Augustine’s Theology of Sin
Jesse Couenhoven
Augustine is known as the great theologian of sin. Many who read his Confessiones presume that the testimony offered there is a confession in our sense of the term, a litany of guilt. For this he has been celebrated as a realist and criticized as a pessimist. What modern readers often miss is the deeply humane source and character of Augustine’s views about sin. We tend to think of Augustine, especially the mature Augustine, as a perhaps astute or perhaps grumpy observer of humanity whose setting in the midst of the slow demise of an empire provided ample material for reflection on the darker side of life. But Augustine’s doctrines of sin and evil were less a product of empirical observation than that picture suggests. He did, of course, believe that his hamartiology explained much of the human behavior he saw. But he did not arrive at his views by aggregating particular observations into a general theory. Rather, he began with a doctrine of grace and a conception of the good. His ideas about evil and sin were driven by those commitments and laced with compassion for the plight of all those whose lives are a disappointment to them (though also with scorn for those who are self-satisfied).
In his Unfinished Work in Answer to Julian, Augustine noted that talk about sin can have at least three referents. One might have in mind the primal sin for which Adam was responsible when he fell from his immature perfection about which Augustine suggested that ‘he had nothing evil in him by which he was urged against his will to do evil. So from his sin he was free to hold back.’ Second, one might be interested in the penalty of that first sin, felt by the entire human race and indeed the world. Augustine called this the ‘evil that one does not but suffers.’
Third, there is ‘sin that is itself also the punishment of sin,’ by which Augustine meant original sin, the sin from which Adam’s progeny are not free to hold back.1 This chapter discusses how these three approaches to sin are related in Augustine’s thought, though not in the order in which Augustine named them. I begin with the second referent of sin-talk just mentioned and then turn to the first and the third.
A key argument in this chapter is that Augustine’s views about sin and evil are derived from his views about grace and goodness. Given his ways of thinking about the latter, the former follow. Keeping this fact in mind may or may not make Augustine’s views easier for modern readers to love, but it can help to avoid some common misunderstandings. A second major contention is that Augustine’s ontology of evil as a privation should shape the way we understand Augustine’s claims about sin. This point is developed in conversation with Augustine’s doctrine of original sin, which applies his privation account to moral psychology, and in conversation with Augustine’s doctrine of primal sin, which has more in common with his understanding of original sin than is commonly realized.
The Evil We Suffer: Augustine’s Privation Account
Evil has a complex relationship to sin in Augustine’s thought. Augustine believed that all evil is a result of sin. The first evils, which contributed to all the others, are the devil’s revolt against God and the ensuing fall of Adam and Eve. Because sin is the initial form of evil, sin has a kind of priority among evils. Yet sin also falls under evil as a species of that genus. Thus, in
1 Saint Augustine, ‘Unfinished Work in Answer to Julian’, in The Works of Saint Augustine: Answer to the Pelagians, Vol III, ed. John E. Rotelle, O.S.A, trans. Roland J. Teske, S.J. (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1999), p. 73.
order to understand Augustine’s view of sin it is helpful to consider how he thought about evil more generally.
Augustine believed that awareness of one’s imperfections creates the opening needed for a sinner to be receptive to grace. This epistemic function of sin gave it prominence in Augustine’s writing about salvation. The shape of Augustine’s thought looks different, however, when we attend to his metaphysics. Once Augustine had overcome his attraction to the Manichean belief that the universe is a battleground between two equal forces of good and evil, he became an adherent of the Christian doctrine of creation. According to that doctrine the world is not balanced between powers but asymmetrical. There is just one God, who created all things good. This implies that whatever is natural, is good.2 It also means that, far from being a serious ontic competitor to the good, evil is always secondary. Evil lacks genuine creativity of its own, and must live like a parasite off its host. Evil can exist only by twisting what is good. The world can be perfectly good, therefore, but it cannot be perfectly evil because evil needs the good.3 Likewise, a person can never be completely sinful.
Augustine’s view that evil is ontologically derivative is known as his privation account of evil. On this account, for something to be evil is for it to lack goodness. Augustine recognized, of course, that there are many good things that lack other goods; he offered the night as one example, because it is lacking in light yet is not evil.4 Thus, on Augustine’s account, for something to be evil is not merely for it to lack goodness, but to lack a kind of goodness natural
2 It is not quite right to summarize Augustine’s view by saying, as people sometimes do, that whatever is, is good, because Augustine did not deny evil’s reality.
3 Saint Augustine, ‘Concerning The Nature Of Good, Against The Manicheans,’ in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, Vol. 4., ed., Philip Schaff, trans. Albert H. Newman (Grand Rapids, MI: Christian Classics Ethereal Library, 2009), p. 600.
4 Ibid., p. 609.
to it, which God designed it to have. Things can be condemned as evil, he wrote, only when they are not what they ought to be.5 The implication is that although all evils are privations, not all privations are evil. Evil is a privation of a particular sort, one that violates the proper functioning of the thing that is corrupted. Because he believed that all virtues are properly described as forms of love, Augustine’s central example of such a corruption was loves that have been twisted so that they no longer serve the good of lovers or beloved.
It is well known that among Augustine’s motives for subscribing to this privation account was the fact that it distances God from evil. If evil is a corruption of what is natural and good, then it is clear that God does not directly create evil but only permits evil to exist. Augustine considered this relationship between God and evil fitting because he considered it antithetical to divine holiness for God to be the direct agent of evil. It is important to clarify, however, that the privation account was only one part of Augustine’s theodicy and an introductory part at that. On the privation account, God has an indirect relationship to evil and because of God’s oversight of all things God remains responsible for permitting evil. By itself, therefore, the privation account does not solve the problem of evil. It is not meant to.
Contrary to what some claim, Augustine did not believe that the privation account of evil implies the non-existence of evil. The privation account does not seek to save God from criticism by saying that evil is not a genuine reality an implausible claim to which Augustine was certainly not attracted. Rather, the privation account was meant to clarify the kind of reality evil has. Augustine recognized its power but also its weakness, since he insisted that evil is nonessential, and always a way of being less rather than more.
5 Saint Augustine, ‘On Free Choice of the Will’, in Augustine: Earlier Writings. The Library of Christian Classics, ed. J. H. S. Burleigh (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1953), p. 196.
Augustine only took up questions about theodicy after he had identified what counts as evil. Once his privation account was in place, Augustine made the further argument that God is justified in permitting that which he had identified as evil. The justifications Augustine offered included the claim that God only permits evil when it is necessary for a greater good, such as free will, pedagogy, or the unique relationship with God possible in salvation. He also argued, however, for epistemic humility, because human minds cannot always understand God’s rationale for permitting evil. Given these convictions, Augustine concluded that we should not blame God for allowing evil to exist. It should be clear that the main work in Augustine’s theodicy was done not by the privation account but by the other arguments I have mentioned. Thus, it may be better to think of the privation account of evil as pre-theodic rather than part of Augustine’s theodicy proper.6
Augustine’s privation account has for so long been associated with theodicy that it is sometimes forgotten that he found the privation theory appealing not only because it situates God in relation to evil but also because it situates what God created in relation to evil. A second motivation for Augustine’s commitment to the privation account was that it helped him define what is and is not evil for creatures (and, correspondingly, what is and is not sin). For instance, in a discussion of whether it is fair to blame Satan for being evil, given that the devil now sins necessarily, Augustine argued that the only barrier to blaming the devil would be if he was evil by nature.7 Augustine’s proposal was that because evil is contingent, a violation of the good for
6 For a helpful discussion of this point, see Donald A. Cress, ‘Augustine's Privation Account of Evil: A Defense’, Augustinian Studies 20 (1989), pp. 115-117. For an overview of Augustine’s mature theodicy, see Jesse Couenhoven, ‘Augustine's Rejection of the Free Will Defence: An Overview of the late Augustine's Theodicy.’ Religious Studies 43 (2007), pp. 279-298.
7 Saint Augustine, The City of God (XI-XXII), trans. William Babcock (Hyde Park, New York: New City Press, 2013), pp. 15-16.
which a being exists, what is evil for a person must be ontologically non-necessary for that person. Even when a person is evil through and through, that is not a fact about that person’s essential nature, but a disordering of it.
This claim has implications that only sometimes receive proper attention. One relatively well known implication of Augustine’s privation account is that evil diminishes rather than empowers. We do evil with a desire for some good but evil by its very nature cannot deliver what it promises. That is why evil, and evildoing, is a kind of weakness, even when it takes the form of arrogance and lust for power.
A less discussed implication of his account is that negative experiences that we often call evil may be so only in the broad sense in which there is something bad about anything we experience and dislike. Theologians and philosophers are typically more interested, however, in a narrower sense of the term, where something is evil if it ought not be. When we consider the term with that more specific meaning, Augustine’s privation account seems to imply that pain is not necessarily an evil. Pain is not evil, narrowly construed, because it is part of the proper functioning of embodied beings to experience at least some pain when they encounter their environment in certain ways. The ability to experience pain whether that be the pain of a stubbed toe, or the experience of frustration when a complex task cannot be performed as well as one might like is a fact of finitude, part of the natural order created by God. Thus, it is good. How exactly this claim should be developed is a topic for a different essay, but the general point about the limits of evil is worth noting. We saw above that the privation account does not mean that every kind of lack is evil, since this would imply that anything that is not God is, by definition, evil. We can now extend that insight to the claim that that not everything that is
negative for a being is evil. What is evil, rather, is what impedes a being’s ability to achieve the sort of good appropriate to the kind of being that it is. Such impediments could come from having too much. Cancer, for instance, is an impediment to human well-being because it is cell growth that is out of control. Cancer thus is a corruption and disorder that is too much of a good thing, which counts as privation on Augustine’s theory.
Privation accounts have come in for a good deal of criticism in recent years.8 Once the confusions about Augustine’s views mentioned above are out of the way, the main question the privation account faces is what exactly it means to claim, as Augustine did, that evil is ‘the absence of good.’9 A strong reading of this claim can seem implausible. It goes against common sense to claim that all evils are to be understood simply as a lack of positive attributes. Take the evil of an experienced sadist, for instance, one who has found a stable job as a torturer. Such a person will certainly be lacking many positive attributes, but such evil also seems to require us to say something about the qualities the torturer has. It is not enough to say that the torturer is not compassionate or caring, for instance, because a torturer is hardly alone in being deficient in those qualities. What makes the torturer special is the ‘positive’ qualities such a person has, such as the knowledge required to harm without killing, and the structures of mind and desire required to take pleasure in destroying a person face to face. The torturer is hard to understand if we speak only of what such a person is missing.
Given the active and perversely generative forms that evil can take, a weaker reading of Augustine’s claim, which allows that the absence of good can come in many forms, seems more
8 For an overview, see Todd C. Calder, ‘Is the Privation Theory of Evil Dead?’, American Philosophical Quarterly 44:4 (2007), pp. 371-381.
9 Saint Augustine, ‘Enchiridion,’ in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, vol. 3, ed. Philip Schaff (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1993), p. 240.
attractive. And, indeed, I have already claimed that Augustine’s privation account does not merely associate evil with ontological lack or the psychologically negative, and that it is able to associate the idea of privation with that of problematic excess. On this view, the key insight in Augustine’s claim that evil is the absence of good is the metaphysical claim that for something to be evil is for it to be at odds with God’s designs for that thing. Augustine metaphorically associates evil with a wound or sickness because of the way evil impairs the proper functioning of the being whose powers it perverts.
On a sympathetic reading, Augustine did not intend to claim that each particular instance of evil should be thought of only in terms of a not-being. One way to clarify this is to suggest that on Augustine’s privation account describing a particular evil in terms of the goods that it is missing is necessary but may not be sufficient. Since the privation account claims that evil always involves corruption of the goods natural to creation, it will always be the case that whatever particular evil we have in mind will involve missing out on goods proper to the being in question. It is not necessary, however, to maintain that each particular evil is nothing more than such a corruption.10 Evils might very well take on quite particular forms that we will find it helpful to describe in ‘positive’ terms. Thus, we could say that a torturer is able to be evil only because of a lack of compassion and regard for others, but also note that the talented and effective torturer develops qualities like the enjoyment of other’s pain and a perverse kind of empathy for how to manipulate others.
10 A similar approach is described in Cress, ‘Augustine's Privation Account of Evil: A Defense,’ pp. 109-128 and in Nicholas Wolterstorff, ‘Barth on Evil’, Faith and Philosophy 13:4 (1996), pp. 584-608.
He Was Free to Hold Back: Augustine’s Account of Primal Sin
Since the focus of this essay is on Augustine’s doctrine of sin rather than his conception of evil per se, I will forgo further inquiry into Augustine’s privation account. Let us now consider the implications of Augustine’s approach to evil for his doctrine of sin. The implications of Augustine’s privation account for his view of sin are relatively straightforward, but Augustine himself did not always highlight them, so it may be illuminating to point them out.
We have seen that Augustine thought of sin as a particular kind of evil. Some evils function as divinely imposed punishments; sin, by contrast, is evil that deserves blame and punishment. Sin deserves blame, Augustine thought, because it is an evil that resides in the volitional capacity of a personal agent. For the sake of simplicity I will refer to that volitional capacity as the heart and mind, but we should not forget that Augustine did not think of these as separate powers but rather different ways of looking at one thing. When evil is located in the heart and mind it is culpable, and therefore sin. Non-personal creatures may have a variety of evils, but Augustine believed that they cannot sin (or go to hell) because they lack the agential status required to do so. To be sinful is to have one’s mind and heart — and the powers of belief, desire, and love associated with them warped in such a way that they are at odds with the plans God has for the perfection of one’s self. To sin is to act in a way that is at odds with the divine design, which typically harms not only the world in which one acts, but the heart and mind of the actor as well. In other words, sin is bad not only because it defies God, but also because it actively misrelates to the good of others and to one’s own good.
Both Augustine’s theodicy and his privation account required that God not be the direct agent of evil, so he found it fitting that evil’s genesis was in the power of created agents. The first evil was the first sin, the devil’s desire to follow his own light rather than God’s, soon
followed by the disobedience of Adam and Eve. That primal sin, Augustine believed, had cosmic implications, since it unleashed all the evils now extant. Thus, although not all evil takes the form of sin, sin is the most fundamental form of evil and its source.
Augustine famously found the primal sin inexplicable. From an early point in his career, in his attacks on his former Manichean beliefs, Augustine contended that what makes sin possible is the fact that created agents are unlike God in their ability to fall back into nothing. God’s absolute perfection means that it is not possible for God to become less than God is. That is the metaphysical reason why God cannot be evil. Things are otherwise for humans and angels. Those who were created out of nothing can fall back into nothing; the possibility of failing to flourish is a necessary part of their ontology as contingent beings.
However, this ontology does not make a fall into sin necessary. As a result, Augustine’s ontology helped him to explain only the condition of the possibility of sin. The actuality of sin remained inexplicable. Although it is true that God did not act to make sin impossible, the Augustinian ontology just described suggests that the only way for God to have done so would have been to unite humanity to Godself from the beginning. Augustine offered a reason why God did not do so: God did not want to take all the drama out of creation. God intended to confirm humanity in the good, and give them eternal life, if Adam and Eve obeyed the command given to them in the garden. At the same time, Augustine maintained that even in their state of innocence God did not leave Adam and Eve on a knife’s edge, teetering between good and evil. Indeed, Augustine believed that God could not have done so for two reasons. First, doing so would have been unsuitable to God’s goodness, because it would have been a way of leaving the first couple overly vulnerable to evil.11 Second, Augustine did not consider it psychologically possible for
11 Saint Augustine, The City of God, pp. 45-46.
the first couple to be in what he called an ‘intermediate’ position. Their wills could not have been neither bad nor good. They had either to love righteousness or fail to love righteousness.12 Under the circumstances, God made them morally good or, as Augustine put it, following Ecclesiastes 7.29, ‘upright.’13
According to Augustine’s moral psychology, Adam and Eve’s prelapsarian agency had its source in a love for the good that was bestowed on them at the moment of their creation. He envisioned Adam and Eve acting out of a volitional structure in which love for God and love for themselves and others were properly ordered from the start. In other words, the first couple was endowed with an original righteousness. Not only did they not have to struggle with the disordered desires that Augustine called ‘carnal concupiscence,’ they were born with a desire to obey God.14 Their praiseworthy volitional structure was not, however, habituated, and their original righteousness was immature, because Adam and Eve were intended to confirm themselves in the good (to some degree) by making right decisions and acting on them. This need for maturation meant that there was a definite psychological possibility of deviating from the good. To counter this possibility, Augustine suggested that God graciously supported Adam and Eve, not only by commanding that they act obediently and implying that they would be rewarded for doing so but by giving them the mental and volitional power to hold fast to the good. So although Adam and Eve were ontically and psychologically capable of sinning, God had stacked the deck against the Fall, and it made no sense that they should have done so. There was no good reason for Adam and Eve to sin, and every reason for them to have followed the
12 Saint Augustine, ‘The Punishment and Forgiveness of Sins and the Baptism of Little Ones’, in The Works of Saint Augustine: Answers to the Pelagians, vol. 1, ed. John E. Rotelle, O.S.A, trans. Roland J. Teske, S.J. (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1997), pp. 99-100.
13 Saint Augustine, The City of God, pp. 116-118, 496-497.
14 Saint Augustine, ‘The Punishment and Forgiveness of Sins,’ pp. 104-105.
divine calling they received. They had no reason not to trust God, and their own natures inclined them to do so. This is why Augustine found the primal sin mysterious.
It is sometimes thought that Augustine sought to explain the primal sin with his attempt to describe it as an act of pride made by free choice. However, as he matured Augustine became more and more convinced that any attempt to understand the primal sin must fall short. Let us consider each of these characterizations of the primal sin in turn.
Augustine consistently claimed that the primal sin must have been a sin of pride, in which the devil and the first couple acted out of contempt for God. As he wrote in City of God: ‘Love of self, even to the point of contempt for God, made the earthly city.’15 In making this claim he relied upon what was in his day a widely known Biblical passage from Sirach 10:13, which states that ‘the beginning of all sin is pride.’ Augustine found it natural to understand the angelic fall, in particular, as a sin of pride because only an unlimited desire for more that sought to transcend the finitude of creation can explain how it was possible for such powerful and happy beings to contemplate revolting against God. This explanation of the primal sin is quite limited, however, since it remains unclear why beings who lacked nothing and should have been entirely happy would have been discontented with or contemptuous of God. Thus, while it is reasonable to describe the primal sin as proud, the sin itself remains mysterious and irrational. Those who were made to love God should not have found the prospect of defying God attractive, and pride should not have come naturally to them.
Similarly, the claim that the primal sin was an act of free choice has limited explanatory power. Indeed, Augustine came to think it was misleading, in a way. He often wrote that the primal sin was an evil choice, perhaps because he thought of it that way when he first articulated
15 Saint Augustine, The City of God, pp. 136-137.
his famous free will theodicy in On Free Choice of the Will. However, Augustine emphasized in his mature works that the primal sin was an attitude before it was a choice expressed in action.16
Adam and Eve flirted with desires that would not have been attractive to them had their hearts not already been turned to sin before they actually chose to disobey. Their faulty attitude towards God’s command was not the subject of a choice, as if upon hearing the serpent’s temptation Adam and Eve decided that it would be appealing to doubt God. They simply found themselves doubting God. In doing so they sinned, and found that they could not go back.
Thus, Augustine’s mature view was that the first couple acted out of their fundamental orientation of love for God right up until they did not. The language of ‘fall’ is peculiarly appropriate for this take on what happened in the primal sin, since the Fall was not so much an act of choice in which they were in control, choosing their destiny, as a state of mind in which Adam and Eve happened to find (or, indeed, lose) themselves. Augustine had no explanation to offer concerning why it would suddenly make sense to them that God’s law should be violated, so their sin remained bizarre. Augustine highlighted this fact with his suggestion that the primal sin had a ‘deficient’ cause, which implied that the Fall was more a case of their hearts and minds malfunctioning than it was an act of genuine freedom.17
We might wonder why Augustine sometimes called the primal sin a ‘free choice’ (liberum arbitrium), if it lacked a proper explanatory relationship to Adam and Eve’s psychology. One possibility is that this was a topic about which he changed his mind. I have argued that Augustine abandoned the free will defense in his late anti-Pelagian works (those written after 412) because he came to think that it was theologically inappropriate to suggest that
16 Saint Augustine, The City of God, pp. 116-121.
17 Saint Augustine, The City of God, pp. 41-44, 45-46.
the God who saves by grace started human history off by asking human beings to set their own ultimate state.18 In his Unfinished Work Augustine cuttingly proffered the Fall as the premier example of the libertarian freedom celebrated by Pelagius. If this is what an undetermined freedom leads to, Augustine suggested, we are better off without it.19 Augustine, by contrast, did not ground the possibility of the Fall in an innate volitional power for choosing among alternatives. Rather, he saw the Fall as a faulty act of will, a view that fit naturally with his privation account.
A second possibility, compatible with the one just mentioned, is that (at least in the works Augustine wrote after he began to develop his doctrines of original sin, operative grace, and predestination, by 396) Augustine referred to the Fall as a ‘choice’ not in an attempt to explain the primal sin but to more clearly locate the type of evil that it was: one located in the minds and hearts of personal agents. As we have seen, he did not believe that reference to a free choice could explain the Fall, since in order to make sense a choice has to fit an existing agential volitional structure, which falling into sin did not. Reference to a choice could, however, act as a reminder that the first evil was volitional even if it was not the act of autonomous self-control Milton portrayed it as.
This naturally leads to another question about Augustine’s mature treatment of the primal sin. If that sin was not a libertarian free choice but a surd that happened to the primal sinners as much as it was done by them, why should they be blamed for it? Although there is not room here to engage the full complexity of Augustine’s ideas about freedom and responsibility, I want to suggest that Augustine had a thoughtful answer available to him.
18 Couenhoven, “Augustine’s Rejection of the Free Will Defence”, pp. 285-286.
19 Saint Augustine, ‘Unfinished Work in Answer to Julian’, pp. 108-109, 111.
Augustine’s mature view was that personal agents are accountable for the features of their hearts and minds and can be praised or blamed for their content. This is not because they control their hearts and minds, in the sense that they have the power to choose what will be in their hearts and minds, and thus to choose who they will be. To the contrary, Augustine increasingly saw human persons as dependent beings with porous selves, who receive their identities from God and the other people around them. Adam and Eve are an excellent example, since at the moment of their creation Augustine considered them quite virtuous and praiseworthy. This was not because they had chosen their innocent perfection. God had chosen that state for them. Given their circumstances, Adam and Eve were admirable without having made themselves so. Their righteousness was a gift. Augustine considered them deserving of praise simply because their beliefs and loves were good. Put more broadly, Augustine’s claim was that human agents are accountable for what they own, and that persons own their hearts and minds, which make us who we are as persons.
Similarly, when Adam and Eve fell, they had ownership of their now fallen beliefs and desires. So while they may have lacked control over their fall into sin (as they had lacked control over their having been made with an original righteousness) they did not lack accountability for being fallen.20 Intriguingly, this view of the Fall as a privation of Adam and Eve’s volitional goodness that they found within themselves without having chosen paralleled Augustine’s conception of the original sin into which all of Adam’s race are born.
20 I develop these ideas further, in relation to Augustine’s doctrines of original sin and operative grace, in Jesse Couenhoven, Stricken by Sin, Cured by Christ: Agency, Necessity, and Culpability in Augustinian Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), Ch. 3-4.
The Sin that is the Punishment of Sin: Augustine’s Account of Original Sin
Once sin entered the world, Augustine believed, the human race was changed for the worse. Scripture taught that all of creation was harmed by the advent of evil, and cursed as part of God’s punishment of it. But the most ironic and fitting punishment was the fact that those who had sought to rebel against God now found that without God’s help their own bodies and souls rebelled against them. Augustine considered physical death the most obvious example of our inability to hold ourselves together. Far from exemplifying the power of autonomy, our bodies fall into decay. He often wrote about male sexuality as a more subtle example of this new dynamic. Sometimes men wish to be sexually aroused yet cannot, but at other times, they are aroused when they do not want to be. These bodily failures are indicative of humanity’s internal state. Persons’ hearts and minds have become fractured and disorganized, and with beliefs and desires at odds it is hard to be content or to have self-control.
The idea of original sin fit in naturally at this point for Augustine, since he considered it appropriate for an attempt to be free from God to have been punished by enslavement to sin. It is important to note, however, that Augustine’s views about original sin were motivated not primarily by his ideas about punishment or his personal observations of human nature, but by his theology of baptism and his doctrine of Christ. All human beings are in need of Christ’s healing, he reasoned, so all human beings, even infants, must be wounded by sin. This line of thought was reinforced by the practice of baptizing infants, and the widespread belief, expressed in the Creed, that baptism is given for the forgiveness of sin. Since infants obviously do not sin in the active or intentional ways in which more grown up human beings do, Augustine thought their sin must be of a special sort. They must share, involuntarily, in Adam’s sin.
That idea fit Augustine’s soteriology, which developed the apostle Paul’s parallel between the solidarity Christians have in Christ and the solidarity humanity has in Adam. The elect are brought into Christ by God’s grace, a salvation that is necessary because of the seminal existence of all human nature in the first couple. Much as Christ’s righteousness is credited to the saints, the stain of Adam’s guilt infects everyone because of the unity of the human race. ‘We were all in that one man’ when he sinned, Augustine wrote.21 The guilt human beings share is not simply backward looking, however. It is also predicated upon an echo of the primal sin that exists in every human born of Adam’s seed. Augustine believed that human beings are now born without a proper order among their loves. That makes postlapsarian humanity sinful from the start. Even when they are able to restrain themselves from acting unjustly towards one another, or themselves, their internal attitudes are characterized by carnal concupiscence envy, lust for power, and other untoward desires. Infants, as Augustine famously suggested at the start of his Confessions with his image of a baby greedy for milk, share this inheritance.22 Baptism is given to bring a fallen humanity into relation with Christ, who not only forgives the guilt all share in common but heals the flawed second nature with which all are born.
In Augustine’s thought, original sin in the two forms of shared guilt and carnal concupiscence are volitional evils from which human beings cannot escape without divine assistance. Original sin is original in the sense that it is an evil at the origins of human agency, and from which human agency flows. We act on our loves, and if our loves are flawed so too must we be. Famously, this means that sin is a necessary part of fallen human life. Even basic human goods, such as our social nature, have been perverted. Augustine often noted in his
21 Saint Augustine, The City of God, p. 79.
22 Saint Augustine, The Confessions, trans. Maria Boulding, O.S.B, ed. John E. Rotelle (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1997), p. 43.
Confessions and elsewhere ways in which his friends had a negative influence on him by getting him involved in movements and activities that led him astray. Augustine did not, however, believe that all human goodness had been eradicated.23 That would have contradicted his privation account of evil. Human nature is corrupted, therefore, in the real but limited sense that human hearts and minds have been warped and twisted to the point that love is rarely, if ever, pure.
The impurity of love that Augustine considered the basic form of sin often took the form of pride. In City of God Augustine diagnosed the fundamental sin at the heart of the Roman Empire as pride, the hubris that led the Romans to accomplish great feats in the name of honor, but which inevitably led to the fall of empire as well, since it sought to be more than it could. Because of that book’s emphasis on sinful self-love, it is widely believed that Augustine thought sin always takes the form of a love of self not properly ordered by love of God. However, that interpretation is mistaken. In spite of the many similarities between the primal sin and original sin in Augustine’s thought, a signal difference between them is the fact that, as punishment, original sin highlights weakness and failure in a way that the first sin did not. Thus, it should not be a surprise to read Augustine’s statement that ‘Many sins are, after all, committed out of pride, but not every wrong action is done with pride. Many wrong actions are done by the ignorant, by the weak, and often by persons weeping and groaning.’24
23 See Saint Augustine, Revisions, ed. Roland J. Teske, S.J., trans. Boniface Ramsey (Hyde Park: New City Press, 2010), p. 132.
24 Saint Augustine, ‘Nature and Grace’, in The Works of Saint Augustine: Answer to the Pelagians, Vol. 1, ed. John E. Rotelle, O.S.A, trans. Roland J. Teske (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1997), pp. 241-2.
Original sin is a state of bondage to evil that is self-imposed, in the sense that original sin is not forced upon a person from the outside but rather constitutes who a fallen person is from the start. It is not accidental that Augustine often used medical metaphors such as sickness, disease, or plague, to describe this condition. He recognized that often enough, his own sins were not intended to be such at the time when they were committed, but rather they were only recognized as such in retrospect once he had come to a deeper knowledge of himself and the good. It was misleading to speak of such involuntary sins as hubris. Sins done out of ignorance of the good, or out of desperate weakness of spirit by those who long for rest are not sins of pride. As a result, Augustine suggested that there is no one central form that sin takes. Pride is the beginning of all sin, but not its necessary form.25
This view of sin as many-sided and fragmented fit naturally with Augustine’s claim that sin is a privation of the good. It may be that prelapsarian created agents, who were volitionally unified, and who loved an ordered and unified good, had only one avenue along which to oppose the good pride. Postlapsarian agents, by contrast, are a mess. They love only haltingly and in part. They cannot order their loves, or fit them together. The sin that is a privation of these fractured goods might naturally take many forms, failing to be good in a variety of ways even while being good in others. Looked at in these ways, original sin is more pathetic and sad than the primal sin. Both certainly have devastating consequences, but the evils of original sinners are often quite small and miserable. This, Augustine believed, should give us compassion towards one another.
25 See Jesse Couenhoven, ‘Not Every Wrong is Done with Pride: Augustine's Proto-feminist Anti-Pelagianism’, Scottish Journal of Theology 61:1 (2008), pp. 32-50.
Augustine’s claims about the necessity of sin can sound fatalistic. Because of the necessity of being healed in Christ it was clear to Augustine that no sinner can save him or herself. Augustine became embroiled in the Pelagian debates because of his philosophical development of that theological principle. As we have seen, his view was that human agents live out their loves. Because postlapsarian human loves are flawed, human lives will necessarily be flawed as well. That is the psychological reason why human beings can live rightly only when God gives what God commands. This teaching equalizes all of humanity in dependence on grace, but it has seemed to many of Augustine’s modern readers that it does so only by undermining human agency.
One reason not to see Augustine’s doctrine of original sin as fatalistic is that he did not believe in a psychological determinism according to which a person’s story is set by the cards dealt him or her at birth. God’s free and unpredictable grace is the ultimate disruptor of any such determinism, but even short of that Augustine believed that there were often cases where the resources of a person’s heart and mind would leave a variety of options underdetermined. Here there was room not only for chance Augustine particularly mentions the way in which what comes into our thoughts is not always under our control but for intentional shaping of self and others.26 Augustine’s polemics against the Pelagians did not offer a context for him to emphasize this latter theme, but the shape of his own life exemplified it. Augustine lived in community with friends who together practiced a way of life that was meant to elevate them all, and to minimize temptations. Although they had no hope of fully eradicating the disordered loves with which they had been born as original sinners, they sought to be as good as they could under the
26 Saint Augustine, ‘The Gift of Perseverance’, in The Works of Saint Augustine: Answer to the Pelagians, Vol. 4, ed. John E. Rotelle, O.S.A, trans. Roland J. Teske (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1999), pp. 201-202.
circumstances. It is hard to deny that Augustine believed in the moral and spiritual superiority of his dedicated brothers, in spite of their imperfections. To a great degree the differences he saw between human virtues can be accounted for by his doctrine of grace, which did not require that God give equally to all. Augustine also believed that sinners have at least some control over how their sin is expressed. Thus he preached that Whatever we are commanded to do, we have to pray that we may be able to fulfill it; but not in such a way that we let ourselves go, and like sick people lie flat on our backs and say, May God rain down food on our faces, and we ourselves wish to do absolutely nothing about it; and when food has been rained down into our mouths we say, May God also swallow it for us. We too have got to do something. We've got to be keen, we've got to try hard, and to give thanks insofar as we have been successful, to pray insofar as we have not.27
A second reason to reject the claim that Augustine’s doctrine of original sin is fatalistic is that even in cases where Augustine believed that human beings sin necessarily for instance, in the attitudes of greed, envy, or idolatry that postlapsarian human agents sometimes cannot avoid having he argued that the sort of necessity at work is not one that undermines the importance of what is in each personal agents’ heart and mind, or that makes praise and blame useless.28 By itself, he insisted, necessity does not undermine responsibility. The question is what makes the necessity and how. Original sin is a necessity shaped by what is in each person; it is not coercively imposed from the outside. Since original sinners’ faults are their own defects of thinking, loving, or acting, Augustine considered it entirely proper to rebuke them for their lack of character.
27 Saint Augustine, ‘Sermons (341-400)’, in The Works of Saint Augustine III/1, ed. John E. Rotelle, O.S.A., trans. Edmund Hill, O.P. (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1995), p. 99.
28 Saint Augustine, The City of God (I-X), trans. William Babcock (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2012), pp. 156-158.
Here it may be helpful to recall the earlier discussion of responsibility for the primal sin and original righteousness of Adam and Eve. Because human beings cannot create their own natures, Augustine considered it impious for a theory of moral and spiritual accountability to make responsibility depend on a power to choose one’s own identity. He suggested that human beings are responsible for the contents of their hearts and minds because persons own what they believe and love. On this view, the ability to choose is not the main criterion of responsibility. For Augustine, personal loves and beliefs are intrinsically the sort of things that can be praised and blamed, rewarded and punished. How we come by them is important, but it is not decisive.
Conclusion: Must We Talk About Sin?
Augustine’s views about sin are sometimes attacked because interlocutors dislike the views Augustine had about specific activities or attitudes. For example, he is particularly supposed to have had problems with sex, although that claim is somewhat misleading. Augustine considered sexual lust a good example of the ways in which those who desire autonomy find themselves out of control, but he was not more concerned with sexual desire than lust for power or prestige. He did have ideas about sexuality that differ significantly from the views widely held today, but the same can be said for his austere views about eating or his strict rejection of lying.
At any rate, it is quite possible to find insight in Augustine’s doctrine of sin whether or not we find insight in Augustine’s particular moral stances. This distinction has sometimes been made by separating out discussion of particular ‘sins’ from a doctrine of ‘Sin.’ Though there is mutual influence between how one thinks about particular sins and one’s general doctrine of sin, the two differ in significant ways as well. Thus, we should judge Augustine’s doctrine of sin less on
whether we like his ideas about self-love, sexuality, or ambition, than on the ways in which he developed his privation account, his soteriology, and his moral psychology.
Even so, in a culture that values optimism it can be difficult for us to see anything to be excited about in a doctrine of sin. Why focus on the negative? Augustinians can offer a three part response. First, although our litany of sins tends to differ in important ways from Augustine’s — he did not typically chide his fellows for their failures to recycle, or for their sexism we still have implicit ideas about evil that drive many of our responses to the world around us. We still blame and hold people accountable for various evils in which we believe them to be implicated. Therefore, we also have our own conceptions of sin of culpable evil that can be illuminated by conversation with Augustine, precisely because his thought world was quite different from ours.
Second, I have argued that in Augustine’s hands the doctrine of sin is meant to serve the positive. Augustine’s doctrine of sin was provoked by his conception of the good and by his beliefs about the grace available through baptism and other means. His views about sin are often blamed for his stark vision of hell and damnation, but this assessment reads Augustine’s conceptual history backwards. Augustine developed his doctrine of sin in the light of the beliefs he held on ‘positive’ matters like the sacraments and the nature of salvation in Christ. His references to sin in his Confessions, for example, were often meant not to denigrate himself but to highlight God’s attempts to teach him, and to show the import of his own agency in contradistinction to the Manichean claim that the evil in his life was not his own. Augustine’s doctrine of sin sought to provide a logic that made sense of his other commitments about human nature.
Third, the language of sin is less pejorative than is often claimed. Though Augustine should at times have spoken less harshly than he did, it is important not to overestimate how harsh Augustine actually was. His doctrine of sin was meant not merely to condemn but to diagnose our condition. He sought to follow in the steps of the great physician Jesus Christ by clarifying the nature of our deepest troubles, so that we might be able to see our avenues of hope more clearly. Unlike his theological opponents moral elitists who believed that only a select few could purify themselves Augustine trusted that by grace salvation is open to the many. Because the linchpin of his theology was divine forgiveness, he found it necessary to speak of the wounds God works to cure. Augustine’s doctrine of original sin, in particular, is not meant to be callous. It is a moral psychology that depicts the tragedy of the universal human relationship with shocking and mundane evils that trap and diminish us. If he was right, the seemingly optimistic claim that individuals can and should renew their own hearts, minds, and communities is actually a false hope, one that asks what the fallen cannot give, thereby adding to the burdens of the already afflicted. In his view, our true freedom lies in the gift of new life already offered to us by the one who made us. The deepest sin is to refuse to rest in this hope.
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