Christ And The Soul

Augustine

Christ and the Soul

The lofty theology of a book like City of God is always a little irrelevant. All of it may be true. A full understanding of the dispensation of salvation may be impossible without it. But in the end it is just another construction of the human intellect. Even if the intellect is aided by divine illumination, its triumphs are still fleeting ones.

How God deals with the human race may be a matter of speculative interest. How Christ redeems the individual soul is an urgent concern. The individual person has no other life but his own. The Christian who believes in his God and longs to be united with him deems all other concerns secondary, however important. The abuse this zeal fosters is selfish concentration on personal salvation at the expense of a caring involvement in human affairs, but to Augustine such concentration is always self-defeating. The path to personal salvation lies through a future of personal self-abnegation in the love of God and of neighbor. Paradoxically (that word again), to save one's soul means abandoning all morbid preoccupation with self by immersion in self-effacing love. "He who would save his soul must lose it." (Matthew 10.39) Thus, it is "microtheology" that presents Augustine's vision of Christianity in its fullest development and that attracted the fiercest controversy. In the last two decades of Augustine's life, the Pelagian controversy forced him to examine his views on these subjects with passionate care. What emerged in that period was a fuller statement of principle and a working out of logical consequences, but not a new theology.[1]

The rudiments of the Augustinian theology of grace can be seen as early as the first book of the Seven Various Questions for Simplicianus, written in the mid-390s when Augustine confronted the paradoxes of Paul's letter to the Romans. Augustine was fortunate, however, to be able to pursue his argument with the Pelagians in logical sequence, which we will attempt to duplicate here. The central concerns are threefold: sin (the condition of mankind left to itself), grace (the act of redemption in Christ), and predestination (the condition of the liberated soul--the most mysterious matter of all, and most fraught with complexities arising from the effect of grace on the will.)

The first thing Augustine wrote against the ideas of Pelagius (of whom he had barely heard himself) was The Guilt and Remission of Sin; and Infant Baptism, written in 411 in response to questions from his friend Marcellinus.[2] In this pamphlet he dealt with the fact, as he saw it, of original sin and raised the further questions about grace to be answered in Spirit and Letter, to which we shall turn shortly. Fifteen more years of controversy were to elapse before his final views on predestination and free will were set down in the work that will occupy us last, The Predestination of the Blessed (429).

Sin

The human animal is a moral animal, and its plight is dismal. The best of intentions demonstrably lead to the most disastrous of conclusions, and even the best of intentions are but rarely sovereign. Human beings have an irrepressible capacity for disappointing themselves and each other with their thoughts, words, and deeds. Conscience is more than a chain by which the human mind irrationally constrains itself, and is at least the evidence of a tension and dissatisfaction deeply planted in the race. The material world presents us with things as they are (or seem to be) and does so brutally. But in the realm of the mind, we consider things as they should be. The origins of the moral instincts may be baffling, but their tenacity in the face of all discouragement is great. No vision of human nature is adequate without an explanation of the nature of moral evil.

In Christian theology, the explanation is simple and blunt. The human race is separated, temporarily but drastically, from the consoling source of being and goodness. Alone in a world from which they have tried to banish God, men act as irresponsible children suddenly lacking clear guidance and immediate punishment. As we saw in the last chapter, the history of the species is the story of the separation and reunification of creatures and creator. In the pages of revelation, the separation is documented by the example of Adam. In City of God Augustine saw in the fall of Adam an essential mystery: Evil enters the world, it persists, but it consists of nothing more than the perversity of dependent creatures, fleetingly anonymous in their rebellion. Through sin, death and all misery entered the world. The wounds of life are all self-inflicted.

But what does the sin of the first parents have to do with the present misery? The weakest link in Augustine's theology of sin is his view on the transmission of original sin. Literal acceptance of the Adam and Eve story created difficulties for him that he need not have faced. Throughout his life, he visibly inclined to a theory of physical propagation, according to which the disorder of the sexual appetites discussed above was not only the sign of sin but the instrument of its transmission--hence, perhaps, a special suspicion of sexuality. But it is also indisputable that Augustine was aware of the dangers of this theory and ultimately refused to commit himself to any particular hypothesis on the origins of individual human souls and the transmission of Adam's sin. Instead, he confined himself to what he was sure of, namely the sin of Adam and the presence of his sin in the species. Given those two points, the mechanism of transmission was of less than supreme importance, and Augustine could indulge in an agnosticism that maddened some of his contemporaries (and almost all of posterity).

In summary, he concludes that original sin is innate in human beings, even though the responsibility for that sin does, quite fairly, inhere in each individual. The paradox here is clear: original sin comes from Adam, but is the responsibility of each individual. Here again, the pragmatic approach satisfied Augustine. To those who would debate the fairness of this system of transmission, he would simply point out that every individual, from the earliest age, is in fact a sinner. From even before the access of knowledge and reason (the conditions we are accustomed to associate with moral responsibility) there is the clear presence of selfishness--the basis of evil--and willed disobedience.[3]

And yet original sin differs from actual sin, that is, sin committed by the individual. The sinfulness of the individual infant is not itself the same thing as original sin, but only the evidence of the sinful propensities that original