the old Adam

“The old Adam” is the book’s Christian expression for the self that survives renunciation: bodily instinct, vanity, and the capacity to turn even spiritual service into self-regard. Its appearances connect ascetic struggle with the fictional “Lives” written by Joseph Knecht, and with Abbot Dion Pugil’s account of theological speculation. Across these contexts, the phrase marks not a single appetite but the difficulty of escaping the self by force, piety, or clever ideas.

Meaning and Literary Context

The phrase appears in the account of Josephus Famulus, a hermit who has renounced his possessions and the sensory invitations of life in the world. His body has been disciplined through hunger, thirst, scars, and calluses, until it has withered; nevertheless, desire returns in cravings, dreams, and hallucinations. The image of the old Adam makes this persistence legible as a spiritual predicament: outward austerity can weaken the body without abolishing the impulses and vulnerabilities that inhabit it.

The expression also helps explain the purpose of the “Lives” that students write during their years of free study. These official exercises ask a student to imagine himself living in a chosen historical period, taking on its circumstances and intellectual climate. The student learns to regard his own person as a mask, a temporary garment of an entelechy. Yet the exercise is not free of self-projection: some students invest their fictional pasts with belief and cast themselves as the people they wish to become. The old Adam is therefore not only sensual appetite; it can persist as the desire to idealize and magnify oneself.

Ascetic Discipline and Its Reversal

For Josephus Famulus, the struggle changes as his reputation grows. Visitors seek his confession and counsel, and he initially receives their presence as a grace: their arrival gives his withdrawn life a purpose beyond itself, allowing him to serve others and God. But that vocation supplies new material for vanity. He notices the pleasure he takes in being sought out, becomes alarmed by his self-love, and prays that penitents will no longer come. When they stop coming, he is no more at peace; when they return, he again catches himself taking satisfaction in their attention.

The temptation deepens beyond vanity. At times Josephus finds himself cold toward those who confess to him, even contemptuous. He responds by treating penitents as brothers and giving particular deference to the people he likes least, regarding each as a messenger sent to test him. After many years he reaches a measure of equanimity, and those nearby regard him as a faultless man at peace with God. Yet that peace remains changeable: it waxes and wanes rather than securing a final victory over the self. The old Adam thus persists not simply as a dramatic eruption of desire, but as a quieter susceptibility to pride, lovelessness, and spiritual dryness.

Flight, Self-Recognition, and the Limits of Self-Mastery

The crisis becomes acute when Josephus is haunted by the urge to die. He leaves his hermitage carrying only water, his traveling pouch, and his staff, and sets out as a fugitive from the life and mission he had once valued. After his frantic pace subsides, he examines what he has done and recognizes the flight as an admission that he can no longer hold his post. He sees that his stubborn defense of a lost position may itself have been prompted by the old Adam: the effort to persist could be egotism disguised as fidelity.

In retrospect, the attempted resistance has brought division and lethargy, and has helped make self-destruction imaginable. Josephus is horrified by the thought of suicide as a possible human sacrifice, an echo of a pre-Christian practice that he associates with the chosen man giving up his life for the community. More disturbing still is the possibility that his longing to die had contained a presumptuous desire to imitate the Redeemer’s voluntary sacrifice, as if redemption were insufficient. Flight, rather than heroic self-sacrifice, becomes the act that returns him to God’s hands. His tears then release the choking oppression he has carried and briefly make him feel like a child again. The episode turns spiritual recognition away from grand mastery: he is saved, for the moment, by acknowledging failure and abandoning the pose of a final, self-chosen offering.

Theology, Creation, and the Recurring Problem of the Self

Abbot Dion Pugil’s recollection of his earlier theology extends the expression’s significance from the ascetic’s inner life to the problem of interpreting the world. In his youth, Dion and others reasoned that the Creator might be an inferior god, a Demiurge responsible for a failed and accursed creation, while a higher God would bring a wholly spiritual world after the present one faded. They blamed the Creator more than Adam for the world’s evils and devised cosmic explanations meant to serve the Redeemer. Their reasoning became so consuming that, during a fever, Dion imagined he had to kill his own mother to undo his carnal birth.

Dion’s history presents elaborate doctrine as no guaranteed escape from the old Adam. The wish to explain or condemn creation can become another form of self-involvement, and theological systems can turn against the very human life they claim to redeem. The expression’s force lies in this recurrence: appetite survives bodily punishment, pride can grow out of a genuine calling, and spiritual or intellectual ambition can reproduce the self-centredness it means to overcome. The old Adam is therefore not a problem solved once, but a name for the self’s capacity to reappear inside its attempted remedies.