Chapter 8 of Augustine’s Handbook on Faith, Hope, and Love delves into one of the most influential, but also controversial, aspects of Augustine’s theology/philosophy: his doctrine of the Fall.

Remember that a cardinal principle of Augustine’s thought is the essential goodness of creation. All things are, considered in themselves and their essential natures, good. Creation is the product of a supremely good God, and Augustine doesn’t seek to explain the existence of evil by positing a demiurge or an intractabile quality of matter that makes it an inferior reflection of the Good.

However, while created things are good, they are also changeable. This means that their goodness can be diminished, so there is at least an opening for evil in the world. But the only thing that can direct things toward a diminshment of their good is a rational will. “The cause of evil is the defection of the will of a being who is mutably good from the Good which is mutable.”

This happened first in the case of angels who rebelled against God, and secondly in the case of human beings. Augustine doesn’t discuss here why rational creatures defected from their supreme Good, and this does create some problems for his account. If rational creatures are good by their very nature, it’s hard to understand why they would choose to turn away from the supreme Good. On the other hand, any explanation of why they would do so risks pushing the source of evil back into the very nature of created being itself. Augustine has to maintain a strongly indeterminist account of free will (at least for unfallen rational natures) to maintain the essential goodness of creation. But indeterminist accounts of free will have a hard time making free will not look arbitrary or random.

That difficulty noted, let’s move on to what Augustine takes the consequences of the fall to be. “In train of this [the ‘primal lapse of the rational nature’] there crept in, even without his [i.e. man] willing it, ignorance of the right things to do and also an appetite for noxious things. And these brought along with them, as their companions, error and misery.”

Recall that for Augustine the soul finds its proper end in having its loves rightly ordered. This means, above all, loving God for his own sake. Only when we love God, the supreme and immutable Good, can our loves for finite and mutable goods be properly oriented. When God is not at the center of our universe, so to speak, finite things are no longer in their natural orbit and we developed distorted forms of love for them. So, if the primal fall was a turning away from the love of God, it makes sense on Augustine’s terms that ignorance about what is right and desires for what is wrong would follow. “From these tainted springs of action–moved by the lash of appetite rather than a feeling of plenty–there flows out every kind of misery which is now the lot of rational creatures.”

There is, however, a further consequence of this defection of the will, namely death. Death is the penalty which God has inflicted upon man for his disobedience. The threat of death had been intended by God to deter human beings from disobedience and the forfeiture of blessedness that entails.

Moreover, the penalty is passed from our first parents to all succeeding generations. Here we find one of the most troubling aspects of Augustinian theology, at least to modern sensibilities:

From this state, after he had sinned, man was banished, and through his sin he subjected his descendants to the punishment of sin and damnation, for he had radically corrupted them, in himself, by his sinning. As a consequence of all this, all those descended from him and his wife (who had prompted him to sin and who was condemned along with him at the same time)–all those born through carnal lust, on whom the same penalty is visited as for disobedience–all these entered into the inheritance of original sin.

The phrase “he had radically corrupted them, in himself, by his sinning” seems to hint at the idea that the entire human race, being containted potentially in Adam, was somehow corrupted in their very nature by his sin. This could be understood in a fairly straightforward quasi-physical sense: that Adam’s “seed” became corrupted. It could also be understood by seeing “Adam” as a stand in for human nature itself which somehow became corrupted and which all individual human beings participate in a quasi-Platonic sense. The latter view, however, suggests a non-historical fall in some sort of ur-time, whereas Augustine appears to think of the Fall as a historical event involving particular individuals.

Part of the difficulty many Christians have had with Augustine’s account of the Fall is that it involves both a hereditary corruption or propensity to sin and a hereditary guilt. The former notion can be made sense of in a variety of ways. We can see, without too much difficulty, how being born as a human being in human society makes it very difficult, if not impossible, to avoid sin (I discussed one such account here) and how the choices of our forbears constrain our own freedom.

However, the idea of hereditary guilt is far more troubling. It conflicts with various intuitions most of us have about moral culpability. How can it be just for God to impute Adam’s guilt to all his descendants, to the extent of inflicting death and damnation as fitting punishment? The best answer to this that I’m aware of is simply to say that God’s ways are not our ways and his justice is inscrutable. Or to say that the creature is in no position to make demands of justice against the Creator. The only other way to reconcile this that I can think of is to argue for some account of moral culpability that is compatible with the doctrine of inherited and imputed guilt.

Whatever we may think of the idea of inherited guilt, it plays an essential part in reconciling Augustine’s predestinarianism with the justice of God:

This, then, was the situation: the whole mass of the human race stood condemned, lying ruined and wallowing in evil, being plunged from evil into evil and, having joined causes with the angels who had sinned, it was paying the fully deserved penalty for impious desertion. … And if [God] had willed that there should be no reformation in the case of men, as there is none for the wicked angels, would it not have been just if the nature that deserted God and, through the evil use of his powers, trampled and transgressed the precepts of his Creator, which could have been easily kept–the same creature who stubbornly turned away from His Light and violated the image of the Creator in himself, who had in the evil use of his free will broken away from the wholesome discipline of God’s law–would it not have been just if such a being had been abandoned by God wholly and forever and laid under the everlasting punishment which he deserved? Clearly God would have done this if he were only just and not also merciful and if he had not willed to show far more striking evidence of his mercy by pardoning some who were unworthy of it.

The rhetorical power of this passage notwithstanding, the force of the argument rests on the guilt imputed to Adam’s descendents. Barring a good reason to think that guilt can properly be transferred/inherited in this way, it’s hard not to see God’s mercy as a fairly abitrary and minor mitigation of a much graver injustice. Much has been made of Augustine’s use of Romans 5:12: “Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death came through sin, and so death spread to all because all have sinned…” and whether this is to be read as implying a sinful nature or predisposition that passed from Adam to his descendents or whether this inheritance also included Adam’s guilt. My impression is that many, if not most exegetes now think that this passage doesn’t refer to inherited guilt, but I could be wrong about that.

Leaving aside exegetical questions, the view that I’m most sympathetic to is that, due to the actions or our distant anscestors, we are all born into a historical/cultural matrix which makes a relational alienation from God a virtual certainty. This fundamental disposition of the self – turned away from God – is “original sin.” This disposition gives rise to “acutal sin,” or discrete sinful actions. The connection between sin and (spiritual) death is not that death is imposed as an extrinsic punishment for sin, but rather that there is an intrinsic connection between a self “curved in on itself” and death. A soul that is turned away from the source of its being is already on a path which, without intervention, leads to a state where it collapses in on itself, sort of like a spiritual black hole. Death is the natural consequence of sin, or alienation from God. Thus it can make sense to talk about death being a consequence of sin without having to accept the notion of imputed/inherited guilt.

Whether or not one finds the Augustinian doctrine of the Fall credible, it has to be said that he has provided one of the most influential accounts in Western Christendom, one that was later largely picked up by Luther and Calvin among others. I think some of the enduring truths in his account are: 1. The goodness of creation, 2. The source of evil in the will of rational creatures rather than in some inherent defect in created being, 3. The severity of human beings’ alienation from God which occurs as a result of sin, and 4. The need for God’s grace to redeem us from our predicament.