St Augustine and original sin
St Augustine and original sin
St Augustine was Bishop of Hippo, in what is now Algeria, from 396 to 430. He was one of the greatest theologians in history and his ideas still influence Christian thought today.
Although he didn't invent the doctrine of original sin, his ideas about it dominated Western Church teaching.
Augustine's theory shows great understanding of human psychology. It provides an explanation for human suffering and guilt by teaching that those human beings somehow deserved these things.
Human beings deserve to suffer because the first parents sinned. And since humanity deserves the bad things it gets, humanity can comfort itself with the idea that it has a just rather than an unjust God.
This made the presence of evil in the world easier to understand, and answered the question of why a benevolent God would allow such a state of affairs to exist.
Purpose of the theory
Augustine developed his idea of original sin for several reasons:
- to explain the almost irresistible pressure to behave badly that troubles even the most saintly people
- to justify the need to baptise babies as soon as possible after birth
- to demonstrate that human beings are totally reliant on God's grace and all-powerful goodness
- to defeat the ideas of Pelagius, an English theologian
Augustine's theory
Augustine saw original sin as working in two ways:
- inherited guilt for a crime
- spiritual sickness or weakness
Augustine thought that humanity was originally perfect ("man's nature was created at first faultless and without any sin"), immortal and blessed with many talents, but that Adam and Eve disobeyed God, and introduced sin and death to the world.
Augustine didn't see any need to provide a good reason why Adam, who had originally been created perfect, chose to sin, or why God hadn't created a perfect being that was incapable of sin.
As far as Augustine was concerned the point was that Adam had sinned and humanity had to deal with the consequences.
Modern people would think it unjust that human beings should suffer for something that happened long before they existed, but to people in Augustine's time the idea of punishing later generations for their parents' crimes was familiar.
Why Adam's sin affects everyone
Augustine developed the following argument:
- the whole essence of human nature was contained in Adam, the first man
- when Adam disobeyed God, the whole of human nature disobeyed God
- thus the whole of human nature became sinful
- thus the whole human race was damaged for all time.
Nothing remains but to conclude that in the first man all are understood to have sinned, because all were in him when he sinned; whereby sin is brought in with birth and not removed save by the new birth... it is manifest that in Adam all sinned, so to speak, en masse. By that sin we became a corrupt mass.Augustine
Bible scholars think that this element of Augustine's theory was partly based on a mistranslation in the Latin version of the Bible. However, Augustine does not base his entire argument only on that particular text, and his theory is not wrecked by this error.
Having established that every human being had inherited guilt from Adam, Augustine taught that this was why that all human beings were damned, even if they didn't commit any extra sins of their own.
Consequence of original sin
Augustine was certain that the consequence of original sin was damnation. This even applied to people who hadn't committed any sins, like newborn babies, if they died before their souls were cleaned by baptism.
People could only escape damnation through God's grace, and the sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross for their sins. God's grace was passed on through baptism (or martyrdom - but this was a route that few would choose).
Unfortunately there was no guarantee that everyone who was baptised would be saved from damnation, merely the certainty that those who weren't baptised would go to hell.