Catrina throws out a post about Christianity, modesty and nakedness, re: the fall of Adam and Eve, and Augustine develops an interesting argument justifying Adam and Eve requiring clothing...
According to Augustine, as long as Adam and Eve obeyed God, they had complete willed control over their bodies. (Augustine goes on for quite a while about organs of generation, procreation without lust etc...) But the object is clear -- before the fall, everything was "mind over matter". When it happened that Adam and Eve disobeyed God, they fractured the whole paradigm in some sense, and their physical bodies 'rebelled' against their wills, mirroring their wills' rebellion against God. Now given our First Parents' nakedness, and given that Augustine (in his pagan days) enjoyed the company of ladies... we can all imagine what exactly happened to Adam...
Thus begins the era of pants, and continual squabbling over who is responsible for lust...
But to drag this around to the topic of the readings, the backflip Augustine did in explaining the Genesis story had absolutely no textual support in Genesis. It was grounded merely in Augustine's owns sense of what was plausible and internally consistent (though it did inform his more theologically-relevant opinions about Original Sin, which DID influence the ideas of the Church)
That, to me, is slightly unnerving, that a chunk of theological opinions are based merely on what one ex-nymphomaniac (however clever) thought was plausible.
To realllly stretch it to get to the class readings, what the abstract expressionists did was similar, but even further removed from religion. They may have started with Jungian archetypes, which might be said to be present in big-picture religion, and ran away from there -- figures are barely present in some of these compositions, and if one has to take the artist's word for even that, there is very little there to start from.
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