How Original is Original Sin? Aldous Huxley
How Original Is Original Sin?
Until now I have talked about the human situation in relation to the planetary scale, which is the largest possible one. In this lecture I want to bring it down to the much smaller scale of the individual and to discuss genetics and environment and their relations with our general philosophy of life and political ideals.
I shall begin with a question, and the question is this: How original is original sin? This is a question which has preoccupied men in all countries for a very long time. How original is what seems to be the fundamental badness of man, so strongly stressed in orthodox Christianity? And how original is what may be called ‘original virtue’, which is stressed more strongly in the Taoist and Hindu traditions (where the basic nature of man is called the ‘Atman’, and is identical with the basic nature of the Godhead), but which is also within the Christian tradition—what Quakers called the ‘inner light’ and the medieval mystics used to call the ‘scintilla animae’ (spark of the soul) or the ‘synderesis’.
This question of original sin and original virtue has been asked ever since man started philosophizing about himself, and it has been answered in a great variety of ways. Within the Indian tradition it has been answered in terms of the theory of karma: each of us comes into the world with the end product of innumerable past lives, which somehow have to be worked out life after life. This is an idea of heredity; our original destiny is pre-ordained for us by previous existences, which we inherit. In the Greek tradition the problem is discussed in terms of the relationship between man and the gods on the one side and necessity on the other, a necessity which nothing can change and which dominates even the gods. Finally we come to the Judaeo-Christian tradition, where in the past the question was discussed in terms of grace and free will, of nature and grace, of predestination and salvation by works.
The problem of predestination is summed up in four curious lines from a poem by Matthew Prior—a most surprising poem, because Prior generally wrote rather frivolous and charming lyrics while this is a long reflective poem about religious problems.
Cou’d destin’d Judas long before he fell
Avoid the terrors of a future Hell?
Cou’d Paul deny, resist or not embrace
Obtruded Heav’n, and efficacious Grace?
In the history of Christian theology the whole problem was thrashed out in the beginning of the fifth century in the great controversy between Pelagius and St Augustine. It is worth going into this in some detail because it seems to summarize in the context of an earlier tradition a problem which still vexes us: the problem of nature and nurture.
Pelagius was apparently a Briton, either from Scotland or, possibly, from Ireland. He was brought up in the tradition of the British Church of that period, which was profoundly affected by the Eastern Church rather than the Roman Church, and he made his way to Rome as a middle-aged man in about 400. He found Rome then, as it generally was for many centuries thereafter, a real sink of iniquity; but he also found, and this disturbed him very much, that the Romans were justifying their behaviour in terms of the Augustinian doctrine of the total depravity of man and the bondage of the will to evil. Granted the truth of this doctrine, why make any effort to behave a little bit better?
Pelagius was evidently an early example of British practicality and empiricism, and he decided that what was necessary was a reform of social institutions and self-help. He was convinced that man could improve himself, both by individual effort and by making respectable and decent social institutions. He denied the originality of original sin, and this was his profound heresy. He denied that the sin of Adam affected anybody but Adam himself; he denied that it went on affecting the entire human race, and he insisted that all children were born innocent even as Adam had been born innocent. This was the opposite of the doctrine of St Augustine, who affirmed that children were born in original sin and, unless baptized, would certainly be damned. St Augustine even asserted, in very picturesque terms, that hell is paved with a mosaic of infants less than a span long—which we find a somewhat frightful doctrine, but which nevertheless follows logically from the assumption of the originality of original sin.
We cannot go into the details of the controversy, which was extremely important in the history of Christian dogma, but it is worth pointing out certain peculiarities in the Pelagian doctrine. Pelagius insisted that men are born without any inherited characteristics. He said they are born ‘non pleni’ (not full) and without a character; that they are born ‘sine virtute, ita et sine vitio’, that is to say without virtue even as without vice, without inborn tendencies either to good or to evil; and that each man becomes what he is, for good or for evil, in virtue of his surroundings and of his reactions to them. These ideas were profoundly at variance with the Augustinian doctrine and with the orthodox view of the Church of the time and were condemned; but for the next twelve centuries or so theological compromises had to be worked out between Pelagianism or semi-Pelagianism on the one hand and extreme Augustinianism on the other.
The next important Pelagian figure who appears is Helvétius, one of the thinkers of the eighteenth century, when people began to believe in inevitable progress—a belief which entails the conviction that man is determined primarily by the nature of his environment and can advance by improving it. Helvétius was extremely influential in his time, though very little read now. He reaffirmed the Pelagian doctrine that man is born without any hereditary characteristics and that he becomes what he is in virtue of what he learns and of how he reacts to the influences around him. Helvétius made the somewhat astonishing statement that any shepherd boy of the Cévennes could be turned into an Isaac Newton by suitable education. This sort of view prevailed to a considerable extent among the thinkers of the so-called Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, and certain elements of it were still to be found among the utilitarians of the nineteenth.
On the biological level we find, again in eighteenth-century France, the interesting figure of Lamarck, who insisted that environment could create hereditary factors—in a word, he insisted on the heritability of acquired characteristics. This view was controverted in the nineteenth century first by Darwin and then, in their detailed study of genetics, by Mendel and his followers. Today I don’t think any geneticist accepts Lamarck’s view, except possibly certain geneticists in Russia, followers of Lysenko, who claim that they can modify a plant species by environmental changes in such a way that the changes within the individual plant will be inherited. These claims, as far as I know, have never been substantiated, and the great majority of geneticists remain completely opposed to the idea.
Somewhat before Lysenko began his preaching in Russia, we had the phenomenon in this country of J. B. Watson’s behaviourism, in the early days of which Watson made some quite remarkable statements which exactly parallel those of Helvétius. He affirmed, for example, that he could find no evidence of inherited human faculties of music or mathematics, and that man’s behaviour was entirely determined by environmental causes. I think there has been some modification of this point of view, but even today the behaviourists tend to play down hereditary factors to an extraordinary extent. In Professor Skinner’s monumental Science and Human Behavior there is exactly one page devoted to hereditary factors, and all the rest is devoted to the determination of behaviour by environmental conditioning. In theological terms, we may say that people with the behaviourist turn of mind tend to be Pelagians, whereas those with the geneticist turn of mind tend to be Augustinians.The truth as usual lies somewhere between the two extremes. It seems perfectly clear that hereditary factors—nature—and environmental factors—nurture—are equally important and that in point of fact we can never isolate the two.
In view, however, of the fact that there has been for a long time a down-playing of hereditary factors, I think it is worthwhile to go into what is original—inherited—in the human individual. In general we find that as we go up the evolutionary scale, the variability of species increases, and there is no question at all that when we reach man we find the highest level of variability of any species that we know. There are extraordinary inherited differences, such as anatomical differences, between human individuals. Perhaps the best of the recent atlases of anatomy, Anson’s, published in 1950, is probably the first to stress the profound variability of human beings on the anatomical level.
Anson uses eight different plates to show the common variations of human hand. He has to use no fewer than twelve to show the human heart in its commonest variations (there are people who have written of the heart who say that it is if anything more variable than the human face—an amazing statement when you consider how variable is the human face).
There are many other ways in which human beings vary anatomically. Take, for example, that very important organ, the intestine. In long and skinny people, as compared with round, soft people, the difference between the weight and length of the intestine is something fantastic: the intestine in the fat person may weigh twice
