Augustine on human nature

Overview

Recall questions on Augustine's reading of Genesis, life before the Fall, concupiscence and the transmission of original sin, the divided will, the two cities and the state, unmerited grace and the summum bonum, Pelagius, and whether Augustine's account is pessimistic, mistaken, or usable alongside evolution.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

1. 1

   How does Augustine read the story of Adam and Eve in Genesis, and why does that reading matter for everything else he says about us?

   Model answer

   Augustine treats it as an account of something that actually happened to the first human beings, not merely a picture of the human condition. Because the disobedience was a real event in history, its consequences are real and inherited: what went wrong is not simply that each person copies bad examples, but that human nature itself was damaged at its source. Every later claim he makes - about desire, about the will, about the need for grace - rests on that reading.

2. 2

   What, on Augustine's account, was human life like before the Fall?

   Model answer

   Augustine pictures a condition of harmony. Adam and Eve enjoyed friendship with God and with each other, their reason governed their bodily appetites rather than being dragged about by them, and they were free in the fullest sense because they were able not to sin. He even argues that sexual union would have taken place in paradise, but under the calm direction of the will rather than under the compulsion of desire.

3. 3

   Why is it significant that Augustine describes the first couple as friends rather than as master and servant?

   Model answer

   Friendship implies equality of regard and freely given loyalty. By describing the pre-Fall relationship that way, Augustine makes domination of one person by another a symptom of the Fall rather than part of the original design. It also lets him say that what sin destroys is above all relationship - with God, and then between human beings - rather than merely a set of rules being broken.

4. 4

   Explain what Augustine means by concupiscence.

   Model answer

   Concupiscence is disordered desire: appetite that no longer obeys reason and no longer aims at God as its final end. Augustine sees it most obviously in sexual arousal, which arrives and departs without the will's permission, but it runs far wider - greed, ambition, the craving for status. It is not the same as the sinful act; it is the standing disorder in the person out of which sinful acts come.

5. 5

   How does Augustine say the effects of the first sin reach us, and what is the role of sexual reproduction in that account?

   Model answer

   He argues that the damage is transmitted biologically through the act of generation, so that every human being conceived in the ordinary way inherits a nature already corrupted by disordered desire. Humanity is one mass, implicated together in Adam. This is why he insists infants need baptism: on his view guilt and corruption are already present before any personal wrongdoing.

6. 6

   Explain what Augustine means by the divided will.

   Model answer

   He means the experience of genuinely wanting something good and finding that the wanting does not carry through into action, so that a person seems to have two wills pulling in opposite directions and neither wholly in charge. Augustine reads this not as an odd psychological hiccup but as the standing state of fallen humanity: the will is intact as a faculty yet no longer able to command itself, and that inner fracture is precisely what he thinks sin has done to us.

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