Foucault and Agamben on Augustine, Paradise and the Politics of Human Nature

This article focuses on Foucault’s and Agamben’s readings of Augustine’s account of human nature and original sin. Foucault’s analysis of Augustine’s account of sexual acts in paradise, subordinated to will and devoid of lust, highlights the way it constitutes the model for the married couple, whose sexual acts are only acceptable if diverted by the will away from desire and towards the tasks of procreation. While Agamben rejects Augustine’s doctrine of original sin and reclaims paradise as the original homeland of humanity, his reappropriation of paradise remains conditioned by our turn towards our true nature, from which we have been estranged by sin. Agamben’s politics of reclaiming paradise necessarily involves the demand for obedience to this originary model of human nature. It therefore follows to the letter Augustine’s description of paradisiacal sex, in which the will prevails over desire by applying itself to and curtailing itself.


Introduction
Giorgio Agamben's (1998: 9) claim in the first volume of the Homo Sacer series to correct and complete Michel Foucault's theory of biopolitics gave rise to prolific commentary in philosophy and political theory that sought to elucidate the relation between the theoretical orientations and methodological approaches of the two authors (Ojakangas, 2005;Snoek, 2010).Besides the two authors' common interest in divergent approaches to biopolitics, Foucault has also influenced Agamben's work in other fields, most notably the method of archaeology (Agamben, 2009b;see Frost, 2019), the focus on styles of existence (Agamben, 2016; see Van der Heiden, 2020) and truth-telling (Agamben, 2009a;see Crosato, 2020).
What has received less attention in this discussion is the relation of the two authors to questions of political theology.The interest in theology is of course more explicit in the case of Agamben than Foucault, despite the latter's turn to 'political spirituality' in his later work (Foucault, 2005: 15;Foucault and Bremner, 2020).Nonetheless, the recent publication of the fourth volume of Foucault's History of Sexuality, Confessions of the Flesh (2021) and Agamben's The Kingdom and the Garden (2020) permits us to analyse in more detail the two authors' approaches to the Christian theological tradition, and specifically Augustine's doctrine of original sin.
In their readings of Augustine, Foucault and Agamben address the same set of questions: what is the human nature that was lost with original sin and the expulsion from paradise, how did the loss take place, and can its outcome be mitigated or even overcome?Nonetheless, they pose these questions in the context of rather different theoretical projects, respectively genealogical and messianic.For Foucault, Augustine's doctrine of original sin marks a key episode in the genealogy of the subject of desire in the Western tradition, whereby sexual relations became the site for both the 'veridictive' interrogation of the subject's inner truth and the 'jurisdictive' regulation of its behaviour.Agamben is interested less in charting the role of the idea of sin in the constitution of the subject than in the possibilities of overcoming sin as such and reclaiming paradise for humanity.He therefore opposes to Augustine's doctrine the more affirmative visions of human nature developed by Eriugena and Dante.
Despite these divergent orientations, addressing the two readings together is highly instructive insofar as it illuminates the problems involved in Agamben's attempt at the messianic politics of the return to paradise.As we shall demonstrate in this article, Agamben's attempted refutation of Augustine maintains his identification of sin with disobedience, which entails that the project of reclaiming paradise must presuppose the requirement of obedience that characterized human behaviour before the fall.Agamben's vision of paradise regained carries an uncanny resemblance to Foucault's image of the Christian marital couple whose sexual life imitates what Augustine thought sex was like in paradise: obedient, reasonable and wholly subject to the will.Foucault's genealogical approach thus offers a sobering corrective to Agamben's enthusiastic affirmation of the 'cancellation of sin' that leaves its logic intact.
Our argument in this article unfolds in three steps.Firstly, we shall address Foucault's reading of Augustine's account of original sin, starting from his unorthodox interpretation of sexual acts in paradise, devoid of desire and entirely controlled by the will.The disobedience of God in original sin puts an end to this sexual experience, introducing into human nature involuntary sexual urges (concupiscence).The expulsion from paradise thus entails a split in the will that can never be entirely overcome but only mitigated in the context of marriage by diverting one's will from desire in one's sexual acts, subjecting them entirely to the legitimate tasks of procreation and avoidance of fornication.While original sin cannot be cancelled in this life, it can be tempered by practising sexual acts in a voluntarist and dutiful manner, as Adam and Eve did before sinning.
In the second section, we turn to Agamben's reading of Augustine's doctrine, which, similar to that of Foucault, highlights Augustine's rejection of any possibility of overcoming original sin in this life and thereby reclaiming the earthly paradise.Agamben opposes this doctrine with the more heterodox approaches to paradise developed by Eriugena and Dante, for whom human nature has not been corrupted by sin but only deviated from in our acts of will, and that paradise, consequently, remains accessible to us, perhaps as a metaphor for our human nature itself, which may be abused and distorted by will but can always be recovered by applying the will against itself.
In the final section, we shall discuss the way Agamben posits this recovery as the task of a messianic politics that identifies the advent of the Kingdom, which the theological tradition has deferred to heaven after the end of time, with the return to the Garden.Insofar as this return presupposes the cancellation of sin, which for Augustine consists of disobedience, we shall conclude that Agamben's messianic politics is necessarily characterized by the requirement of obedience, which Foucault analysed as the key feature of subjectivation in early Christianity.

The Will (Not) to Sin: Foucault on Paradisiacal and Marital Sex
Foucault's Confessions of the Flesh is the concluding volume in his History of Sexuality project.Foucault's original plan for the six-volume series devoted to the regulation of sexual practices in 17th-19th century Europe was abandoned after the publication of the introductory volume (Foucault, 1990a) in favour of a much longer historical perspective, going back to ancient Greek (Foucault, 1990b), Roman (Foucault, 1990c) and early Christian (Foucault, 2021) sources.The focus of the study also shifts from the 'objectifying' regulation of sexual behaviours towards the emergence of the subject of desire in various technologies of the self.Although it is the final volume in the series, Confessions of the Flesh was actually completed before the second and third volumes (Elden, 2018;Gros, 2021: x-xi) and is thematically closest to the problematic of the first volume, which also addressed confession as the key technology of subjectivation in the Western tradition (Foucault, 1990a: 60-63).In Confessions, Foucault addresses three episodes in the genealogy of the subject of desire: the emergence of the notion of the 'flesh' in the Christian tradition that supplants the idea of pleasure (aphrodisia) in antiquity, the formation of the practice of virginity in monastic settings and the procedures of truthtelling associated with it, and, finally, the problematization of sexual acts in the marital relationship.
In our analysis of Foucault's reading of Augustine we shall focus on the concluding chapter of Confessions of the Flesh, in which Foucault addresses the question of the 'libidinization' of sex, its constitution as no longer merely a bodily pleasure, but rather as an experience of lust or concupiscence.In order to understand the formation of this experience we must first consider the possibility of sexual relations deprived of it, which leads Foucault to Augustine's description of prelapsarian sexuality.In his Reply to Two Letters of Pelagians, Augustine discusses four possible forms that sexual relations could take place in paradise.
[While] maintaining, you Pelagians, the honorableness and fruitfulness of marriage, determine, if nobody had sinned, what you would wish to consider the life of those people in Paradise, and choose one of these four things.For beyond a doubt, either as often as ever they pleased they would have had intercourse; or they would bridle lust when intercourse was not necessary; or lust would arise at the summons of will, just at the time when chaste prudence would have perceived beforehand that intercourse was necessary; or, with no lust existing at all, as every other member served for its own work, so for its own work the organs of generation also would obey the commands of those that willed, without any difficulty.(Augustine, 1887a: 1.34)The first two possibilities are immediately ruled out by Augustine.The first of these would render God's creatures enslaved to lust, while the second would be incompatible with the understanding of paradise as a place of bliss due to the emphasis it places on selfrestraint.This leaves two options, the sole difference between which concerns desire.In the third option, humans could, of their own volition, bring forth desire at the appropriate moment.In the fourth option, humans could have sexual relations in the absence of any desire and only obeying the orders of the will so that 'there is the highest tranquility of all the obedient members without any lust' (Augustine, 1887a[c. 380-410]: 1.35).
In Foucault's argument, Augustine clearly prefers the fourth option and only mentions the third as a concession to his Pelagian adversaries.Yet, even in the third option, the desire in question is produced by the will.In both of these variants we are therefore dealing with an activity that is entirely voluntary and hence can be contrasted with fallen humanity's experience of concupiscence as involuntary desire that the subject must confront and struggle with.Foucault (2021: 261) takes particular care to differentiate this understanding of the sexual act from any idea of natural spontaneity: [Now], if this absence [of desire] is assumed, what would the sexual act consist in?In a natural and spontaneous unfolding that nothing would disturb?Not at all.The text says it without any ambiguity: one must imagine an act whose every element is placed under the exact and unfailing control of the will.Let us not imagine man, in the sexual union of paradise, as a clueless being moved by the urges whose innocence is guaranteed insofar as they are beyond his grasp, but as a skilful artisan who knows how to use his hands.Ars sexualis.If sin had left him the time, he would have been, in the Garden, a diligent sower.Paradisiacal sex was obedient and reasonable like the fingers of the hand.
Even when Augustine concedes to his interlocutors the possibility of humans developing 'sexual urges' by their own volition, the sexual act remains 'subject to the empire of the will' (p.262), which alone decides when these urges are appropriate.As the title of Chapter 35 of the Reply clearly indicates, 'desire in paradise was either none at all or it was obedient to the impulse of the will' (Augustine, 1887a[c. 380-410] The voluntarist character of paradise sex distinguishes it from sexual acts after the fall, which are characterized by involuntary urges of concupiscence.This involuntary character, addressed at length in Book XIV of The City of God, is itself a result of the fateful act of will on the part of Adam and Eve, i.e. the original sin.For Augustine, the original sin did not consist of eating the forbidden fruit as such, which was of no particular importance either to God or to Adam and Eve, but in the rebellion against God that this act manifested.Consequently, the punishment that God imposed on the disobedient humans is 'exactly fitted to the sin' (Foucault, 2021: 262): the disobedience that the first humans showed to God will be replicated within human existence itself, which will from now be split between the will and what escapes it.The sexual act is a prime site for the manifestation of this split, insofar as it is now characterized by involuntary urges, the 'rush of concupiscence' that the first humans never experienced before (p.264).This is why Adam and Eve blush when observing each other naked for the first time: not merely because their genitals were formerly covered by a 'garment of grace' (Augustine, 1993[412 and 426 CE]: XIV 17), but also because, having been stripped of it, they now experience previously unfamiliar urges arising from them.
But when they were stripped of this grace, that their disobedience might be punished by fit retribution, there began in the movement of their bodily members a shameless novelty, which made nakedness indecent: it at once made them observant and made them ashamed.(Augustine 1993: XIV 17) The familiar activity of sex, wholly subjected to the will and devoid of all desire, is now subverted by the involuntary aspect that does not contribute anything to it but functions solely as punishment, showing human beings, who have already learned how to disobey, what it is like to be disobeyed.'In short, sex "springs forth", arisen in its insurrection and offered to the gaze.It is for man what man is for God: a rebel' (Foucault, 2021: 264).What is shameful is neither the organ, which was fully formed and active before, nor the act, which was already practised wilfully, but the urge of the organ to act: 'the involuntary form of a movement is what makes the sexual organ the subject of an insurrection and the object of the eye's gaze.Visible and unpredictable erection' (p.265).
It is notable that, while it is manifested in the sexual act, concupiscence is not intrinsically tied to it: 'it is an element which the transgression, the fall and the principle of "reciprocity of disobedience" tied to the act synthetically' (p.266).Thus, sin has nothing to do with sexual difference or the sexual act, which both pre-existed it, but consists entirely of the disobedience of God, which is in turn punished by resigning man to the resurrection of the sexual organs against their will.The origin of desire is therefore not to be found in the body but in the will itself, which makes human beings want to be their own masters, turning away from God, who made them what they are.This excess of the will ultimately leads to the degradation of human nature itself, which becomes all the more deficient the more it disobeys its creator (p.269).
Thus, the line separating the voluntary and the involuntary does not pass between soul and body, subject and nature, but rather is from the outset placed within the subject's will itself.While animal acts of copulation are at first glance similar to human sexual acts in being involuntary, the involuntariness in animals is of a different kind, since it does not mark a division in the soul.It is only human desire that divides the self against itself, resigning the human to involuntarily imitating the movements of animal copulation.'What is involved is a will whose voluntary deviation from what maintains it in being allows it to exist in the element that tends to destroy it -the involuntary' (p.270).Desire is the very form of the will insofar as, by willing itself, it ends up willing the opposite.This is why Augustine can view concupiscence as at once sui juris and imputable to the subject: 'the "autonomy" of concupiscence is the law of the subject when it wills its own will.And the subject's powerlessness is the law of concupiscence.This is the general form of imputability, or rather its general condition' (p.271).
The establishment of this general condition of imputability permits the emergence of an entirely new rationality of governing sexual behaviours, no longer in terms of excess and continence as in antiquity, but in terms of the individual's relationship to his or her own concupiscence.Foucault traces two consequences of Augustine's theory of concupiscence for the government of sexuality.Firstly, the notion of consent (consensus) makes it possible to impute the act to the subject.Even if all subjects exist under the law of desire, it takes a certain exercise of the will on itself to bring the sexual act to presence.In this exercise of consent, the will 'wills that will that has the form of concupiscence; it takes itself for an end as fallen will; it assumes its own condition as concupiscent will' (p.279).Consent is not simply a matter of actualizing desire but of the constitution and confirmation of oneself as the desiring subject, to whom its involuntary movements may now be imputed.This emergence is a crucial episode in Foucault's history of sexuality since it also marks a point of descent of the subject of law (p.280).
Secondly, the notion of use (usus) permits us to rethink the regulation of sex in marriage, which becomes no longer a matter of the exercise of the right of the use of the body of the other, but instead a matter of the use of one's own concupiscence in the manner that is different from the volition of one's concupiscence.While the form of the sexual act will remain the same, its ends can be diverted from consenting to one's desire and instead consist in engendering children or keeping one's partner from falling into fornication -both legitimate objectives of sexual acts for Augustine.In this manner, one can make use of an evil in a good or an evil manner and it is this manner of usage that will determine whether an act is sinful: It is possible to make an utterly non-concupiscent use of concupiscence, but the latter will not be done away with for all that.It often happens that one makes use of it just for concupiscence, so that the latter seems to carry the day, but this usage will nonetheless remain a specific and imputable act.(p.283) Foucault concludes that this separation between the evil of concupiscence and the manner of its use opens a range of possibilities for the juridification of marital sexual relations that in the period of antiquity were viewed as the least problematic and therefore remained the least regulated (p.284).As sexual acts are neither a good in itself (to be regulated by their 'natural' function) or simply evil (to be regulated by strict demands for continence), they can be classified and codified according to their use, ends, circumstances, etc. (p.283).Of course, this codification actually took place hundreds of years after Augustine (from the 13th century onwards), yet, in Foucault's view, it was nonetheless prepared by Augustine's theory of concupiscence, which made possible [a] very precise codification of the moments, the initiatives, the invitations, the acceptances, the refusals, the positions, the gestures, the caresses, even the words that can take place in sexual relations.Sex in marriage thus becomes the object of juridiction and veridiction.(p.284) Moreover, since the notions of consent and use do not define the relations between the spouses directly but rather define the relation each spouse establishes to their own desire, the regulation of sexual behaviours ultimately ends up founded on the relationship the individual maintains with themselves, not with others.This is how the 'problematization of sexual behaviours . . .becomes a problem of the subject' (p.285), the subject of desire who is at once the subject of law, both the truth of its desire and the goodness of its actions discoverable on the basis of its relation with itself.
Augustine's idiosyncratic conception of paradisiacal sex marks an essential moment in the genealogy of this subject.Entirely devoid of desire and thoroughly subjected to will, it demonstrates the possibility of sex without sin, albeit a possibility that is no longer available to fallen humanity, for whom sexual acts will always be accompanied by involuntary movements of desire that mark them as evil.And yet, while this evil cannot be effaced entirely, it can be mitigated, not only through the simple cessation of all sexual activity (pp.117-134), but also, in the context of marriage, through the redirection of one's will to concupiscence towards the legitimate ends of procreation and avoiding fornication.The sin of disobedience that resulted from the abuse of the will is thus tempered, but not effaced, by the exercise of the will on itself that diverts desire from willing only itself towards more respectable ends.In this manner, marital sex may acquire at least a partial resemblance to sex in paradise: while it might not be entirely devoid of desire, it nonetheless remains subjected to the will and is hence just as 'diligent' and 'obedient' as the sex enjoyed, if the word is appropriate, by Adam and Eve prior to their expulsion from paradise.Tormented by the urges of concupiscence, the subject of desire may at least find consolation in the fact that, by directing these urges to the tasks of procreation and avoidance of fornication, one gets as close as possible to returning to paradise.

Untouched and Pure: Agamben on Paradise and Human Nature
Whereas Foucault's aim in the reading of Augustine is to trace the emergence of the subject of desire, Agamben's (2020) reading of the doctrine of original sin in The Kingdom and the Garden raises the stakes in seeking nothing less than the reappropriation by humanity of the paradise that according to Augustine it has lost forever.If paradise is no longer accessible due to original sin, the entire promise of redemption is deferred both temporally (to the afterlife) and spatially (to heaven).The only way this deferral can be halted and reversed is through the demonstration of the possibility for human nature to free itself from original sin in this life.This, according to Agamben, is the meaning of Bosch's famous triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights.While the left panel of the painting shows God introducing Eve to Adam in paradise and the right panel depicts the torments of sinners in hell, the central panel features an expansive landscape of the Garden teeming with human and animal figures engaged in various amorous activities.While this central panel has been interpreted in various ways, Agamben follows Wilhelm Fränger's reading in approaching it as a depiction of the 'restoration of the Edenic innocence, which humanity had enjoyed in the earthly paradise' (Agamben, 2020: 2; see Fränger, 1951).In The Kingdom and the Garden, Agamben (2020) draws on a variety of sources, of which Eriugena and Dante are the most important, to affirm the possibility of such a restoration and refute Augustine's doctrine of the original sin.
As we have seen, for Augustine the original transgression of the first men is transmitted to all of humanity both synchronically, from Adam to all men, and diachronically, from the parents to children (cf.Foucault, 2021: 272-273).Thus, sin no longer pertains to a person's acts or even their character, but to their very life and nature: [That] wound, which has the name of sin, wounds the very life, which was being righteously lived.This wound was at that fatal moment of the fall inflicted by the devil to a vastly wider and deeper extent than are the sins which are known among men.Whence it came to pass, that our nature having then and there been deteriorated by that great sin of the first man, not only was made a sinner, but also generates sinners; and yet the very weakness, under which the virtue of a holy life has drooped and died, is not really nature, but corruption; precisely as a bad state of health is not a bodily substance or nature, but disorder; very often, indeed, if not always, the ailing character of parents is in a certain way implanted, and reappears in the bodies of their children.(Augustine, 1887b[c. 380-410]: 2.57) Adam's sin produces a change in human nature itself, substituting a lapsed and corrupt nature for the original Edenic nature.This change cannot be healed without God's grace, yet even after such an intervention in the form of baptism, this corruption remains in human nature in the form of the above-discussed urges of concupiscence that drive human beings to sin in the involuntary manner, the disobedience of their organs recalling Adam's original disobedience to God.Agamben (2020: 31) notes that this reading endows human will with the extraordinary power of transforming the nature created by God, but gives it no power whatsoever to reverse or negate this transformation: Man is the living being that can corrupt its nature but not heal it, thus consigning himself to a history and to an economy of salvation, in which the divine grace dispensed by the Church through its sacraments becomes essential.
In the aftermath of the first man's disobedience, human nature remains corrupt and can only be remedied in this life through divine grace dispensed by the Church.Indeed, this dispensation is the only justification for the very existence of the Church: 'if human nature were capable of not sinning without grace, then the Church, which dispenses it through its sacraments, would not be necessary ' (p. 34).
From this perspective, paradise now appears forever lost and, if it exists at all in the present time, it can only exist in vain, forever devoid of human dwellers.At the moment of Judgement, human beings will either be transported to the Kingdom in heaven or spend eternity in hell.Messianic hope is thus relegated from reclaiming paradise on earth towards attaining a Kingdom in heaven: 'while the Kingdom to come is the central paradigm of the history of humanity, the Garden is deprived of any meaning whatsoever for that history' (p.50).It stands vacant as testimony to man's originary transgression and 'the cherubim with the flaming sword keeps watch so that man does not seek to penetrate it undeservedly' (p.73).
Faced with this paradoxical status of the Garden, Agamben chooses to entertain an alternative hypothesis: '[If] the human soul has preserved its possibility of not sinning, then man is in some way still in relation with the originary justice that he had possessed in paradise' (p.50).In order to investigate this possibility, Agamben turns to Joannes Scotus Eriugena's (John the Scot's) Periphyseon (John the Scot, 2011[c. 866-867]), reading this text as an esoteric refutation of the Augustinian doctrine.In contrast to Augustine, who viewed creation as a single act, Eriugena viewed creation as a two-step operation, even though the steps take place at the same time.The first creation produces a spiritual and immortal body of the kind we will have in the resurrection, while the second produces the mortal and corruptible 'clothing', which is added to the first one in advance of any possible sin (pp.800A-808A, 263-264).Thus, our mortal and corruptible bodies do not exist as punishment for Adam's eventual disobedience of God, but were created, with a sort of sublime irony, by the divine wisdom before any sinful event whatsoever, as an animal body that was added to the first not as a second body but as a mutable and corruptible clothing that always already clothes the spiritual body.(Agamben, 2020: 64) This account of creation permits Eriugena to advance a highly provocative claim that man, still dwelling as he is in this mortal and corruptible clothing, has never actually lived in paradise (John the Scot, 2011[c. 866-867]: 809A, 265).While Augustine conceived of paradise as a real place on earth, albeit no longer accessible to us, Eriugena approaches paradise as a metaphor for the first creation of human nature.Thus, paradise has always existed but, since human beings have always dwelled in their mortal bodies, it has remained forever empty.Even Adam and Eve did not stay there long but immediately gave in to sin: Had there been any duration to his stay, man would have been able to acquire sufficient perfection to prevent sin from occurring.We conclude, then, that he never really was in the paradise of human nature.What is written as if describing the first man is really a reference to what is to come at the end of the world.(pp. 809A, 265) Both the sin and the fall must then have happened outside paradise and therefore could not have affected the first creation of human nature, which remains safe and intact in paradise.In this manner, Eriugena clearly breaks with the Augustinian doctrine and affirms a version of Pelagianism, positing human nature as not corrupted or even corruptible by sin: Humanity is both one and many: one in its cause, the highest Good, and indefinitely multiple in the effects of that cause.Since the highest Good is wholly present everywhere, so is its image.Humanity, therefore, is diffused wholly in all men and is wholly present in each.There is no more humanity in the good man than in the evil.(pp. 942C, 321) It is evident that, in this understanding, human nature could never be affected by sinful actions: 'for both just and unjust, the spiritual body will be the same, purified of all animality, equally incorruptible, equally beautiful, equally eternal.Human nature retains its integrity in all' (pp.946A, 322-323).In this approach, sin is not an activity or disposition punished by exile from paradise but rather man's own exit from paradise, which is coextensive with the entire history of humanity.However, this very exit ensures that human nature remains intact: 'There is not a sin that could corrupt human nature, because man is always already descendens, in exit from it' (Agamben, 2020: 69).
Moreover, the fact that we have exited the Garden does not in any way entail its inaccessibility to us but, on the contrary, points to its continuing availability: [Man] -the living being that still does not have access to its own nature, because, by abusing its goods, it has always already abandoned it -will necessarily end up returning to it, when all things will be restored to their cause.Paradise -human nature -is that to which man must return without ever truly having been there.(p. 71) This paradoxical return to where human beings have never been is not an event deferred to the future, let alone to the end of the world, but something available in this life: '[Man] can enter again into the Garden, in order to encounter there original innocence and original justice' (p.127).Thus, even though, for Eriugena, paradise does not refer to a real place on earth, it is ultimately not distinguishable from the earth as such, except by what Eriugena calls the 'difference of beatitude' (John the Scot, cited in Agamben, 2020: 72).
The reference to beatitude or happiness leads Agamben to his second key interlocutor in The Kingdom and the Garden, namely Dante, who identified 'terrestrial' paradise with the 'happiness of this life', contrasting it with the 'celestial paradise' that consists of the 'enjoyment of the countenance of God' (Alighieri, 1904(Alighieri, [1312(Alighieri, -1313]]: 3.16.4).In Agamben's (2020) reading, this understanding of earthly paradise has a clear political significance insofar as Dante's idea of universal monarchy becomes thinkable as the project of a reappropriation by all humanity of its own nature and, consequently, of the 'return of originary justice on earth' (p.96).Once again, we are dealing with a return to something that is at once originary since it formed part of creation and formerly inaccessible as long as we keep exiting and turning away from it.
Thus, in contrast to the Augustinian model, in which the Garden as the original homeland of humanity remains forever out of reach, replaced by the ever deferred Kingdom in heaven, for both Eriugena and Dante paradise is never lost but perpetually awaiting our return, which is at the same time the first ever turn toward our very nature: Paradise -life in all its forms -was never lost: it is always in its place and remains as an untouched model of the good even in the continual abuse that man makes of it, without managing in any case to corrupt it.The heavenly paradise, which is not distinguished from the earthly one, into which man has not yet penetrated, coincides with the return to the originary nature that, untouched and pure, awaits all humanity from the beginning of time.(pp. 73-74) This approach clearly offers a refutation of the Augustinian doctrine of paradise.Yet, there remains a question of whether it also exemplifies the 'negation of the theologians' paradise' (p.127), i.e. whether the paradise that Eriugena and Dante consider accessible is the negation of Augustine's paradise that he considers inaccessible.Divergence on access aside, how much do the two concepts of paradise differ?At first glance, Eriugena's notion of paradise appears to differ from Augustine's concept in being clearly metaphorical or 'figurative', referring to human nature as such and not a particular garden someplace on earth.It therefore becomes easier to present it as awaiting our return since it is not a determinate place we could actually return to and dwell in.Nonetheless, this accessible but unreal paradise continues to be thought according to the same logic as Augustine's real but inaccessible one.After all, Agamben's claim that we 'return to the originary nature, untouched and pure' evidently implies that we return, albeit for the first time, to that very nature augmented by grace that for Augustine characterized the first men's existence in paradise.
For Augustine, this return is unthinkable in earthly life, while Eriugena and Dante consider it possible, yet the condition to be returned to appears to be the same: nature reunited with grace and hence no longer lacking or deficient.It is therefore difficult to agree with Agamben that in Augustine's reading the earthly paradise already marked a constitutive lack in human nature: the natura integra is something from which it suffices to subtract its clothing of grace for it to exhibit its faulty nudity, and sin is nothing but the operator of a defectiveness that was inscribed in it from the beginning.The earthly paradise, from which man, for this reason, could only be expelled, is not the cipher of human nature's perfection so much as, instead, its constitutive lack.(p.125) Surely, for Augustine, it was the loss of paradise that signified this lack while, prior to this loss, there was hardly any lack to speak of, hence the integrity of natura integra.Augustine's account of paradise is only negative to the extent that it describes a condition that is lost forever and cannot be recovered.While Agamben's reading of Eriugena and Dante overturns this negativity by making the Garden available to us again, it does not succeed in modifying Augustine's concept of it.The nature that awaits us in the Garden is the nature that has never sinned by disobeying and therefore could not be punished by the relocation of this disobedience within the human being where it would manifest itself in involuntary concupiscence.If we follow Agamben, Eriugena and Dante in affirming the incorruptible character of human nature, then on our return to the Garden, shedding our corruptible and mortal 'clothing', we will end up in that 'empire of the will' that for Augustine characterized prelapsarian sexuality, in which nothing like concupiscence could ever arise.

The Garden of Diligent Sowers: Obedience and the Cancellation of Sin
What is at stake in Agamben's affirmation of the return to paradise is more than a matter of theological exegesis.Agamben's intention is not merely to affirm an alternative conception of paradise but also to derive from it a messianic politics.This politics affirms the messianic Kingdom prophesied in both Judaism and Christianity, yet rather than equate this Kingdom with the existence of the Church (Augustine) or defer it to heaven after the end of the world (Tertullian), it finds it on earth.
The model for the Kingdom, to be established in the present or near future of messianic time (Agamben, 2005), is nothing other than the Garden as the site of 'originary nature, untouched and pure'.The theological tradition has kept the pre-historic Garden apart from the (ever deferred) post-historical Kingdom, ensuring the reign of the Church throughout history: The Garden must be driven back into an arch-past, which it is no longer possible to obtain in any way; the Kingdom, when it is not simply flattened into the Church and in this way neutralized, is projected into the future and displaced into the heavens.(Agamben, 2020: 152) In contrast, Agamben affirms the two poles as two aspects of the same experience of the present: Only the Kingdom gives access to the Garden, but only the Garden renders the Kingdom thinkable.We grasp human nature historically only through a politics, but this latter, in its turn, has no other content than paradise, which is to say, in Dante's words, 'the beatitude of this life '. (p. 152) These concluding sentences of The Kingdom and the Garden clearly demonstrate the stakes of rethinking the status of paradise for Agamben's political theory.We can return to the Garden only by instituting a messianic Kingdom through political action, yet the content of this political action is exhausted by the affirmation of human nature as it has always already been in the Garden, undivided and devoid of all lack, knowing neither one's own disobedience of God nor the disobedience of one's sexual organs.While humanity spent its entire history in a self-imposed exit from paradise, dwelling in the mortal and corruptible 'clothing' and stripped of the divine clothing of grace, there always remains a possibility of shedding this clothing and reuniting with its originary nature through what Agamben calls the 'cancellation of sin ' (p. 94).
In Agamben's reading of Dante, this cancellation can be attained in the absence of any sacraments or any other assistance from the Church.Contrary to the theological doctrines that reject the possibility of human happiness in this life (p.105), Dante (Alighieri, 1995(Alighieri, [1308(Alighieri, -1321]]: 7.116) argues that the incarnation of Christ makes it possible for human nature to restore itself to its original condition, 'lift [itself] up again'.Sin can be overcome without the help of the sacraments, simply by the exercise of free will, which is the 'greatest gift bestowed by God upon human nature', through which 'we attain to joy here as men, and to blessedness there as gods' (Alighieri, 1904(Alighieri, [1312(Alighieri, -1313]]: 1.12.3).Humanity can cancel sin, restore its nature and attain the 'beatitude of this life' by itself, through the exercise of free will that will lead it to happiness.
Since sin was nothing other than the abuse of our free will in the disobedience of God, the cancellation of sin proceeds by applying our free will to itself, correcting its abuses that kept us away from our integral nature.In this manner, it cancels nothing other than the revolt of human will against God that initiated the corruption of human nature for Augustine, as natura integra was stripped of divine grace.While the 'theological tradition' maintains that this corruption has rendered the Garden forever inaccessible, leaving us with the expectations of the Kingdom in heaven at the end of this world and the reign of the Church in the meantime, Agamben insists that the Kingdom remains possible on earth and consists of entering the Garden for the first time, redeeming our nature in acts of free will that cancel the sinful excesses of the will itself.
It is important to reiterate that, despite repeated references to the 'originary nature', Agamben's approach has nothing to do with any return to the origin understood as a determinate moment or condition in the past.Our originary nature is something that we never had (aside from the first man and woman) and never left (since our nature cannot be altered by sin).For this reason, Agamben's messianic politics has no use for either nostalgia for return or forward-looking progress.Return and progress, the Garden and the Kingdom, pre-and post-history are now brought together and coincide in the human nature that is untouched and pure as a 'model', even when it is constantly abused by various apparatuses governing human existence.Rendering these apparatuses inoperative (Agamben, 2005(Agamben, : 95-112, 2016: 277) : 277) will pave the way for our reappropriation of what we have always been.This is a key point of Agamben's theory that has attracted little attention due to the vaguely emancipatory overtones of his messianic politics.Rendering the apparatuses of 'abuse' will not deliver us to the freedom to experiment with diverse models of human nature or the freedom to dispense with such models altogether, but only to the appropriation of our incorruptible nature as it is and has always been.This incorruptible nature can only be re-(dis)covered, but never altered, other than in a corrupting way of 'descendence' that would entail us leaving paradise once again.
It is difficult to see how it could be otherwise.Let us recall that, for Augustine, sin does not consist of the sexual acts themselves, but the disobedience of God.What happens when this disobedience is 'cancelled' in the return to the Garden?Since sin was an act of will, its cancellation must involve cancelling at least some aspect of the will itself.In Eriugena's words, 'sin is not natural although it is voluntary.It is uncaused in the sense that it lacks all natural causes.It is caused in that it, along with its punishment, is the result of the evil will' (John the Scot, 2011[c. 866-867]: 944A, 322).
While Dante shares this identification of sin with will, he differs from Eriugena in also viewing it as the condition of our redemption: free will, which was God's greatest gift to human nature, actually makes it possible for us to 'lift ourselves up' from our present condition and return to the Garden.The return takes place by the negation of free will (as the agent of disobedience) in an act of free will -an operation that is strictly analogous to that performed by the married couple in Foucault's reading of the theory of concupiscence.One wills (freely, using God's greatest gift) not to will (disobedience, or sin, which leads one astray from one's nature), thereby diverting will away from its power to disobey and directing it to the task of lifting ourselves up to our originary nature.The analogy is so rigorous that one cannot but expect to find the reclaimed paradise full of married couples dutifully imitating Adam and Eve before the fall.
While the return to the Garden makes use of the 'greatest gift' of free will, it also curtails this will by suppressing the potentiality not to lift oneself up to the model of one's nature.This potentiality not to has been identified by Agamben himself as a necessary condition of any meaningful experience of freedom: 'freedom is freedom for both good and evil' (Agamben, 1999: 182-183).The cancellation of sin can only mean that this 'freedom for evil', potentiality not-to, ends up effaced.We are left with only the positive aspect of potentiality, which is capable of happiness and beatitude but not their negation.This is why, to recall Foucault's expression, there are in paradise only 'diligent sowers', obedient and reasonable subjects that have wilfully truncated their free will in order to remain true to their incorruptible nature.It matters little whether paradise is thought literally or metaphorically or whether Adam and Eve ever dwelled there or not.As long as we envision our (re)turn to paradise in terms of the recovery of a certain model of human nature through the cancellation of sin, any Kingdom thus constituted will inevitably demand obedience to this model, curtailing the very will that we rely on to lift ourselves up to it.Whereas Adam and Eve once sinned by willing to disobey and were banished from the Garden, the subject of messianic politics now wills not to will disobedience in order to be allowed to return to it.While Agamben's messianic politics skilfully evades the Church and the sacraments and even manages to avoid any reference to the divine, its reliance on the idea of incorruptible nature ensures that it maintains at least one aspect of the theological tradition it otherwise seeks to subvert, i.e. the imperative of obedience that Foucault traced in his analysis of Augustine's theory of concupiscence and Christian techniques of subjectivation more generally (Foucault, 2021: 91-94).It might appear that in Agamben's Garden-Kingdom this requirement of obedience is somewhat tempered by the fact that what one must obey is ultimately one's own nature and not some exterior agency.Moreover, the description of the actual features of that nature is noticeably scant, leaving us with little knowledge of what it is we must obey or renounce disobeying.
Yet, this is precisely the crux of the problem: whatever we might think human nature consists of, the Kingdom modelled on the Garden can only be constituted and maintained by renouncing our potentiality to disobey it by acting contrary to it.Since humanity has never dwelled in the Garden, we have no way of knowing what the nature that survives there is like and we ought to take all descriptions of it with a grain of salt.What we do know, beyond any doubt, is that we can only lift ourselves up to this nature by renouncing and continuing to renounce all disobedience to it.Even if Agamben's messianism is read as merely metaphorical and his theory is developed beyond its theological sources, the understanding of politics in terms of the recovery of something 'incorruptible', 'pure and untouched', cannot but end up demanding obedience to it in order to prevent a new descent into its abuse.After all, what would be the point of returning to the Garden only to keep exiting it again and again?