1: Augustine on Original Sin
Many of Augustine's writings were hammered out in controversies with views he considered heretical and, in the case of original sin and the associated doctrine of grace, Augustine's main opponent was Pelagius, a British monk, who for some time exerted considerable influence among Christians in Rome and further afield. Pelagius is said to have taught that Adam had been created mortal, that the sin of Adam injured nobody but himself, that while Adam set a bad example for posterity the guilt for his sin was not inherited by those who came after him, and that infants were born in the same state as Adam before the fall.Footnote 1 On all of these points the Pelagians were opposed by Augustine.
Augustine wrote about original sin on more than one occasion and his numerous writings make frequent references to aspects of this doctrine as well as to the general sinfulness of human beings. I have elected to present here the account he gives of original sin in Books 12–14 of The City of God, supplemented with references to some other works, because this represents the views of the mature Augustine who has had time to think of the problems raised by his account of original sin and time also to develop responses to these problems.
Augustine's argument
In The City of God Augustine works out his theology in the context of what he understands to be the history of humanity and he frames his reflections on original sin likewise in the general history of humankind. So in Book 12, chapter 10, for example, he gives us his opinion on those who think that the human race, like the world itself, always existed, and in the following chapter he writes “On the mistaken history which ascribes many thousands of years to times past.” As so often, Augustine works at a fairly speculative level and before he begins his treatment of original sin in chapter 6 of Book 12, he dwells for a time on the nature of angels and on the fall of the angels in heaven. This is no incidental preamble to his reflections on the original sin of the human race since in the mind of Augustine it is very clear that the fall of the angels, of those who chose darkness in preference to the light, is closely linked to the fall of Man. The big question Augustine addresses in this chapter is how it was possible for evil to have a beginning and, since God made all things good, how it was possible for something good to be the cause of evil. “How can a natural being that is good though changeable, before he comes to have an evil will, create something that is evil, I mean, the evil will itself?” (CG 12: 6; 33)Footnote 2 Here Augustine is addressing the problem in its most acute form. It is not difficult to see how moral evil is the product of an evil will, but how can an evil will emerge from one that is good?
Augustine gives his answer to this problem in the next chapter, chapter 7, saying that we should not seek “an efficient cause of an evil will, for the cause is not one of efficiency but of deficiency even as the evil will itself is not an effect but a defect.” (Ibid., 33) Augustine clearly believes that this notion that evil is not something positive, something real, but rather an absence of the real, a deficiency, the privation of what is good –privatio boni– puts a stop to the search for the efficient cause of evil, a search that threatens to engulf God himself since the question can be asked how evil could have begun if God himself had not willed that it begin. For Augustine there can be no question of God being implicated in the origin of moral evil and he believes that the notion of evil as deficiency, as literally non-being, creates a firewall between evil and God. There can be no efficient cause of nothing. Rather nothing is the absence of being rather as darkness is the absence of light and silence the absence of sound (Ibid.). “To be sure, each of these two things is known to us, and one only through our eyes, the other only through our ears, yet clearly we know them not by their definite shape, but by the absence of shape or form. Hence let no one seek from me” (and here we encounter Augustine the rhetorician) “to know what I know that I do not know, except it be in order to learn how not to know what we should know cannot be known.” (CG 12:7; 35)
So Augustine's view is that sin or moral evil is the result of an evil will and original sin is no exception, being the result of Man's evil will. There is no anterior cause, however, of the evil will itself, nothing beyond the evil will causing itself to turn bad. The evil will is the result of a lapse of the will itself, it brings about its own corruption. “The lapse is not to what is bad, but to lapse is bad. In other words, the natural objects to which there is a lapse are not bad, but to lapse is bad because the will lapses against the natural order from what has supreme being to what has less being.” (CG 12:8; 37) Sin is not a consequence of anything in the natural world – such as gold or beautiful bodies or whatever – but resides in the soul of man who comes to love such things to excess at the expense of righteousness and moderation. An evil will, the only source of sin there is, is the result of the will's own lapse, nothing more and nothing less.
The psychology of sin
As an account of evil as a philosophical concept, Augustine's argument here is good but it is not clear that he provides an adequate account of original sin, of the first morally evil human action. When viewed psychologically it is difficult to see how a good will can lapse in the context of the Garden of Eden. It is the nature of the will to seek the good and a good will seeks the truly good. What motivation could anyone have to lapse if his will were already thoroughly good, where the word ‘good’ would suggest that it was trained on its object in a manner commensurate with all that is right and proper in human nature? How could it possibly lapse unless it were already inclined to selfishness and sin? That evil is the privation of the good, a deficiency, does not seem to answer the question of how a perfectly good will, unaffected by any force of attraction beyond the good, could possibly choose evil over good. Despite Augustine's subtle and telling philosophical argument, the question of motivation and inclination remains at the level of human psychology. While it is not at all difficult to understand a lapse of the will in a universe already infected by sin it is very difficult to understand the same lapse in a totally innocent universe in which sin is unknown. In such a universe how could a perfectly good will be tempted? It would seem to be so constituted as to be impervious to temptation. Indeed, the very possibility of temptation would seem to be ruled out by definition, since the will is presumed to be good and hence ordered to that to which it ought to be ordered, without demur. The very possibility of the will departing from its true path seems ruled out, literally ruled out, by the conditions that have to be met for the will to be considered good and prior sin nonexistent.
In summary, it is one thing to provide a definition of the nature of evil as ‘the privation of the good’, privatio boni. That is a matter of ontology, of the objective reality of evil. It is quite another thing to speak of a will that is ordered to the good becoming disordered or re-ordered to that which is bad and wrong. For the will to change there is needed some account of motivation or reasons for changing and it is here that a defender of Augustine's position must begin to struggle. To describe it simply, as Augustine does, as a lapse or failing of the will is to beg the question, for the question is: How could such a will lapse or fail? What could possibly have caused the will, motivated it, provided it with reason, to change or lapse? Can a perfectly good will change without it being already prone to evil and, if prone to evil, already implicated in sin? That is a matter not of ontology but of psychology.
Augustine is not unaware of the distinction between ontology and psychology but he does not appear to have worked it out clearly in his mind and this leads him, I believe, to an inconsistent position regarding the origin of sin. For one answer Augustine's position tempts one to adopt – and it is one that Augustine, a thinker of considerable subtlety, is well aware of (see, for example, CG14:10) – is that man sinned because he had already sinned: that he sinned in deed because he had already sinned in his mind or heart. Augustine rightly repudiates the possibility of this happening in paradise, exclaiming, “Heaven forbid, I say, that we should think that before all sin there already existed in paradise such sin … ” (Ibid.; 321) Having said this, however, he then proceeds to contradict himself by arguing a few chapters later (CG 14:13; 339–41) that man succumbed to pride in secret before he performed the deed by which he sinned: “This wrong, I repeat, came first in secret and prepared the way for the other wrong that was committed openly.” (Ibid, 341) It is hard to see consistency between Augustine's words of repudiation in chapter 10 of Book 14 and his words concerning the corrupting influence of pride in chapter 13 of the same Book. In fact, Augustine is up against the very conditions he has established as prevailing in paradise and cannot satisfactorily answer the question: Can a human being sin in such circumstances? Can a human being sin if the conditions that make sin psychologically possible are absent? The negative route of privatio might explain evil but lapsation or failure of the will, albeit necessary, is not sufficient to explain sin in a world where sin is not known. Lapsation of the will requires in addition a cause or reason for lapsing, and it is here that Augustine's argument encounters its greatest difficulty.
While Augustine is aware of this line of thought, he appears to feel that he has met it by identifying the snake mentioned in Genesis 3 as a tool of the devil, the latter being a fallen angel who seeks to bring about in humankind the fall from divine favour which his own pride had caused him to experience previously (see CG 14:11–13). There is a blending of arguments here that is likely to confuse the reader. Augustine presents the devil as a creature of superior intellect who deliberately chose as the target for his temptation “the lower member of that human couple in order to arrive gradually at the whole.” (CG 14:11; 331) Adam yielded to temptation not because he believed his wife to be telling the truth but because of “the close bond of their alliance.” Adam's mistake, he goes on to say, was to believe that his offence would be pardoned – in this way both the man and the woman were “ensnared in the devil's toils.” (Ibid; 333) Now this introduction of an agent of seduction and temptation may seem to answer the question about the origin of moral evil along the lines that moral evil came about because there was already on the scene a morally corrupt being who misled the human couple – first the woman and through her the man – into sinning. However, this does not answer the question of how moral evil arose in the first place in a universe in which none had previously existed. It simply puts the origin of evil back, to the fall of the angels in heaven, and the arguments placed against the moral lapse of the human couple can be equally well placed against the moral lapse of the angels. Whether he is dealing with the fall of man or the fall of angels, Augustine is faced with the difficulty of making sin in a sinless universe psychologically possible. Augustine's reference to the devil is also weakened by the fact that it has no scriptural support so long as we stick to the tale we find in Genesis.
Contradiction
Augustine seems to be involved in a contradiction in this part of his argument, since he rightly repudiates the notion that the human couple could have sinned before they sinned but then goes on to say that they committed the sin of pride before they deliberately disobeyed God's prohibition against eating the forbidden fruit. (CG 14:13; 335–6) By turning to pride as the cause of the first sin, Augustine seems to be tacitly admitting the distinction I have made between talk about evil and talk about sin, and admitting that to explain the latter requires some exploration of motivation and reasoning that leads up to the sinful act. He discourses at length on pride which he deems to be the originator of all sin and occurs when man “is too well pleased with himself” and, instead of being grounded in God, is grounded in himself (Ibid., 337). “Accordingly, the evil act, that is, the transgression that involved their eating of forbidden food, was committed only by those who were already evil.” (Ibid.) In a nutshell, Augustine's contradiction lies in this: he attempts to argue that what he should designate as a consequence of original sin, namely human pride and the distortion of the human will, is in fact the initiator and cause of the first sin. Augustine seems to be confusing before and after at this juncture: while it makes sense to say that pride was a consequence of sin it cannot with consistency be argued that this same pride was the instigator or cause of the first sin. If there were no evil before man sinned then there could be no sinful pride. Augustine fails to prove his case. Furthermore, if man was guilty of sinful pride before the “original sin” of disobedience, he must have come from the hand of his creator as one already inclined to pride. In other words, Augustine's argument fails to protect God from being implicated in human sin.
In the case of the fall of the angels, Augustine again attempts to explain their sinful action by citing a lapse of the will (CG 12: 9; 39); but once more he feels the need to go further and in this case explain how it was that one group of angels remained faithful to God while another group lapsed and fell. He does so by claiming that the holy angels received “more help” from God than did the bad angels (Ibid; 43). Augustine feels the need to “load the dice” both on behalf of the good angels and against those who lapsed: he does not remain content with his statement that sin is caused by a lapse of the will but feels obliged to explain how it was that some angels were inclined to adhere to God while others lapsed – again, he appears to concede the distinction between evil as an ontological reality and the moral evil of sin with the latter requiring some psychological explanation involving motivation or reasoning. He expresses the situation of the angels in such a way that it is hard to see how the holy angels could have done anything other than remain faithful to God: since they “with more help (amplius adiuti) achieved such fullness of bliss as brought them the utmost certainty that they would never fall from it.” (Ibid., 43); nor to see how the bad angels could possibly have remained faithful since they did not receive the “bliss” or “delight” (beatitudo) in God to the degree that caused the good angels to adhere to the truth. Once more, it is difficult to have any confidence that Augustine has adequately shielded God from implication in the fall of the evil angels, since it appears to be God's provision of sufficient grace or his failure to do so that predestines one group of angels to remain faithful and the other to lapse. All his life Augustine had difficulty in reconciling human freedom with God's grace. As T. Kermit Scott concludes, after examining Augustine's reasoning on this issue, “God predestines the angels and the first humans just as completely and certainly as he does fallen humankind.”Footnote 3
Augustine, however, is serenely oblivious of any flaws in his argument and, indeed, is inclined to make the general state of innocence in which Adam and Eve lived before the Fall yet another reason for their condemnation. As he puts it at the end of Book 14, chapter 12, “This command, which forbade the eating of one kind of food where a great abundance of other kinds lay close at hand, was as easy to observe as it was brief to remember, especially since the will was not yet then opposed by desire. Such opposition arose later as punishment for the transgression. Consequently, the crime of violating the command was all the greater in proportion to the ease with which it could have been heeded and upheld.” (335) Again, in answer to the objection that the punishment of “eternal death” seems excessive in view of the nature of Adam and Eve's sin, Augustine retorts, “Whoever thinks that condemnation of this sort is either excessive or unjust surely does no know how to gauge the magnitude of wickedness in sinning when the opportunity for not sinning was so ample.” (CG 14:15; 347).
The consequences of original sin
Augustine believes his philosophical comments on the nature of evil have satisfactorily answered the questions about the possibility of the origin of human evil and he continues later in Book 12 to explain the consequences of sin for Man. “For he (God) created man's nature to be midway, so to speak, between angels and beasts in such a way that, if he should remain in subjection to his creator as his true lord and with dutiful obedience keep his commandment, he was to pass into the company of the angels, obtaining with no intervening deathFootnote 4 a blissful immortality that has no limit; but if he should make proud and disobedient use of his free will and go counter to the Lord his God, he was to live like a beast, at the mercy of death, enthralled by lust and doomed to eternal punishment after death.” (CG 12: 22;111) The notion of man created “midway between angels and beasts” has become something of a common place in Western thinking down the centuries – we think of Alexander Pope's lines, “Placed on this isthmus of a middle state/A being darkly wise and rudely great”– so that it is salutary to recall that this is not part of the biblical account at all but reflects the influence of Platonism on Augustine's thought.
The Platonic strain in his thought causes Augustine to develop a fondness for angels, pure spirits unencumbered by a body, and in Book 12 of The City of God he goes on to say that God foresaw the sin of the first man but at the same time foresaw that “by his grace a company of righteous men would be called to adoption and that, after they were forgiven their sins and made righteous by the Holy Spirit, they would be united with the holy angels in eternal peace, when the last enemy, death, was destroyed.” (CG 12:23; 113) In line with the thesis he develops throughout The City of God, Augustine argues that even at the point of creating the first man God foresaw “two societies or cities among the human race. For it was from him that mankind was destined to arise, of which one part was to be joined in fellowship with evil angels for punishment and the other with good angels for reward. Such was God's decree, which, though hidden, was yet righteous. For … we know that neither can his grace be unjust nor his justice cruel.” (CG 12: 28; 131) He dwells on the statement in Genesis that God made man in his own likeness and from there he speculates on how the sin of Adam is inherited by the entire human race. A key element of Augustine's thinking is indicated by the heading for Book 12, chapter 28 that “in the first man was the entire plenitude of the human race.” Augustine is alert to the significance of this for his account of how we all inherit Adam's sin. He carefully stresses the fact that one man and one alone was directly created by God – even Eve was made from Adam “in order that the human race might derive entirely from one man.” (CG 12: 22; 111) Augustine is strictly patriarchal, claiming that sin stems from the male line, but his main reason for stressing that sin derives from Adam is to support his contention that all of humanity is tainted with original sin: all are tainted with sin because all, including Eve, are descended from the very first human created directly by God. Adam is the source of all human sinfulness and no human being is exempt (although Augustine upholds Jesus's freedom from original sin owing to his virginal conception by the power of the Holy Spirit).Footnote 5
While for the sake of strict logic Augustine is at pains to point out that humanity's sinfulness is the result of the sin of Adam, the fount and origin of all human beings, he does provide ammunition, later in The City of God, for those who over the centuries have pointed the finger of accusation at the woman. Quoting the verse in 1 Timothy 2:14 (which he attributes to St Paul), “Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived”, he goes on to say, “He must have meant that Eve had accepted what the serpent said to her as though it were true, while Adam refused to be separated from his sole companion even in a partnership of sin. Yet he was no less guilty if he sinned with knowledge and forethought.” (CG14:11; 331) – hence, although humanity is sinful because of Adam since from Adam all other human beings are descended, the instigator of the sin could, on this account, be considered to have been the woman!
Much of Book 13 of The City of God is a prolonged reflection on death, which Augustine considers to be a punishment for original sin. When man was first created by God obedience to his commandments “was to bring angelic deathlessness and an eternity of bliss with no intervening period of death, whereas disobedience would be very justly punished with death.” (CG, 135) This notion that human beings were created immortal and that mortality only came about as a result of original sin is one that does not sit comfortably with modern scientific thinking which sees death as a natural part of life, or more precisely as the natural conclusion of the biological life cycle. Today we see that all living creatures – plants, animals and human beings – die and this strikes us as perfectly natural. Without death it would be impossible to speak of generations succeeding each other and unless certain things died out to be replaced by others, it would not be possible to speak of the diversity and evolution of species. The evolution and diversity of species require random variations, time and death or elimination. It is hard for us to understand death as some kind of punishment. The scriptural basis of Augustine's thinking is the statement by God in Genesis 2: 17 that “In the day that you eat of it (the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil) you shall die.” The notion that man was created immortal is an inference from this statement; it is not something stated explicitly in Genesis but is an inference which Augustine, and following him countless other Christians, have drawn from the divine pronouncement.
Not only is it difficult to reconcile the notion of death as a punishment for sin with the modern scientific notion of evolution, it is also difficult to reconcile it with the notion of death we encounter in the Old Testament. Commenting on the words of Genesis 2: 17 (‘On the day that you eat of it, you shall die’), the late James Barr makes the important point that death was not seen as an unmitigated evil in the Old Testament and was not by any means considered to be punishment for sin.Footnote 6 On the contrary, death that was not marked by violence was seen as normal and natural and was often presented as the completion of a full and satisfying life.Footnote 7 Such comments as “Abraham breathed his last and died in a good old age, an old man and full of years” (Gen 25: 8) or, “And Isaac breathed his last; and he died and was gathered to his people, old and full of days” (Gen 35: 29), do not suggest anything other than that death was considered normal and natural. Barr goes on to make the point that this is an attitude that has continued into Christian culture when someone dies a peaceful death, “their life's work complete, their faith in God calm and untroubled.”Footnote 8 On such occasions we do not think of death as a punishment or as contrary to the will of God, and neither did the ancient Hebrews.
It may, however, be quite possible to form another convincing interpretation of these words of the Lord God, and in my next article I shall attempt to provide such an interpretation. Augustine's account of death as punishment for the original sin is just part of the general discomfort that any modern person with a reasonable grasp of modern scientific thought must feel when presented with Augustine's interpretation of Genesis 3.Footnote 9 Augustine's thought categories, largely derived from Plato, are so removed from those of modern science that one can well see why some moderns have jumped to the conclusion that Genesis 3 is contradicted by modern science. I shall argue, however, that it is not the third chapter of Genesis that is at variance with modern science but rather the interpretation of Genesis 3 presented by Augustine. It is time the Christian Church took stock of Augustine's thought and distinguished between that which is enduring and that which can be seen today to be less than convincing.
Another consequence of original sin Augustine reflects on in Book 13 is the shame of being naked expressed by our first parents immediately after they had sinned and the need they felt to cover their “pudenda, that is, shameful members” with fig leaves (Genesis 3:7–10).Footnote 10 Previously they had felt no shame but now they were ashamed. Augustine expands on this reading of the Genesis text with some Platonic reflections of his own but reflections that weigh very strongly with him since he regards the shame experienced by Adam and Eve following their original transgression as indicative of a more general rebellion of the body against the spirit:
“The soul, in fact, delighting now in its own freedom to do wickedness and scorning to serve God, was stripped of the former subjection of the body, and because it had wilfully deserted its own higher master, no longer kept its lower servant responsive to its will. It did not maintain its own flesh subject to it in all respects, as it could have done for ever if it had itself remained subject to God. Thus it was that the flesh then began to ‘lust against the spirit.’ This is our congenital conflict. From the first transgression come the beginning of death in us and the carnal rebellion or even victory that we sustain in our limbs and blighted being.” (CG 13:13; 179)
This is an argument Augustine develops in several of his writings, one that he feels strengthens his case since there is strong empirical evidence that man often experiences a conflict between his carnal desires and his rational will. The Platonic strain in his thought caused Augustine to regard the shame of nakedness human beings experience and, in particular, the need they feel of keeping their sexual organs covered, as empirical proof of the conflict between body and spirit generated by the first sin; this was an essential and telling manifestation of the disturbance and corruption of their nature that human beings experienced as a consequence of their sin. If there were nothing to be ashamed of, if we did not share in the primeval guilt of our first parents, then why cover up these parts of our body? It is not only illicit sexual unions that demand that they be carried out in private, Augustine points out, but even that type of legitimate intercourse between a husband and wife that is required for the procreation of children and the survival of the race seeks “a chamber secluded from witnesses.” (CG14:18; 363)
This is of a piece with Augustine's reflections elsewhere on the rebellious nature of the male penis. If man were truly integrated and free of the disturbance sin had brought about, the penis would be as subject to his reason and obedient to his will as the foot, hand or tongue (CG 14:23; 14:23; 381 and 384).Footnote 11 But, as Augustine is all too aware, with an awareness he presumes also in his readers, the penis is not subject to the will in this way. He notes how at the moment of sexual climax, “There is almost a total eclipse of acumen” and of thought (CG 14:16; 353). In fact, the unruly behaviour of the male sexual organ is, for Augustine, a case – indeed the supreme case – of concupiscence, the generic name he gives to the inclination to evil, including the pull of carnal desire, which was both a consequence of man's first sin and a cause of the propagation of the sin throughout the human race.Footnote 12 According to Augustine, holy people who are married would prefer it if children could be born without the lust of the body, if the members needed for procreation “would be set in motion when the will urged, not stirred to action when hot lust surged.” (CG 14:16; 355)Footnote 13 Before their fall, our first parents were unashamed of their nakedness; it was only the disobedience of their sexual organs which they experienced after the fall that caused them to perceive nudity as indecent and hence to experience shame. (CG 14:17; 357) The reason the tree from which they disobediently ate was called the tree of knowledge of good and evil was because after eating from it they were capable of distinguishing between “the good they had lost and the evil into which they had fallen.” (Ibid., 359) That is what scripture means when it speaks of their eyes being opened. (Ibid.)
That all human beings inherit the first sin of Adam and indeed are involved not only in all that followed from Adam's sin but also in his guilt as the original sinner, is something Augustine maintains steadfastly in all his writings. Although we were not yet born and had not yet assumed our individual identity, Augustine maintains that each and all of us were implicated in the sin of our first parent:
“We did not yet have individually created and apportioned shapes in which to live as individuals; what already existed was the seminal substance from which we were to be generated. Obviously, when this substance was debased through sin and shackled with the bond of death in just condemnation, no man could be born of man in any other condition. Thus from the abuse of free will has come the linked sequence of our disaster … as it were from a diseased root, all the way to the catastrophe of the second death that has no end. Only those who are freed through the grace of God are exempt from this fate.” (CG 13:14; 181)
Augustine is very strict in his notion of how original sin is inherited and has no time for later notions, popular among some modern theologians, that original sin is mediated by a sinful society – that original sin is something we pick up or acquire from entering into sinful humanity. Augustine wants to know how society became sinful in the first place and he is insistent that all human babies are born with the stain of original sin upon them. (Hence Joseph Ratzinger's broad comment that ‘sin begets sin’Footnote 14 would not be precise enough for Augustine).
The transmission of original sin
Augustine never quite made up his mind concerning the agency by means of which original sin is transmitted.Footnote 15 In the passage above it looks as if he considers the male semen – the ‘seminal substance’ (natura seminalis) – to be the agent of transmission but elsewhere he veers to the opinion that it is the lust experienced by the male partner when achieving an erection that causes him to sin when engaging in sexual intercourse and that it is this sinful accompaniment to intercourse (which cannot take place unless the penis is erect) that acts as the agent for the transmission of original sin.Footnote 16 Elsewhere he speculates that original sin is transmitted to the pre-existent soul as soon as it makes contact with the sinful body it is to inhabit, although he refines this account by speculating further that the soul that consented to being conjoined with a human body may already have been tainted with sin.Footnote 17 In all of his accounts of how the first sin is transmitted, Augustine is insistent that original sin is present from the first moment of conception. He does not shrink from the conclusion that babies who have not had the stain of original sin wiped away through the grace of baptism are destined for hell. Indeed, one of his arguments against the Pelagians is that they are unwilling to commit to his belief, which follows logically from his premises, that unbaptised babies are eternally damned in hell.Footnote 18 It is true that Augustine at times attempted to temper his position by claiming that unbaptised infants received only the mildest punishment, but he never changed his basic position.Footnote 19 For Augustine, the default setting of humanity is damnation; salvation is a bonus, owing everything to God's sovereign mercy, and is reserved for only some human beings, the predestined elect.
Notwithstanding the Platonic influence on his thinking, it is worth noting that there are limits to Augustine's Platonism. For example, he repudiates the notion, which he considers to be Platonic but probably also regarded as Manichean, that “the flesh is the cause of every sort of vice in the case of bad morals”, insisting that “the body's decay, which weighs down the soul, is not the cause of the first sin but the punishment for it” (CG 14:3, 271) and that Adam's sinful act was preceded by an evil will (CG 14: 23; 335). He makes it clear that, as regards its character, the first sin was an act of disobedience – man disobeyed God's explicit command. He places little importance on the image of the tree found in the Genesis account other than to see it as a case of the humans’ eyes being opened after the event. He sees the sin almost exclusively in terms of Man's disobedience of his Lord's command, even suggesting that what God wished to reinforce was the need in man to obey his master (CG 14:12, 334–5; and 14: 15, 345). God simply wished to show his creature that he was master; to impress on man the need for “wholesome obedience.” (Ibid.) Adam's disobedience is contrasted with the obedience of Christ, and a feature of Augustine's reflections on original sin is the contrast he consistently draws between Adam, the bringer of death, and Christ, the bringer of new life, just as he balances his reflections on punishment and condemnation with those on God's mercy and grace. Augustine is known in Church history as the Doctor of Grace and his theology of grace complements his theology of original sin. As Alistair McFadyen has said, “Sin and grace are reciprocally interpreting coordinates in his (Augustine's) theology.”Footnote 20 While there are aspects of Augustine's thinking that strike a modern sensibility as harsh and even cruel – especially his willingness to see unbaptised babies condemned to hellfire – Augustine's thought is also broad and generous when he turns to the theme of grace. This should not be overlooked.
The influence of Augustine
Given the sheer volume of his writings, his speculative reach, his brilliant mastery of Latin and logical turn of mind, it is not surprising that Augustine became the Church Father who most influenced the development of theology in the West. The west has built its theology on Augustine and a central part of this theology has been his doctrine of original sinFootnote 21, which as we have seen is integral to his theology of grace and to the development of his ideas of freedom and predestination. It is little wonder that it has been extremely difficult for other interpretations of Genesis 3 to win a hearing because there has been no one in the west to rival Augustine in stature or authority.Footnote 22 Moreover, the Augustinian understanding of original sin has been such a solid component of a comprehensive theological system of thought that there have been fears that to attempt to dislodge it or to radically alter it is to risk bringing down the whole system of theology in which it stands and to which it gives support.
If in recent times Augustine's interpretation of original sin has come under closer scrutiny and become an object of criticism and attack, this is not unconnected with the new emphasis on scripture as the basis for theological reflection that has grown among Catholic theologians as well as the developing understanding of the Bible that is shared by Catholic and Protestant scholars. As Herbert Haag, former president of the Catholic Bible Association of Germany, says quite unequivocally, “The doctrine of original sin is not found in any of the writings of the Old Testament. It is certainly not in chapters one to three of Genesis.”Footnote 23 This is a position endorsed by the distinguished Old Testament scholar James Barr in the Preface to his The Garden of Eden and the Hope of Immortality, where he says:
“Old Testament scholars have long known that the reading of the story of the ‘Fall of Man’ in the traditional sense … cannot stand up to examination through a close reading of the Genesis text. But though this has long been evident, scholars have not, on the whole, succeeded in formulating a general picture of the purpose and impact of the story which could rival the traditional one and could carry an equal force or similar relevance over so wide a range of biblical materials and theological considerations.”Footnote 24
Not only does Anglican scholar Barr support the view put forward by the Catholic scholar Herbert Haag, he also draws attention to the fact that if the traditional, Augustinian notion of original sin is to be dispensed with, it will need to be replaced by another account of human sinfulness, one that does justice to the biblical evidence – which traditionally includes St Paul's reflections in Romans 5 in addition to the story told in Genesis 3 – as well as to the abundant evidence of human sinfulness we witness around the world on a daily basis. In this article, I have attempted to point up some of the difficulties of Augustine's position. In my next and future articles I shall attempt to put forward another interpretation of Genesis 3 within the context of Genesis 1–11, and in doing so present an alternative account of human sinfulness to that presented by Augustine. I shall also comment on Paul's words in Romans 5 in my final article.
It is on the basis of certain key features of the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden recounted in Genesis 3 that I shall first attempt to offer an alternative interpretation of the events described there and, in this way, to offer an understanding of Christian doctrine that departs in significant ways from that provided by Augustine. My motivation has not been anti-Augustinian but rather Augustine's teaching has been a casualty of the interpretation which attention to the data of Genesis 3, assisted by modern biblical scholarship and the insights of modern anthropology, gives rise to. And given the pre-eminence of Augustine's interpretation, I have found it valuable for the sake of clarity to contrast my own interpretation with that of Augustine on certain crucial points.
