain early rabbinic and Christian responses to the problem of sin diverged dramatically in their resolution of these narrative problems I shall choose to identify only three Christian stands of such interpretation in the rough typology but each strand as we shall see generates a further theodicy issue and a further set of philosophical problems it just gets worse the lesson to be learned here is that there seems to remain in any rich theological interpretation of the narrative Genesis 3 a profound element of divine mystery even alongside the various dimensions of philosophical unsatisfactoriness which may seem to attend it but in the last section for I shall propose one possible philosophical solution to the difficulties one that draws somewhat eclectically on the classic materials we have surveyed and my aim here is to throw particular contemporary light on the relation of desire temptation freedom and sin and therefore to construct a Felix Cooper rendition of the fall beyond and complimentary to the famous Christological one known in the West from the time of Augustine that the good thing about the fall the happy fault was that it led to salvation in Christ and I'm going to dub this a double felix call / alternative which involves the retrieval of an important strand in aunt psalms thinking not from his famous kor Deus homo but from his rather neglected little text on the fall of the devil day cazzo diabolos conjoined with some passing but rich insights from the east syrian traditions on genesis 3 for me this amalgam will constitute the best possible philosophical rendition of Genesis 3 that attends sensitively to it's crucial philosophical detail the problems and in particular its key focus on the relation between desire and sin yet without reducing the final mystery of divine providence inherent in the narrative so that's the structure of what's to come let me now comment just briefly to complete the work of this introductory section on what analytic philosophy of religion has to date tended to say when confronting the problem of sin and the fall for it's precisely this that I seek to complexify and enrich what we find here I submit is not any unanimous witness as such except insofar as there is a tendency to rush quickly to the familiar difficulties of the modern problem of evil and its potential solution according to some version of the so-called free will defense or a variation on it and thus not to tarry as long as would be desirable with the and puzzling questions of what actually constitutes sin according to the biblical narrative a fine programmatic article by the late Philip Quinn sin and original sin may be seen as indicative of these tendencies in analytic philosophy religion it wastes no time in providing a definition of sin as quote the concept of a human fault that offends a morally perfect God and brings with it guilt that's his definition of sin a human fault that offends God and brings guilt and he does this this definition in complete abstraction from the complications of the biblical narrative he then moves fast to the Western Augustinian understanding of original sin and immediately declares it morally problematic from the perspective of modern Western sensibilities John Locke Immanuel Kant Soren Kierkegaard or more recently Richard Swinburne the doctrine of original guilt is declared even more unacceptable I quote we are guilty only for our own morally evil actions individualistically and so we acquire guilt only by committing personal sins close quote Quinn's article thus throws down the gauntlet from which other analytic philosophers religions seemed to scatter in various directions albeit with a shared presumption that individualist libertarian freedom of some sort must be defended to the hilt thus Richard Swinburne's account of sin in his book responsibility in atonement chapter 9 which preceded Quinn's article and is already commented on by by him takes a strong line against Augustinian original sin largely because it abrogates what Swinburne already presumes as a supreme good the human power for in compatibilist freedom necessary as a first plank in any free will defense as we know from Swinburne's other writings on the problem of evil thus Augustine is repudiated core I quote Swinburne there seems no reason whatever to adapt adopt the Augustinian view that's because he's already decided what freedom is and Swinburne correlative Lee throws in his lot with what he calls quote the liberal greek-speaking theologians of the early centuries closed creped whom he takes we shall shortly see if this is correct it isn't actually as propounding some form of modern incompatible ISM ie the human power individualistically to determine our own destiny as he puts it in a form of radical human hacia t significantly direct from the transcendent causal powers of the divine to be sure Swinburne is alert to modern evolutionary thinking in this mix and hence does have something to say about desire not however inspired directly by the biblical text he thinks desire is passive rather oddly but selfish and delivered to us by our evolutionary inheritance this however despite being a complicating and countervailing factor has no need to disturb the heroic capacity for individual free will in Homo sapiens and sin in contrast is simply for Swinburne quote a failure in a duty to God close quote considered eurid eclis and again without any direct reference to the biblical text we might see Michael Ray's long recent article the metaphysics of original sin in dialectical contrast as a sort of extended albeit implicit repast to Swinburne's presumptions about the fall and are setting the gold standard for a sophisticated metaphysical defense of Augustinian original sin as precisely compatible with the principle ray calls em our moral responsibility that is I quote a person P is morally responsible for the obtaining of a state of affairs s only if s obtains or obtained and P could have prevented s from obtaining close quote I'm not going to repeat the details of Ray's complex argument here except to note that he provides two different possible metaphysical pictures neither wildly popular as he says in current philosophical circles for rendering moral responsibility and the doctrine of original sin do s logically compatible with one another this is a heroic achievement in its own terms and if you're a Calvinist here or even the more generally an Augustinian and you want to be an analytic philosopher as well this might be the article that could help you but again we notice that a supreme good that is assumed to be in need of defense it's a particular kind of modern rendition of moral responsibility one that has supreme significance in the arena of the freewill defense sin is not actually defined in reference to the biblical text again or indeed at all except in its quote original form as a quote kind of corrupted that disposes us to it finally from the analytic circles and very differently again one might think of the late Marilyn Addams renowned attempt in her book Christ and horrors her attempt to give an account of the creation and fall as representing a problem of vulnerable embodiment rather than primarily a problem of sin or human error as such what Adams chooses to call human non optimality a wonderful way of talking about condition her frailty resides in our embodied State are necessary subjection to what Adams calls horrors events such as would make any particular life not worth living on this perspective Augustine's rendition of the Falls meaning is certainly false and quote even if Adams and Eve's choices are supposed to be somehow self determined I quote God is responsible for creating human beings into such a framework so she doesn't let God off the hook Adams his account of the basics the Odyssey problem is thus obviously different again from when burns and rays and we shall shortly investigate if it too has any base in classic patristic theorization of the fall but the point here once again is that some version of the modern problem of evil is again the tail wagging the philosophical dog in these accounts of sin Adam intensifies this problem still further under the category of horror and in a somewhat heterodox fashion in which vulnerable bodily necessities in as such but what our account of the fall ironically shares with both Swinburne and Rhea is a presumption that quote the modern problem of evil is the fundamental issue to be negotiated in and behind any story of the fall and the origins of human error or depravity now that's just a little survey of what's happening in analytic philosophy of religion on sin and I think you can already see there are some problems so let us move now to section 2 and see if there is any mandate for the presumptions made by this group of very sophisticated analytic philosophers now of course we must turn back to the biblical text itself and see what we can possibly make of it so here's Genesis 3 to 4 and it's paradoxes what is sin and the relation to desire in the biblical text what I shall be arguing here is that an analytic philosopher who wishes to be a good theologian an analytic theologian needs in contrast to these existing discussions in analytic philosophy of religion sophisticated as they are to turn back first more probing lis to the very mystery of sin as presented in the biblical text and its intrinsic connection to the category of desire a theme which indeed along with sin the analytic tradition of philosophy has to a large degree neglected to probe with any great exact dude at least until recently now I don't call sin a mystery unthinkingly here because the first and central message of this paper is to urge that the story of the fall in Genesis 3 presents us with no unambiguous account of what sin at its root is so I urge you in the course of this are to reflect afresh on whether you think you know what it is but it's rather a narrative that acts as a kind of Co an the presentation of a set of irreducible paradoxes which must and should continue to tease our philosophical minds in putting things that way I acknowledge once more my indebtedness to modern theorists of myth who have pointed to the irreducible structures of such myths for human meaning making while structuralism as a holse explanatory project is now deeply unfashionable in anthropology some of the insights that Claude lévi-strauss brought to the study of myths remain as already intimated above hugely insightful in my view and by no means need to be read as implying that myths signal untruthfulness on the contrary I think they express particular truths better than they could be expressed in any other way as Adrienne Cunningham discussed long ago in a little book which still repays study levy Strauss's proposal that culturally sustaining myths are those that mediate contradictions in narrative form is of considerable significance for theological reflection in general and has special bearing on the full narrative in particular as I shall now attempt to show in what follows the biblical story presents to us different and conflicting truths which appear unassailable to us and yet have to coexist in some kind of seemingly unbearable tension what is clear from the Genesis text however is that sin is inexorably something to do with desire gone wrong although the mystery starts already in Genesis 2:17 with a strange and unexplained prohibition from Yahweh not to eat from a particular tree under pain of death and it is this point about the vicissitudes of desire that I now wish to explore hermeneutical II what we should note first in returning to Genesis 3 for a moment unfettered if we can buy later Western presumptions is that desire features even more significantly in the Hebrew text than our modern translations tend to pick up and early Jewish interpreters were very attuned to those interesting semantic complexities thus in Genesis 3:6 in which Eve's initial temptation by the serpent is described two words for desire are used in quick succession I quote so when the woman saw that the tree was good for food and that it was a delight literally in Huber Hebrew a desirable thing to Arwa to the eyes and was to be desired another Hebrew verb Neph ma to make one wise she took of the fruit and ate the particular impossible contradiction inscribed here it seems to me is that the human capacity for such desire at this stage in the story points simultaneously in two opposing directions it is clearly already a striking feature of the human made in the image of God to have the capacity for such desire so Adam and Eve are already desiring creatures and indeed the further activation of that desire is clearly strictly speaking required for the human more fully to come into that image if the human is to know good and evil and thereby acquire the godlike capacity for wisdom and discernment thus in an important sense desire is the mark of the paradoxical necessity of the fall the Felix corpora of which Augustine was later to speak so tellingly and which other Western authors such as Anselm further ramified in ways we shall discuss below in this sense - although Eve has in one strand of Christian tradition in 1 Timothy - and later into Italian who says you are the devil's gate ray already been marked out for particular projective blame and there are intimations of that in early Jewish literature as well her striking initiative she takes the initiative here is also from another perspective her distinctive desiring contribution to the necessary drama of salvation once the fall has occurred however a new sort of gender binary becomes fatally fixed woman too painful childbearing man - endless toil and Eve's desire is now characterized by a different and third word in Genesis 3:16 - shuka which appears only 3 times in the Hebrew Bible and seemingly connotes although this is heavily disputed in the secondary literature and also be mused some of the early translations including the peshitta translation and the Septuagint translation but it seems to connote a kind of obsessive sexual desire for a man which is then met with a yet deeper demand by him for subjection I've cited a very important article by Andrew McIntosh on the meaning of Toluca which is the latest review of all the inmates immensely complicated literature on this subject on which bishop Andrews also commented extremely insightful II in his Cambridge dissertation I've been sitting up at night in bed reading his Cambridge dissertation which isn't published and I commend it to you it is surely not insignificant that this same word shuka is used almost immediately once more in Genesis 4:7 where the text rather curiously says of Cain's jealousy for his brother that sin is lurking at the door its desire to shuka is for you but you must master it note that this false desiring inherent in sibling rivalry and violence in Genesis 4 is not the original sin as some followers of Rene Girard would have it but it's a secondary spin-off one linguistically coterminous with Eve's corrupted sexual desire so there's something about this word that relates both to sex and somehow to either violence or jealousy in other words it's corrupted or misdirected desire of some sort that is the special mark of sin along with the disobedience to divine instruction that then follows but not original desire itself which in its uncorrupted form appears to have a special role in propulsion towards the divine propulsion to consideration of the goods of the earth and even propulsion towards a certain likeness to God as a later Minority Report in the rabbinical tradition also put it it's actually from the Jerusalem Talmud speaking of the mysterious yetzer hara the evil inclination which was used by the evil early rabbis to further explain the mysterious original propulsion to sin in Genesis 3 I'm quoting now from the Jerusalem Talmud it is obvious that we have no strength to resist it the evil inclination so let it be your will Lord my god that you vanquish it from before us and subdue it so that we may do your will as our own will with a whole heart I think it's instructive here to find such a remarkable parallel to later Western Augustinian sensibilities it would seem then that the nature of Eve's sin of disobedience or more deeply as I see it corrupted desire is also and paradoxically her particular Felix culpa characterized by a desire that reaches out of and beyond itself that is precisely stretches out to God whereas the unambiguous sin seems to be desire wrongly aimed desire missing its mark or rather miss aggregated in its attempt grasp and control what is more appropriately weighted on as a gift in other words it is good surely that she desires to discern good and evil it is wrong that she takes it for herself and then that becomes corrupted into some kind of obsessive sexual subservience or as in Cain's case into jealousy or violence or projective blaming when we finally ask then on this vision who was to blame for the fall the answer is of course from the perspective of mythic contradictions hugely ambiguous it was the serpent it was Eve it was Adam all of these are possible and in the early rabbinic commentaries you get the emphasis on all three and yet underlying Li what the early rabbis are not willing to say surely it must ultimately have been God in God's self who is responsible for the entire scenario yet the same God also behaves inscrutably by demanding a nun parent unthinking obedience to his command while placing before Adam and Eve a potential god of enormous significance that is the mature capacity for the discernment of good and evil but it is indeed to become their due inheritance as made in the image of the divine in due course moreover it seems from this story in the Hebrew that the fruit of the tree is indeed desirable it is good to eat as clarified by use of the Hebrew terms and not merely apparently so as some embarrassed patristic authors such as gregory of nyssa were later to avert further while the story purports to explain the entry of sin into the world it is clear that it is already there at least potentially in the form of the strange talking serpent who himself also after all can only finally be the creation of the good creator whilst rabbinic tradition was to counter explain this surd in terms of the yetzer Hara the evil inclination sometimes associating that pettite chili with the serpent Christianity quickly by the third century had to reach for its own counter myths also founded in proto rabbinic thinking about Genesis 6 in terms of the prior fall of the bad angels and that comes out of the Enochian literature and ultimately as I said Genesis 6 so there's a backing up how can we explain that the serpent is there already how can we explain that there's already an evil inclination answer it must be because there was a fall of angels already finally and lastly the threat of death stated as punishment for the sin of eating from the tree in the text is of course not actually carried out at least not immediately nor is it obvious that Adam and Eve would have been immortal if they had not eaten of it since that possibility then becomes a further reason for expelling them from the garden see Genesis 3:22 in short what we might call the theodicy problems spawned by the text of Genesis 3 are at least as extensive and troubling as those which it purports to resolve as in any just so story or levy Strauss II and myth the text generates yet more irresolvable questions just as it seems to seek to provide an answer to them but has been precisely the burden of this section of the paper to insist that the holding of these unbearable contradictions together is what is irreducibly distinctive about this founding narrative on the origins of human sin in Genesis 3 and this I submit should not be an offense to our philosophical and theological minds but rather an enrichment and challenge to them so now having confused you thus far I want to turn to a rough typology of classic Christian patristic and scholastic responses to the Genesis narrative as we shall see their interpretations unlike their modern analytic philosophical counterparts did keep the problem of corrupted or voluble desire at the heart of the picture in a variety of ways rather than merely reducing to a failure in duty as in Swinburne or an offense to a morally perfect god Quinn or in some kind of replacement of sin with physical vulnerability as in Adams none of these definitions look convincing frankly in the light of the text but as for the divergent classic interpretations which I saw now survey the irony is that they were merely each of them in turn to spawn another set of paradoxes mysteries and theodicy problems so it's a game of snakes and ladders we are going up and down let me now illustrate this point by sketching three very different classic renditions of Genesis 3 and it's narrative so here the plot thickens generating a typology of classic interpretations of the four Elaine Pagels now classic treatment of the history of thinking about Genesis in the first four to five centuries CE II Adam even the serpent draws our perhaps over simplistic conclusion from her own complex account which nonetheless still has some truth though we're going to need to correct and modify it in what follows I quote her for nearly the first 400 years of our era she writes Christians regarded freedom as the primary meaning of Genesis 1 2 3 and self-mastery as the source of that freedom so you can tell the story about how we needed to have freedom with Augustine she says the message changed completely now the fall becomes a story of complete human bondage why was this according to Pagels it was largely the result of the Constantinian settlement such that after it Christians had to reconsider identity as non martyrs in state terms thus forcing conflict inside them but I'm not sure that this explanation helps to explain the notable divergences of for instance the near contemporaries Gregory of Nyssa in the east and Augustine West on the fall after all both of these are post Constantinian or the general and continuing divergence of east and west on some crucial issues in understanding human freedom and human sinfulness moreover as we shall now expand there was also a third admittedly Minority Report on the matter from a strand of theological reflection beyond the borders of the Roman Empire amongst the East Syrian Syriac speaking faithful followers of the theological traditions of Theodore of Mop Celestia so let's look at these three in turn first Gregory of Nyssa I call this embodied freedom tested as you may know Nissen in his text the making of man reads Genesis one two three through a particular rendition of Genesis 1:27 broken into two parts Genesis 1:27 in the image of God God created the human male and female he created them Nissen reads this as saying that the initial creation of the human in the image is sort of humanoid or even angeloid well what we would now call the boundary binary of gender comes into being only with an eye to the fall enroute to the fall and ultimately according to Gregory that will be transcended once more at the end of time so gender doesn't go through us all the way down it doesn't have either proto logical or eschatological instantiation by the same token what constitutes the image of God in the human is essentially for Gregory intellectual or psychic not in any way bodily or changeable and unlike Athanasius before him Gregory does not hear press to insist immediately on the image his christological form ultimately given the seriousness of the fall to come as for the nature of the first sin in its explanation Gregory is somewhat evasive in the making of man he expatiate sat some length on how the quote fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil evidences mixture or mixed knowledge in the beguiling sense he thinks the fruit combines a divine good under the color and shape of that which stands for sensuality and quote for this reason writes Gregory comes that desire which arises towards evil as though towards good so he's facing here the problem that it was a good that Eve was reaching out for but he thinks the covering of it was connotes sensuality of a negative form again it seems here as if the physical or at any rate the sensual or passionate realm is the prime problematic and you might say there are shades of Marilyn Adams it's revulsion against the physical here but in Gregory it's not a worry about the vulnerability of the body but what he calls its heaviness the physicality of us weighs us down words however in his text the kattegat catechetical oration in contrast Gregory looks at this issue from rather a different direction instead of explaining the act of the fall in terms of mingled sensuality and goodness as if the body and sensuality were primarily to blame as a downward tug he points instead directly to an evil which in some way he does not explain attempt to explain it arises from within us I quote it has its origin in the will he says when the soul withdraws from the good but why and how does this happen at one point Gregory does indeed seem to start to advance what moderns would detect as a version of the freewill defense I quote him since it is the mark of free will to choose independently what it wants says Gregory God is not the cause of your present woes for he made your nature independent and free that's where Swinburne gloms onto gregory of nyssa here in short the full narrative is more an indication of the risks of freedom than a collapse towards sensuality let alone a tragedy of irreparable depravity as in Augustine and the Serpent's rather strange role in the story for Gregory is that of evidencing a primary sin of envy for finessin envy is the main problem as the primary sin he took it amiss the serpent that there should be produced a being to resemble so closely the transcendent dignity of God close quote overall however although the image of God in the human is not completely or disastrously marred as a result of the fall according to Gregory since our capacity for synergistic freedom indoors we can cooperate with God in freedom nonetheless the sin is an enduring and distressing feature of post-lab Syrian life and our bodies are destined for death as a result of the fall complete restoration to participation in God and the renewal of good and indeed ecstatic desire for the divine life for which Gregory's later commentary work is justly famed as a theme come only through the power of the resurrection it's important to note however that Gregory's account of synergistic human freedom and this counts against Swinburne's inclination to treat him as a modern incompatible list involves a true cooperation between divine grace and human response Verna Harrison's excellent monograph spells this exegetical point out with care and thus the fall cannot in fact involve an autonomous human associate II altogether direct from God's sustaining action so Gregory is no modern libertarian thus as richard Norris showed in one of his last and most brilliant articles on Gregory's understanding of sin and the fall in his late works the homilies on the Song of Songs Gregory actually continues to tie himself into knots about the origins of evil and sin right up to the end of his life and indeed he apparently seems to make some worse he still says that evil which he takes with the majority edition of early Christian thought to be insubstantial in comparison with the good to be the result of the fruits seductive mingling of opposites sensuous and psychic but now he admits that in effect there is good even in this evil the fruit is an apparent good and thus an occasional for teaching us something he says further and even more intriguing Lee Gregory now argues concomitant Lee and I believe he is the only exponent in the tradition to propose this that the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and the Tree of Life are actually the same tree seen from different perspectives since only one tree can stand right at the center of the garden he insists such then is the paradoxical but close continuity of good and evil at the heart of human desire ultimately however Gregory seems defeated by his own conundrum here as Norris puts it the symbolic and allegorical intersection of the two trees precisely illustrates Gregory's my quote fruitless struggle with the question of the origin of evil that's Norris since he takes it as a read that human desire is basically and originally oriented to the good the introduction of the idea of an intrinsic magnetism to evil finally flaws him as to its explanation except insofar as the seductive fruit represents a downward tug to sensuality and materiality dressed up in its opposite so the COTC problem ultimately remain remains and arguably is intensified the good God is ultimately responsible for the temptation of the fall and the good God is responsible likewise for making a seductive fruit appear desirable and the freedom that Adam and Eve exercised in being seduced by the fruit does not in any in compatibilist way excuse them from the sustaining responsibility and providence of the divine finally flawed Gregory has to admit at one point that the paradox of the two trees means that in a sense good and evil are the same thing now this is a desperate ending point signaling Gregory's final bafflement at the ambiguity of human desire and it's divine origins so much for Gregory you know he's my hero but he does seem to be in trouble here secondly pedagogy and the adolescent human this is a strand of tradition you may not know of particularly in Theodore of Matsu estia and Syrus of Edessa another strand of eastern thinking about the fall which was to be promulgated later across the Imperial border into Persia however an alternative rendition of the fall story was being concocted which focused precisely on what Gregory would only hint at viz the idea that the ambiguous stretching of desire in the act of temptation was precisely intended to teach Adam and Eve something this is a little-known alternative to the Christian rendition of the fall although it has a certain anticipation in irony is's earlier suggestion in the West that Adam and Eve were adolescents rather than mature adults hence their resistance to orders and it stands in the thought of Theodore of matzah Esther himself strangely alongside another account which is much closer to that of the cappadocia UNS since we are partly reliant on Later and fragmented texts from the 6th century Cyrus of Edessa for this unusual line of reflection I here follow the Jesuit William Macomb burrs account of what Theodore's and Cyrus's second so-called pedagogical rendition of sin and the Genesis narrative amounts to the argument runs thus to put it succinctly and in Macomb buzzwords I quote where is the traditional Eastern view begins with an initial happy state that is disrupted by sin and deteriorates progressively with time this alternative rendition of Theodore's and Cyrus's begins with the state of radical imperfection that improves under divine action with the passing of the age towards better things in this conception man though ultimately destined to attain a state of immortality and sinlessness could not have been created thus in the beginning because he would have been incapable of appreciating this inestimable gift and of giving due thanks to God for it for whereas God alone knows his essence created natures but by by intrinsic than sorry but but for whereas God alone knows by his essence created nature's by sinfulness by intrinsic necessity can only learn by contraries and hence without an experience of sinfulness and death they could never learn to understand and appreciate sinlessness and immortality indeed if we had been created in mortal and immutable from the beginning we would have been no better off than a pearl of comely beauty that is unaware of its own splendor and is not conscious whether it is fixed in the crown of a king or whether likewise it is set in a camel saddle as Sarris puts it and hence we would have derived no profit from these priceless gifts thus in Cyrus's view whatever gifts Adam may or may not have received in the beginning he was radically imperfect because he lacked the capacity to appreciate and benefit from the most important of the gifts that God intended ultimately to bestow on him whenever he knew would be the best and man would be able to receive them so the school of Theodore thus developed this pedagogics theodicy with remarkable acuity and originality simply however and the musically setting this account alongside their other and opposite renditions rather as the rabbi's also allowed the collocation of contemporary interpretations in their distinctive contestation of meaning on genesis so it's a rather interesting pedagogic hermeneutic you set down come two completely different renditions of a text and allow people to worry about it but we do not find evidences of the pedagogical being developed in any sustained and philosophic form in this tradition moreover while the suggestion of this minority pedagogics strand apparently solved one central theodicy problem the divine permission for the existence of evil it by no means dispelled others did God want Adam and Eve to sin then or only to be tempted how was this a higher order good exactly if and when they did sin and so unleash the consequences on the world how could that then lead to a confidence in their final perfection and so I'm going to come back to these questions very shortly in the form of an Psalms closer philosophical treatment of them but meanwhile we turn thirdly and very briefly to Augustine whose rendition could scarcely be more different from Cyrus's here is no pedagogy of ascent from adolescence to maturity but a dramatic and a radical descent into erotic enslavement so thirdly original sin in Adam we're on more familiar territory here Augustine's vision of the effects of the faller of course also notably contrastive with Gregory of nYSSA's and not the least interesting feature of this divergence is the picture of gender that is a crucial part of them both unlike many contemporary feminist combinators commentators I am disinclined simply dubis much Augustine for his various renditions of the binary of gender which have complex and rich features not in any case wholly consistent between the differing accounts he gives in his various texts the literal commentary on Genesis the good of marriage the de trinitarios itti of God and in more than one of these texts he shows a considerable interest in protecting women from male violence and violation I do an account of this in Chapter six of God sexuality and the self yet there is no doubt that Augustine's interpretation of Genesis two and three which is solely his own has had unparalleled ly ambiguous implications for women down the centuries in the Christian West and this is integral to his theory of the fall and desire not a mere coincidental accompaniment the most important point for our current purposes here is that unlike Gregory Augustine holes that distinctively different maleness and femaleness the female subordinate to the male are intrinsic parts of the original unfallen state of the human as to is enacted sexuality which is nonetheless wholly good insofar as it is rationally conducted and pro creatively fruitful that's in city of god 14 what goes wrong in the fall therefore is a new saw of servitude or subordination of woman to man as a result of it even though she was already pre-fall appropriately subject to her husband Augustine averse yet now quote there is a condition similar to that of slavery rather than the bond of love so that subjection is a result of the fall this is subjection gone completely awry see his literal commentary on this and note that this involves close and accurate attention to the reflections on desire in the biblical text as outlined above yet seemingly the subjection occurred because Eve was on her own unable to resist the seduction of the serpent the reason for this perhaps Augustine is not dogmatic here is that the image of God is not directly attributable to Eve on her own but only indirectly and secondarily via Adam and he appeals to 1 Corinthians 11 for this so she was not up to resistance on her own and cannot ultimately be blamed Adam in turn however falls not because he is sexually seduced by Eve since until after he is fallen sexual temptation is not a problem for him although it becomes an overwhelming problem afterwards rather he does what Eve asks because I love this bit he did not wish to make her unhappy just as Augustine notes we too can offend God just to keep the attachment and affection of friends Adams primary problem then when confronted by God as to his disobedience is not at this point concur persons but pride he blames Eve instead of acknowledging in humility his own complicity in sin now where Augustine does of course most markedly diverged not only from Nissen but from the majority Eastern tradition is in his rendition of the Greek of Romans 5:12 Adam in whom in quo all sinned and here notoriously he misunderstands the Greek fo as a result of which and his theory thereby of the inherited and indeed sexually transmitted effect Adams original sin results a patient a position intensified towards the end of his career by the effects of the Pelagian controversy the fall becomes then for Augustine a literal event which inexorably and biologically changes the course of human history history freedom is radically and inexorably and universally undermined by the cacophony of internal compulsions towards concupiscence and libido Canales the human will has no power of freedom to resist such evils except and unless it freely accepts the offer of divine grace and the only freedom on offer is paradoxically a complete submission to the workings of that grace at first blush then what the comparison of gregory of nyssa and Augustine on the fall illustrates is how radically divergent two interpretations of the densely complex yet compelling Genesis narrative can be on issues of gender and sexuality on the identification of the prime sin envy or pride on the question of our original sin is transmitted for Gregory as a place in this sin is merely a perennial problem for the human rather than a sexually transmitted disease and above all on the nature and extent of human freedom Gregory and Augustine are in response to these Calandra seemingly poles apart and yet underlying ly there is a most interesting congruence between them and it is in the realm of the fundamental role of desire in the face of sin not only in the fall itself but in the further grace filled out workings of the Christian life post salvation for both Gregory and Augustine have rich and complex understandings of such desire as we've now seen both read desire as ambiguous labile open both to corruption especially sexual corruption in Augustine's case and to the interruptive propulsions of divine grace as the Christian continues to stand in that inexorable tension that Paul so vividly describes in Romans 7 but neither Gregory no Augustine ever solves the fundamental mystery of the fall that is neither can ultimately its Blayne the primal sin and of this mystery both men become vividly clearer as we've seen towards the end of their lives as Jesse Kuhn Harvin concludes in a fine Survey article of Augustine Orson in the new TNT companion to the doctrine of sin I quote Augustine famously found the primal sin inexplicable just as Gregory before him manifestly had for all their philosophical and interpretive ingenuity and insight certain of the original impossible contradictions inherent in the biblical narrative that is the very emergence of sin and evil in a world created by a good loving all-knowing and all-powerful God and moreover through the seductive exercise of a serpent also created by the same God remained further as I've now demonstrated Nissen did not moderate this problem by any appeal to a mod a modern in compatibilist view of freedom both men so again differently saw human freedom as sustained within the matrix of divine grace it might thus seem hugely paradoxical at least to the modern analytic philosophical mine to argue that the contradictions of the Genesis full narrative are best resolved by a divine providential compatibilism rather than a human in compatibilism but that is the idea that I'm now going to presume and defend in my last section and which I presume will go down better in these circles at Wickliffe that it might in some other circles though I'm going to do it more from the presumption of Thomas and the Scholastic traditions of the compatibility of divine a temporal Providence and individual human choices so I'm now going to move into my last section I'm sorry I've slightly overrun my time but I hope you want to hear how I'm going to solve all this very briefly you can I can leave it there if you like and what I'm going to do here is something a bit odd I don't think anyone's done it before I'm going to take a bit of the East Syrian tradition that I presented to you and I'm going to weave it together with a bit of Anselm of Canterbury that has been a bit neglected right one proposed solution and Psalms on the fall of the devil as a test case for the education of desire we come back here to of course to the other connected and underlying problem that beset all renditions of Genesis 3 both Jewish and Christian from the outset how was evil already present in the form of the serpent at the start of this story as mentioned earlier already from the time of origin Christian solved this by appeal to a meta story that of the fall of the Angels prior to the story of the fall in Genesis that of course only replicated the upper area of Genesis 3 at a higher level but Anselm was not an exception in following this tradition yet he proved I think further than others had and further than even Aquinas would later into the mystery of what this proto fall might mean and some in this little text clearly wants to give us clear an account as possible about how evil came into the world in the first place and how the fall of the devil backing up one level from Genesis 3 is ultimately responsible for this and gives us the blueprint of how sin subsequently exercises its power however he also takes it as read with the majority classic tradition both east and west that evil is in substantial not unreal but insubstantial in comparison with good he thus has to explain in a characteristic dialogue between a teacher and a student why an angel would make a bad choice in the first place the argument from sections 11 to 14 runs thus and attempts to probe this mystery in a way that perhaps echoes but in a considerably more philosophic and incisive mode the earlier pedagogics suggestions of theodore of mop CSTR in the east first Ansem repeats his conviction quote that evil and nothing can be shown from their names to be as something but only a quasi something that is therein substantial and in that the angel cannot have its first act of willing from itself and moreover if it had only the will for happiness it could neither will anything else nor not will it and the will whatever it will will be neither just nor unjust and it would be the same if the angel were given only the will for rectitude it but it is because it was given both that it can be just and happy so it has to be given the possibility of willing the bad it follows section 18 that the bad angel makes himself bad and the good angel makes himself good and that the bad angel owes thanks to God for the goods he received and abandoned just as the good angel does who retained what he received paradoxical as this may seem therefore an saan concludes section 28 that the power to will what his unfitting was always itself good and willing itself is good insofar as it exists so if we're to have choice it is good that we can choose the bad what are we to make of this we are perilously close you might think to Gregory of nYSSA's bemused in sight that good and evil somehow converge or perhaps more radically to Julian of Norwich --is much later mystical insight that sin is somehow be holy if it fits in ultimately with the good providential intentions of God for what an Psalm seemingly wants to insist upon and it is crucial to his own C Odyssey is that God wants both angels and human creatures to be as close imitators of the divine nature as is possible for their appropriate status and one central dimension of this must be the capacity to make real but compatible it's moral choices the very fruit of the tree of the discernment of good and evil as such so God gives the angels genuine moral choices according to this compatibilist model within the orbit of his timeless divine providence as he does to later to Adam and long with that go all the desires and dispositions appropriate for making such a choice the desire for justice and happiness for instance as well as the precious ascetic gift of perseverance without the possibility of that choice however Anselm argues neither Angels nor humans are genuinely themselves in God that is both the risk and the moral dilemma without this potential for disaster even as still caught in the providential workings of the divine note something absolutely crucial is lost the capacity for genuine moral agency God remains good however even in presenting this choice for evil is ultimately insubstantial and the good of the pedagogic training of desire outweighs the evil of the potential for the corruption of it so this whole model assumes a meta ethic in which an ethic of virtue it's taken as the best choice in theological ethics rather than a meta ethic of divine command or deontology and that's where the divergence comes here it might be objected of course that Ann Summers merely recreated the same irreducible paradox of freedom desire and divine providence as was already present in the genesis narrative itself and thereby taken us around in a fruitless circle but this I think is not quite right not only does an Psalms assumed metaphysical scaffolding ensure that insubstantial evil will in no wise altom utley triumph least of all on account of the salvific workings of the Incarnation and its logic about which of course he argues famously elsewhere in his core Deus homo but his compatibilist understanding of angelic and human freedom also keeps even our bad choices ultimately within the divine providential purview as Braun Davis and Gillian Evans put it in their introduction to this highly original text focusing again on the crucial issue of desire as rendon by Anselm I quote and some argues that what Satan did wrong was to desire something to be like God which was itself a good thing but which he wanted to a degree not possible for his created nature hi though it was so his fault had to do with wanting something good but in the wrong way or to a false degree a breach of what an some calls the rectus or doe the right order the ambiguity of desire and will then lies at the heart even of this final of theodicy account but the resolution even within the remaining mystery in relation to divine providence how God allows evil choices insists on the final goodness of God's permission to angelic and human sin let me just conclude in a few words let me now sum up very briefly what I've argued in this paper admittedly a complex one and just indicate how some recent new stirrings in analytic philosophy suggests that our theological debate on this topic of sin have fresh cultural actuality or relevance in the contemporary secular sphere of philosophy first I argued that the irreducible paradoxes of the Genesis three story are an essential part of its power and should not be diffused too quickly as some analytic philosophers of religion have notably attempted to do to stay first with these impossible contradictions is precisely the name of the philosophical and theological game and we need to go through that we need to be goaded and intrigued and bothered about this text secondly I showed by a rough three full typology of classic theological attention to these paradoxes that the Christian and also behind that the Jewish traditions have evidence no one univocal response to Genesis 3 but a pluriform 'ti of insights that should also continue to exorcise us dialectically both philosophically and theologically finally by suggesting a certain amalgam of insights from these different strands of tradition and by keeping focused on the centrality of the problem of desire and freedom I have proposed a reconsideration of a neglected text of an Psalms which I think goes some way not to dissolve the ultimate mystery of divine providence in the face of evil which of call always remain but to probe the significance of an ascetic testing of desire according to what an son calls the rectus Auto the right order this I have argued creatively constitutes a second account of a Felix culpa in the fall that's one of the happy faults along with of course the one that resolves it the Incarnation itself so it's a double failing school kur in closing just let me note by way of a coda for those of you who are interested that in the ongoing contemporary analytic philosophical debates about the nature of intentionality freedom and responsibility some new voices are currently being heard which precisely return us to the problem of desire a topic long-neglected in analytic circles whether it be tall but brewers at uva incisive challenging of what he calls the three dogmas of desire according to a merely propositional account of desire significance or john hymens very different and indeed Herculean rendition of the fall as an ascent into freedom the classic theological deposit of reflection on the nexus of desire reason and freedom in the fall is seemingly surprisingly back in vogue philosophically even for those who are not Christians so I think it's time for analytic theologians and indeed for all theologians to stretch our muscles further and to engage fully with these interesting new philosophical developments what they witness to after all is the in eradicable significance in Western culture of the myth of the fall and its mysterious and disputable account of the nature of human sin in relation to desire and divine providence to continue to probe this mystery I predict will remain a central responsibility of all theologians in crucial ongoing debate with secular philosophy classical theological resources and our pluralist culture thank you