I needed the following timeline to help me keep events in Serpent straight.

Timeline

St. Clement, Pope, d. 101
***St. Polycarp 69? - 155?
***St. Justin Martyr c. 100 - c. 165
***Clement of Alexandria 150? - 214?, Father of the Church
***Tertullian 160? - 220?
Origen c. 185 - 254
Montanus - 2nd century, comtempories and followers: Prisca and Maximilla
Eusebius of Caeserea 260?-340?
Donatus the Great, made bishop of Carthage in 311
Eusebius of Nicomedea d. 342 (advocated Arianism)
Julian the Apostate 331- 363 or 364, emperor on Nov. 3, 361
*,***St. Jerome c. 345 - 419 or 420
*,***St. Ambrose 340? - 397
**St. John Chrysostom 349-407
*St. Augustine 354-430
Pelagius, active in 390, died circa 455
Julian of Eclanum, foremost disciple and contemporary of Pelagius, carried on Pelagius's work after his death
*Pope Gregory I, c.540-604

* original Doctors of the Western Church, named 1298

** original Doctors of the Eastern Church, named 1568

*** Father of the Church

      You can get a list of the fathers of the church by using the find - word command under Encarta and entering "father of the church".

      1) "Augustine's theory of original sin not only proved politically expedient, since it persuaded many of his contemporaries that human beings universally need external government - which meant, in their case, both a Christian state and an imperially supported church- but also offered an analysis of human nature that became, for better and worse, the heritage of all subsequent generations of western Christians and the major influence on their psychological and political thinking." page xxvi

      2) "What I am thinking of is what the anthropologist Foucault calls "the politics of truth" - that is, that what each of us perceives and acts upon as true has much to do with our situation, social, political, cultural, religious, or philosophical." page xxvii

      3) Regarding Jewish peasants during the lifetime of Jesus: "Many Jews, especially poorer ones, and those who lived in the rural villages where John and Jesus preached, detested the court of the Herods, with its luxurious entertainments and extravagant palaces, which the Herods sometimes named for the emperors but financed with heavy taxes, extortion, and bribes extracted from their fellow Jews. What angered these rural people especially was the way the Herods, neglecting Jewish tradition, courted and copied the Romans." page 4

      "Many Jews distrusted, too, their own religious leaders who served at the Jerusalem Temple, especially the powerful and wealthy men who surrounded the high priest, for their open collusion with the Roman occupiers." page 4

      4) "According to the New Testament, Jesus himself mentioned the story of Adam and Eve only once, in answer to a question about the legitimate grounds for divorce." page 8

      5) Regarding Jesus' teachings on sexuality, marriage, and divorce: "Jesus and his followers, at the beginning of what came to be called the Christian Era, took up startlingly different attitudes toward divorce, procreation, and family from those that prevailed for centuries among most of their fellow Jews." page 9

      "As the Christian movement emerged within the Roman Empire, it challenged pagan converts, too, to change their attitudes and behavior. Many pagans who had been brought up to regard marriage essentially as a social and economic arrangement, homosexual relationships an expected element of male education, prostitution, both male and female, as both ordinary and legal, and divorce, abortion, contraception, and exposure of unwanted infants as matters of practical expedience, embraced, to the astonishment of their families, the Christian message, which opposed these practices.

      Certain scholars, prominently Paul Veyne, as we have noted, have recently downplayed these differences and have pointed out that philosophical moralists such as Musonius Rufus and Plutarch advocated similar moral practices." pages 9 - 10

      "Other Jewish teachers of Jesus' time, and for generations before, had pronounced certain pagan sexual practices abominable. Among conscientious Jews, only the worship of pagan gods aroused more outrage than pagan sexual behavior. Generations of Jewish teachers had warned that pagans thought nothing of pederasty, promiscuity, and incest. Yet the clash with outside cultures challenged Jewish customs in turn. Many pagans found such practices as circumcision to be peculiar, antiquated, and no less barbaric than Jews found the sexual habits of pagans. Babylonians and Romans, themselves monogamous, criticized the ancient Jewish custom of polygamous marriage, practiced by such venerable patriarchs as Abraham, David, and Solomon, as well as by the wealthy few who could afford it, even in Jesus' time and later.

      For centuries - indeed, for over a millennium - Jews had taught that the purpose of marriage, and therefore of sexuality, was procreation. . . . Prostitution, homosexuality, abortion, and infanticide, practices both legal and tolerated among certain of their pagan neighbors, contradicted Jewish custom and law.

      Both polygamy and divorce, on the other hand, increased opportunities for reproduction - not for women, but for the men who wrote the laws and benefited from them. Jewish law even went so far as to require that a man bound for ten years in a childless marriage should either divorce his wife and marry another, or else keep his barren wife and take a second to produce his children. . . .

      Generations before Jesus, Jews, like so many other peoples, had begun to invoke their creation account, specifically in Genesis, to prove that such tribal customs as these were not barbaric or peculiar as pagan critics charged, but were part of the very structure of the universe itself." pages 10- 12

      "Other Jewish teachers agreed that the purpose of marriage is to "increase and multiply"; that one must accept whatever facilitates procreation, including divorce and polygamy; and that one must reject whatever hinders procreation - even a marriage itself, in the case of an infertile wife.

      Jesus radically challenged this consensus. Like other Jewish teachers, Jesus, when he speaks about marriage, goes back to the Genesis account of the first marriage; but he reads the same passage differently than others did. Asked by conservative teachers of the law, the so-called Pharisees, about the legitimate grounds for divorce, Jesus answered that there were none:

"Have you not read that he who made them from the beginning made them male and female and said, 'For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one?' So they are no longer two but one. What therefore God has joined together, let no man put asunder. "             (Matthew 19:4-6)

      6) "To prepare themselves for these events, Jesus commanded his followers to forget ordinary concerns about food and clothing, "sell your possessions, and give alms" (Luke 12:33), divest themselves of all property, and abandon family obligations, whether to parents, spouses, or children, for such obligations would interfere with their dedication to the apocalyptic hopes Jesus announced; the disciple must become wholly free to serve God." page 15

      7) "By subordinating the obligation to procreate, rejecting divorce, and implicitly sanctioning monogamous relationships, Jesus reverses traditional priorities, declaring, in effect, that other obligations, including marital ones, are now more important than procreation." page 16

      8) "Paul accepts Jesus' judgment that marriage is indissoluble and, like Jesus, not only subordinates but actually ignores the command to procreate. But he often speaks of marriage in negative terms, as a sop for those too weak to do what is best: renounce sexual activity altogether. Paul admits that marriage is "not sin" yet argues that it makes both partners slaves to each other's sexual needs and desires, no longer free to devote their energies "to the Lord" (1 Corinthians 7:1-35)." page 16

      "For Jesus and Paul, as for the Essenes, such drastic measures were not a reflection of sexual revulsion but a necessity to prepare for the end of the world, and to free oneself for the "age to come". Paul, like Jesus, encouraged celibacy not because he loathed the flesh (which in my opinion he did not) but out of his urgent concern for the practical work of proclaiming the gospel." page 17

      "Their vows of celibacy served many convets as a declaration of independence from the crushing pressures of tradition and of their families, who ordinarily arranged marriages at puberty and so determined the course of their children's lives." page 20

      9) After giving examples of different versions of the same story in Matthew and in Luke, Pagels writes: "The author of Matthew not only apparently changes words and injects phrases but goes further, deliberately juxtaposing Jesus' more radical sayings with more moderate sayings on the same theme." page 22

      10) "Certain followers of Paul, concerned to make Paul's message equally accessible, and finding some statements in his first letter to the Corinthians, for example, too extreme, decided that he could not have meant what he said there, much less what enthusiastically ascetic Christians took him to mean. Thus some of Paul's followers proceeded to compose, in Paul's name, letters of their own designed to correct what they believed were dangerous misinterpretations of Paul's teachings. . . . Many people - then and now - have assumed that these letters are genuine, and five of them were in fact incorporated into the New Testament as "letters of Paul." Even today, scholars dispute which are authentic and which are not. Most scholars, however, agree that Paul actually wrote only eight of the thirteen "Pauline" letters now included in the New Testament collection: Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Phillippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon. Virtually all scholars agree that Paul himself did not write 1 or 2 Timothy or Titus - letters written in a style very different from Paul's and reflecting situations and viewpoints very different from those in Paul's own letters. About the authorship of Ephesians, Colossians, and 2 Thessalonians, debate continues; but the majority of scholars include these, too, among the "deutero-Pauline" - literally, secondarily Pauline - letters." page 23

      "The conservative Paul of Timothy directly contradicts the advice Paul gives in 1 Corinthians, where he urges virgins and widows to remain unmarried. According to 1 Timothy, Paul, concerned that the presence of unmarried women among the Christians may arouse suspicions and scandalous gossip, declares, "I would have the younger widows marry, bear children, rule their households, and give the enemy no occasion to revile us" (1 Timothy 5:14). Dismissing ascetic discipline as mere "bodily training" (1 Timothy 4:8), worth little for developing piety, this "Paul" warns his readers to "have nothing to do with godless and silly myths." "page 24

      "The Letter to the Hebrews expresses a positive reverence for marriage - and specifically for sexually active marriage: "Marriage is honorable unto all, and the marriage be is not polluted" (Hebrews 13:4). The deutero-Pauline letter to the Ephesians calls ascetic Christians foolish, insisting that "no man ever hates his own flesh, but nourished and cherishes it" (Ephesians 5:29)." page 25

      "Within thirty to fifty years of Paul's death, then, partisans of the ascetic Jesus - and of the ascetic Paul - were contending against those who advocated a much more moderate Jesus and a much more conservative Paul." page 25

      11) "Clement rejects, above all, the claim that Adam and Eve's sin was to engage in sexual intercourse - a view common among such Christian teachers as Tatian the Syrian, who taught that the fruit of the tree of knowledge conveyed carnal knowledge. . . . Sexual intercourse, he declares, was not sinful, but part of God's original - and "good" - creation: "Nature led [Adam and Eve], like the irrational animals, to procreate"; "and," Clement might well have added, "when I say nature, I mean God." . . .

      If engaging in sexual intercourse was not the sin of Adam and Eve, what was the first and fatal transgression? Such fathers of the church as Clement and Irenaeus insist that the first sin was disobeying God's command. " page 27

      12) "Clement believes that Jesus meant both to confirm and to transform patterns of marriage; that he did not challenge the patriarchal structure of marriage (which for Clement expresses the natural superiority of men, as well as God's punishment upon Eve); but that Jesus did intend to eradicate such pagan sexual practices as incest, adultery, "unnatural intercourse", homosexuality, abortion, and infanticide, as well as the Hebrew practices of polygamy and divorce. . . .

      To accomplish this, as one might imagine, is not easy. "The gospel", as Clement reads it, not only restricts sexuality to marriage but, even within marriage, limits it to specific acts intended for procreation. To engage in marital intercourse for any other reason is to "do injury to nature." Clement excludes not only such counterproductive practices as oral and anal intercourse but also intercourse with a menstruating, pregnant, barren, or menopausal wife, and, for that matter, with one's wife "in the morning'" "in the daytime," or "after dinner." . . .

      Even at best, however, Christian marriage remains inferior to chastity. " page 29

      13) "Pagan skeptics might ridicule the Roman gods as naive and foolish illusions; but for Justin and many of his fellow Christians these gods were real and dangerous adversaries." page 40

      "No intelligent person, the sophisticated pagan might have explained, actually worshipped images of the gods, or worshipped living emperors; instead, the gods' images - and the images of the emperors themselves - provided an accessible focus for revering the cosmic forces they represented." page 41

      "Wherever Justin turned in Rome, he, like everyone else, encountered images of the gods; and what once he had admired as splendid, beautiful, or awesome he now saw as leering masks of corruption and wickedness. Statues of Jupiter, often identified with the emperors, stood not only in temples but also in the public squares and government buildings and dominated the Roman amphitheater." page 43

      "Clement's attack upon Jupiter thinly veiled his contempt for some of the rulers themselves:

Is Jupiter, then, the good, the prophetic, the patron of hospitality, the protector of supplicants, the avenger of wrongs? No: he is instead unjust, the violator of right and law, the impious, the inhuman, the violent, the seducer, the adulterer, the incestuous. . . so given to sexual pleasures as to lust after everyone, and to indulge his lust upon everyone."             pages 44-45

      For Rusticus, Justin's refusal to perform such a routine token of loyalty belied the claims of these Christians to good citizenship. For most Romans, political and social obligations were religious obligations - the center of all that they held sacred. Only the Jews, of all the nations under Roman rule, had won the right to separate their political obligations from religious ones, to obey Roman law as subjects of the emperor but to worship their own God. The Roman historian Tacitus, a member of the senatorial aristocracy, wrote in his Histories: "Among the Jews, all things are profane that we hold sacred; on the other hand, they regard as permissible what seems to us immoral. . . . Proselytes to Jewry adopt the same practices, and the very first lesson they learn is to despise the gods, and shed all feelings of patriotism." " page 49

      "The emperors rule by force and violence; but among the Christians, Tertullian said, "everything is voluntary." Instead of extracting taxes to pay for the emperor's luxuries, building projects, and wars, Christians voluntarily contributed to support the destitute, and to pay for their burial expenses; to supply the needs of boys and girls lacking money and power; and of old people confined to the home. . . . we do not hesitate to share our earthly goods with one another," page 50, Tertullian's quote from Appology

      15) "For the Christian message could prove powerfully explosive in a society that ranked each person with a social hierarchy according to class, family, wealth, education, sex, and status- above all, the status that distinguished free persons from slaves. Within the capital city of Rome, three quarters of the population were either slaves - persons legally classified as property - or were descended from slaves. Besides being subject to their owner's abuses, fits of violence, and sexual desires, slaves were denied such elementary rights as legitimate marriage, let alone legal recourse for their grievances." page 51

      "Many Christians were themselves slave owners and took slavery for granted as unthinkingly as their pagan neighbors." page 52

      16) "Monucius Felix, too, challenged those who said the Romans "deserved their power" because of their consummate piety; he argued instead that the empire originated from a defensive pact formed by criminals and murderers: "Did not [the Romans] in their origin, when gathered together and fortified by crime, grow by the terror of their own ferocity?" First they started wars, drove their neighbors from their lands, and destroyed nearby cities through military force. Capturing, raping, and enslaving their victims, they increased their power: "The Romans were not so great because they were religious, but because they were sacrilegious with impunity." " page 54

      17) "True liberty, such dissidents argued, involves freedom of speech - that is, the freedom to stand up to unjust rulers. Conservative senators, of course, regarded this philosophic version of liberty as mere license - an invitation to anarchy. So long as they remained a persecuted, illegal minority, Christians insisted that only Christian baptism - certainly not the Roman government - conveyed liberty. For baptism liberated the convert simultaneously from sin, from enslavement to the pagan gods, and from the power of their human agents, who could only execute - and thus set free - Christian martyrs." page 55

      "But persecution, which, however intense, remained sporadic, was not the only reason that the majority of Christians came to accept an increasingly institutionalized structure to oversee each group internally and instruct and discipline its members. By the second century many Christians wanted to incorporate Jesus' moral fervor into everyday life by turning his Sermon on the Mount into a set of rules, an ethical system that set Christians apart from their pagan environment, and sometimes placed them in direct opposition to it; this ethical imperative became still another reason for the increasingly institutionalized church.

      What distinguished Christians from everyone else, according to both pagan and Christian contemporaries, was their moral rigor, which impressed even pagans hostile to the movement." page 58

      "The practices Justin praised - sexual self-restraint, sharing one's goods with the destitute, and living with people of all races - appealed especially, as we have seen, to those people most vulnerable to sexual abuse, financial exploitation, poverty, and racial hatred - that is, to freedmen, noncitizens, and slaves, to the despised and rejected within the Roman world." page 59

      18) "These so-called gnostics, then, did not share a single ideology or belong to a specific group; not all, in fact, were Christians." page 60, gnosis (in Greek) means a higher awareness, knowledge, or insight and the ancients calling someone a gnostic were calling them a know-it-all.

      "Gnostic Christians, on the other hand, castigated the orthodox for making the mistake of reading the Scriptures - and especially Genesis - literally, and thereby missing its "deeper meaning." " page 63

      From page 67 with the quote taken from the Nag Hammadi Library 271-277: "An extraordinary gnostic poem called "Thunder: Perfect Mind" depicts the spirit, manifested variously as Wisdom and as Eve, speaking as follows:

I am the first and the last.
I am the honored one and the scorned one.
I am the whore and the holy one.
I am the wife and the virgin.
I am the bride and the bridegroom, and it is my husband who begot me.
I am the knowledge and the ignorance . . . .
I am foolish and I am wise. . . .
I am the one whom they call life [Eve] and you have called Death. . . ."

      "What transforms one spiritually, according to the Gospel of Phillip, is continual self-awareness and acknowledging the evil within oneself wherever one finds it." 72

      "Above all, their opponents charged that these dissident Christians challenged what the majority regarded as the fundamental theme of the Christian gospel: that human beings, created by God and endowed with moral freedom, received in baptism the power to live transformed lives, the power to overcome evil and death." page 77

      19) "Yet as Christians saw it, celibacy involved rejection of "the world" of ordinary society and its multitudinous entanglements and was thereby a way to gain control over one's own life." page 78

      "As the historian Elizabeth Clark so ably has shown, "renouncing the world" sometimes brought wealthy and aristocratic women like Melania practical benefits often denied to them in secular society. They could retain control of their own wealth, travel freely throughout the world as "holy pilgrims", devote themselves to intellectual and spiritual pursuits, and found institutions which they could personally direct." pages 88-89

      Jerome's "quarrel with Jovinian concerned one basic issue: He [Jovinian] puts marriage on a level with virginity, while I make it inferior; he declares that there is little or no difference between the two states; I claim that there is a great deal. Finally. . . he has dared to place marriage on an equal level with perpetual chastity." page 95, Jerome's quote taken from Letter 48, To Pammachius

      "But to claim that marriage is as meritorious as repudiating marriage "for the sake of the kingdom of heaven" implied Christian sanction for traditional pagan values, as if honoring family and social obligations - the ancient pagan ethical ideal in Christian dress - were morally equivalent to renunciation. " page 96

      20) "Where earlier generations of Jews and Christians had once found in Genesis 1-3 the affirmation of human freedom to choose good or evil, Augustine, living after the age of Constantine, found in the same text a story of human bondage." page 97, my comment: That Augustine lived after Christianity was firmly established as the state religion of the Roman Empire seems significant. Once Christianity became the state religion, it needed to cease being a revolutionary force opposing the state and to become a conservative force supporting the state.

      21) "Instead of the freedom of the will and humanity's original royal dignity, Augustine emphasizes humanity's enslavement to sin. Humanity is sick, suffering, and helpless, irreparably damaged by the fall, for that "original sin", Augustine insists, involved nothing else than Adam's prideful attempt to establish his own autonomous self-government. Astonishingly, Augustine's radical views prevailed, eclipsing for future generations of western Christians the consensus of more than three centuries of Christian tradition." page 99

      22) "The political and social situation of Christians in the early centuries had changed radically by Augustine's time. Traditional declarations of human freedom, forged by martyrs defying the emperor as anti-Christ incarnate, no longer fit the situation of Christians who now found themselves, under Constantine and his Christian successors, the emperor's "brothers and sisters in Christ." But Augustine's theory conformed to this new situation and interpreted the new arrangement of state, church, and believer in ways that, many agreed, made religious sense of the new political realities." page 100

      23) "Excessive wealth, enormous power, and luxury, Chrysostom charges, are destroying the integrity of the churches. Clerics, infected by the disease of "lust for authority," are fighting for candidates on the basis of family prominence, wealth, or partisanship. Others support the candidacy of their friends, relatives, or flatters, "but no one will look to the man who is really qualified." They ignore, Chrysostom says, the only valid qualification, "excellence of character." Pagans rightly ridicule the whole business: " "Do you see,' they say, 'how all matters among Christians are full of vainglory? And there is ambition among them, and hypocrisy. Strip them,' they say, 'of their numbers, and they are nothing.' " " page 104 by the way, Chrysostom in Greek means golden-mouth and Chrysostom earned this nickname by his powerful oratory

      24) "The traditional Christian answers to the question of power no longer applied by the later fourth century, when not only Constantine but several others, including Theodosius the Great, had ruled as Christian emperors. Augustine's opposite interpretation of the politics of Paradise - and, in particular, his insistence that the whole human race, including the redeemed, remains wholly incapable of self-government - offered Christians radically new ways to interpret this unprecedented situation.

      Whereas Chrysostom proclaims human freedom, Augustine reads from the same Genesis story the opposite - human bondage." page 105

      25) "Augustine knows that most of his Christian contemporaries would find this claim incredible, if not heretical. John Chrysostom, indeed, warns the fainthearted not to blame Adam for their own transgressions. . . . That Adam's sin brought suffering and death upon humankind most Christians, like their Jewish predecessors and contemporaries, would have taken for granted. But most Jews and Christians would also have agreed that Adam left each of his offspring free to make his or her own choice of good or evil." page 108

      26) "How can one imagine that millions of individuals not yet born were "in Adam" or, in any sense, "were" Adam? Anticipating objections that would reduce his argument to absurdity, Augustine declares triumphantly that, although "we did not yet have individually created and apportioned forms in which to live as individuals," what did exist was the "nature of the semen from which we were to be propagated. The semen itself, Augustine argues, already "shackled by the bond of death," transmits the damage incurred by sin." page 109

      27) Summary of page 111: Augustine believes that man is enslaved by his uncontrollable ability to be sexually aroused. Specifically, when a man wants an erection, he cannot always have one. Also, when a man doesn't want an erection, often one comes anyway.

      "That each of us experiences desire spontaneously apart from our will means, Augustine assumes, that we experience it against our will." page 112

      "For Augustine, 'lust is an usurper, defying the power of the will, and tyrannizing the human sexual organ." page 112

      Augustine appeared to have an exceptionally strong sex drive - one so strong that he could barely control it.

      "Augustine agreed with his predecessors in delineating two distinct modes of relationship - one motivated by impulses of domination and submission, the other by mutually affirming love. But what sets Augustine's mature position apart from that of his predecessors is his refusal simply to identify the first with the state and the second with the church. As he redefines them, the "city of man" and the "city of God" cut across both categories. Even baptized Christians are not exempt from either the war of conflicting impulses or the need for external government." page 116

      "If Christians cannot even be trusted to govern themselves, how are they to approach church government? Later in his life Augustine came to endorse, for the church as well as the state, the whole arsenal of secular government that Chrysostom had repudiated - commands, threats, coercion, penalties, and even physical force." page 117

      28) Eusebius was Constantine's court theologian. page 118

      29) "For if the fifth-century state no longer looked so evil as it once had, the church, in turn no longer looked so holy. Chrysostom, holding to his by now essentially sectarian theory, deplored what had happened to the church since imperial favor shone upon Christians: first, the massive influx of nominal converts; and second, the way that a shower of imperial privileges had radically changed the dynamics - and raised the stakes- of ecclesiastical politics. . . .But what Chrysostom could only denounce, Augustine could interpret. . . .Augustine's theory of original sin could make theologically intelligible not only the state's imperfections but the church's imperfections as well.

      Secondly, while changing the way Catholic Christians understood the psychological and religious meaning of freedom (libertas), Augustine's theory bore the potential for changing as well their understanding of, and relationship to, political liberty. Throughout the Roman republic men of wealth and power tended to agree that libertas meant living under the rule of a "good governor'", that is, an emperor of whom the senate approved." page 119

      Summary of page 123: Augustine's version of Christianity won because the political powers that be supported it. They supported it because it was in their best interests to support it.

      30) When Chrysostom was made bishop of Constantanople, a position second in ecclesiastical power only to the bishop of Rome, in 397, he became the spiritual advisor to the imperial family. "Chrysostom was so impolitic, so concerned with his responsibilities as moral advisor to the powerful, advocate for the destitute and oppressed, and austere guardian of clerical discipline, that within three years he had offended virtually everyone who had once welcomed his appointment. His acts of social conscience turned powerful people among the court and clergy against him." He was forced out after 6 years. pages 121-122

      31) "The church that Augustine chose to join, as Peter Brown pints out," was not the church of Cypria" - not, that is, the select community of the holy, willing to risk persecution and death or, lacking the opportunity for martyrdom, eager to leave the world; it was the new, expanding church of Ambrose, rising above the Roman world "like a moon waxing in its brightness." It was a confident, international body, established in the respect of Christian emperors, sought out by noblemen and intellectuals, capable of bringing to the masses of the known civilized world the esoteric truths of the philosophy of Plato, a church set no longer to defy society but to master it." page 123

      32) "Yet Augustine abandoned the policy of toleration practiced by the previous bishop of Carthage and pursued the attack on the Donatists." page 124

      33) "Yet far beyond his lifetime, even for a millennium and a half, the influence of Augustine's teaching throughout western Christendom has surpassed that of any other church father. There are many reasons for this, but I suggest as primary among them, the following: It is Augustine's theology of the fall that made the uneasy alliance between the Catholic churches and imperial power palatable - not only justifiable but necessary - for the majority of Catholic Christians.

      Augustine's doctrine, of course, was not, either for him or for the majority of his followers, a matter of mere expedience. Serious believers concerned primarily with political advantage, could find in Augustine's theological legacy ways of making sense out of a situation in which the church and state had become inextricably interdependent." pages 125-126

      34) "During the fourth and fifth centuries, certain Christians - including Pelagius, a devout Catholic ascetic from Britain - influenced by Greek science and philosophy, argued in his later teachings that human desires and human will, in themselves, have no effect on natural events - that humanity neither brought death upon itself nor could it, by an act of will, overcome death: death was in the nature of things, despite the clear statement to the contrary in Genesis. But Pelagius's contemporary Augustine vehemently rejected this view of nature, and the majority of Christians for more than a thousand years thereafter followed his example." page 129

      35) "According to his biographer Georges de Plinval, Pelagius himself had once agreed with the majority of his Jewish and Christian contemporaries - and with Augustine himself, for that matter- that death came upon the human race to punish Adam's sin. Yet as Augustine developed his view into a theory of human depravity, Pelagius's followers came to argue the opposite. Universal morality cannot be the result of Adam's punishment, since God, being just, would not have punished anyone but Adam for what Adam alone had done; certainly he would not condemn the whole human race for one man's transgression. Mortality, therefore, must belong to the structure of nature; mortality, which human beings share with every other species, is not, nor ever was, within the power of any human being to choose or reject." page 131

      36) "What about death? Doesn't Genesis teach that death is punishment for sin? Certainly, Julian [of Eclanum] responds, but not physical death. He insists that the death one suffers as punishment for Adam's sin is different from the universal mortality natural to all living species. Although the Genesis account says that God warned Adam that "on the day" of his transgression, "you shall surely die," Adam did not die physically. Instead, Julian says, Adam began to die morally and spiritually from the day he chose to sin." page 132

      37) "Ever since Augustine, the hereditary transmission of original sin has been the official doctrine of the Catholic church." page 134

      "Why did Catholic Christianity adopt Augustine's paradoxical - some who say preposterous - views? Some historians suggest that such beliefs validate the church's authority, for if the human condition is a disease, Catholic Christianity, acting as the Good Physician, offers the spiritual medication and the discipline that alone can cure it. No doubt Augustine's views did serve the interests of the emerging imperial church and the Christian state, as I have tried to show in the preceding chapter.

      For what Augustine says, in simplest terms, is this: human beings cannot be trusted to govern themselves, because our very nature - indeed, all of nature - has become corrupt as the result of Adam's sin. In the late fourth century and the fifth century, Christianity was no longer a suspect and persecuted movement; now it was the religion of emperors obligated to govern a vast and diffuse population. Under these circumstances, as we have seen, Augustine's theory of human depravity - and, correspondingly, the political means to control it - replace the previous ideology of human freedom." page 145

      38) "If Augustinian theology, or that of the rabbis or shaman who have also attributed suffering to sin, served only as a means of social control, why would people accept such sophistry? Why do people outside religious communities often ask themselves, as if spontaneously, the same questions, and give similar answers, blaming themselves for events beyond their power as if they had caused - or deserved - their own suffering?

      The "social control" explanations assume a manipulative religious elite that invents guilt in order to dupe a gullible majority into accepting an otherwise abhorrent discipline. But the human tendency to accept blame for misfortunes is as observable among today's agnostics as among the Hopi or the ancient Jews and Christians, independent of - even prior to - religious belief." page 146

      "Augustine would, I suspect, take it as evidence that human nature itself is "diseased," or, in contemporary terms, neurotic. I would suggest, instead, that such guilt, however painful, offers reassurance that such events do not occur at random but follow specific laws of causation; and that their causes, or a significant part of them, lie in the moral sphere, and so within human control." page 147, my emphasis

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