Author: Lee M.

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.

In these three chapters Augustine deals with the questions of error, lying, and certainty, especially with respect to matters of faith. In particular, Augustine here seems concerned with what later philosophers have dubbed the “ethics of belief.” In other words, he’s focusing more on what our moral duties are with respect to belief rather than how we actually form true beliefs, which is the traditional concern of epistemology.

Error, Augustine writes, is clearly undesirable, but it’s also at times unavoidable, for “it is impossible not to be ignorant of many things.” However, some error is morally culpable. “If someone thinks he knows what he does not know, if he approves as true what is actually false, this then is error, in the proper sense of the term.” This seems to imply that there can be a moral dimension to error, perhaps because we are careless in forming our beliefs, or engage in wishful thinking, etc.

While there may be cases where being mistaken or in error about something may actually benefit us (e.g. we may feel happier not knowing the truth about something, or we may be mistakenly led into fortuitous circumstances), considered in itself error is bad because it goes against the nature of our minds. “To err means nothing more than to judge as true what is in fact false, and as false what is true. It means to be certain about the uncertain, uncertain about the certain, whether it be certainly true or certainly false. This sort of error in the mind is deforming and improper, since the fitting and proper thing would be to be able to say, in speech or judgment: ‘Yes, yes. No, no.’”

However, worse than to be deceived, either innocently or by our own carelessness or epistemic failure, is to intend to deceive someone else. Augustine takes an uncompromising view of lying. If being in error deforms the soul by diverting it from its proper end of grasping truth, lying intentionally misuses language, whose primary function is to act as “a medium through which a man could communicate his thought to others. Wherefore to use language in order to deceive, and not as it was designed to be used, is a sin.”

Augustine concedes that lies may have good consequences as well as that some lies are worse than others, but these circumstances don’t alter the essential nature of the lie. He is clearly taking a deontological view that certain acts are wrong in themselves, regardless of their consequences. Adultery, theft, and lying are wrong even if we can imagine circumstances where we could help someone by engaging in them:

That men have made progress toward the good, when they will not lie save for the sake of human values, is not to be denied. But what is rightly praised in such a forward step, and perhaps even rewarded, is their good will and not their deceit. The deceit may be pardoned, but certainly ought not to be praised, especially among the heirs of the New Covenant to whom it has been said, “Let your speech be yes, yes; no, no: for what is more than this comes from evil.” Yet because of what this evil does, never ceasing to subvert this mortality of ours, even the joint heirs of Christ themselves pray, “Forgive us our debts.”

To understand this it’s illuminating to note that earlier Augustine writes that “the liar thinks he does not deceive himself and that he deceives only those who believe him. Indeed, he does not err in his lying, if he himself knows what the truth is. But he is deceived in this, that he supposes that his lie does no harm to himself, when actually every sin harms the one who commits it more that it does the one who suffers it” [emphasis added].

The suggestion here seems to be that the effect that vice or sin has on the soul of the one who commits them is actually worse than the external effects it may have on others. This harks back to Socrates’ view, in light of being condemned to death by the Athenians, that no evil can truly befall a good man. This is because virtue is the life of the soul and, to borrow a phrase, we should fear that which can kill the soul (i.e. vice) rather than that which can kill the body.

And if truth is also the life of the soul (and, indeed, that Truth from which all truth comes), then it makes sense for Augustine to say that departing from truth actually harms him who lies more than the victims of his deceit. Does this mean, however, that we should be indifferent to the consequences of our actions? Augustine’s account of the wrongness of lying is here couched entirely in terms of its violation of the nature of language (or what it’s for: to communicate thought). Most of us, I suspect, find a blanket prohibition on lying pretty tough to swallow, not just because we may think that “white lies” act as a kind of social lubricant, or get us out of difficult situations, but because we can imagine situations where it is not only permissible, but obligatory to lie, such as the archetypal case of the Nazis at the door seeking Jews hiding in your attic whom they will cart off to the ovens if you don’t lie. In other words, lying in such a case seems not only a forgivable offense, but no offense at all, and in fact not to lie would be the offense in this case.

Whether this is right or not, Augustine certainly has something valuable to say to Christians, “heirs of the New Covenant to whom it has been said, ‘Let your speech be yes, yes; no, no: for what is more than this comes from evil.’” How seriously do most of us take the dominical injunctions to be truthful in our speech?

This meme asking for nominations for the best contemporary (=published in the last 25 years) theology books has been making the rounds of many of the blogs I read regularly.

I’m not learned enough in theology to nominate books that are, objectively speaking, the best theology or the most influential, but I’ll mention some books that have had a big impact on the way I think about theology. (Not coincidentally, these tend to be on the more “popular” side of the ledger rather than strict academic theology):

1. William Placher, The Domestication of Transcendence. Placher attempts to retrieve a premodern understanding of God by means of a re-examination of the thought of Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin, and argues that many contemporary criticisms of “classical theism” such as those made by process thought or deconstructionism simply miss the mark. He also shows how grace is radically subversive of our constant attempts to contain it in some kind of moralism or pietism. Also worthy of note is his Jesus the Savior, a kind of Christology for laypeople. Placher is a model of clear theological writing for the church rather than for the academic guild.

2. Luke Timothy Johnson, The Real Jesus. Not only is this a brilliant polemic against the “historical Jesus” industry, Johnson’s book shows how the living Jesus is presented to us in the Gospel accounts, the NT letters, and the ongoing life of the church. His follow-up book, Living Jesus is a worthy successor in exploring how Christians live into the mind of Christ.

3. Andrew Linzey, Animal Theology. People are probably sick of me flogging this book, but I think in many ways Christians have just begun to scratch the surface in thinking about our fellow creatures. Even a lot of liberal and progressive theology remains steadfastly anthropocentric. Bonus Linzey book: Animal Gospel.

Chapters 3 and 4 are compact but rich summaries of the heart of Augustine’s metaphysics. He deals here with God, creation, the goodness of created things and the problem of evil. It’s surely one of Augustine’s great accomplishments as a thinker to clearly establish the basic outline of a sound Christian metaphysics.

While Augustine clearly remains influenced by neo-Platonism, he sharpens its metaphysics and brings it into closer conformity with biblical religion. The primary metaphysical distinction for Augustine isn’t between sensible and intelligible being or mind and body, but between created and uncreated being. God is uncreated being and everything else is created being. It’s not necessary, he says, for Christians to be expertly versed in philosophy or natural science, but it is necessary for them to grasp this elemental truth:

For the Christian, it is enough to believe that the cause of all created things, whether in heaven or on earth, whether visible or invisible, is nothing other than the goodness of the Creator, who is the one and the true God. Further, the Christian believes that nothing exists save God himself and what comes from him; and he believes that God is triune, i.e., the Father, and the Son begotten of the Father, and the Holy Spirit proceeding from the same Father, but one and the same Spirit of the Father and the Son.

This statement is an implicit rebuke to the various forms of gnosticism and manicheism floating around, which Augustine was all too familiar with, that held the material world to be the product of an evil force or lesser deity. But it also stakes out a position against a kind of neo-Platonic view that sees creation as “emanating” from God as a kind of effulgence rather than as the result of God’s gracious will.

Having established that creation is the product of a good God, he moves on to the affirmation of the goodness of creation itself:

By this Trinity, supremely and equally and immutably good, were all things created. But they were not created supremely, equally, nor immutably good. Still, each single created thing is good, and taken as a whole they are very good, because together they constitute a universe of admirable beauty.

This is a clear and beautiful summary of the Christian doctrine of creation. Creation is the gratuitous gift of a supremely good Creator and is itself a real, though lesser, good. It’s good because it is the handiwork of the Supreme Good.

But of course this leads ineluctably to the problem of evil. If creation is the good creation of a supremely good Creator, whence evil? “For the Omnipotent God, whom even the heathen acknowledge as the Supreme Power over all, would not allow any evil in his works, unless in his omnipotence and goodness, as the Supreme Good, he is able to bring forth good out of evil.”

Here we get Augustine’s justly famous doctrine of evil as privation. That is, considered in itself, evil is no-thing, but a lack or corruption in a being which is essentially good:

All of nature, therefore, is good, since the Creator of all nature is supremely good. But nature is not supremely and immutably good as is the Creator of it. Thus the good in created things can be diminished and augmented. For good to be diminished is evil; still, however much it is diminished, something must remain of its original nature as long as it exists at all. For no matter what kind or however insignificant a thing may be, the good which is its “nature” cannot be destroyed without the thing itself being destroyed.

This implies that, as good as creation is, it has an inherent vulnerability to evil. This is because created things are changeable, and therefore their goodness can be diminished. Only God is entirely impervious to evil. But that doesn’t change the fact that every being, no matter how corrupted it may become, remains good considered in itself as an entity. Augustine’s dictum that “every being, in so far as it is a being, is good” is a watchword for this metaphysic. “Nothing evil exists in itself, but only as an evil aspect of some actual entity. Therefore, there can be nothing evil except something good. Absurd as this sounds, nevertheless the logical connections of the argument compel us to it as inevitable.”

However, we still don’t know how, if creation is a real, though lesser, good, how evil arises in the first place. Augustine contends that only an evil will, itself the product of a good nature, whether human or angelic, can be the source of evil.

From a human nature there can spring forth either a good or an evil will. There was no other place from whence evil could have arisen in the first place except from the nature–good in itself–of an angel or a man. This is what our Lord himself most clearly shows in the passage about the trees and the fruits, for he said: “Make the tree good and the fruits will be good, or make the tree bad and its fruits will be bad.” This is warning enough that bad fruit cannot grow on a good tree nor good fruit on a bad one. Yet from that same earth to which he was referring, both sorts of trees can grow.

This leads to Augustine’s difficult doctrine of the Fall, which will come up in later chapters. For now, I just want to point out that what seems to be implied by his view of creation is that the evil will, at least in the beginning, is a kind of radical disruption of the good creation. And it’s something that seems radically undetermined by the nature of the being who posseses it, whether that’s a human being or an angel. Augustine has to hold this in order to be consistent with his view that the natures of created things are good in themselves. Otherwise, evil gets a kind of ontological foothold in creation.

In chapter 2 Augustine discusses faith, hope, and love in the light of the Lord’s Prayer and the Apostle’s Creed. “In these two we have the three theological virtues working together: faith believes; hope and love pray. Yet without faith nothing else is possible; thus faith prays too.”

Faith is here defined by Augustine as belief in the truths of the Christian religion. There are certain facts concerning, say, the death of Christ, his resurrection and ascension which faith, or belief has as its objects. And it can pertain with matters of the past, present, or future. It’s proper to say, for instance, that Christians have faith that Christ will return in glory.

Hope, while it regards matters to take place in the future, has an evaluative component that faith (understood as belief) seems to lack. “[H]ope deals only with good things, and only with those which lie in the future, and which pertain to the man who cherishes the hope.” We only hope for that which is desirable.

Faith and hope are united, however, in that their objects are unseen, though Augustine allows that there are cases where one can be said to believe in something that is the object of one’s present experience. Presumably the apostles who witnessed the risen Christ could be said to believe or have faith in what they had seen. However, this seems for Augustine to be the exception, and as a general rule faith is in what is not seen. Hope, meanwhile, is by definition in the unseen because what is future obviously can’t be seen. “When, therefore, our good is believed to be future, this is the same thing as hoping for it.”

And hope can’t exist without love. For to have hope is to believe that the future holds that which we regard as good. The faith commended by Paul (contrary to the faith of “the demons” mentioned by James) can’t exist without hope and love. That which Christians believe in, Christ, is also the object of our love and our hope. “Thus it is that love is not without hope, hope is not without love, and neither hope nor love are without faith.”

There seems, then, to be a certain ambiguity in the notion of faith that Augustine sketches here. There is faith understood simply as belief in certain facts, and there is the faith that is inseparable from love and hope. Is the difference determined by a quality in the believer or a quality in that which is believed in? Is faith the root of love and hope, or is the quality of faith determined by them?

Partly inspired by Derek’s post on first steps with the fathers, and partly out of a desire to get back to basics, I’ve decided to inagurate this blog with a series on Augustine’s Enchiridion, or “handbook on faith, hope, and love.” This very brief text was written as a response to one of Augustine’s correspondents who had asked for a brief summary of the Christian faith. My edition clocks in at about 70 pages and consists of fourteen chapters, each dealing with a major area of the faith.

In Chapter 1, “The Occasion and Purpose of this ‘Manual,’” Augustine sets the agenda for what’s to come. His correspondent, “Laurence” had asked for “a brief summary or short treatise on the proper mode of worshipping God.” Augustine here identifies the worship and service of God with wisdom. This may be a way of establishing this work in the tradition of ancient philosophy which, far from being pure speculation, was understood as a way of life aimed at transforming the self in light of some great good, often involving ascetic and ethical practice in addition to theoretical understanding. It was common for the Fathers to argue that Christianity was the “true philosophy.”

Augustine asks what true wisdom consists in and answers that it consists in piety, or the service of God (theosebeia). And to serve God is the same as to worship God. So wisdom is the worship of God.

But how is God to be worshipped? “In faith, hope, and love” is Augustine’s reply, and his handbook will be a brief explication of “What should be believed, what should be hoped for and what should be loved.” These are “the chief things–indeed the only things–to seek for in religion.”

For Augustine we must begin with faith because we can’t attain certain understanding of “matters that pass beyond the scope of the physical senses” by reason alone. Instead, we must believe the witness of the biblical writers. However, faith, working by love, leads to sight. We may, over the course of our lives, come to “catch glimpses of that ineffable beauty whose full vision is our highest happiness.” This sounds a bit like Anselm’s “I believe so that I may understand”: faith is the initial step down a path that will ultimately result in understanding, even if complete understanding and knowledge of God won’t be ours until the next life. As Augustine writes, “We begin in faith, we are perfected in sight.”