Life Everlasting Based on a Misprint

On the error at the root of the doctrine of the soul

The doctrine that we are each of us born already guilty, answerable for a sin committed before we existed, grew up in the space left by two words of Greek that a reader in the fourth century could not construe. They come at the end of a sentence of Paul’s, the one about death entering the world through a single man and passing from him to everyone, and they are ἐφ’ ᾧ, eph’ hō, which most likely mean because, or on the grounds that, so that Paul has death reaching all of us because all of us sinned.¹ What Augustine read, in a Latin that had already gone wrong before it reached him, was in quo, in whom, and the sentence he then had in front of him said that all of us had sinned in Adam, inside him, before we were born, a fault already committed in a man long dead. He was not a cruel man. He was a careful reader, following a sentence of Scripture closely and faithfully to its floor, and the only trouble with the magnificent edifice he raised upon it is that the sentence he was following was not the one that had been written.

What grew there came down in a long unhurried descent that took centuries and felt, to the men making it, like nothing but more careful reading.² If the fault is inherited then the newborn carries it; and if the newborn carries it then the newborn who dies before baptism carries it still, out past the edge of the church and into whatever waits there, and Augustine, who built most of this, did not look away from where the reasoning went. A condemned mass, he called the human race, massa damnata, justly condemned and condemned as one, the few who are saved drawn out of it by a mercy that owed them nothing and passed the rest by. I set this down without heat, the way I would want it set down if it were mine. And I want one fact set down hard, because the rest of the essay leans on it: the error did not pass unseen at the time. A younger contemporary of Augustine’s, Julian of Eclanum, who could read the Greek that Augustine could not, put the objection to him plainly and went on putting it, that the sentence said because and not in whom and would not bear the weight of an inherited guilt. Augustine had the right reading set in front of him, by a man able to give it, and he kept the other. The doctrine did not grow in the dark, for want of anyone to point at the mistake. It grew with the mistake pointed at.

I am not the man to be trusted on the Greek, so I will hand the point to someone who cannot be brushed aside. The most accomplished translator of the New Testament now living, David Bentley Hart, who reads the language better than almost anyone now reading it and who has not the slightest interest in flattering the conclusion I am driving toward, calls the Latin handling of those two words one of the most consequential mistranslations in the whole history of the religion.³ He is right, and his being right matters to me less for the weight of his authority than for what it forces up into the light. Here is a claim about the standing of every human soul before God, about innocence and guilt at the deepest level the tradition is able to reach, and it is resting on a preposition that was misread. And it is not the only place the tradition rests on such a thing. The same translator has spent a large part of his life arguing that the word the church hardened into eternal, the word in eternal life and in eternal fire, aiōnios, does not securely carry that meaning at all, that it means belonging to an age, to the age that is coming, and that the genuinely endless word in the Greek, aïdios, is the one the New Testament keeps for God and never once spends on the fate of the damned.⁴ That second claim is contested in a way the first is not, and I will not pretend the lexicons have come down on his side, because they have not; they allow the word both senses and leave us to fight over which is meant. But the two cases lean the same way and put the same question. A doctrine of everlasting life and a doctrine of everlasting punishment, the two ends of the whole Christian account of what we are for, both standing exactly where the Greek went uncertain and the reading fell one way and not the other.

The easy thing to say about this is that it is ironic, a fine joke at the believers’ expense, eternity hanging by a slip of the pen, and the easy thing is also the useless thing, because everyone has already said it and it goes nowhere. What interests me is not the embarrassment but what the error lets me see about the thing that made the doctrine, which kept working after the mistake exactly as it had before and did not so much as break stride. Consider what would have to be true for a mistranslation to grow a whole religion’s account of the soul. The mind that received those broken words did not receive a gap, an absence of meaning sitting where the right meaning should have been, and stall there, baffled. It received the gap and made, on the spot and without apparent effort, a meaning of the highest kind a meaning can be, a complete architecture of guilt and inheritance and rescue, as though the material had been sufficient all along. It was not reaching for the sense of the text and missing it; it was doing the one thing it never stops doing, which is to make sense, to bring a presence of meaning into being where a moment before there was none. I had thought at first to say that the faculty cannot tell a sound text from a broken one, but that is weaker than the truth and the record will not quite carry it, since the break can be shown to the mind and was, when Julian set the right reading in front of Augustine. The harder thing, the thing the record does carry, is that the production does not stop when the error is named. The meaning, once made, goes on standing after the ground it stood on has been pulled out from under it. An error is simply the place where you get to watch the work go on with the lights up.

I have written elsewhere about a nearer instance of the same thing, the way the mind of a person who has lost someone it loved goes on producing that person after the death, the step heard in the hall, the place laid at the table, the dead kept in the room long after the body is in the ground, because the mind cannot bear an absence as an absence and will not stop making the presence it knows how to make.⁵ What Augustine’s preposition shows me is that the identical faculty is at work where no one has died at all, where the only thing in front of it is a defective Latin sentence. Set it before a gap, a place where the meaning has dropped out, and it will not leave the gap as a gap; it fills it, the way the widow fills the doorway, and what it puts there is never noise but always a sense, a coherent husband on the stair, a whole doctrine where a moment before there was a hole, and it takes up residence inside what it has made as though the thing had been there all along to be found. The bereaved cannot leave the dead absent. The reader cannot leave the sentence empty. It is one habit, and I have come to think it is very nearly the only one the mind has.

There is an answer to all of this that is older and graver than any joke about misprints, and I want to give it its whole weight before I say what I think it is. The believer is not obliged to grant that the doctrine rests on an error in the way I have been implying. He can say, and the tradition has said it from the beginning, that the providence which governs the church governed its reading too, that God is not so feeble a craftsman as to be undone by a translator’s slip, and that what looks from underneath like a mistake was from above the appointed channel through which a truth was meant to arrive.⁶ The liturgy sings of the sin of Adam as a happy fault, felix culpa, the fault that earned so great a redeemer; the old confession holds that Scripture has been kept pure in all ages by God’s singular care. On this reading there is no error at the root of anything, only the strange courtesy of a God who writes straight with crooked lines. I do not think this can be refuted, and I will not insult it by pretending I can refute it. What I notice is something else. The move the believer makes, the move that turns the slip into providence, that refuses to let the accident stay an accident and finds an intention waiting inside it, is the very move I have been describing from the start, and Julian shows it at full stretch, because here the accident was not even allowed to stand as an accident; the correction was held out, and the intention was found on the far side of refusing it. It is the mind unable to leave a meaningless thing meaningless, producing a presence of intention over a gap, performed now not by one reader at his desk but by a whole church across a thousand years, over the gap in its own founding text, and willing in the end to read providence even into the rejection of the very reading that would have closed the gap. Providence, read this way, is not the refutation of what I am saying but the largest and most patient instance of it. The widow turns toward the door for her husband. The church turns toward its mistranslation and finds that God was in it all along. I have never been able to see, from where I stand, that these are two different kinds of act.

But I have let the wrong man stand in for the opposition, and the strongest reader I could set across the table from me would not make the providential argument at all. He thinks, as I have said, that the readings were mistakes, and bad ones, and he has said so in print more bluntly than I have dared to.⁷ His quarrel with me lies deeper and runs quieter, and it is the only quarrel in this whole matter that genuinely interests me. He would grant me Augustine and the preposition, grant me the widow and the church, grant that the mind makes meaning and makes it readily, and then he would put to me the question I keep trying to step around. How do you know, he would ask, that the meaning is made and not found. When a mind brings a presence of meaning up out of what looks to you like a gap, why are you so certain it is producing the meaning rather than receiving it; why should the gap have been empty in the first place; why is it not the case that meaning is no more manufactured by minds than light is manufactured by the eye, that being itself is intelligible all the way down, lit from within, and that a mind which keeps finding sense wherever it turns keeps finding it because the sense is there to be found. And he would press it past the world and into me. What I keep calling production, he would say, is at every step a making of sense and not of noise; when the widow fills the doorway she fills it with a coherent man and not with static, and the reach toward the intelligible rather than the meaningless is not a bias I hand myself. It is, he would say, the print of the given on the inside of the very faculty I am using to deny it, and I cannot get behind that faculty to check whether the print is really there, because I would have to use it to do the checking. That is not a soft question and there is no soft answer to it. It is the whole of classical theism on its feet, and the man putting it has spent his life on the conviction that to be is to be intelligible and that meaning comes to us the way light does, from a source and not from the eye, so that my picture of a mind spinning sense out of noise is to him no description of the world at all but a confession of what I have decided in advance the world is forbidden to contain.

I have turned that over more than I would like, and here is the most honest answer I can give it. I cannot prove him wrong. But before I say where I think the ground tilts, I have to give back the true half of his objection, because it is better handed over than taken. There is a meaning in Paul’s sentence in the plain human sense of the word: the Greek has a grammar, the grammar leans toward because and away from in whom, and Julian could hand Augustine the right reading because that small determinacy was really there to be handed over. I am not saying that the mind makes meaning out of nothing, or that a text is so much vapor that one reading is worth any other. Augustine did not invent his doctrine from the empty air; he built it where the human determinacy of the sentence gave out, in the room the grammar left standing open, and there, where a meaning could have been waited for, the mind supplied one instead. So the given I deny is not that one but the larger given, the meaning said to lie in the grain of being itself, beneath every grammar and before all of them, and its sharpest form is the one he pressed not on the world but on me, that my making is always a making of sense and never of noise, that the faculty is bent toward coherence before I have done anything with it at all. I feel the force of that more than of anything else he says. But it turns on its own hinge, because I can no more get behind the bias toward sense to certify that I gave it to myself than he can get behind it to certify that it was placed in me; the faculty is the only instrument either of us has for the looking, and it will not turn round to see its own back. So I do here what I did with providence. I name it, I grant that I cannot answer it, I decline to be surprised by it, and I go on. I cannot prove the larger given is not there. If it is, then the mind that keeps finding sense is receiving and not making, and my whole account is a blindness got up as a theory, and I concede that much without reserve, because the alternative is to claim a certainty no one has ever had.

What I will not concede is quite as much as I once meant to. I had wanted to say that my picture holds his inside it, that I can explain his sense of a given as what a producing mind feels from within while he cannot explain mine without adding the given on top, and that the containment runs one way only. It does not. He can return the courtesy as fast as I pay it, for my own unease, my sense that I am merely making, is exactly what a finite mind would feel straining against a ground too large for it to take in, and his picture predicts my disquiet as neatly as mine predicts his conviction. Both account for both feelings, and I saw the asymmetry only because I ran the explanation in the one direction that flattered me. The honest remainder is smaller, and I think it still stands. My picture asks for fewer kinds of thing in the world than his does. It asks for the faculty, which can be watched at its work, in the woman moving toward the hall and the bishop bent over his broken Latin and myself as I set down this sentence, and it does not ask for the given besides. That is the whole of the advantage, and it is real, and it is not a proof, because whether the world is in fact lean enough to be the one my picture needs is the very thing we are quarreling over, and the leanness cannot be entered as evidence for itself.⁸

A subtler critic than I will ever be once described the whole business of reading as a kind of divination that never arrives at its object, the interpreter forever glimpsing a secret through the weave of the text and never holding it in his hand, so that the work of interpretation ends, as he put it, in a necessary disappointment.⁹ He was right about the glimpsing and wrong, I think, about where it comes to rest. The reader he describes is a melancholy figure, always aware that the secret has slipped him once again, and the minds I am describing are not melancholy in the least. They are triumphant. They do not glimpse the secret and mourn that it got away from them; they produce the secret, give it a name, original sin or life everlasting, raise the cathedral over it, and forget altogether that they were the ones who made it. The disappointment he found waiting at the end of interpretation is what a mind feels while it still knows that it is interpreting. The doctrines come afterward, once that knowledge has been mercifully lost.

I have to turn all of this on myself now, because if I do not I have written something clever and not something true. Every word of it depends on a mind that makes meaning and cannot stop, that throws a presence across every gap it meets, and I have been describing that mind throughout as though I were standing somewhere outside it with an open view. I am not outside it. There is no outside to stand in. The thing I have been building in these pages, the single faculty underneath the widow and the bishop and the whole long history of belief, making eternity out of anything at all, is itself a meaning, and I am the mind that made it, and I made it, for all I can prove, over a gap. It is the grandest thing the faculty has produced in this essay, a law wide enough to hold the whole of human meaning in one hand, and I have no way to get behind my own eyes and check whether I came upon it in the world or spun it out of my need for it to be so. I am doing, in the writing of this, the exact thing I have charged everyone else with doing, and so is Augustine, and so is the church, and so is the man across the table with his given, who cannot climb out of his own mind to confirm that the meaning he receives was set there before him and not made by him, any more than I can climb out of mine to confirm that it was made and not set there. We are every one of us inside the production, with no door.

What draws me to all this in the end has nothing to do with the doctrines, which I do not hold and do not begrudge anyone for holding. It is the question underneath two essays I have already written, why it should be so nearly impossible to say yes to a life with its own ending inside it, to take the whole of a loved thing, the having and the losing in one breath, and mean it.¹⁰ I think this is a part of the answer. To say yes to the loss would be to assent to an absence, to a real emptiness in the place where the loved thing was, and the mind cannot dwell in an absence as an absence. It can mark one well enough, name it, point to the empty chair and the door that does not open, but it marks it always by setting some presence in its place, an image, an expectation, an ache, so that the bare emptiness it would have to consent to is the one thing it can never quite bring before itself. It makes the dead present in the hall, and it makes eternity out of a broken sentence, and it makes a god to stand behind the world and mean it well, and each of these is the same refusal, the refusal to let a gap be a gap. The god the believer receives, and the husband the widow hears on the stair, and the seed of guilt that Augustine found waiting in Adam are at the root the same act, the mind filling what it cannot bear to leave empty. I do not say this to take anything from anyone, and I am wary of how it will sound, because I am inside it as deeply as any of them, filling my own emptiness with this very essay as I write it. The only difference I can honestly claim is not that I see further than the others but that I am trying to catch the act in the doing, even as I do it. Whether that is wisdom, or only a lonelier way of being unable to stop, I am not the one who can say, and here, as before, I would rather stop than spoil it by claiming more.

1. Romans 5:12. The phrase ἐφ’ ᾧ (eph’ hō) is the preposition epi with a relative pronoun in the dative, and the reading most modern exegetes favor across confessional lines is causal, “because” or “inasmuch as,” so that Paul has death spreading to all because all sinned, rather than all sinning while inside Adam. John Meyendorff, surveying the dispute, notes that the causal sense is the one “accepted by most modern scholars of all confessional backgrounds,” and that the Latin in quo, “in whom,” cannot honestly be drawn out of the Greek. One complication belongs here: Augustine did not work from the Vulgate, which was being made during his own lifetime, but from Old Latin versions whose wording at this verse ran close to it, and his Greek was, by his own admission, poor, so that he leaned on the Latin where it mattered most.

2. The descent is laid out across the anti-Pelagian writings, above all De Peccatorum Meritis et Remissione. The reading of Romans 5:12 he took over from Ambrosiaster, who had it before him; the objection that the Greek says because and not in whom was pressed on him again and again by Julian of Eclanum, in the long exchange behind the Contra Julianum and the unfinished work against Julian that he left at his death. From inherited guilt followed the damnation, mild but real, of infants dying unbaptized, affirmed against the Pelagians at Carthage in 418, and the figure of the massa damnata, the condemned mass of the race out of which the elect are drawn by grace that owes them nothing. I am not claiming the doctrine of sin stands or falls with one verse; Augustine had other reasons and other texts. I am claiming that the particular shape it took, guilt inherited rather than mere weakness inherited, leaned its full weight on the misread sentence.

3. The phrase is from his footnote to Romans 5 in The New Testament: A Translation (2017), where he calls the Vulgate’s rendering “one of the most consequential mistranslations in Christian history.” I lean on him here on purpose, because the objection I least want to face is that there is no real error at all, only my reading of one, and his authority removes it for me; no one is going to inform the most exacting Greekist in modern theology that he has misjudged the Greek. That he is also, as the essay goes on to show, the reader most dangerous to my conclusion is an irony I have tried to use rather than hide.

4. aiōnios is the adjective from aiōn, an age. Hart sets out the case in the concluding postscript to his translation; behind him stands the fuller scholarly argument of Ilaria Ramelli and David Konstan in Terms for Eternity, which tracks aiōnios and aïdios across classical and Christian Greek and finds the first far less settled in the sense of “endless” than the tradition assumed. I want to be fair to the other side, which is strong. The standard lexicons, BDAG and Louw-Nida among them, carry an unending sense for aiōnios beside the age sense and attach it to the eschatological passages; a sympathetic reviewer in First Things grants that Hart “makes a convincing case” and stays unpersuaded, on the ground that the Greek word inherits the freight of the Hebrew olam standing behind it; others have judged his refusal to let the word ever mean “eternal” too rigid by half. The point I draw is the narrow one, not that Hart has settled the matter, but that aïdios, the word that unambiguously means everlasting, is used of God’s power in Romans and of the bound angels in Jude, and that second use is the hard case I want to be seen seeing. The chains the angels are held in are a punishment, or near enough to one, and a classicist pressing me would lay that verse in my path at once. The point survives it only by staying narrow: the word that plainly means everlasting is spent there on the chains of fallen spirits and nowhere in the New Testament on the punishment of human beings, so that the doctrine of an endless human hell stands instead on aiōnios, the word that did not have to be read as endless.

5. The essay is my “On Being Unable to Die,” where I argue that the mind produces presence and has never produced an absence, and that grief is not the slow withdrawal of attachment the textbooks describe but the continued manufacture of the missing person. The nearest prior claimant to the present essay is Harold Bloom, who argued in The Anxiety of Influence that strong poetry is made out of the poet’s misreading of his precursors, and who went so far, in Jesus and Yahweh, as to call the New Testament a great creative misreading of the Hebrew Bible. I owe him the acknowledgment, and I want to be exact about the distance between us. Bloom wrote a theory of creation, of how the new and strong work gets made by an exceptional maker straining against a father. What I am describing is not creation but inability, the ordinary mind unable to leave an absence alone, and Augustine was no strong poet clearing room for himself but a man with poor Greek making an honest error, after which the doctrine grew on its own, against his interest, with the mistake pointed out to his face. Bloom asks how the new is made. I am asking why the gap cannot be left open.

6. The happy fault is sung in the Exsultet of the Easter vigil, O felix culpa, quae talem ac tantum meruit habere Redemptorem, the fault that merited so great a redeemer; the claim that Scripture has been “kept pure in all ages” by God’s “singular care and providence” is the Westminster Confession’s. Reading providence as the meaning-making faculty operating at the scale of a whole tradition is, as far as I can find, my own, and it is the same move I made in the essay on death, where the life to come is this same overproduction of presence carried out by a people over the whole of its dead. I hold it as a redescription and not a refutation. It shows the believer’s providence and the mind’s production to be one act seen from two sides, and it does not, because it cannot, show which side is the true one.

7. The universalism is the argument of That All Shall Be Saved (2019); the metaphysics behind the objection I have put in his mouth is that of The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss (2013), where being and intelligibility are not constructed by minds but given, and God is their source. I have voiced the objection in my own words and not his, and I have tried to give it in its strongest form rather than a convenient one, because the essay would be worth nothing if it only beat a weak version of the position that frightens it.

8. The advantage I am claiming is a claim about parsimony alone, not about proof, and not about containment, which runs both ways, since each picture can explain the other’s convictions as readily as its own. What is left, once the containment is given up, is only the count of kinds. The smaller picture needs the faculty, which can be observed; the larger needs the faculty and a given, which cannot. This does not make the smaller true. The given may be there, and the mind may be receiving where I say it is producing, and parsimony has never been a guarantee of anything but economy. I press the point only this far, that the burden lies on the one positing the extra thing, and that the leaner account is not the junior party in the exchange merely for believing in less. A reader who knows my essay on death will see the danger I am in, since there I granted that the watching self on which everything rested might itself be one of the mind’s products, and if that is so then the I doing the producing in this essay is producing itself first of all, and the whole argument is resting on something it cannot get underneath.

9. Frank Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy (1979), the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, in which interpretation is divination, the secret is glimpsed and never finally held, and reading ends in what he calls a necessary disappointment. I correct here a citation I have seen attached to these ideas, to a British Academy memorial essay of 2011; that is a memoir written after his death, not his own book, and the thoughts are from the 1979 lectures. The deeper philosophical support for what I am claiming, that the possibility of failure and misfiring is built into the nature of any sign at all, is Derrida’s, in “Signature Event Context” and Limited Inc, though his way of putting it dissolves the very difference between genuine meaning and error that I am trying to keep, and so I take the support with that reservation noted.

10. The life with its ending inside it, and the double yes to the having and the losing, are the matter of two earlier essays of mine, and the present one turned out, in a way I did not plan when I began it, to be their explanation. The reason the second yes is so nearly impossible to say is that it asks the mind to assent to an absence, and the mind has no way to dwell in one; it can mark an absence, and affirm a presence it has lost, but the bare emptiness it is being asked to bless is the single thing it cannot bring before itself to be blessed. I leave the matter where Stakes left its own, holding something smaller than a conclusion and, I hope, truer than one.