Essayist and biographer Alan Jacobs introduces us to the world of original sin, which he describes as not only a profound idea but a necessary one. As G. K. Chesterton explains, "Only with original sin can we at once pity the beggar and distrust the king." Do we arrive in this world predisposed to evil? St. Augustine passionately argued that we do; his opponents thought the notion was an insult to a good God. Ever since Augustine, the church has taught the doctrine of original sin, which is the idea that we are not born innocent, but as babes we are corrupt, guilty, and worthy of condemnation. Thus started a debate that has raged for centuries and done much to shape Western civilization. Perhaps no Christian doctrine is more controversial; perhaps none is more consequential. Blaise Pascal claimed that "but for this mystery, the most incomprehensible of all, we remain incomprehensible to ourselves." Chesterton affirmed it as the only provable Christian doctrine. Modern scholars assail the idea as baleful and pernicious. But whether or not we believe in original sin, the idea has shaped our most fundamental institutionsour political structures, how we teach and raise our young, and, perhaps most pervasively of all, how we understand ourselves. In Original Sin, Alan Jacobs takes readers on a sweeping tour of the idea of original sin, its origins, its history, and its proponents and opponents. And he leaves us better prepared to answer one of the most important questions of all: Are we really, all of us, bad to the bone?

Original Sin
A Cultural History

Chapter One

Six Stories

One

When the Greek soldiers burst into the city of Troy, Cassandra—who had prophesied it all, who knew what fate awaited her and all the Trojan women—fled to the temple of Athena. Until quite recently there had stood the talisman of the Trojans, the Palladium, the great statue crafted by Athena herself, the presence of which guaranteed the safety of the city. But one night Odysseus and Diomedes had crept into the city and stolen it. Its theft dismayed and terrified the Trojans, who felt the loss of divine power and protection; they substituted a wooden copy, which under the circumstances was all they could manage. Cassandra threw herself upon this counterfeit, pleading for the divine intervention she knew would not come.

It was Ajax who found her there—Ajax son of Oileus, called "Little Ajax" in contrast to his giant comrade, Telamonian Ajax. All the tales agree that he dragged Cassandra from the temple, as she clutched still the effigy of Pallas; some poets say he raped her first. Later she was taken by the great king Agamemnon back to Argos, where she prophesied and then witnessed his murder before being murdered herself. But Ajax returned to Locris, his homeland, on the north shore of the Gulf of Corinth, where in a storm his ship broke upon the rocks. Brought safely to land nonetheless by the aid of Poseidon, he climbed out of the surf and boasted that he had saved himself by his own power, overcoming the ill will of the gods. For this Poseidon immediately struck him dead, or perhaps Athena herself executed him with a thunderbolt from the armory of her father, Zeus.

His death was a great tragedy for the Locrians, not because they lost their chief and hero, but because now the wrath of Athena could fall only upon them. Famine and disease overcame them; not knowing that their warrior prince had defiled Athena's shrine—he had been killed before boasting of that—they consulted the great Oracle at Delphi, who told them the story, and told them also that there was a way to atone for Ajax's cruelty. But it was a harsh way.

Athena would ease their suffering under this condition: that each year, for a thousand years, two young maidens of Locris would be sent, as payment and sacrifice, to serve at Athena's shrine at Troy. However, those Trojans who remained in their ruined city considered the very presence of these girls a defilement and would stone them to death and burn their corpses—if they could catch them before their arrival at the shrine. But if the girls could reach Athena's temple, they could not then be touched; they became slaves of Athena's priests. So the Locrians took great care to arrive in stealth at various times of the year. And what the Trojans did not know (so says Aeneas Tacitus, an early Roman military strategist who wrote a survival guide for the dwellers of besieged cities) was that the same secret passage that Odysseus and Diomedes had used to steal the Palladium was the one the Locrians used to sneak this year's maidens into the temple and spirit away the ones they had brought the previous year.

A strange legend; and one with a strange and long life. The Greek historian Polybius, writing in the second century B.C.E., claims to have visited Locris on several occasions. He finds it curious that they trace the lineage of their aristocracy, the "Hundred Families," through the female rather than the male line. He points out that the Hundred Families had always supplied the girls who were sent to Troy; it was a point of honor for them. And he says that the practice continued even in his own day, though Robert Graves (like other modern scholars) contends that it had ended a century before.

Many historians now believe that a great Trojan War did occur and that Homer's poems may even capture some details of it, though they cannot be sure when it occurred. But by any reckoning, the Locrian maiden tribute had been paid for very nearly a millennium when Polybius visited the city. Once, the story goes, a Locrian slave girl had been killed by an invader of Troy, in Athena's temple itself, and this mirroring of the fate of Cassandra caused the Hundred Families to think that perhaps their debt was now canceled. So the next year they sent no maidens to Troy. But pestilence immediately returned to afflict them; they resumed their tribute and, it seems, never again questioned it.

No one knows for sure when the tribute finally ceased. But generation after generation these ¬people patiently endured the loss of their daughters because of the great sin of their ancestor. They accepted that the goddess's curse had fallen upon them, if not rightly then at least inevitably. Such was the way of the world; the sins of the fathers had to be expiated, even by a thousand years of children. And there was no one else to do it but them.

Two

Of course, this is a particular suffering of a particular ¬people—a historical accident, one might say. The Locrians were unfortunate enough to have had an impious braggart as their prince, just as the Ithacans were fortunate enough to have had a wise and just king, Odysseus. But Greek artists and thinkers sometimes wondered whether the sheer prevalence of impiety and arrogance suggested something—something worrisome—about the very shape or form of humanity. There are, after all, so many more Ajaxes than Odysseuses in the world.

The last and longest of Plato's dialogues, the Laws, the only one that does not feature Socrates, begins like a joke: a Cretan, a Spartan, and an Athenian are walking down the road, a road on Crete leading to a cave-shrine dedicated to Zeus, where the Cretan and Spartan, Kleinias and Megillos, plan to worship. The Athenian falls in with them along the way, and we meet the trio . . .

Excerpted from Original Sin: A Cultural History by Alan Jacobs
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