Dowler Theological Ethics
Tim Stephenson
- 37 minutes read - 7826 wordsChapter 1: Sin and Grace
Augustine and Pelagius
The incident of the pears
Theft receives certain punishment by your law (Exodus 20:15) Lord and by the law written in the hearts of men (Rom 2:14) which not even iniquity itself destroys … I wanted to carry out an act of theft and did so, driven by no kind of need other than my inner lack of any sense of or feeling for, justice. Wickedness filled me. I stole something which I had in plenty and of much better quality. My desire was to enjoy not what I sought by stealing but merely the excitement of thieving and the doing of what was wrong. There was a pear tree near our vineyard laden with fruit, though attractive neither in colour nor taste. To shake the fruit off the tree and carry off the pears, I and a gang of naughty adolescents set off late at night after (in our usual pestilential way) we had continued our game in the streets. We carried off a huge load of pears. But they were not for our feasts but merely to throw to the pigs. Even if we ate a few, nevertheless our pleasure lay in doing what was not allowed. Such was my heart, O God, such was my heart. You had pity on it when it was at the bottom of the abyss. Now let my heart tell you what it was seeking there in that I became evil for no reason. I had no motive for my wickedness except wickedness itself. It was foul and I loved it. I loved the self-destruction, I loved my fall, not the object for which I had fallen but my fall itself. My depraved soul leaped down from your firmament to ruin. I was seeking not to gain any thing by shameful means but shame for its own sake.
— Augustine of Hippo, Confessions 2.4.9, trans. H. Chadwick
In a famous passage from his spiritual autobiography, the Confessions, Saint Augustine (ad 354–430), Bishop of Hippo in North Africa and ‘father of the western Church’, draws a far-reaching account of the human condition out of an incident in which he and a group of teenage friends stole pears from a neighbour’s tree. Our first reaction to Augustine’s analysis of this trivial youthful misdemeanour might be to agree with the American justice Oliver Wendell Holmes who commented to his friend Harold Laski, ‘Rum thing to see a man making a mountain out of robbing a pear tree in his teens.’ But if we do find the story, as it is told in the Confessions, absurdly over-solemn, then this perhaps gives Augustine his point. For his reflections on stealing the pears make it clear that sinful desires and inclinations are so deeply rooted in human life that they permeate all of it, even the most apparently trivial incidents. And, Augustine would claim, this is not simply his own observation, since in the book of Genesis itself, much is also made of Adam and Eve illicitly eating a piece of fruit (Gen. 3), while Jesus himself has a story about a young man who craves food that is only fit for pigs (Luke 15.15–16). The incident of the pears reveals that both Adam and the prodigal son lurk below the surface identity of an apparently ordinary African youth, doing normal adolescent things with his friends.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge used the expression ‘motiveless malignity’ to describe the evil perpetrated by Iago in Shakespeare’s play Othello and, for Augustine, the frightening fact about human sinfulness is precisely its motiveless quality. He is at pains to tell us that there was no real reason for his theft of the pears, no rational explanation for what he and his friends did that night. They could not have justified their action on the grounds that they were hungry, since they were not. Neither were their eyes bigger than their stomachs, as might have been the case if they had been left alone in a shop full of enticing sweets, but the pears were ‘attractive neither in colour nor in taste’. The incident reveals, as Augustine recounts it, that human beings love to do what is wrong simply because it is wrong, and seek shame ‘for its own sake’.
For Augustine, then, human nature is fundamentally skewed and disordered, a fact that may be apprehended in virtually all of our thoughts and actions, however trivial. Such a bias towards willing and doing what is wrong may be compared with the game of bowls or the French pétanque. In this game, even if the ball is thrown in an absolutely straight direction, its inbuilt bias will cause it to veer off track. Similarly, in Augustine’s view, even when human beings are consciously determined to act rightly, their distorted desires tend to lead them radically off course. ‘All this life of ours,’ he writes, ‘is a weakness; and a long life is nothing else but a prolonged weakness.’ [1]
In Augustine’s view, human beings experience grave difficulty both in knowing and doing the good. So far as the former of these is concerned, human moral vision has been, in Augustine’s view, clouded and darkened by sin. But even when we can clearly see what is good, we nonetheless still find it hard to do it. Looking into ourselves, we find that we are deeply divided and conflicted, that our motives are constantly mixed, and that we are frequently unable to do even the good things that we sincerely intend and wish. Augustine frequently quotes some words of Saint Paul in the letter to the Romans; words that he believes echo frighteningly in each of our lives: ‘I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing that I hate … I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do’ (Rom. 7.15–19).
Throughout his writings and sermons, Augustine, who was not only a theologian and polemicist, but first and foremost the pastor of a local congregation, shines a spotlight on the weakness of human beings, the distortions and divisions that exist within us, and the enormous complexity that attends our deepest motivations and intentions. He powerfully depicts the experience of being gripped by passionate but often contradictory desires: ‘it was no iron chain imposed by anyone else that fettered me, but the iron of my own will’. [2] In his account of the battle he experienced inside his own will on the eve of his conversion to Christianity, he writes, ‘I neither wanted it wholeheartedly nor turned from it wholeheartedly. I was at odds with myself, and fragmenting myself.’ [3] Even if our inner motivations are clear to God ‘to whom all hearts are open and all desires known’, [4] they often remain frighteningly opaque even to ourselves: ‘I am become a question to myself’, he writes, ‘and therein lies my downfall.’ [5]
Augustine finds the explanation of these problems in the story of Adam in the book of Genesis: ‘this disintegration was occurring without my consent … it was not I who brought it about, but the sin that dwelt within me as penalty for that other sin committed with greater freedom; for I was a son of Adam’. [6] In Augustine’s view, Adam was created perfectly free to do as he willed, either for good or evil. But when Adam sinned, he transmitted his original sin to his descendants who already existed in his seed: that is the entire human race. In the aftermath of Adam’s sin, human beings no longer enjoy the freedom that their first ancestor had at the beginning but are, because of his original sin and our seminal identity with him, pre-programmed to go wrong. Thus, sin resides in us innately and from the moment of our conception, permeating our every thought and action. A favourite proof text for this view comes from the Psalms: ‘indeed I was born guilty, a sinner when my mother conceived me’ (Ps. 51.5). Even babies, who are too young to make conscious moral choices, are nevertheless infected with original sin so that, in Augustine’s view, they too need to be baptized. After all, who could be more selfish than a baby? ‘I have watched and experienced for myself,’ Augustine writes, ‘the jealousy of a small child: he could not even speak, yet he glared with livid fury at his fellow-nursling.’ [7]
Many objections have been raised to some of the biological and historical details of Augustine’s description of original sin, especially since his exegesis of a crucial New Testament passage about our seminal identity with Adam (Rom. 5.12) notoriously rests on a mistranslation of Paul’s words in the Latin translation of the Bible with which he was working. [8] However, despite such difficulties, Augustine’s dramatic and profound insights into the nature of human psychology have remained a compelling account of human moral agency, in which either knowing the good or willing ourselves to do it is rarely straightforward, and often deeply problematic.
Pelagius
Augustine’s account of original sin certainly failed to convince his greatest adversary in a life full of argument and controversy. The British monk Pelagius (c. 354–c. 420), memorably described by Saint Jerome (347–420) as ‘a fat booby bloated on Scotch porridge’, was in fact a stern ascetic who advocated a programme of spiritual renewal and moral discipline in order to reform what he saw as an increasingly lax church, tending more and more to adopt the corrupt moral norms of the Roman Empire, into which he feared it would become assimilated. Around ad 413, Pelagius wrote a letter to Demetrias, a wealthy young woman who, shortly before she was due to get married, had decided to become a nun. In it, Pelagius describes the human condition in terms that contrast starkly with those of Augustine:
In our case, God himself, that eternal Majesty, that ineffable and inestimable Sovereignty, has sent us the holy Scriptures as the crown of his truly adorable precepts; and, so far from receiving them at once with joy and veneration, and taking the commands of so illustrious a sovereign for a high privilege (especially as there is no thought of advantage for him who gives the command, but only of profit for him who obeys it) on the contrary, with hearts full of scorn and slackness, like proud and worthless servants, we shout in God’s face and say, ‘It’s hard! It’s difficult! We can’t! We are but men, encompassed by the frailty of the flesh!’ What blind folly! What rash profanity! We make the God of knowledge guilty of twofold ignorance: of not knowing what he has made and of not knowing what he has commanded. God wished to bestow on his rational creation the privilege of doing good voluntarily, and the power of free choice, by implanting in man the possibility of choosing either side; and so he gave him, as his own characteristic, the power of being what he wished to be; so that he should be naturally capable of good and evil, that both should be within his power, and that he should incline his will towards one or the other.
— Pelagius, Letter to Demetrias, 16.2, trans. B. R. Rees
Whereas Augustine in his description of the incident of the pears wrestles with the mystery of his mixed motivations and the recalcitrance of a human will that seems to impel us in the wrong direction, even when we would rationally choose otherwise, it is evident from this letter that Pelagius is impatient of such tortuous complexities. In his view, the particular characteristic of human beings as moral agents is that we are endowed with absolute freedom of choice: ‘the possibility of choosing either side’. As we have seen, in Augustine’s view, Adam enjoyed this freedom before the Fall, but, as a consequence of his sin, it has been irrevocably lost thereafter both for Adam and for the descendants who were ‘in him’. By contrast, although Pelagius would accept that human beings are weakened by factors such as the individual slothfulness of each one of us, our accumulated bad habits, and the unfortunate examples that others set us, he does not accept Augustine’s view that we are innately and inescapably predisposed towards sin. Rather, having been given the law, we are simply required to obey it without making excuses. The Scriptures tell us what God requires of us, and our task is to get on and do it.
We can see from Pelagius’s letter to Demetrias that, in his view, Augustine’s understanding of this subject seems first of all to imply an impoverished view of human agency: indoctrination with a strong sense of our helplessness and inability in the face of original sin will lead us to give up on our own abilities. We will too easily say ‘It’s hard. It’s difficult. We can’t,’ whereas we should instead redouble our efforts to lead good and holy lives. Writing at a time when Christianity was becoming respectable in the Roman Empire, Pelagius was concerned that Christians might use the moral teaching of Augustine’s Confessions to exonerate themselves from following the rigorous moral standards that would distinguish them from others in society. If being good is impossible, why even try?
A second criticism implicit in the letter to Demetrias is that Augustine holds a diminished view of God’s wisdom: to claim that we are unable to do what God has commanded implies that God does not know what he is doing. But, argues Pelagius, the God who made us in the first place, and who gave us the law through Moses and Jesus, knows what he is doing: ‘no one knows better the true measure of our strength than he who has given it to us nor does anyone understand better how much we are able to do than he who has given us this very capacity of ours to be able’. [9] Since he has said that human beings should reflect his own holiness (Lev. 19.2) and that we should be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect (Matt. 5.48), who are we to say that these things are somehow not possible?
Anthropology and theology
Pelagius, then, is far more positive than Augustine about the capacity of human beings to make good moral choices. He admits, at least in possibility, a brighter view of ourselves, in which we are essentially self-determining moral beings, able to know what is good and then to get on and do it. By contrast, Augustine’s pessimism on this subject has often seemed unattractive. A disturbing example of this may be found in his dealings with the Donatists, the name given to members of a rival church in North Africa which had split away from the mainstream Catholic Church in the aftermath of the persecution under the Emperor Diocletian (244–311), over the Catholic Church’s perceived leniency to those who had lapsed. Early on in his time as a bishop, Augustine had hoped that the Donatists would become reunited with the Catholic Church through persuasion rather than fear. As time went on, however, he came to the conclusion that compulsion would indeed be the best means of achieving this end. [10] To some extent, Augustine’s change of mind was caused by his observation of the high success rate of the Roman authorities in persuading Donatists to become Catholics – unsurprisingly high, given that their property, livelihoods and even lives often depended upon it. But this empirical evidence was backed up by his anthropology: Augustine’s assessment of the human condition under original sin persuaded him that, in the words of Peter Brown, ‘men needed firm handling’. [11] His low estimate of human moral capabilities made him able to support the imperial policy of coercion, which he justified by the chilling use of Jesus’ words in the parable of the great feast: ‘Compel them to come in’ (Luke 14.23).
However, when assessing the argument between Augustine and Pelagius, it would be wrong to make too simple a contrast between Augustine’s somewhat dark and gloomy vision of humanity and what has sometimes wrongly been portrayed as Pelagius’s sunny liberal optimism. For Pelagius was essentially a stern ascetic. He advocated a quasi-monastic existence for all Christians, and emphasized the terrifying consequences of moral laxity. If human beings possess the unclouded capacity to see the good and the unfettered capacity to do it, then they can be held entirely responsible if they fail. For Pelagius, as for many in the early Church, it was barely possible for sins committed after baptism to be forgiven. As a consequence, Pelagius puts far more emphasis on hell fire and punishment than does Augustine: ‘after so many notices drawing your attention to virtue; after the giving of the law, after the Prophets, after the gospels, after the apostles, I just do not know how God can show indulgence to you if you wish to commit a crime’. [12]
Augustine by contrast is far more able to present a compelling account of the nature and extent of God’s grace. Since sin is original, and stretches back to its origin in the sin of Adam, individual human beings cannot entirely be blamed for it. Since each of us is effectively pre-programmed to go wrong, then it follows that we cannot be entirely responsible, as we would be if we, like Adam, had a completely free choice in the matter. Thus, in the comparison between Pelagius and Augustine, we see that when the focus changes from anthropology to theology, from talking about human beings to talking about God, a sort of reversal takes place:
Augustine | Pelagius | |
Anthropology | - | + |
Theology | + | - |
Augustine’s low view of human nature; his belief in its inherent wickedness and weakness leads him to set a very high premium on God’s grace. For if we are in the hopeless and helpless state that Augustine thinks we are in, then we have all the more need for Christ’s saving work and for God’s help every minute of the day to save us from falling into the sin which is so utterly ingrained in our nature. Augustine often quotes Jesus’ words in John’s Gospel, ‘apart from me you can do nothing’ (John 15.5) to assert our total reliance on a gracious God for any good actions that we might do. In the words of H. F. Lyte’s famous hymn ‘Abide with Me’,
I need thy presence every passing hour;
What but thy grace can foil the tempter’s power?
The Confessions depict to us just such a God, who is indeed abundantly gracious: constantly present and active in the life of an individual man; constantly working to save him from the slough of sin into which, left to his own unaided efforts, he would inevitably fall, even after he has been baptized.
Conversely, Pelagius’s higher view of our capabilities and our ability to get things right on our own finds its counterpart in a pessimistic view of God. God is not, as for Augustine, a perpetually present companion, but a stern lawgiver, who tells us what we need to know and do and then leaves us to get on with it, only returning in order to judge how successfully or otherwise we have performed. In a famous section of the Confessions, Augustine asks God to ‘Give what you command, and then command whatever you will.’ [13] Pelagius would certainly have believed God free to command whatever he wills, but he took grave exception to Augustine saying that God should give what he commands: that if God requires something from us, then he must also graciously give us the strength to do it.
For Pelagius, the grace of God operates, as it were, externally. God has endowed us at our creation with free will. Christians have been washed clean from sin by baptism. Moses and Jesus have revealed the moral law. In Pelagius’s view, all the grace we need has been dispensed through these channels. In contrast, Augustine would certainly agree that grace operates in these ways, but for him it also has a crucial inner dimension as daily help and strengthening, and not just law and doctrine. Grace is ‘an internal and secret power, wonderful and ineffable by which God operates in our hearts’ and, as Bonner puts it, ‘not only the endowment given to us as created beings made in the image of God, but … the ministration of the Holy Spirit, assisting our wills and actions’. [14] We need this grace every minute of the day to initiate the good within us and to carry it through to fruition. If we don’t have it, we are lost: ‘we cannot conquer the temptations of this life without God’s help, by the exercise of our wills alone’. [15]
Freedom
That is the trouble with freeing people: relatively easy to know what you’re freeing them from; much more difficult to know what you’re freeing them for. [16]
The argument between Augustine and Pelagius has further implications for the way in which we think about the nature of human freedom. The theme of freedom is prominent in the New Testament, and particularly in the letters of Saint Paul, who reminds the Galatians, whom he believes to be in danger of giving up their Christian liberty, that ‘for freedom Christ has set us free’ (Gal. 5.1). To the Romans, Paul writes of the eschatological age when the creation will obtain ‘the freedom of the glory of the children of God’ (Rom. 8.21). The precise nature of Christian freedom is central to the dispute between Augustine and Pelagius, and their attitudes towards it are radically different. For Pelagius, freedom consists in the opportunity for self-determination, self-actualization and choosing our own path. Human beings in their moral actions are essentially free because we are equally poised between good and evil, with ‘the possibility of choosing either side’. By contrast, for Augustine, to be free is to be liberated through God’s grace from the necessity of sinning, from the constraining power of the sin that dwells within us (cf. Rom. 7.23). ‘The beginning of freedom,’ he tells his congregation, ‘is to be free from crime … such as murder, adultery, fornication, theft, fraud, sacrilege and so forth. Once one is without these crimes (and every Christian should be without them), one begins to lift up one’s head toward freedom.’ [17]
Echoing the perspective of Pelagius, many have questioned whether the freedom that Augustine describes is really freedom at all. Augustine was often to quote Proverbs 8.35 (Septuagint), ‘the will is prepared by God’. God’s actions predate our merits and every good deed that we do must be attributed to him. Augustine often asks his congregation Paul’s rhetorical question, ‘what do you have that you did not receive?’ (1 Cor. 4.7) As Augustine sees it, God’s grace is irresistible. As Rist summarizes his approach, ‘fallen man is totally subject to the acts of God’. This is a view that, towards the end of his life, Augustine pressed to its conclusions in his works On the Predestination of the Saints and On the Gift of Perseverance. In some of the more extreme statements of it, human beings can seem little more than puppets, incapable themselves of free choice, but continually overwhelmed either by original sin or, if God has chosen that it be so, by God’s grace. [18]
In response to this, however, Augustine would argue that the grace of God acts within the hearts of men and women, so as to make them delight in God’s commandments, and thus start to obey the commandments not under duress, but freely and willingly. One of his favourite New Testament verses is Romans 5.5: ‘God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.’ Grace does not disempower human agents, obliterating their wills and taking away their freedom, but empowers them, enabling them freely to love God and neighbour, and to do good works that express such love. For all his stress on human limitations, Augustine was clear that it was part of the basic, observable structure of human psychology that we, unlike inanimate objects, do have a will, and that we are not simply governed by necessity. [19] Thus, when the Holy Spirit bestows grace on human beings, enabling them to love and to do the good, this does not simply make them passive recipients: ‘they are acted upon that they may act, not that they may themselves do nothing’. [20]
This dispute between Augustine and Pelagius about the nature of freedom has far-reaching repercussions for ethics, since any understanding of morality presupposes a basic level of freedom: if human actions were completely predetermined, and if we were entirely unable to make choices, and to determine to some degree the direction of our lives, then the whole notion of right and wrong would be meaningless. Freedom is of course very highly prized in modern Western society. Taking their cue from the American Declaration of Independence, with its stress on ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’, many people would regard freedom as being an absolute and transcendent good. Ironically, perhaps, such an emphasis on the importance of freedom often goes hand in hand with a simultaneous sense that the lives and decisions of modern men and women are, to a large extent, determined by factors outside their control, such as their genetic make-up, upbringing, or economic circumstances. As O’Donnell comments, ‘We are a culture blithe in our praise for freedom and our missionary zeal to share freedom with others, but at the same time obsessed with a series of discourses – political, ethical, medical – about the conflicts and limits of freedom … We act as though we are free, but we beg off the consequences of our actions by pleading incapacity.’ [21] Moreover, as the newspaper extract below argues, it is questionable whether the enormous amount of choice available to affluent people in the West necessarily makes for human flourishing.
From the foods we eat, to the television channels we watch, to the schools we send our children to and the career we choose to pursue, society has never offered us so much variety.
But while the ability to choose is generally a good thing, too much freedom of choice is crippling us with indecision and making us unhappy, claims the new research. People can become paralysed by too much variety and wracked with uncertainty and regret about whether they have made the right decision. Ultimately they can be less satisfied by the choices they have made.
The study believes that the problem is that when you have too much choice, you become obsessed about what your decision will say about you. Then when you have made the choice you worry that it is wrong. Choice can also foster selfishness and a lack of empathy because it can focus people on their own preferences and on themselves at the expense of what is good for society as a whole.
Professor Hazel Rose Markus, the author from Stanford University’s Department of Psychology, said: “We cannot assume that choice, as understood by educated, affluent Westerners, is a universal aspiration, and that the provision of choice will necessarily foster freedom and well-being.
“Even in contexts where choice can foster freedom, empowerment, and independence, it is not an unalloyed good. Choice can also produce a numbing uncertainty, depression, and selfishness.”
The authors looked at a body of research into the cultural ideas surrounding choice. They found that among non-Western cultures and among working-class Westerners, freedom and choice are less important or mean something different than they do for the university-educated people. Professor Markus said: “And even what counts as a ‘choice’ may be different for non-Westerners than it is for Westerners. Moreover, the enormous opportunity for growth and self-advancement that flows from unlimited freedom of choice may diminish rather than enhance subjective well-being.” Professor Markus said her study, which focused on Americans, applied to all middle-class Westerners. She said: “Americans live in a political, social, and historical context that advances personal freedom, choice, and self-determination above all else. Contemporary psychology has proliferated this emphasis on choice and self-determination as the key to healthy psychological functioning.”
— Richard Alleyne, Independent, 21 January 2010
In line with such insights, it seems that we should question whether freedom is simply the ability to do whatever we choose, and that our freedom is greatest when we have multiplied the number of possibilities open to us. [22] Rather, as Oliver O’Donovan argues, choices always take place within certain limits and if there were no limits, there could be no meaningful choices, and therefore no freedom. Moreover, when we make choices, we necessarily impose new limits on ourselves, and these limits then govern the context in which our future choices will be made. ‘Decision,’ O’Donovan writes, ‘depends upon existing limits and imposes new ones. Limit is the very material with which freedom works.’ [23] An illustration of this point may be found in Shakespeare’s play, King John, in which one of the citizens comments in the following terms about the wedding of the Dauphin and Blanche of Spain:
He is the half part of a blessed man,
Left to be finished by such as she;
And she a fair divided excellence,
Whose fulness of perfection lies in him.
O, two such silver currents, when they join,
Do glorify the banks that bound them in. [24]
The citizen points out that the marriage into which Blanche and the Dauphin are entering will necessarily create limits upon them. Just as the banks of a river bind it in, channel it in a particular direction, and enable it to flow more freely and forcefully, so, the married state will impose limits on Blanche and the Dauphin, but these limits will not simply curtail their freedom, but focus and energize it, so that it can flow more forcefully in a particular direction. The banks (that is, in this instance, the married state) are glorified by the strongly flowing river, because if there were no banks, there could be no river.
A further problem about understanding freedom as the maximizing of choices is that not everyone can be absolutely free all of the time since the freedom exercised by one person will sometimes inevitably interfere with those claimed by another. This point was made in relation to the issue of assisted suicide by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams in an address to the General Synod of the Church of England in 2010. Williams argued that a relaxation of British law in relation to assisted suicide might lead to pressure being placed on sick or elderly people to end their lives: ‘the freedom of one person to utilise in full consciousness a legal provision for assisted suicide brings with it a risk to the freedom of others not to be manipulated or harassed or simply demoralised when in a weakened condition’. As Williams sees it, we are faced here not with a simple scenario in which everybody is simply able to be free, but rather, with a competing and complex ‘balance of freedoms’ which must be carefully worked out in order to avoid injustice.
Many of these later debates are foreshadowed by the seminal argument between Augustine and Pelagius on the nature of freedom. True freedom, in Augustine’s understanding of it, is not so much the ability to choose what we want, unfettered by any constraint, but freedom from the power of sin. What is important is not so much that we should be free from all constraints, but that we should be free for excellence, for happiness, for flourishing.
Christian freedom as St Paul spells it out is always freedom from isolation – from the isolation of sin separating us from God, and the isolation of competing self-interest that divides us from each other. To be free is to be free for relation; free to contribute what is given to us into the life of the neighbour, for the sake of their formation in Christ’s likeness, with the Holy Spirit carrying that gift from heart to heart and life to life. [25]
Sexuality and the body
(Headstone) … walked with a bent head hammering at one fixed idea. It had been an immovable idea since he first set eyes upon her. It seemed to him as if all that he could restrain in himself he had restrained, and the time had come – in a rush, in a moment – when the power of self-command had departed from him. Love at first sight is a trite expression quite sufficiently discussed; enough that in certain smouldering natures like this man’s, that passion leaps into a blaze, and makes such head as fire does in a rage of wind, when other passions, but for its mastery, could be held in chains. [26]
Augustine displays in his writing a very vivid understanding of the power of sexual desire and its capacity, as he expresses it in one of his later writings, to ‘swamp the mind’. [27] It is likely that he would have entirely recognized Dickens’s description in the passage quoted above of the school master, Bradley Headstone, caught in the grips of his passion for the somewhat insipid Lizzie Hexam, a passion that Headstone can neither understand nor control. Indeed Augustine himself was notoriously subject to such feelings. In a passage from the third book of the Confessions paraphrased by T. S. Eliot, he writes of himself as a young man, ‘enamoured with the idea of love’, seeking the delights of this major city with its cosmopolitan atmosphere and relaxed sexual mores:
To Carthage then I came
Burning, burning, burning, burning
O Lord Thou pluckest me out
O Lord thou pluckest
burning. [28]
Augustine lived at a time when commentators both within and outside the Church habitually expressed strongly negative attitudes to the body, sexual desire and indeed physical existence generally. The Neoplatonist philosopher Porphyry, an important influence on Augustine, famously held that ‘the body is to be fled by all’. Augustine himself was deeply influenced as a young man by the Manichee sect, whose religion erected a strict set of dualistic divisions, such as those between light and darkness, the Old Testament and the New, believers and outsiders. In particular, the Manichees recoiled from all the physical aspects of human existence. Indeed, the central task of their ‘elect’ was to consume brightly coloured vegetables such as tomatoes and peppers, and then belch so as to liberate the particles of light contained in them from their corrupt material casing.
Critics of Augustine, from the scourge of his later years, Julian of Eclanum (c. 386–455), until today have accused Augustine himself of hiding deep-seated Manichaean distaste for the body under a veneer of orthodox Christianity. In fairness to Augustine, it is clear that as he matured as a Christian, he grew also in his appreciation of the importance of physical existence. In this, he was strongly influenced by his reflection on scriptural texts such as Ephesians 5.29, ‘No one hates his own flesh’ and, in particular, by the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the body. In contrast to Porphyry, Augustine tells his congregation in a sermon that ‘I do not want my flesh to be removed from me for ever, as if it were something alien to me, but that it be healed, a whole within me.’ [29] The most serious aspect of the human predicament is not for Augustine that we are condemned to bodily life, but that our wills are divided and disordered. He reflects in the Confessions on his ability to bring his body under control, while his mind and will remain divided: ‘the mind commands the body and is instantly obeyed; the mind commands itself, and meets resistance’. [30]
Moreover, as the title of his work On the Good of Marriage suggests, Augustine had a positive view of the institution of marriage that contrasts strongly with negative assessments of it, and indeed of women in general, held by contemporaries such as Jerome. The married state is a good one, although it is a lesser good than virginity: ‘marriage and fornication’, he writes, ‘are not two evils, one of which is worse, but marriage and continence are two goods, one of which is better’. Augustine’s reading of Genesis leads him to conclude that ‘God instituted marriage from the beginning’: [31] it was given prior to original sin, and with it the sexual intercourse that would replenish and populate the earth.
However, although sexual intercourse itself did belong to the life that God created for men and women in the beginning, it was sexual intercourse with a crucial difference. In the Garden of Eden, sex was free of lust in a way that it no longer is after the Fall: ‘if sin had not come into being, therefore, marriage, because worthy of the felicity of Paradise, would have produced children to be loved, but without the shame of lust’. [32] According to Augustine, Adam, in his unfallen state, would have been an entirely coordinated being, who enjoyed perfect mastery over his body, including the sexual organs that are now so recalcitrant. ‘We move our hands and feet,’ he writes, ‘to perform their tasks when we so will … why, then, with respect to the procreation of children, should we not believe that the sexual organs could have been as obedient to the will of mankind as other members are, if there had been no lust, which arose in retribution for the sin of disobedience?’ [33] But for Adam’s descendants after the Fall, this perfect control of the sexual organs has been lost, just as the Fall has damaged our control of our bodies more generally. In an entertaining passage in the City of God, Augustine argues that, despite this loss of control, the remnants of our unfallen condition endure in the ability of some people to move their ears, others to be able to bring their scalp down to their eyebrows and still others, he claims somewhat improbably, to perspire at will and sing out of their anuses. [34]
Thus, although our central problem is weakness of the will rather than having a corrupt body, a key aspect of this weakness is that it undermines the soul’s capacity to do what it ought to do, which is to govern and direct the body. Augustine regards sex as the paradigmatic case study of the will’s inability to exert proper rational direction over the body. The phenomenon of sexual desire epitomizes the words of Paul that express the entire human condition: ‘I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do’ (Rom. 7.19). Augustine shows a profound appreciation for the ability of sexual desire to generate feelings that run so deeply that they are not able simply to be suppressed, Pelagius-style, by the exercise of free choice. As Banner writes,
We will not come to terms with certain phenomena in human sexual life – amongst them the awfully widespread phenomena of child abuse, rape, addiction to pornography, and the like – if ‘bad choices’ remains our principal analytic tool. We shall never come to terms with these phenomena, that is to say, while we think that ‘choosing better’ is the solution to our predicament; our real predicament lies in enthrallment to bad choices and thus in an inability to choose well. [35]
For all his deep understanding of the power and the dynamics of human sexuality, and for all that he viewed it more favourably than most of his contemporaries, Augustine can be criticized for insisting that, in the aftermath of Adam’s fall, sex is always infected with the sin of concupiscence: lust or immoderate desire. This is evident in his contrast between the controlled and rational sexual activity of the Garden of Eden and sexual activity as it now is in a fallen world, in which desire will always overwhelm those involved, and militate against their right use of reason. [36] For fallen human beings, even sexual acts that pass the strictest moral criteria are nevertheless marked by some degree of concupiscence: ‘the weakness of carnal generation is from the transgression of original sin’. [37] Because, according to the New Testament, Christ’s own conception was not caused by sexual intercourse, he alone is free from this taint. Thus, despite the psychological profundity of Augustine’s understanding of sexual desire, and despite his being more positive than many of his contemporaries in his attitudes to the body and to sexuality, he nonetheless introduces what Henry Chadwick describes as a ‘powerful and toxic theme’ into later Christian theology, [38] by insisting that sex and sin are always coterminous for fallen human beings.
Questions for discussion
How would you assess the relative strengths and weaknesses of the arguments of Augustine and Pelagius about sin and grace?
How would you define freedom?
What connections do you think can be drawn between the dispute between Augustine and Pelagius and modern controversies among Christians about sexual ethics?
Case study: crime and punishment
Jason is an eighteen-year-old boy who has grown up on a deprived inner-city estate. Jason has never known his father, but has been brought up by his mother and her succession of boyfriends, with whom she has had difficult and often violent relationships. Throughout his life, Jason has always attended schools in which teachers have struggled to maintain discipline and his academic achievement has been low. Jason is already familiar to the police for a large number of crimes on his housing estate, including vandalism and petty theft. In his latest appearance in a magistrate’s court, his lawyer argued in his defence that antisocial behaviour could be expected of somebody who had been brought up in a world where so many things seemed to be against him.
Questions for discussion
How you would assess the moral aspects of Jason’s situation?
How do you think it relates to the dispute between Augustine and Pelagius?
Commentary
Those who take a sterner view of Jason’s predicament might instinctively side with Pelagius in his insistence that moral choices are not predetermined, but that it is entirely up to him as a mature moral agent to act rightly and to take responsibility for what he does. If Jason’s actions were simply the result of his social conditioning, then it would be expected that everyone brought up in similar conditions would also become criminals, but the fact that they do not shows that Jason alone is responsible for his actions. As a free human being, he possesses what Pelagius describes to Demetrias as ‘the power of being what he wished to be’, and he is manifestly misusing it.
Others would be inclined to be more sympathetic to Jason. They would emphasize his difficult family circumstances and the grim conditions in which he has been brought up, and argue that these are bound to have influenced his capacity for making good moral decisions. They will stress that Jason primarily needs rehabilitation into society and that simply to punish him will be useless and counter-productive. This more lenient view of Jason’s predicament coincides with Augustine’s strong insistence that when we make moral choices, we do not always do so in a cool, objective way but rather we are subject to a variety of forces that impel us in particular directions, and are often beyond our control.
This latter view finds echoes in the work of a variety of modern thinkers, many of whom may seem very different from Augustine, but who nonetheless argue, like him, that pervasive forces outside our control (e.g. sexual factors [Freud] or economic factors [Marx]) govern much of what we do, even when we are unaware of them and believe ourselves to be acting in complete freedom. [39] The more extreme version of such views (often described as Determinism) can, if stretched to the limit, entirely evacuate the idea of free will from moral decision making, and make human beings seem little more than puppets: precisely the criticism that Augustine received from some of his Pelagian critics.
Notes
2 Augustine, Sermon 30.2.
3 Augustine, Confessions 8.5.10.
4 Augustine, Confessions 8.10.22.
5 Collect for Purity, Book of Common Prayer.
6 Augustine, Confessions 10.33.50.
7 Augustine, Confessions 8.10.22.
8 Augustine, Confessions 1.7.11.
9 Augustine, relying on his Latin text, refers to Adam as the one ‘in whom all have sinned’, but the original Greek text of Romans does not attribute the problem to Adam in such a strong sense: ‘death spread to all because all have sinned’; see Augustine, Against two Letters of the Pelagians, 7; Bonner (1986), pp. 372–3.
10 Pelagius, Letter to Demetrias, 16.3.
11 See Augustine, Letter 93.
12 Brown (1967), pp. 236–7.
13 Quoted in Brown (1967), p. 371.
14 Augustine, Confessions 10.29.40; cf. The Gift of Perseverance 20.53.
15 Bonner (1986), p. 360.
16 Augustine, Exposition of Psalm 89.4.
17 Andrew Marr, quoted from the BBC TV series, The Making of Modern Britain.
18 Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John 41.10.
19 For further discussion of this subject, see Rist (1994), chapter 5.
20 See Augustine, On the Freedom of the Will 3.1.2.
21 Augustine, On Admonition and Grace 2.4.
22 O’Donnell (2005), pp. 329–30.
23 See O’Donovan (1994), p. 107.
24 O’Donovan (1994), p. 108.
25 Shakespeare, King John, Act 2, Scene 1, 437–42. I owe this comparison to Stephen Batty.
26 Rowan Williams, Archbishop’s Presidential Address to the General Synod of the Church of England, February, 2010. This section draws on McCoy (2004), pp. 45–53.
27 Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 341.
28 Augustine, Against Julian 4.7.
29 T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, 307–11 from T. S. Eliot (1969), The Complete Poems and Plays (London: Faber and Faber); cf. Augustine, Confessions 3.1.1.
30 Augustine, Sermon 30.4, quoted in Rist (1994), p. 92.
31 Augustine, Confessions 8.9.21.
32 Augustine, City of God 14.21.
33 Augustine, City of God 14.23.
34 Augustine, City of God 14.23.
35 See Augustine, City of God 14.25.
36 Banner (2008), p. 37.
37 See Banner (1999), p. 300.
38 Augustine, On the Merits and Remission of Sins 2.15.
39 Chadwick (1986), p. 114.
40 On Augustine and Freud, see Brown (1967), p. 366.