Augustine On Human Nature Flashcards
Pre lapsarian
The garden of Eden was a perfect place. Adam and Eve had a harmonious relationship with nature and each other as friends. God commanded them to go forth and multiply, which implies they had a sexual relationship. However, Augustine thought that our rationality must have had perfect control over our bodies before it became corrupted by original sin. Before the fall, sex would have been a purely rational act without being driven by desire.
Augustine interpreted these verses to say that there was perfect harmony between the human body, will & reason
The Fall
Adam and Eve disobeyed God and as a punishment were banished from the garden of Eden to this fallen world. After their sin, God said Eve will now have pain in childbirth and Adam would have to ‘toil’ the land to make food. Human nature is corrupted by a tendency to do evil. The shame of nakedness and the punishment of lust & selfish desires, and of subordination to Eve, defines male-female relationships after the fall. This is due to Adam and Eve disobeying God causing a corruption in their nature which causes an irresistible desire to sin. This corruption has been inherited by every human.
According to Augustine all humans were ‘seminally present in the loins of Adam’. We existed in merely a ‘seminal nature from which we were to be begotten’ but when that became ‘vitiated through sin’ it became impossible for anyone to be born without original sin.
Cupiditas & Caritas
Augustine thought the human will was based on love, of which there are two types. Cupiditas is love of earthly impermanent things, selfishness and love of self. Ignorance and unhappiness results from this. Caritas is the Latin version of the Greek word Agape. It means love of others due to virtue as an expression of God’s will. Concupiscence is a defining feature of original sin. It is when bodily desire overpowers reason. Augustine thought the most obvious case of this is sexual desire. The sexual organs can be active when the mind does not want them to be and not active when the mind does want them to be, a consequence of the Fall.
Original sin
The state humans were brought into by the fall, the first sin.
For Augustine, original sin, which came into the world at the fall characterises human nature. In his terms, the will continues in its disharmony & therefore rebels. This is illustrated sexually - man loses his ability to control his sexual desires. Other thinkers see original sin as describing human nature, however Augustine saw it as changing it; therefore no human is truly good, however much they do good things.
Augustine believed that original sin is passed on to all generations through sexual intercourse because all humans are united through being descendants of Adam & Eve and all are conceived as a result of lust (except Jesus). This is shown in concupiscence.
Augustine said that original sin was a double death
Killing the friendship between God & humans
Becoming mortal, following the fall
Original sin is the cause of human selfishness, a lack of free will & a lack of stability as well as the cause of corruption in all human societies.
Exclusivism
Augustine’s exclusivism holds that we are so corrupted by original sin that genuine persevering faith in Jesus is only possible with God’s help: his gift of grace, which predestines some people to have and keep faith in Christ and thus be one of the ‘elect’ who will be saved.
Grace
Grace is what saves humans and thereby allows them into heaven. Humans can accept the Grace of God, but as they continue to sin,, Augustine believed that God elects some people to go to heaven; a sign of his benevolence. In other words, humanity so corrupted that we are unable by ourselves to be good enough to deserve salvation. Only with God’s granting of undeserved grace can we possibly be saved.
In Romans 8, St Paul seems to hold to predestination, which is the view that our fate in the afterlife, i.e. whether we will go to heaven or hell, is already unalterably fixed. Augustine thought this view of election followed logically from the doctrine of original sin and grace. If we cannot get ourselves into heaven then God has either predestined us for heaven, or he hasn’t and our original sin damns us to hell. This view is called double predestination: that heaven is predestined for some and hell for others.
Inspired by Plato, Augustine talks about Gods goodness being the greatest good (Summum bonum) that is available only for some - goodness in the world is temporary, whereas the summum bonum is eternal happiness that can only be found in the presence of God.
Pelagius
Pelagius points out that the Bible is full of cases of God commanding humans to do morally good actions and avoid morally bad actions. It’s difficult to see why God would make these demands if original sin meant that humans did not have the ability to obey those commands. Furthermore, it’s hard to see what the point of even trying to be good is, if we are so corrupted that we are unable, which Pelagius thought led to a fatalistic and lazy attitude towards morality. Pelagius said that to claim, as Augustine does, that we cannot follow God’s commands due to our fallen nature amounts to accusing God of ignorance as if God were ‘unmindful of human frailty’ such that he ‘imposed commands upon man which man is not able to bear’. The fact that God commands moral action therefore presupposes that we have the free will to do them, which means that original sin does not inhibit us.
- Pelagius concludes: ‘That we are able to do good is of God, but that we actually do it is of ourselves’. God gave us free will and thereby gave us the ability to do good, but our actual doing of a good action is thus the result of our free choice.
