He asked what the woman was for and could not find an answer, with the answer four chapters earlier in his own citation of the verse. He divided the image of God. And he made the guilt heritable.
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Augustine of Hippo wrote in Latin in North Africa and died in 430. He is the most consequential theologian the Western church has had, and three of his operations bear directly on Eve: a question about her function, a division of the image, and the conversion of a charge into an inheritance.
All three are checkable in his own texts, and all three have the same shape, which is the shape the two writers before him left: the conclusion is in place first and the text is brought to it.
[See EVE · TERTULLIAN · JEROME]
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THE QUESTION HE ASKS ABOUT HER
In the ninth book of the Literal Commentary on Genesis, having quoted the making of the woman, he puts the question directly and answers it by elimination.
Aut si ad hoc adiutorium gignendi filios, non est facta mulier viro, ad quod ergo adiutorium facta est? If the woman was not made as a help to the man for begetting children, then for what help was she made?
Working the ground together is considered and dropped: there was not yet labor enough to need help, et si opus esset, melius adiutorium masculus fieret, and if there had been need, a male would have made a better help. Company is considered and dropped: quanto enim congruentius ad convivendum et colloquendum duo amici pariter quam vir et mulier habitarent, how much more fittingly would two friends live together and converse than a man and a woman. Even command and obedience is considered and dropped, because if one had to order and the other obey, seniority already supplied that: one was made first and the other after.
Then the conclusion. Quapropter non invenio ad quod adiutorium facta sit mulier viro, si pariendi causa subtrahitur. He does not find, he says, for what help the woman was made for the man, once childbearing is taken away.
[See EZER KENEGDO · REPRODUCTIVE CONTROL]
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AND THE METHOD FORCES THE ANSWER BEFORE THE TEXT IS CONSULTED
Look at what the procedure can possibly return, because it cannot return anything else.
He tests each candidate function by asking whether a man could perform it better, and every function a human being can perform, a man can perform. So an elimination run on that test has exactly one survivor, and the survivor is fixed before the first candidate is examined. The answer is not found in Genesis. It is produced by the form of the question, which asks what she is for rather than who she is.
And the question itself has already done the work. A thing that must be for something is an instrument, and an instrument is specified by its function. He is not asking what the verse says. He is deriving a specification.
[See THE POLARITY TREE · DISQUALIFIED TESTIMONY]
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AND THE ANSWER WAS IN HIS OWN CITATION, FOUR CHAPTERS EARLIER
This is the part that cannot be put down to a poor text, because the text he needed is the text he quoted.
Book nine opens by quoting the verse, and his Latin reads faciamus ei adiutorium secundum ipsum, a help for him corresponding to himself. Secundum ipsum is a close rendering of the Hebrew kenegdo, which carries facing, over against, as a counterpart. The phrase says what kind of help: not a help for a task but a help answering to him, of his own kind, standing opposite.
He quotes it at the top of the book and cannot find it four chapters later, because by then he is no longer asking what the words say. He is asking what office she fills.
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AND HE ROUTES THE FRIENDSHIP BOND AWAY FROM HER BY NAME
The friendship clause is the one that should be read slowly, because he does not omit friendship. He considers it and assigns it elsewhere.
Ad convivendum et colloquendum, for living together and for conversing, duo amici, two friends, would do better. So the two goods that constitute a friendship in his own working vocabulary, shared life and speech between equals, are named, found good, and placed between two men. What is left to the man and woman after the friendship goods have been assigned away is the one function that required her, and the relation between them is specified by what is left.
A relation that has been emptied of shared life and shared speech is not a lesser friendship. It is a different kind of thing, and he says which kind.
[See THE DEAD HANDLE · LOYALTY]
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AND TWO MEN WOULD NOT HAVE CURED IT
Set the duo amici against the verse he is expounding, because the verse had already considered the pairing he is recommending.
It is not good that the man should be alone. That is a stated deficiency with a stated remedy, and the remedy supplied was not a second man. So if two friends really would live together and converse more fittingly, the cure for the aloneness was available and was not taken. His reasoning does not expound the verse, it corrects it, and what he offers as the improvement is the one thing the account declined.
And the reason it was declined is geometry rather than preference. A single hand has no handedness operatively, because handedness is a relation and not a property, and a second hand of the same handedness supplies none: that is the same tone doubled, the unison, which is the merge. Two men would not have answered the aloneness. They would have doubled it. What the deficiency required was a counterpart, and kenegdo says which kind: over against, facing.
Then notice what he assigns in a single paragraph. Shared life and speech go to the second self, which is the merge. She is left with the function of bearing, which is the servant. Both burials, in one breath, by the hand that had asked what she is for.
Which is also why the elimination could not have returned anything else. It compares on a function axis, and functions are substitutable, so any two parties can be scored against each other for any task. A counterpart is not a function and does not appear on that axis at all. His test cannot see the thing the verse supplied.
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THE IMAGE, DIVIDED IN ONE SECTION
The seventh chapter of the twelfth book of On the Trinity asks whether the woman is also the image of God, and the answer has two halves that are usually quoted separately.
The first half is a defense of her. He says the apostle's remark is not contrary to Genesis, that the Genesis text makes human nature itself, complete in both sexes, in God's image, and that it does not separate the woman from the image of God.
The second half, in the same section, installs the division: the woman together with her husband is the image of God so that the whole substance may be one image, but when she is referred separately to her quality of help-meet, which regards the woman herself alone, then she is not the image of God, while as regards the man alone, he is the image of God as fully and completely as when the woman is joined with him.
So the concession is real and it is not load-bearing. He grants that Genesis does not exclude her, and then holds that considered as herself she is not the image, and that the man alone is the image completely, her joining adding nothing to him.
[See DID GOD CURSE WOMAN · THE LIES THEY TOLD US ABOUT EVE]
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AND THE MECHANISM IS THE RANKING HE ALREADY USED ON THE ANIMALS
He gives the reasoning openly, and it is not about women at all, which is what makes it useful.
The division is carried over from his account of the mind. The mind contemplating eternal truth is the image of God; the same mind turned to the knowledge of lower, temporal, bodily things is, on that side, not the image of God. He then maps the pair onto the sexes: the man stands at the position of the mind on its eternal side, and the woman at the position of the mind's attention to lower things.
Which makes her, in the argument, the figure of the faculty that has to be restrained, and the covering he discusses is a sign of that restraint rather than a fact about her. It is want of reason as a warrant, the same instrument that put the animals outside the class of things with an inside, applied here to the sexes by the same hand.
[See THE NEPHESH GATE · THE CONSCRIPTION OF THE ANIMALS]
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AND THE GUILT BECOMES HERITABLE AT ROMANS 5:12
State this one at its real strength and no further, because it is contested and the overclaim is common.
Paul's Greek is eph' hō pantes hēmarton. The Old Latin he worked from gives in quo omnes peccaverunt, in whom all sinned, and he read in quo as pointing to Adam: all sinned in Adam, so the guilt descends by propagation. The Greek is capable of that reading. It is more naturally taken as a conjunction, because or inasmuch as all sinned, which is the reading most modern scholars of every confession now hold, and it is not how the Greek fathers read the verse.
So this is a contested rendering and not a demonstrated error, and the finding does not need it to be an error. The scholarship that has examined his insistence on in quo concludes that it follows from a conviction he already held, that sin is an inherent human nature, which puts the Latin phrase in the position of support rather than source.
What he contributed is not the charge. Tertullian had already laid the charge against a class. What he contributed is the mechanism by which it is transmitted, so that it no longer needs to be proved against anyone.
[See SUFFERING · THE HANDOVER]
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WHAT THIS ESTABLISHES AND WHAT IT DOES NOT
The objections are serious and two of them are partly good.
He is reasoning inside a genre and a cosmology, with the tiered soul he inherited from Aristotle and Plotinus as the furniture of educated thought, and reading him as though he chose it freely is anachronism. The Literal Commentary passage is exploratory, raising difficulties in order to work through them. And the On the Trinity chapter is explicitly figurative and mystical by his own heading, so reading it as a flat claim about women misreads its register.
Granted, and the findings survive all three. An inherited cosmology explains the shape of the ranking and does not explain which way he pointed it, and the elimination test he ran is his own. An exploratory question still produced a conclusion he never withdrew. And a figurative register does not make the division harmless, because what was received and built on for a millennium was the division, not the figure. The concession in the first half of the section was available to be built on too, and was not.
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Three men, three centuries, three operations, and not one of them reached the conclusion from the text.
Tertullian quoted Genesis 3:16 correctly and laid the charge in the next breath. Jerome had a practice for a word he could not resolve and did not use it where a woman was the subject. Augustine quoted adiutorium secundum ipsum and then could not find what she was for. The texts were not the cause in any of the three cases, which is why correcting the texts has never ended it, and why the correction is still worth making: not because it removes the doctrine, but because it removes the doctrine's cover.
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