Alan Jacobs is an author I enjoy – his The Narnian (a combined life and discussion of C S Lewis) was superb.   Shaming the Devil, a book of essays, wasn’t just written well, and readably, and wisely, it looked clearly at the promises and limits of the modern era.

So when I discovered his latest book, Original Sin, was available, I ordered it on interloan to see what it was really about.   Well, of course it’s about the title topic, but in the process we’re given the chance to ramble through a number of highways and byways that sometimes seem to have only a limited connection to the subject.  

For example he opens with Six Stories, in which we are acquainted with the Locrians, three characters from Plato, King David and Bathsheba, a disciple of Confucius called Xún Zi, the Yoruban religion, and the New Guinea people called the Urapmin.    All this in twenty pages.  And this is merely the beginning.    Famous names, infamous names and a number of names that meant nothing to me all weave through these pages, and in every case Jacobs makes their stories intriguing enough to keep us reading, even if at times we wonder quite why we’re reading about them. 

Early in the piece there’s a good deal about Augustine, as you’d expect, (and a little less  about Paul).   Augustine is almost the backbone of the book – and rightly so; his name pops up again and again whether Jacobs is discussing Coleridge, Southey and Robert Owen, or Pinker, Dawkins and Rebecca West.  

Jacobs isn’t writing a book on the theology of original sin.  It isn’t always clear to me, however, quite what he is writing.    His subtitle of a ‘cultural history’ leaves him the latitude to digress, and consequently the book lacks some of the tightness of his other tomes.   He always comes back to his theme, but some of his subjects take off with such a life of their own that they may well have started out as essays that Jacobs has decided to draw together under one umbrella. 

And while he’s a believer in original sin, and is perhaps surprised that so many people have thought there’s some better alternative explanation, he doesn’t firmly bring a conclusion to the why of original sin.   It seems to be a reality in our lives, but how did it actually get into us, and why did it?    Avoiding theology to a great extent means that the reader is left understanding that Jacobs is convinced about it, but doesn’t essentially manage to convince us.

All that aside, this is a fascinating, if discursive, look at one of the much-maligned doctrines of the Church.   The conclusion Jacobs comes to is this: you may hate the idea of original sin, you may think it’s old-fashioned, that Augustine was a ranter and a prude, and that life would be better without the concept; but in the end, like it or not, original sin seems to be woven into the fabric of our beings.   Better get used to it.