St. Augustine's Doctrine of Original Sin

Augustinian Studies 36:2 (2005) 359–396

St. Augustine’s Doctrine of Original Sin

Jesse Couenhoven Villanova University

I. Introduction

One might expect a doctrine as influential and (in)famous as the doctrine of original sin to have been exposited and analyzed so often that there would be little left for more recent commentators to say—and since it has been an axiom for most historical theologians that the doctrine of original sin cannot be traced back beyond Augustine (Bray 1994; Burnell 1995), one would expect Augustine’s view of original sin to be especially well studied. Oddly, however, there are no definitive treatments of Augustine’s views on this matter. In fact, the last century saw only a handful of anything approaching comprehensive discussions of Augustine on original sin.1 Perhaps this is because those who engage Christian discourse have assumed they know the basic points of the doctrine, and that there is little to discuss—or perhaps it is because so many modern thinkers have found the doctrine of original sin wrongheaded and even dangerous. But whatever the reason, Augustine’s views concerning original sin are under-discussed. This essay is one attempt to address that situation. I do so by piecing together from a variety of texts the main lines of Augustine’s late views about original sin. A good number of the texts I cite were not written as part of his debates with the Pelagians, but it is worth noting that I have found especially illuminating Augustine’s lengthy, much maligned, yet also often ignored final book, the Unfinished Work in Answer to Julian.

1. The more important discussions include Alflatt 1974, 1975; Burnaby 1938, 184–192, 203, 208–210, 219; Burns 1980, 96–109; Kelly 1978, 361–369; Rigby 1987; Rondet 1972; Tennant 1912; TeSelle 1970, 158–165, 258–266, 278–294; Williams 1929, and most recently, Wiley 2002.

While this essay is largely expositional, it also defends two overarching theses. The first is that what we call Augustine’s doctrine of original sin is actually a handful of doctrines, some more closely related than others, but each capable of independence, and possibly in tension with the others. The second thesis is that his doctrine does have a conceptual core: the notion of inherited sin, which I will call original sin itself.

Readers should keep in mind that attempts to present Augustine’s views are apt to make him seem more straightforward than he typically is in his actual texts. While this essay presents the main thrust of Augustine’s late view of original sin, I do not want to obscure the complexities of this task. Augustine’s greatness depends partly on the many questions he poses; his resulting untidiness is both a burden and a gift to his readers.

Theological Background

In beginning a discussion of original sin, it might be good to begin by indicating what sin is. The essential distinction, I believe, is between sin and evil: sin is a particular form of evil, a culpable misrelation to God and the world. Thus, sin is not simply evil; neither is it merely evil to which humans contribute. Rather, sin is a blameworthy evil for which one is responsible.2 Thus the scandal of Augustine’s doctrine of original sin: to Julian and Pelagius in his day, as to many others since, it has seemed unjust to blame infants for an inherited condition.Yet that is what Augustine proposed. In Rowan Greer’s fine summary, for St. Augustine the doctrine actually “means that all humans are born moving away from God” (Greer 2001, 120). Thus, the doctrine does not merely claim that all adult human beings are sinners, having sinned at some point or another; more radically, it maintains that all human beings are born culpably misrelated to God.

Modern proponents of doctrines of original sin—most famously Reinhold Niebuhr—have typically established their main line of defense on the claim that the original sin is, as much as any theological commitment can be, empirically

2. This naturally raises the question of punishment, but that issue lies beyond the scope of this paper. Three notes are important, however: first, on a non-consequentialist theory of just punishment (which Augustine clearly held) punishment implies guilt, and guilt implies blameworthiness for whatever a person is being punished for; second, though punishment implies blame, blame as an attitude of a moral judge is not identical with punishment, and need not always call for it; indeed, and third, some sins may not require any punishment beyond the sin itself, which may be considered “its own reward.”

confirmed.Sin,afterall,iseverywherearoundus,evenagainstourwishes;doesn’t the doctrine of original sin persuasively account for this? Augustine is not insensitive to this point. Nevertheless, he is primarily committed to the doctrine for other reasons.3 In his theological controversies with the Donatists,4 Augustine had argued that saving faith in Jesus Christ was available through the Catholic church alone, and, in particular, through the sacrament of baptism (see, e.g., Gr.et pecc.or. 2.29.34).5 If there are paths to salvation independent of Christ, into whose death we are baptized, then Christ died in vain (Nat et gr. 9.10; C.Jul.imp. II.146; Harmless 1997). This belief led Augustine to be committed to the idea that all human beings, of whatever age, are sinners who need Christ, and thus to infant baptism.

Since infant deaths were all too common in Augustine’s day, infant baptism was common as well. The practice was not especially controversial, because a general consensus held that infants who died without receiving baptism were unable to enter the kingdom of heaven (C.Jul. III.12.25)—although Christians disagreed about the precise nature of infants’ final destination. Augustine’s rationale for this practice is straightforward: God would not keep little ones from heaven unless they were sinners and merited such treatment. Infants need exorcism and baptism because they need the medicine of Christ, who saves people from sin (Gr.et pecc.or. 2.24.28; C.Jul.imp. I.50). Moreover, Augustine notes, the creed straightforwardly states that baptism is for the forgiveness of sins.

Augustine also has a theodical reason for his belief in original sin: it would simply be unjust for God to allow infants to suffer deformities, disease, mistreatment, and death, unless they were already sinners (Gr.et pecc.or. 2.20.22; C.Jul. I.6.24; C.Jul.imp. I.39). Augustine is confident that bodies not corrupted by sin would not undergo any of the evils just mentioned. Of course, Christ died, but this was because he took on the “likeness of sinful flesh” in order to renew it. In all other cases, these evils are the penalty of sin, and thus a sign of sin.

3. See Burns (1980, 98–100) for a good discussion of this point.

4. A schismatic group that believed the Catholics had compromised with a spiritually impure world. Their re-baptism of believers led Augustine to examine his own understanding of salvation, and the sacraments.

5. References to Augustine’s works are by book, if any, in Roman numerals, and chapter and paragraph, in Arabic numerals—not to page numbers. I generally refer to his texts by English titles in the body of my paper, but by Latin abbreviations in parenthetical citations. See the note at the end of this essay for a list of titles and abbreviations.

Sin, then, explains infant baptism and suffering—but in what sense are infants sinners? Augustine is certain that the very young commit no personal sins; they cannot choose to sin because they do not even have the use of reason (Pecc.Mer. I.20.28). In addition, he believes that no one is condemned for sins that, according to God’s foreknowledge, would have been committed had life been longer (De Praedestinatione Sanctorum 12.24, 14.26). Such counterfactual judgments would put the eternal status of even the greatest Saints in jeopardy, since it would become possible for them to sin after their own deaths, or even in lives other than those they had actually lived. Moreover, if God judges on the basis of counterfactual occurrences, the Incarnation need not have even happened, since God could save those who would have responded had the gospel been preached (Persev. 9.22). Finally, though he may have countenanced the possibility even in the Confessions, 6 it is clear in his later works that Augustine believes that the election of Jacob without regard to any prior merits also rules out Origen’s notion of a pre-existent soul that could have committed sin before it was embodied (Spir. et litt. 24.40).

This leaves just one explanation for the practice of baptizing infants: an inborn, original sin. This solution fits well with Augustine’s understanding of baptism. Baptized infants are saved without their consent; the consent of their parents stands in for them. Augustine reasons that, if infants can be justified without their own activity through the second Adam (Christ) they can also become sinners without their consent, through the first Adam, and the parental activity of conception (Pecc.Mer. I.19.25; C.Jul.imp. I.57).7

Augustine is also confident that Scripture teaches the existence of original sin, and he challenges those who disagree with him to exegete Romans 5:12 properly. Following Ambrosiaster and the Vulgate, Augustine reads the verse to indicate that “sin came into the world through one man, and death came through sin, and so death spread to all, in whom all have sinned.” Augustine takes Adam to be the one in whom all have sinned. Of course, most modern interpreters are convinced that his opponents’ reading of that passage is better than Augustine’s, and have argued we ought to read “death

6. See Lib.arb. III.20.55–20.59; Conf XII.10.10, XIII.8.1; O’Connell 1968, 150; Teske 2001, 120–121.

7. Augustine does not think infants are sinners unwillingly—what he means in saying they become sinners without their consent it just that they do not first choose to be sinners; rather, because of their solidarity with Adam, sin chooses them.

8. See, e.g., Pagels 1988, 143–144; Rist 1994, 124.

spread to all because all have sinned” (NRSV, my italics).8 But Augustine’s Scriptural evidence for the doctrine does not stand or fall with that one verse. In particular, 1 Corinthians 15:22, “For as in Adam all died . . . ” (cf. Pecc.Mer. I.8.8, III.11.19), is of the first importance for Augustine. Additionally, we must not forget that he does not simply base his views on a set of proof-texts; rather, he is convinced that St. Paul’s contrast between type and antitype, Adam and Christ, leads logically to the ascription of the race’s sinfulness in Adam, just as righteousness is solely found in Jesus Christ. Thus, the doctrine of original sin is based not only on the 12th verse of Romans 5 but on that whole chapter—not to mention Augustine’s exclusivist Christology!

Such, in brief, are Augustine’s theological reasons for adhering to the doctrine of original sin. It is essential to have before us the fact that his main focus is typically on these arguments. This fact can make reading his discussions of original sin frustrating: we want him to explore the implications of the doctrine, to explain why they do not render it unacceptable, or simply to develop his claims. He, however, is often content to return to the central practices and traditions of the church that he cited in support of the doctrine. Thus, we have to tease out, from a mass of statements that are rarely as well ordered and clear as one would like, the fine points of his doctrine of original sin.

As we begin to do so, it will become clear that Augustine’s doctrine of original sin is really a more or less closely affiliated body of five doctrines. My aim in this essay is not merely to describe these parts of Augustine’s doctrine of original sin, but to show that they are not all of equal status, and that they do not rise or fall together. In brief, the five elements of the doctrine of original sin are as follows: (1) the source of original sin is a primal sin in the garden of Eden. (2) All human beings share in this sin because of our solidarity with Adam, the progenitor of the race. The results of the primal sin are twofold. (3) From birth, all human beings have an inherited sin (original sin itself), which comes in two forms: common guilt, and a constitutional fault of disordered desire and ignorance. (4) In addition, Augustine holds that the human race suffers a penalty because of sin—human powers are weakened, and we will experience death. (5) Finally, Augustine speculates about how both sin and penalty are transmitted from generation to generation. Each of these points are explored below, though I focus on the third, the conceptual heart of the doctrine.

II. Primal Sin

Christians have long distinguished between the originating original sin (peccatum originis originans), or the event of the first sin, and the condition of original sin (peccatum originatum) (cf. Schleiermacher 1963, 287). To keep this distinction between the first sin and its effects clear, I will call the originating original sin the “primal” sin, leaving the name “original sin” for the condition of inherited sin.9

Augustine himself supports the distinction between primal and original sin; the distinction is implied in his writings. He writes, for instance, that the cause of original sin is the fact that through one man sin entered the world (C.Jul.imp. V.21). As the cause of original sin, Adam’s sin differs from and is prior to original sin. The primal sin is different in that “Adam . . . sinned because he willed to sin. . . . But original sin is something else . . . the newborn contract it without any will of their own” (C.Jul.imp. V.40).10 The primal sin was committed under special circumstances, circumstances not available to any of Adam’s progeny. Thus, Augustine makes a distinction between (1) sin that is simply sin; (2) the penalty of sin: evil that one does not do but rather suffers, and (3) sin that is the punishment of sin (C.Jul.imp. I.46; cf. C.Jul. V.3.8; Gr.et lib.arb. 20.41). Adam’s sin is merely sin, but original sin is “sin that is the punishment of sin” (Corrept. 11.32; C.Jul.imp. IV.34).11

Original Innocence

Ecclesiastes 7:29 states that God made human beings upright. Augustine takes this to mean that God gave Adam and Eve good wills when God created them—before they became evil, they were good, as the creation account makes

9. As Anselm notes, “original sin would seem to take its name from the origin of each human person . . . each individual contracts original sin with his own origin” (Anselm 1998, 359). Thus, he suggests, it might also be called “natural” sin.

10. As noted above, although Augustine’s Unfinished Work in Answer to Julian—which he died before completing—has received bad press from a number of scholars, I find it in many ways the most lucid and helpful of his anti-Pelagian works. John Burnaby (1938, 231) called it “the work of a man whose energy has burnt itself out, whose love has grown cold,” and Peter Brown called it “an unintelligent slogging-match” (1969, 385; cf. Wills 1999, 137). However, some of the comments in the new edition of Brown’s fine biography suggest that he might now admit this judgment to be misplaced (2000, 492). See also Teske’s introduction to the work (Teske 1999, 13).

11. Augustine also does call Adam’s sin original sin, at least at one point: Nat et gr. 3.3 (cf. 23.5). I find this contrary to his usual usage.

clear (Corrept. 11.32; C.Jul.imp. V.41, 57). He believes, in fact, that it is a fault to withdraw from God because it is more natural to adhere to him: evil is contrary to that for which we were created (Civ.Dei XI.17, XXII.1). Thus, the first couple had an original righteousness, which consisted in their obeying God and not having the law of carnal concupiscence in their members, in opposition to the law of the mind (Pecc.Mer. II.23.37). They were not, like the saints in heaven, unable to sin, but they were entirely able to avoid sinning, which is also a form of goodness, though of lower rank (Corrept. 12.33; Gn.Litt. XI.7.9).

The first couple was blessed in many other ways as well. They were physically fit, wise—so much so that Adam was capable of naming all the animals!—and given the grace to make good use of the power of free choice Augustine calls liberum arbitrium (Lib.arb. III.48; Civ.Dei XIV.11, 26; Corrept. 11.31; C.Jul.imp. V.1). Although they were mortal by natural constitution, they were immortal by a divine gift that would not have been withdrawn had they not sinned (Gn.Litt. VI.25.36).

Sin’s Inexplicability

Precisely because Adam and Eve were so well endowed, Augustine came to find the primal sin inexplicable. Their sin seemed more comprehensible earlier in his career, when he thought that, though they were given free choice in order to choose well, their wills were neutral, and they were neither wise nor foolish (Lib.arb. III.14.71). Even as late as The Spirit and the Letter (412/ 13) Augustine toyed with the idea that free choice is a neutral power, as a way of understanding why not everyone has faith (Spir. et litt. 33.58). But he abandons this approach in his later writings—in part because it opens God to the charge of leaving us vulnerable to evil—and suggests instead that the first sin was ontologically possible because human beings were made from nothing (C.Jul. I.8.36–8; Civ.Dei XII.6). This fact does not make sin necessary or inevitable, but it does make it possible; God, a necessary being, cannot diminish himself by sin, but beings made from nothing can. In addition, sin was possible because the first couple was not given the special grace of perseverance necessary to confirm them in their goodness (Corrept. 10.26; Persev. 7.13). That is why it was possible for them to use their free choice for evil. Nevertheless, doing so was nonsensical: God not only made them with good wills, but gave them the grace to love him, and threatened them with death if they disobeyed his command (Corrept. 12.35)!

Yet they did disobey. In a departure from many of his predecessors, Augustine does not understand the primal sin as carnal (Brown, P. 1983, 59–60; Rondet 1972, 118). He argues that disobeying a direct command from God when life was so blessed would be thinkable only for those who had already begun to be proud in their inner hearts (Gn.Litt. XI.30.39; C.Jul.imp. I.71). The beginning of all sin is pride, the desire to live by the rule of self (Civ.Dei XII.6; Gn.Litt. XI.5.7). Eating the fruit, then, was merely the external expression of the sin that already lay within (Civ.Dei XIV.13, 42; Gn.Litt. XI.5.7). Thus, the evil will is prior to the evil act, and the cause of sin arises not in the flesh, but in the soul (Civ.Dei XIV.3, 13).

This analysis does not explain sin’s advent, but Augustine does not mean it to.12 Instead, he simply suggests that no explanation for the primal sin is really available: instead of an efficient cause, Augustine writes with rhetorical flourish, sin has a “deficient” cause (Civ.Dei XII.6; XII.7, 9). There is no point in worrying over the ontology of deficient causes, however—all Augustine means to suggest by invoking deficient causes is that the primal sin was neither necessary nor reasonable, but perverse.13 This does not mean that nothing can be said about the primal sin: it was a misguided desire for lesser goods and ultimately harmful knowledge. Yet this very desire is inexplicable, given that Adam and Eve were created to rest in God. Thus, their sin was a sin of falling away; they became less than they were made to be. All this accords with Augustine’s account of evil as privation, according to which sin is a culpable fall from the good, a defect, and always irrational.14 For Augustine, if the primal sin made sense, it would not be so bad!

The primal sin was so great that there was a great change for the worse in Adam’s nature, and thereby in the nature of the entire human race (nupt.et conc. I.32.37). We will study the nature of this change below. I want to point out here, however, that Augustine’s view is not, as some have thought, that human nature is completely corrupted by the primal sin; rather, his view is that it is seriously harmed in every part. Augustine does suggest that we are dead in our sins (C.Jul.imp. V.9), and in The Literal Meaning of Genesis he

12. Contra Robert F. Brown (1978, 319–324).

13. William Babcock takes Augustine to task on this point (1988, 46–52). Scott MacDonald (1999) gives a perceptive, but ultimately un-Augustinian, defense of Augustine’s insight, since he overemphasizes the role of reason, and marginalizes the role of perverse desire in the production of the primal sin.

14. Augustine’s view has, at this point, much in common with Karl Barth’s discussion of the “impossible possibility.” For a good summary and critique of the latter, see Wolterstorff 1996.

writes that “this [divine] image, impressed on the spirit of our minds” was lost in Adam’s fall (VI.27.38). But this latter statement is one of the few he later retracts: “I should have said that the image is so deformed that it needs ‘reformation’” (Retr. 2.24.2).15 And the former should probably be read as an exaggeration, given his numerous other statements that we are “half-dead” and in need of a physician (Nat et gr. 3.3; 43.5; 44.76; C.Jul. 3.39).16

From 418 on, Augustine made it clear that because of original sin human beings are born fundamentally disoriented, so that only grace can challenge sinful desires. Human nature is vitiated after the fall, in part, by the withdrawal of divine gifts like immortality, but it is also harmed in its very constitution. Discord between flesh and spirit becomes our new nature, and our intellectual and physical faculties are weakened (C.Jul.imp. V.20). We must now consider his account of how these things take place.

III. Solidarity with Adam: “In Adam’s fall, we sinned all”

How is sin contracted from Adam? Augustine’s attempt to answer this question, while preserving divine justice, depends, first of all, on human solidarity with Adam (he also has a theory of the transmission of original sin, which we will consider later). As head of the human race, Adam contained all future human beings within himself (excepting Christ, the second Adam, who is born of a virgin), and his choices shape the nature of those who proceed from him.17 In Augustine’s view, solidarity with Adam is more than a legal matter of a covenant between God and the human race, in which Adam, as our representative, has the power to ratify or break the treaty for all of us.18 Solidarity with Adam, for Augustine, is both social and ontological. As Augustine says,

We were all in that one man, seeing that we all were that one man who fell into sin. . . . We did not yet possess forms individually created and assigned to us for us to live in them as individuals; but there already existed the seminal nature from which we were to be begotten. . . . when this was vitiated through sin . . . man could not be born of man in any other condition (Civ.Dei XIII.14).

15. A statement first brought to my attention by the quote in Rist 1994, 272n43.

16. See ibid. and Lamberigts 2000, 181.

17. For Augustine, even Eve is from Adam, since she was drawn from his side.

18. Calvin does hold such a view (see the Institutes II.1.7).

Augustine is suggesting that all human beings live double lives—he refers to our lives in Adam as a “common life” of souls not yet living separately. He also calls our lives in our own bodies “individual” and “proper” lives (Pecc.Mer. III.7.14; C.Jul.imp. III.32).19 His theory clearly has a family relationship to Platonic and Plotinian ideas of the pre-existence of the soul—in some sense, our souls partake of the common life of the human race, in Adam, before they enliven our own bodies.20

Although, as we have seen, Augustine is committed to solidarity in Adam because of the Pauline contrast “as in Adam . . . so in Christ,” human oneness in Adam does not completely parallel Christian unity in Christ. While solidarity in Adam involves pre-existence in a common life, solidarity in Christ does not; thus, solidarity in Christ differs from solidarity in Adam, who lived before our proper lives, and whose headship rests on physical, not spiritual, generative powers. Even so, for Christians living after Christ, Augustine thinks the soul is individual and part of Christ at the same time.21

Unfortunately, it is difficult to say much more than this about Augustine’s views of solidarity. He never makes clear exactly how we were in Adam, or how Adam acted on our behalf (TeSelle 1996, 18). One of his final statements about the matter is this:

Some sort of invisible and intangible power is located in the secrets of nature where the natural laws of propagation are concealed, and on account of this power as many as were going to be able to be begotten from that one man by the succession of generations are certainly not untruthfully said to have been in the loins of the father. They were there . . . though unknowingly and unwillingly, because they did not yet exist as persons who could have known and willed this (C.Jul.imp. VI.22).

Augustine writes that all humans existed in Adam’s seed—but this explanation itself calls for elucidation. As we will see (in section VI), he insists that his talk of seminal existence in Adam should not be read to imply a traducianist picture of the origin of the soul, yet he never explains how all did exist and act in Adam, leaving the matter rather mysterious. Thus, in a statement that might just as well apply to himself, he tells his opponent Julian, “if you cannot understand this, believe it” (C.Jul.imp. IV.104; cf. Mendelson 1998).

19. Cf. O’Connell 1987, 243–244, 281; Rist 1994, 121–129.

20. Augustine also, however, clearly rejects standard platonic accounts of the pre-existence of the soul in his later works (Pecc.Mer. I.22.31; An.et.or. I.12.15).

21. And interestingly, in one letter he obliquely favors the general suggestion that the soul is both many and one (O’Daly 1987, 61–62).

However it occurs—and, perhaps because of his confidence that this is what Scripture teaches, or perhaps because human solidarity was taken for ‘By one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so it passed upon all men, in which all have sinned’” (Pecc.Mer. III.14). This Pauline theme leads Augustine to conclude that “all men are understood to have sinned in that first ‘man,’ because all men were in him when he sinned” (C.ep.Pel. IV.7; cf. Kelly 1978, 364). He opposes this view to the Pelagian belief that sin is universal because of imitation (Pecc.Mer. I.9).22 Our solidarity in sin is not merely social, it is ontological. Before we could make choices—before we were able to act on our own in any way—we were harmed in the first Adam and constituted as sinners, just as infants are made saints by baptism into the death of the second Adam, being healed by the great physician without any prior action on their part (Gr.et pecc.or. II.29.34).

IV. Inherited Sin

Thus far we have seen that Augustine thinks there is a reason why all human beings begin life as sinners: human sinfulness is historically grounded, based in the primal sin of Adam and Eve. Augustine’s first way of making a connection between these two facts—the primal sin then and our sin now— is an account of solidarity in Adam (his second way is his transmission theory, discussed below). All are now sinners because all were in Adam. Yet even a person committed to the thesis that all sin now because all were in Adam has choices to make about how to elucidate this thesis: perhaps all perform personal sins as they grow up because Adam’s sin weakened his progeny and exposed them to temptation. Augustine, however, pursues a more radical view, arguing against the Pelagians that infants need to be healed by Christ, not because of their potential to sin, but because they have original sin. He agrees that the effects of the primal sin include a penalty of moral weakness that leads those who grow into active beings continually to commit sins of all kinds (Ench. 81)—this explains the universality of sinful behavior. More fundamentally, however, Augustine thinks Adam’s revolt against God constitutes all humanity as guilty before God: even those who never have a chance to will or act on their own have this inherited sin (nupt.et conc. II.27.45).

22. I consider these issues again in the section on transmission, near the end of this essay.

Inherited Sin as Common Guilt, and Constitutional Fault

But what precisely is this inherited sin? Augustine has two ways of talking about original sin, and each provides a different answer to this question.23 We might call the first Augustine’s participation account of common guilt. Augustine sometimes speaks of original sin as “the guilt from our origin which was contracted by birth” (C.Jul.imp. V.29). In speaking this way, he relies on the solidarity thesis, claiming that since we all were in Adam when Adam sinned, the guilt for his sin is ours from the moment of birth. The guilt of Adam’s sin remains in us as a stain, until and unless it is forgiven in baptism, even when the one who personally committed the sin—Adam—has died (C.Jul.imp. IV.96, 116).

The participation account of original sin is linked to Augustine’s sobering discussion of the massa damnata, the “mass of perdition” (De Diversis Quaestionibus ad Simplicianum I.2.16; cf. I.2.19; Gr.et pecc.or. II.31.36; Corrept. 10.26). According to his reading of Romans 9:21,24 and other passages, we sinned in Adam as in a single mass (C.ep.Pel. IV.4.7; Fredrickson 1988a, 96). The entire human race was lumped together with Adam when he sinned; as a result, the whole of mankind is a “condemned lump,” the stock being punished along with the roots (Civ.Dei XXI.12). Even the elect, before they receive the medicine of Christ, are part of the massa damnata. They, however, are retrieved out of this mass of perdition by the grace of God, and saved. Others are not so fortunate, and Augustine—while affirming that God is not unjust in saving only a few, given the fact that all are lost in this sinful mass—is often at a loss to explain why they are not saved (C.ep.Pel. IV.4.16; Corrept. 8.17; Spir. et litt. 34.60). He does suggest that some are damned as a way of showing divine justice, and highlighting divine mercy, by contrast (see, e.g., Epistula 190), but time after time he also exclaims, “O the depth . . . !” invoking Romans 11:33–36, and the mystery of divine wisdom and love (e.g., Pecc.Mer. I.21.29; Persev. 9.21).

It is well known that Calvin believed the entire human race is imputed Adam’s sin because Adam—well endowed as he was—stood in for us as a representative, and the consequences of the choice he made were visited upon his race. Augustine’s picture of the human race’s involvement in the primal sin is typically more active than Calvin’s; human beings are imputed original

23. Cf. Kelly 1978, 363–365; Williams 1929, 365–372.

24. In this verse St. Paul speaks of the Potter judging a lump of clay.

sin because we were in Adam, and thus sinned with him. This is not a Reformation-type forensic understanding of imputation. For Augustine, it is not our legal situation that makes us guilty—we are judged guilty because we are already guilty, by virtue of our seminal participation in Adam. We are judged and penalized for what Adam did because we actually participated, somehow, in the primal sin. Thus, Adam’s sin and ours are one and the same.

The sense in which we participate in Adam’s sin is obscure: the race’s solidaritywithAdam’ssinisneitherwillingnorconscious,andthosewhoparticipate are nowhere close to being actual persons. One upshot of Augustine’s view, however (like Calvin’s imputation theory), is that unbaptized infants are damned, not first for their own sinful choice, or a fallen and corrupted state of being, but rather a stain of guilt.25 More precisely, what infants are damned for, according to Augustine, is not an activity or state of their “proper” lives, but a guilt that lingers from their sinful “common” life in Adam. Infants are marked down in the heavenly books as guilty for an action performed only in their “improper” lives. One might most accurately call this a theory of “common guilt.”26

Augustine also speaks of original sin as an inherited state of disordered desire and ignorance, a constitutional fault with which we are born. According to this account, original sin is more than participatory or imputed guilt; it is our own vitiated state—a state of disordered love and ignorance—which we have in our own proper lives, not the marginal existence we have in Adam’s loins. Thus, it is not numerically the same as Adam’s sin, though it is causally related to Adam’s sin. The complexities of Augustine’s account of solidarity (and of propagation, discussed below) render it difficult to indicate precisely how this causal relation functions (we might, for instance, be born with vitiated natures because of the guilt we have in Adam). Nevertheless, Augustine’s participation account provides him with a moral justification for the vitiated state in which

25. See Calvin’s Institutes, II.1.6–9.

26. Since the sense in which human beings are “in” Adam is already obscure, it is not hard to see how a theory of common guilt might become an imputation theory: the notion of an ontological solidarity simply has to be replaced by that of a legal solidarity. At times, Augustine speaks of original sin in a manner very like an imputation theory. For instance, he says: “The injustice of the first man is imputed to little ones when they are born so that they are subject to punishment, just as the righteousness of the second man is imputed to little ones who are reborn” (C.Jul.imp. I.57; cf. DNC I.33.38). As we have seen, Augustine defends original sin by pointing to the involuntary nature of infant baptism, where the parents stand in for the child; the implication is that Adam stood in for all of us when he sinned in the garden. Yet Augustine’s understanding of imputation, and “standing in for,” is not forensic, and thus he did not develop this line of thought in the way Calvin did.

we find ourselves: he is convinced that God would not punish human beings by permitting us to have a fallen “second” nature if we were not already guilty by virtue of our common guilt. That is why disordered desire and ignorance are “the disobedience coming from ourselves and against ourselves in a perfectly just turnabout because of our disobedience” (nupt.et conc. II.9.22). Augustine is referring to this vitiated state when he speaks of the punishment of sin that is itself sin. The common guilt that results from the primal sin, however, is neither sin’s punishment, nor a further sin; rather, it is the moral stain left on the human race by the primal sin itself.

While Augustine does not develop his participation account at length, he spends a great deal of time discussing the inherited constitutional fault of disordered desire, and the presentation of Augustine below reflects this emphasis. Comparatively little will be said about the notion of a common guilt, but Augustine’s account of original sin as a constitutional fault is explored in some detail in the following pages.

Concupiscence

In his (396) essay To Simplician Augustine defines sin as “perversity and lack of order, that is, a turning away from the Creator who is more excellent, and a turning to the creatures which are inferior to him” (I.2.18). Later in his life, he gives a corresponding definition of virtue as “rightly ordered love” (Civ.Dei XV.22) and writes that “it must be a sin to desire what the law of God forbids” (Civ.Dei XIV.10). These statements fit perfectly with Augustine’s claim in The Perfection of Human Righteousness: “But there is sin either where there is not the love that ought to exist or where it is less than it ought to be, whether or not this can avoided by the will” (6.15). This states a principle from which Augustine never deviates—indeed, it is central to his thinking. We relate through our loves and desires (he typically equates the two), and sin is a misrelation to God, as well as the good things that God has made. Original sin is like other sin in this respect. It differs in that it is an inherited condition, and a corruption of human nature. In general terms, original sin is a fundamental disorientation, away from God and towards lesser goods. Augustine’s multi-purpose term for this corrupted orientation is carnal concupiscence.27

27. I am supported in this contention by Burnell (1995, 49) and Burns (1980, 101–104). Williams (1929, 327–328) suggests this is Augustine’s early view. Bonner (1962, 310) thinks of

Taken in its broadest meaning, concupiscence is simply desire in general.28 Though many of his readers miss this point, Augustine does not view all concupiscence in a negative light. He writes, “At times . . . one ought to boast over what is called concupiscence, because there is also the concupiscence of the spirit against the flesh, and there is the concupiscence of wisdom” (nupt.et conc. II.10.23; cf. C.Jul. II.10.33; V.15.63). Augustine draws these positive forms of concupiscence from the Scriptures,29 and he finds the former more important than the latter, since he associates it with the work of the Holy Spirit in resisting sinful desire. Concupiscence in itself, then, is not necessarily evil desire. Augustine sometimes uses the term “concupiscence” in a narrower sense, meaning disordered desire, but more often (especially in his latest works) he notes this evil concupiscence by speaking of carnal, or fleshly, concupiscence.

Carnal concupiscence is desire for things forbidden, and thus, the desire for sin (C.Jul.imp. IV.69). Put otherwise, it is the law of sin (Pecc.Mer. II.4.4), or “disobedience coming from ourselves and against ourselves” (nupt.et conc. II.9.22), and as such the sin that is the penalty of sin mentioned above. Thus, carnal concupiscence is disordered desire.

Because he uses the descriptor “carnal,” Augustine has sometimes been read as, implicitly or explicitly, blaming the body for sin (see Clark 1986; Pagels 1988, chap. 6). However, to believe this is to misunderstand what Augustine means when he speaks of the carnal or the fleshly.30 He makes it clear early on that the weakness of our post-fall existence resides in both the flesh and the soul (Gr.et pecc.or. 1.12.13). Moreover, Augustine notes, Scripture often refers to the whole human being by the term “flesh” (An.et.or. I.18.31).

According to his psychology, the flesh cannot desire without the soul, so when he speaks of the flesh desiring, he means that the soul desires in a carnal manner (Perf.Just. 8.19). This is no different, Augustine claims, than when we say the flesh hears—obviously we mean that the soul hears by means of the

concupiscence narrowly as sexual, and says this is not sin but a wound, but his view seems somewhat revised later (1996). For dissenting voices, which typically see carnal concupiscence as a sign of sin without itself being sin, see Alflatt 1975, 175; De Simone 1980, 215; Miles 1979, 70; and the long discussion in Portalie 1960, 108–111. It is a little hard to tell which view TeSelle takes (1970, 317–318), but I doubt there is much disagreement between TeSelle and me when carnal concupiscence is understood as it is in this paper.

28. Lamberigts 2000, 179–180; Miles 1979, 67–69.

29. See Gal 5:17 and Wis 6:20.

30. For good treatments, see Fredrickson 1988a, Fredrickson 1988b, 403; Rigby 1987, 59, 74; TeSelle 1970, 70.

ear (Gn.Litt. X.12.20). Even pains are really an experience of the soul (Civ.Dei XXI.3; Gn.Litt. VII.19.25).31 As Augustine explains in his commentary on The Literal Meaning of Genesis: the cause of carnal concupiscence is not in the soul alone, much less in the flesh alone. It comes from both sources: from the soul, because without it no pleasure is felt; from the flesh, because without it carnal pleasure is not felt. Hence, when St. Paul speaks of the desires of the flesh against the spirit, he undoubtedly means the carnal pleasure which the spirit experiences from the flesh and with the flesh as opposed to the pleasures which the spirit alone experiences (Gn.Litt. X.12.20).32

In another place he writes of “the desires of the soul which are called desires of the flesh, because the soul has carnal desires, when it has such desires that the spirit, which is its better and higher part, has to resist it” (C.Jul. V.5.28).

Therefore, when Augustine calls concupiscence “of the flesh,” he is only using a metaphor (following St. Paul’s lead). The flesh is said to have desires because the soul desires in a carnal way (C.Jul. VI.14.41). Augustine clearly thinks it is an error to believe that sin is in the body only. The bond of sin resides in both the soul and the flesh: “each child is in Adam body and soul” (Gn.Litt. X.11.18). Any sins one might attribute to the flesh reflect on the soul, because the latter has been given governance of the former (C.Jul. III.4.10; Civ.Dei XIV.23). Augustine recognizes, moreover, that sins are not particularly bodily problems: the devil has no body, but he still has many faults, especially pride and envy (Civ.Dei XIV.3).

So carnal concupiscence is the disordering of the whole person, body and soul. Sexual desire, post-fall, exemplifies this disobedience with painful clarity, for Augustine. Our sexual desires are not merely animal or biological (as Julian often suggests);33 they reach our deepest inner being. Yet these desires come and go without the permission or direction of the conscious will, and they are not properly oriented towards higher goods. Instead, they resist and distort reason. Indeed, at its height sexual pleasure prevents the use of reason at all (C.Jul. IV.14.71). Could we ask for a clearer indication of disorder,

31. See O’Daly 1987, 42.

32. The pleasure of the spirit, Augustine adds, is the longing for the courts of the Lord, to keep the commandments.

33. See Peter Brown’s (1983) discussion of how radical Augustine’s view would have seemed in his day.

Augustine wonders? Proper desires should obey the mind; they should not have to be controlled with effort.34

Sexual desire is the example to which Augustine returns time and again, to prove his larger point about our post-fall existence, but he does not reduce carnal concupiscence to sexual desire.35 While claiming that sexual desires provide an especially pointed example, he makes it clear that he does not hold that they are the only sinful desires (C.Jul. IV.5.35). In reply to Julian’s intimation that he does so, Augustine writes, “You say this, as if we say that concupiscence of the flesh surges up only into the pleasure of the sex organs. This concupiscence is, of course, recognized in whichever sense of the body the flesh has desires opposed to the spirit” (C.Jul.imp. IV.28). He also lists non-sexual desires that stem from carnal concupiscence, including the desire to eat food simply for the taste, and not for nourishment, greed for money, and lust for power (C.Jul. IV.14.65–74).

It is certainly true, as many have noticed, that Augustine speaks of lust (libido) at length, especially in City of God. Many readers have failed to notice, however, that Augustine makes it quite clear that lust is a general term for desire of every kind, a contention supported by his usage, since a major concern in City of God is the lust for domination (Civ.Dei XIV.15). Thus, Augustine equates lust and carnal concupiscence only as general terms for the inordinate desire for lower goods (Bonner 1962; 1996, 40).

As his debates with the Pelagians continue, Augustine begins to speak of a good sexual concupiscence that might have existed before the fall. In his Answer to the Two Letters of the Pelagians, Augustine writes that sexual activity in Eden might have involved either the sexual organs obeying the will without any passion, or a proper kind of passion that would have arisen at a sign from the will (C.ep.Pel. I.17.34–5). In his later works he continues to keep both possibilities open, suggesting that sexual desire that neither preceded the will nor went beyond it might have been present in the garden (C.Jul. IV.14.69; C.Jul. V.5.21; C.Jul.imp. II.122; Epistula 6*).36

34. On this and related points, see Ramsey 1988. Ramsey’s criticism of Augustine assumes Augustine thoughtthatsexualdesiresoughttobecontrolledbyconsciouschoice;asIargueelsewhere,however, Augustine’s view that desire should be controlled by the will need not imply that it should be consciously controlled, only that it should not be perversely at odds with the good desires of the spirit.

35. See Lamberigts 2000, 180; Miles 1979, 68, 73; 1981, 77–78, and the perhaps overdrawn but insightful account of Schlabach 1992 (partially echoed in Wills 1999, 13–15).

36. See also Brown, P. 1988, 417–427. Gilbert Meilaender and Lisa Cahill have recently debated Augustine’s views on this point in print (Cahill 2001; Meilaender 2001); it should be clear that I think Meilaender’s reading of Augustine is more defensible.

Augustine also makes a distinction between the simple function of the sense appetite, which also can be called concupiscence, and the senses of concupiscence to which he attaches positive or negative valuation (C.Jul.imp. IV.27).37 The senses of the flesh are not in themselves desires, though they can arouse our desires with the sensory information that they supply to the rational soul.

Carnal Concupiscence and Original Sin

Having clarified what concupiscence actually is, it is now time to deal with an ancient and important question: does Augustine consider carnal concupiscence a form of original sin?38 Augustine himself is largely to blame for the confusion surrounding the question whether carnal concupiscence should be considered inherited sin, and not merely an evil. He is certainly clear that carnal concupiscence is called sin. He writes, for instance, that “The concupiscence of the flesh is indeed blameworthy and defective and is nothing but the desire for sin” (Perf.Just. 6.12), and he speaks of “concupiscence, that is, the sin dwelling in our flesh” (Perf.Just. 13.31).

In this same work, however, he goes on to mention that some claim that the sin that resides in our flesh is not really sin, but only leads to sin insofar as one consents to it. To speak that way, he notes, is to think of concupiscence as sin in an unusual and ill-defined sense (Perf.Just. 21.44; cp. Rist 1994, 136). “Such persons draw these subtle distinctions,” he writes—not admiringly—but he goes on to grant the point for the sake of argument; he then suggests that people sin because they naturally consent to the desires of “this same sin . . . evil concupiscence” (ibid.). One might contend that his willingness to direct his argument away from the mere presence of carnal concupiscence to consent to it indicates that Augustine has begun to consider carnal concupiscence not sin, but temptation, a penalty of the fall. Yet he obstinately calls it sin, even while pressing his argument that all sin on his subtle opponent’s own ground, by arguing that we naturally and inevitably consent to evil desire.

37. These three senses of concupiscence as (1) desire in general, some of which is good, (2) a function of the sensory appetite, and (3) disordered desires, and often sexual desire, are carried over into the medieval and Reformation debates about concupiscence. See Adams 1998, 93.

38. This is an old argument between Protestants and Catholics; see Pannenberg 1968, 87–91. Duffy 1988, 603n8 and Wiley 2002, 63–64, 228n47 argue that original sin is not strictly constituted by concupiscence, but seem misled by too narrow an understanding of what Augustine means by concupiscence, and fail to make use of the distinction between concupiscence and carnal concupiscence.

In later works, Augustine argues that carnal concupiscence is called sin because it was produced by, and longs to commit, sin (nupt.et conc. I.23.25; C.ep.Pel. I.13.27; C.Jul.imp. I.71). Is he then saying that concupiscence is not really sin, but is just figuratively called sin? Or is he arguing that concupiscence is in fact sin, because it urges and orders us to sin? Modern interpreters have read Augustine both ways.39 My suggestion for resolving this question is that we consider other passages in Augustine’s late writings, as well as the general logic of Augustine’s discussion. Both, I believe, indicate that Augustine conceives of carnal concupiscence not merely as evil but as sin. Thus, though Augustine is not as clear as one would like, his considered view is that concupiscence is sin—and not “sin” in some analogous or extended sense, but sin understood as a culpable and blameworthy evil.

Augustine notes that Ambrose called the “law of sin” sinful, “precisely because it is wrong for the flesh to have desires opposed to the spirit” (C.Jul. II.5.12). The perfection of righteousness is for the desires of the spirit to be unopposed; thus, a significant human good is incomplete when one has carnal concupiscence (C.ep.Pel. I.10.19; nupt.et conc. I.29.32). Sadly, perfection is not presently available, and we must be content with a holiness appropriate to the limits of this life, which is to fail to consent to the desires of the flesh (C.ep.Pel. III.5.15; C.Jul. III.26.62). In this lower perfection, however, the good is achieved only in part, because concupiscence, which remains even in the elect, produces shameful desires even when consent is denied (nupt.et conc. I.27.30). Disordered desires are not only evil but produce guilt that must be forgiven, even if conscious consent is lacking (C.Jul. VI.16.49–50).40

Thus, it fits well with Augustine’s views overall (including the views of sin surveyed at the beginning of the section on concupiscence) to hold that carnal concupiscence, even if it is not acted on, or out of, is itself sin, and I take this to be his settled position. His repeated assertions that the guilt of concupiscence is forgiven in the rebirth that is baptism clearly imply that carnal concupiscence is itself sinful. “Concupiscence of the flesh is not forgiven in baptism in such a way that it no longer exists, but in such a way that it is not counted as sin” (nupt.et conc. I.25.28; cf. nupt.et conc. I.19.21; I.23.25; Gr.et pecc.or. 2.40.45; C.Jul. VI.14.42). Prior to baptism, then, carnal concupiscence creates guilt, and this is sinful.

39. Burns1980,103interpretssuchpassagesinthelatterway;seeMiles1979,70,fortheformerreading. 40. Augustine’s lack of emphasis on consent accords with his general opinion that a bad will is evil even if it cannot physically carry out its desires (C.Jul.imp. V.22).

Post baptism, Augustine affirms that carnal concupiscence remains in the baptized as a bad quality, like a disease. The baptized, too, have disordered desires. Their guilt, however, is forgiven, and Augustine suggests that concupiscence is thus no longer literally, but only figuratively, sin. He explains: “this is what it means to be without sin: not to be guilty of sin” (nupt.et conc. I.26.29, cf. 31.36). For those who are baptized, concupiscence is not counted as sin it remains evil, but its guilt is taken away (C.Jul. VI.17.51–2). It can, however, provide the occasion for personal sins, choices and actions that arise from our disordered desires (nupt.et conc. I.22.24). This is why Christian ascetics constantly combat their base desires (C.Jul. III.15.29, 21.42). In this life, Augustine says, Christians do not fulfill the command “Do not desire” (as he renders the tenth commandment), but can fulfill the command “Do not go after your desires,” given by St. Paul:

Against this sin those who are placed under grace carry on a war, not with the hope that sin will no longer be in their body as long as it is mortal . . . but with the hope that it will not reign. And sin does not reign when its desires are not obeyed, that is, the cravings by which it lusts after allurements according to the flesh against the spirit. Hence, St. Paul did not say “Let not sin be in your mortal body” (for he knew that the attraction of sin, which he calls sin, is there since our nature has been corrupted by the original transgression); but he said, Let not sin reign in your mortal body to make you obey its lusts. (Gn.Litt. X.12.20)

In summary, then, the baptized are pardoned of sin, and thus concupiscence is called sin (as it is in this passage) by a figure of speech. However, its guilt is present in those merely born, and not re-born, for whom carnal concupiscence is not simply an evil and a weakness, but itself sin.

Augustine makes an especially clear statement regarding the status of carnal concupiscence near the end of his Unfinished Work in Answer to Julian. Arguing that Julian must admit that carnal desire is sin, he writes of the apostle Paul,

He most clearly showed that it is sin when he said the words I quoted: I would not have known sin except through the law. And if we asked, “What sin?” he said, for I would not have known desire unless the law said, “You shall not desire.” (C.Jul.imp. VI.41, cf. V.13)

As we have seen, Augustine does not believe all desire is bad in itself—in rendering the tenth commandment “you shall not desire” Augustine has disordered desires in mind. He intends in this passage, then, that we should equate sin with disordered desire, a perverse will.

With this analysis in hand, let us turn to one of Augustine’s more confusing statements about the status of carnal concupiscence. Many scholars have taken passages such as the following to indicate that Augustine does not consider concupiscence itself original sin, but only the sign of original sin’s presence in a person, and its penalty. In talking about the struggle that exists even for the baptized, Augustine writes that concupiscence, even if it is called sin, it bears that name, not because it is a sin, but because it was produced by a sin . . . this concupiscence of the flesh is itself forgiven in baptism so that, though it is contracted by those who are born, it does no harm to those who are reborn . . . since its guilt contracted by birth has been forgiven by rebirth. For this reason it is no longer a sin, though it is called a sin. (C.ep.Pel. I.13.27, my italics)

The only way I can see to make this undeniably confusing passage coherent is to suggest that Augustine is speaking at the beginning of the passage of the carnal concupiscence of those already baptized, for whom concupiscence is not sin, but only because its guilt has been forgiven by rebirth in Christ. He makes it clear, however, that prior to baptism concupiscence of the flesh is indeed sin, sin that produces guilt in need of forgiveness.41

For some authors, the passage has raised a further question: if carnal concupiscence remains post baptism, but is no longer sin because its guilt is forgiven, is what makes it sin really the guilt?42 I think not: carnal concupiscence is guilty because it is sin (not vice versa), and it is sin because it is a culpable disordered relation. In baptism Christians are brought into a proper relationship to God by being incorporated into Christ. For Augustine, this changes their fundamental orientation, not completely, but really. They begin to delight in the law of God in the interior self (nupt.et conc. I.30.33). The removal of guilt from carnal concupiscence, then, involves an effect on carnal concupiscence itself—it is forgiven by rebirth, and Augustine sees baptism as bestowing actual righteousness, not only pardon (McGrath 1986, 32–33). Yet disordered desire remains after baptism, and, Augustine claims, it is not counted as sin. He uses this analogy: even if we stopped sinning, the guilt of our past sins would remain until forgiven. In baptism, the opposite happens, the guilt being forgiven while disordered desires remain (nupt.et conc. I.26.29).43

41. See C.Jul.imp. I.67, however, where such a reading is impossible.

42. Kelly 1978, 365; TeSelle 1970, 318 suggest the answer is “yes.”

43. At this point, Augustine sounds proto-Lutheran (we are simul justus et peccator), but the fact that God can pardon original sin even while carnal concupiscence remains does not mean that original sin is guilt only, since guilt comes from concupiscence.

* * *

I have been describing Augustine’s account of original sin as a condition of disordered desire, a misrelation to God into which all human beings are born. He names this condition carnal concupiscence, and uses sexual desire as his primary example of the disordering and disempowering effects of carnal concupiscence.

I now want to address a couple of loose ends in my discussion of the constitutional fault that is original sin. William Babcock has written that Augustine came to identify the internal hold of cupidity on the self with habit (Babcock 1988, 37), and, echoing this position, James Wetzel has said that Augustine associates involuntary sin with habit (Wetzel 1992, 134–138, 169). These statements could be misleading, however, depending on how one understands the term “habit.”44 While the word “habit” can refer to one’s natural constitution, it is more commonly used to refer to tendencies built up over time—the meaning I will use here. To be clear, then, Augustine acknowledges that tendencies developed in the course of one’s life can have the compulsive force that Babcock and Wetzel emphasize. The Confessions certainly makes that clear. Yet in his late writings Augustine emphasizes that sin’s power is not mainly due to choices made along an individual’s path in life. Sin’s power is due to carnal concupiscence, which is a constitutional fault, a disordered fundamental orientation.

It was Augustine’s opponent Julian, actually, who argued that the Pauline “body of death” is habitually sinful, meaning that any struggle with sin is a struggle with bad habits, not with a sinful nature (C.Jul.imp. I.67). Augustine replied that the law of sin is attributed by Paul to the corruptible (i.e. mortal and fallen) body, not habit (C.Jul.imp. I.69). He does not deny that habits can lead us to sin, even when unwilling (C.Jul.imp. I.72), but he insists that evil does not become inveterate only, or even mainly, through the force of personal choices that harden into habits—for, as soon as persons begin to have the use of reason, even if they desire chastity, they already experience the concupiscence of the flesh, which had been asleep because of their young age, as if waking up and fighting back (C.Jul.imp. III.178). Thus, our deepest problem with sin is the fundamentally disordered orientation with which we are born, which not only leads us to personal sins, but is itself sinful. In other words, the problem is an inherited constitutional fault.

44. A point Wetzel has agreed with in personal conversation.

Second, I have mentioned that Augustine calls ignorance a form of original sin. Overall, he has much less to say about ignorance than about concupiscence. Yet he does suggest that ignorance is both sin and punishment for sin. He writes, for instance, that “blindness of heart is itself a sin by which one does not believe in God” (C.Jul. V.3.8; see Pecc.Mer. I.36.67). In this passage, as elsewhere, he suggests that disordered love is typically prior to epistemic blindness, and causes it. Still, epistemic blindness is a sin in itself: those who do not know God’s law do not go without punishment (Gr.et lib.arb. 3.5). Augustine adds, however, that the punishment of those who sin by ignorance is less than those who sin knowingly. While his views will still seem harsh to many, they comport with his oft-stated view that without faith, one cannot have true virtue (e.g., C.ep.Pel. III.5.14). Ignorance, like disordered desire, can stand in the way of a right relationship to God, and is part of the disordered state that is original sin.

Finally, Augustine believes personal sins are added to original sin in the lives of all those who live to an age where they can reason and will on their own. “We admit that human beings also have those sins which are committed not by necessity, but by will, sins which are only sins and from which one is free to hold back” (C.Jul.imp. I.105). Such sins include, as Julian argued, sins of imitation; Augustine’s defense of original sin does not exclude other ways of sinning. Augustine believes we sin in many ways, as we gain the ability to act. These sins add demerits to the guilt of original sin (C.Jul.imp. II.48), and they can also form habits that become difficult, even extremely difficult, to break.

The profound moral questions raised by the notion of original sin should now be coming into focus. Having discussed Augustine’s notion of common guilt, we have seen how his understanding of solidarity in Adam links the primal sin to the sinful state that he believes all human beings experience today. We have also discussed the nature of that inherited fault, a state of ignorance and carnal concupiscence, at length. For Augustine, it appears that Adam and Eve, at least, were human beings with the power fundamentally to harm all other human beings, making them sinners before God. God, however, works through the Church, associating sinners in Christ’s work of redemption via baptism. Human beings are thus vulnerable to the influences of others on the most important of matters, even to the extent that their relation to others determines their standing before God. It is this provocative

thesis about human moral and spiritual fragility that—more than anything else—has made Augustine’s doctrine of original sin seem both so profound and so troublesome.

V. Sin’s Penalty

We now move from the inherited sin that results from the primal pride and foolishness to the penalty of the primal sin. Augustine states that while the penalties of sin are a fitting punishment for sin and pedagogical for sinners, they are not sinful in themselves. They can provide reasons and occasions for sin, but since they do not necessarily lead to sin, they are evil without being intrinsically sinful (Pecc.Mer. II.3.3; C.Jul. IV.16.49).45

It is worth emphasizing that the penalties human beings suffer after the fall are, on Augustine’s account, suffered for their own sin. There is a sense, of course, in which infants who suffer solely on account of original sin do suffer on account of another’s sin, but Augustine emphasizes that even infants’ inherited sin is their own, and not someone else’s (cf. C.Jul. VI.23.74,VI.10.28).46 By taking this line, he attempts to preserve God’s justice in the face of the problem of evil (Gr.et pecc.or. 2.31.36).

At the deepest level, Augustine believes that the penalty of sin displays itself as wounds to human nature. In particular, fallen human beings are ignorant, and disagreement between flesh and soul has become second nature (Augustine calls this “weakness”) (Ench. 81; C.Jul. II.5.11). The clearest example of the penalty of sin is mortality; the first couple was meant to live forever, but, as God threatened, death is now the penalty of all who are born (Civ.Dei XIII.6; C.Jul.imp. I.96).47 This is unnatural in the sense that it is not what God intended; but since the fall, it has also become a fact of human nature, since all human beings are penalized by death. We are weak in other ways as well, since we have lost much of our beauty, are susceptible to disease, cannot reason clearly enough even to understand ourselves, and are often dis-unified in mind, finding many desires or thoughts at odds with others. For

45. Augustine’s clarity about the distinction between sin and evil reinforces the belief that he considered carnal concupiscence sinful; if he did not, he had the conceptual resources to make that point clear, as he did when speaking of the difference between evil that one does not do but rather suffers (sin’s penalty), and sin that is the punishment of sin (ignorance and carnal concupiscence) (C.Jul.imp. I.46; C.Jul. V.3.8).

46. Here he nuances his agreement with Cyprian; compare the quote in Harmless 1997, 27n80. 47. Another penalty is the loss of libertas (C.ep.Pel. I.2.4).

Augustine, such weakness plainly indicates that we live under a penal condition (Pecc.Mer. I.37.68).48

VI. The Transmission of Original Sin

The last of the five tenets that compose Augustine’s doctrine of original sin is in some ways the most complex of them all, and there is not space for a full treatment here.49 Nevertheless, a few central points must be mentioned. Augustine was confident that sin is not merely imitated, because he took Psalm 51 to indicate that original sin is propagated by sexual intercourse (Conf. I.7.12; Pecc.Mer. I.9.9; C.Jul.imp. II. 49).50 Yet he found it difficult to settle all the questions that arise regarding the transmission of original sin, in part because of the obscurity of his participation account of sin, and in part because he was unable to choose between competing theories about the soul’s origin.

In Tertullian’s traducianist theory, the soul is material, and human seed passes on a portion of the parent’s soul and body. This approach explains solidarity in Adam literally: we really were in Adam, the material of our bodies and souls virtually contained in his.51 Yet because it was traditionally a materialist thesis, and because Augustine was convinced that inherited sin is not simply a sin of the body, but of the immaterial soul, he was unwilling to fully embrace traducianism (An.et.or. I.6; C.Jul.imp. II.178).52

The more popular “creationist” theory held that the immortal soul is created directly by God, then infused into the physical body created by human intercourse. Augustine was unable to find Scriptural grounds that ruled this theory out, yet he found it problematic: if God creates fallen souls after the fall, God becomes responsible for original sin’s transmission. Alternatively, perhaps God creates souls good, and then places them in corrupted bodies propagated from

48. This sense that we human beings live in a tragic situation, that some catastrophe has befallen us, remains attractive, even to those who reject the other parts of the doctrine of original sin (cf. Farley 1990). Augustine’s belief that all the evils that befall us are an appropriate punishment for our sin now seems questionable, but it is not hard to see how one might appropriate his notions of non-moral physical and mental weakness, and other evils that we suffer without sin.

49. See Mendelson 1998 for one treatment of the issues, and O’Connell 1993 for a summary of a number of relevant issues.

50. Verse 5 reads, “Indeed, I was born guilty, a sinner when my mother conceived me.”

51. See Kelly 1978, 175, 345–346.

52. Julian nevertheless insisted Augustine had to be a traducianist—how else could original sin be passed down through intercourse (C.Jul.imp. II.178)?

human seed? But this makes original sin depend on the body, which fits neither with Augustine’s understanding of original sin nor with his psychology, on which only a weakened soul would lack the power to control the body properly (An.et.or. I.6.6). In addition, it implies that God unfairly places good souls in a situation that ensures their corruption (Pecc.Mer. II.36.59; An.et.or. I.11.13).

In Book X of The Literal Meaning of Genesis Augustine entertains a further possibility: taking the materialism out of the traducianist picture and creating an “immaterial traducianism,” an idea he seems inclined to like (Gn.Litt. X.11.18; Fredrickson 1988a, 109; TeSelle 1996, 17). Yet he never endorses this view; he could not think of a suitably revised traducianist explanation of how immaterial souls are propagated (An.et.or. I.6; C.Jul.imp. II.178, IV.104; Retr. I.1.3; O’Daly 1987, 19).53

Thus unable to settle this question, Augustine attempted to discuss the propagation of original sin without relying on a specific theory about the soul’s origin. As a result, he often states that the soul is weighed down by the corrupted body produced by lustful sex (e.g., Pecc.Mer. I.38.69; C.Jul.imp. III.44)—one thing he could claim whatever the truth of the matter about the origin of the soul. Unfortunately, this manner of speaking sits uncomfortably with his deeper insight that sin is not simply bodily.

Had Augustine relied on an imputation theory of original sin, sex would not have had a role to play at all: sin would be imputed to the human race because Adam is its head; how humans are procreated would make no difference. But, as we have seen, Augustine believes that “they all sinned then in Adam, when they were still all that one man in virtue of that power implanted in his nature by which hewasabletobegetthem”(Pecc.Mer. III.7.14).Thus,sexualityisvitaltoAugustine’s accountofontologicalsolidaritywithAdam:wewereinAdambecausewewerein his seed. Sex matters because that is how human nature is propagated.54

53. R. J. O’Connell suggests that Augustine preferred another option: God creates all souls in Paradise, and they pre-exist in Adam there, where they live “improper lives;” they are later infused into bodies, where they live their proper lives. Augustine does use this language of “proper lives” at a number of points, but O’Connell reads too much into it, for my taste. I see this language as a way of talking about our participation in Adam that is not intended to imply any particular theory of the soul, let alone a theory of pre-existence. After all, Augustine uses this language early and late, all the while insisting that he is unsure about the origin of the soul. But this debate is too complex to take up here. See O’Connell 1987 and 1993; Mendelson 1998; Rist 1994, 317–320; TeSelle 1996, Teske 2001.

54. Importantly, however, while Augustine’s solidarity theory might imply some kind of sexual transmission theory, the converse is not true. Augustine’s transmission theory does not seem to depend on his views about solidarity, and might fare better without them.

It is surprising, however, that Augustine gives sexual desire a significant role in original sin’s transmission. Augustine claims that carnal concupiscence, though originally the daughter of sin, is also the mother of sin (nupt.et conc. I.24.27). We have seen part of what he means: sin’s punishment can itself be the sinful constitutional fault that leads to personal sins. In applying the idea that concupiscence begets sin to procreation, however, Augustine takes a new and crucial step—lust becomes causally involved in the transmission of original sin: “those who are born from the union of bodies are under the power of the devil, before they are reborn . . . because they are born through that concupiscence by which the flesh has desires opposed to the spirit” (C.Jul. IV.4.34; cf. II.10.33; C.Jul.imp. IV.79; van Oort 1987, 384). Sexual lust thereby becomes not merely a symbol of carnal concupiscence, but its cause.55

Augustine further claims that parental sins can increase the original sin of their children, and parental righteousness can lessen it (Ench. 46–47; C.Jul.imp. III.19, 50, 84, IV.133). Adam’s sin had singular power, guaranteeing the presence of original sin in all infants (C.Jul.imp. III.65). But parents, too, Augustine writes, ensnare children in their own guilt (C.Jul. VI.25.82; C.Jul.imp. VI.21, 23).56 Thus, Augustine himself endorses a theory of the social transmission of sin. This too is surprising, in part because it conflicts with his general view that parental lust does not shape the child. He writes that even promiscuous intercourse does not shape bodies so that they are deformed (C.Jul. I.8.39, III.7.16). But if adulterous sexual desire and behavior has no more effect on the child than marital sex, why can the desire of parents effect carnal concupiscence in their children, and to greater and lesser degrees?

This social transmission theory is also in tension with other aspects of Augustine’s account. Augustine states that because the primal sin is committed by the heads of the human race, it impacted human nature in a uniquely drastic manner (Civ.Dei XIV.12).57 Holding that original sin is transmitted by

55. This view may have seemed attractive as a way of unpacking the importance of the virgin birth. For Augustine Christ had mortality, because this was in his mother, but no carnal concupiscence, because he did not encounter in her the concupiscence of sexual union (C.Jul. V.15.54; cf. De Trinitate XIII.18.23).

56. Anselm later specifically rejects this idea (1998). His position seems to me more consistent on this point than Augustine’s.

57. This could mean that only the primal sin could give rise to original sin, but it could also mean only that the primal sin had the most serious and broad effect. The latter reading is supported in the Enchiridion (47), where Augustine suggests that the sins of progenitors other than Adam can also make children guilty.

lust suggests, however, that the rest of the race suffers not Adam’s sin, but the consequences of Adam’s sin. This theory of original sin’s transmission clearly extends the idea that one is infected by those in whom one finds one’s origin, but it begins to serve as a replacement for his doctrine of solidarity in Adam, since the sexual transmission theory implies that infants are infected directly by their most immediate ancestors, but only indirectly by Adam.58

Thus, Augustine’s views a propos the transmission of original sin fit uneasily with his other thoughts about original sin. His decision not to take a stand on the origin of the soul seems to have made his understanding of original sin less rigorous and systematic than it might otherwise have been (cf. Pannenberg 1968, 137).

VII. Conclusion

We now have a picture of Augustine’s doctrine of original sin. That doctrine may be said to be composed of five more or less loosely affiliated ideas or elements. Although they can be linked in significant ways, they cannot all be defended or all rejected at once and do not necessarily stand or fall together. Indeed, we saw that some lie in tension with others, and that he was more sure about his position regarding some than others. In particular, his position on the nature of human solidarity in Adam is obscure to us, and his ideas about the transmission of original sin are internally conflicted and his ideas about sin’s sexual transmission are in tension with other parts of his doctrine. It is uncertain, then, not only how Augustine thought humanity was in Adam, and how the primal sin came to be shared by all humanity, but also how sin itself, as well as its penalty, are transmitted from parents to children. Augustine is less ambiguous about his commitment to an historical primal sin, and his belief that we all suffer a penalty of weakness because of that sin. Finally, Augustine is reasonably articulate about the nature of inherited sin: it has two forms, a common guilt that we bear because we were in Adam when he sinned and somehow sinned with him, and a constitutional fault composed of ignorance and carnal concupiscence, a state of disordered desire blameworthy and sinful in itself. The notion of a common guilt is closely tied to an understand-

58. Making use of the two parts of his theory of inherited sin, Augustine could have suggested that while common guilt is inherited via our participation in Adam, carnal concupiscence is transmitted via lustful sex. To my knowledge, he does not make explicitly make this move, though it might perhaps be implied by the fact that his attention is often focused on concupiscence when he discusses sexual transmission of sin.

ing of solidarity in sin, and seems to provide Augustine a way to justify otherwise innocent infants being penalized by both a constitutional fault and inborn weakness of mind and body; the idea of a constitutional fault develops Augustine’s view of carnal concupiscence as itself sinful, but is less closely tied to his doctrine of human solidarity.

I have said that the notion of inherited sin is the conceptual core of Augustine’s doctrine, but in the light of the conclusions above, some explicit, concluding comments should be helpful. The fundamental point is that one can believe in primal sin, a doctrine of solidarity with Adam (suitably understood), universal negative consequences of sin, and some sort of theory about how these consequences are transmitted, without being committed to a doctrine of inherited sin, and thus without being committed to Augustine’s doctrine of original sin. Commitment to these four ideas was pervasive in the early church: the majority of Augustine’s predecessors and contemporaries argued that the human race suffered wounds because of the primal sin, and mortality was widely seen as an unnatural condition caused by the fall (see Kelly 1978, 350, 364; Rondet 1972, 128). But almost no one believes (and no one should) that the Greek Fathers, for instance, were committed to a doctrine of original sin—as proposed by Augustine—merely because they were committed to such ideas. On their own, then, these tenets do not necessarily imply a doctrine of inherited sin or amount to a doctrine of original sin.59

In other words, what makes the notion of inherited sin central to the doctrine of original sin is that one could subscribe to versions of the other four tenets without holding a doctrine of original sin, as many have thought Augustine himself did in one of his earliest works, the first book of On Free Choice. 60 What he added to those early views to make a clear doctrine of original sin is his insistence that all who follow from Adam by ordinary generation are complicit with Adam’s sin and are born in a vitiated state that is sinful in and of itself, before they commit any personal sins. That is why the conceptual heart of Augustine’s doctrine of original sin—the element that most makes it what it is—is the notion of inherited sin.

59. Of course, Augustine takes these elements in directions that go beyond many of his predecessors and contemporaries, so that his discussion of solidarity with Adam’s guilt, in particular, clearly moves him into a doctrine of original sin. But this is just to say that his commitment to the notion of an inherited sin influenced his understanding of the elements that formed the background to his belief in original sin.

60. Augustine himself claims that he held to a doctrine of original sin from the time of his conversion (C.Jul. VI.12.39), though see Burns 1980, chap. 1 for an argument to the contrary.

This leads to a final point: while Augustine’s doctrine of original sin is comprised of a number of parts, original sin itself consists of inherited sin. The other tenets of the doctrine explain how original sin came to exist, how and why it is transmitted, and what accompanies it. For Augustine, such doctrines are not merely important on their own, but because they provide a background that assists us in understanding the center of the doctrine, original sin itself. It is no wonder, then, that—while each part of the doctrine has its own controversial and confusing aspects—the most vehement and longstanding controversy about the doctrine has centered on the notion of inherited sin. Without inherited sin, the doctrine of original sin would not contain the seeming contradiction of bondage and responsibility that makes it as worrisome and insightful as, for many people, from ancient times until now, it has been.

In Augustine’s view, these five doctrines, knit together to form the doctrine of original sin, are good and salutary; they accord with biblical teaching, and they make sense of the Church’s practice of baptizing infants. In addition to his theological reasons for adhering to the doctrine, which we have surveyed, Augustine also had a pragmatic rationale: he thought that seeing sin as a kind of power over us, a condition we are placed in involuntarily, leads us to resist moralism. Forgiveness of sins is much easier in the case of original sin (Pecc.Mer. III.5.11; cf. McFadyen 2001, 33; Pannenberg 1991, 238). Whether that will assist in convincing his readers that Augustine’s doctrine of original sin is just, however, remains an open question. * * *

It is natural to wonder whether Augustine actually invented the doctrine of original sin himself, as his opponent Julian charged (nupt.et conc. II.12.25). I cannot address this disputed question at length, but I do want to note, in closing, my reservations about attributing the doctrine solely to Augustine. Though the theologians that preceded Augustine certainly did not develop anything like a detailed or consistent doctrine of original sin, enough of them have hints of such a doctrine that historian J. N. D. Kelly ends a survey of the Church Fathers with the claim that “though falling short of Augustinianism, there was here the outline of a real theory of original sin” (Kelly 1978, 351; cf. 171ff., 345ff.; Tennant 1903, 342–345).61 Though the eastern church did

61. For quotes that support this thesis, also see De Simone 1980, 210–211 and Wiley 2002 chap. 2. De Simone does not carefully distinguish between weakness that is the penalty of the primal

not support the doctrine, it seems safe to affirm that, prior to Augustine, many elements in the West, especially in Africa, did (see Bray 1994; Laporte 1997; TeSelle 1970, 258–263; 1996, 12–13). This accords with Augustine’s own acknowledged debts to Cyprian, Ambrose and Hilary/Ambrosiaster (Pecc.Mer. III.5.10; nupt.et conc. II.29.51; C.ep.Pel. IV.11.29; C.Jul. I.3–35), and the fact that contemporaries like Jerome agreed with Augustine from the beginning of the Pelagian controversies (De Simone 1980, 224–227).

Thus, it appears that some version of the doctrine preceded Augustine, as he contended. In this context, it is suggestive that the Pelagian controversy started without Augustine’s knowledge, when Caelestius, a disciple of Pelagius, was accused of heresy by a Milanese deacon, Paulinus of Milan, who was also Ambrose’s biographer and former secretary (see The Deeds of Pelagius).62 Caelestius was condemned for, among other things, asserting that “The sin of Adam harmed him alone and not the human race”63 by a tribunal in Carthage in 411 or 412, in which Augustine was not involved, and his anti-Pelagian writings post-date it. The main influence in that case would seem, then, to have been Ambrose. Augustine had, of course, written about original sin earlier, in the Confessions (400), To Simplician (396), and the last two books of On Free Choice (395)—but it is doubtful that the under-developed references to original sin contained in these works would have led to the establishment of a doctrine of original sin as a new dogma in such a short time in a day when communication moved much slower than it does now.

It is also suggestive that the belief that baptism saved infants from sin was so widespread among church laity well before Augustine became influential. Augustine himself defended the belief that the infant too needs Christ’s medicine on the basis that “the proof is its mother faithfully hurrying to church with her baby to be baptized.”64

sin, and leads to personal sins, and the inherited sin that is the conceptual core of original sin; this makes many of his quotations inconclusive. One would need to know more about the context of his quotations to know what the author meant. Weaver (1985a; 1985b) does a better job of this, and concludes that the Greek Fathers did not support a doctrine of original sin (see also Meyendorff 1983, 143–149).

62. Augustine also mentions the episode in Gr.et pecc.or. II.2–4; see Teske’s remarks in Teske 1997, 19–22, 32n6, and also Bonner 1963, 320–322; Brown, P. 1969, 344–345; TeSelle 1970, 279–281.

63. The nature of the harm in question is not described in detail, unfortunately, so it is possible that this is simply a reference to the idea of a universal human penalty suffered because of Adam’s sin, and not to the idea of an inherited sin. Nevertheless, in the context of the African writings Augustine was so fond of quoting, the condemnation certainly raises the question of original sin.

64. Sermo 293.10, quoted in Harmless 1997, 26.

I am led to conclude, then, that while Augustine was the great systematizer, developer, and defender of the doctrine, he was not its inventor. He certainly pursued the doctrine more than any before him, and few since, and he pressed it into a form peculiar, in many ways, to himself—especially by his clear emphasis on inherited sin—but it did not originate with him.65

Abbreviations

An.et.or. The Nature and Origin of the Soul (De Anima et eius Origine

C.ep.Pel. Answer to the Two Letters of the Pelagians Contra Duas Epistulas Pelagianorum

Civ.Dei City of God

De Civitate Dei

C.Jul. Answer to Julian Contra Julian

Conf Confessions Confessiones

Persev. The Gift of Perseverance

De Dono Perseverantiae

Corrept. Rebuke and Grace

De Corruptione et Gratia

nupt.et conc. Marriage and Desire

De Nuptiis et Concupiscentia

Ench. Enchiridion

Enchiridion de fide, sep, et caritate

Gr.et lib.arb. Grace and Free Choice

De Gratia et Libero Arbitrio

Gn.Litt. The Literal Meaning of Genesis De Genesi ad Litteram

Gr.et pecc.or The Grace of Christ and Original Sin De Gratie et Peccato Originali

Lib.arb. On Free Choice of the Will

De Libero Arbitrio Voluntatis

65. I would like to thank Margaret Farley, Allan Fitzgerald, Jon Hare, David Kelsey, Gene Outka, Miroslav Volf and two anonymous readers for comments that led me to revise earlier versions of this essay.

Nat et gr. Nature and Grace De Natura et Gratia

C.Jul.imp. Unfinished Work in Answer to Julian Contra Julian Opus Imperfectum

Pecc.Mer. The Punishment and Forgiveness of Sins De Peccatorum Meritis et Remissione

Perf.Just. The Perfection of Human Righteousness De Perfectione Hominis Iustitiae

Retr. Revisions Retractationes

Spir. et litt. The Spirit and the Letter De Spiritu et Littera

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