Augustine

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  • Created by: nelliott
  • Created on: 25-05-21 19:29

Augustine Background

  • Augustine lived between 354 and 430 CE.
  • His father was a pagan and his mother was a Christian. 
  • As a boy Augustine was a gifted student. 
  • When he had finished his own studies he became a teacher.
  • According to his own reports he lived a wild life and in adolescence 'ran wild with lust'.
  • A key idea in understanding Augustine's teaching about human nature is his own disgust at his inability to do what he knew he ought to do.  
  • After Augustine's conversion and baptism he returned to North Africa.
  • He became first a priest and then bishop of Hippo. 
  • He spent the rest of his life writing prolifically and caring for the spiritual needs of his parish.
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Relationship Between Men & Women

Feminist and feminist theologians have sometimes accused Augustine of misogyny.  However, it is important to remember that he was a man of his time. Some of his beliefs reflect the views of his time.

Augustine's starting point for his account of the relationship between men and women is the story of the creation and Fall found in Genesis 2-3.

In Genesis 2: 18 God says  “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.”  From this Augustine concludes that Eve is made to be Adam's helper.  He further deduces that her primary role must be procreation as a male companion would be better for every other task, e.g. better for physical labour and better for conversation.  

This is important because it means that sex has always been a part of God's plan. In Genesis 1 the creation of human beings is followed by the instruction to 'Go forth and multiply'.  Other's  argue that Adam and Eve did not have a sexual relationship until after the Fall.  Augustine believed that they did have sex. However, in the prelapsarian state sex would have been a rational act based on love.  Adam and Eve were companions and sex was one aspect of that rather than the motivation for their relationship. 

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God-given Order

Augustine did believe that there was a God-given hierarchy in which the woman was subordinate to the man.  (The Bible also explicitly refers to the woman's subordination to her husband where they are told to 'obey' their husband and in Paul's letter to the church at Corinth in which he tells women to keep their head covered.) This is not to say that woman need be viewed as less valuable or less in God's image. A possible analogy for this (though not one that Augustine used) is the relationship between parents and child.  Both are equally important but it is still natural for the parent to rule.

The Fall involved a subversion of the God-given order:

•Humans disobey God

•Woman leads man into sin

•Bodily desire overrules reason and understanding

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Marriage

  • Augustine interprets the punishment given to Eve as including both a reiteration of and an increase in her subordinate status.
  • Rather than obeying man voluntarily out of love (as in the traditional marriage vows) he is to become her master.  
  • For Augustine, marriage was the closest that a couple could get to the pre-Fall relationship between Adam and Eve. 
  • In marriage men and women relate together as friends, sex could  occur for the procreation of children (its original purpose) and woman could obey out of love.  
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The Soul

  • For Christians, the rational soul is supposed to be the spiritual part of a human. 
  • Augustine makes it quite clear that in his view both body and soul are created by God.
  • As both body and soul come from God, both are good and both are an essential part of what it is to be human.  
  • Augustine believed that God intended there to be a hierarchy between body and soul. 
  • The soul, being rational, moral and capable of understanding was to be the ruler of the body.  
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Soul & Body

Moreover, it is the soul that makes it possible for us to have free will.

Augustine also thought that the body was also essential as the vehicle for the soul.  It enabled humans to interact with the physical world and carry out the command to procreate. Although body and soul are distinct from each other, they work together.

The soul has two functions. It has an obedient function which is concerned with obeying the things above it. The soul must be capable of understanding the instructions given by God.  It also has a 'deliberative' function.  To deliberate is to think about and choose between different courses of action.  It is the decision making part of the mind.  Augustine believed that the deliberative soul would have a slightly different role for men and women.

Augustine does seem to sometimes think of the body in terms of something that drags down the soul.  However, he explicitly denied that the body was anything other than good (it did after all come from God). He explained that it was not the body itself, but the corruptibility of the body that caused it to be a burden on the rational soul.

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Concupiscence (sin)

To Augustine sin presented a logical problem, one he summed in Book 7 of his Confessions:

  • Essentially his question was why do humans have the potential to sin if they are made by a good God? 
  • Even children, he believed, seemed to come into the world with a predisposition to sin as he knew from his own youthful indiscretions.
  • He was also troubled by a second problem. 
  • If we don't actually want to sin why do we do it? 
  • He had been taught that we sin out of our own free will, but in his experience this did not seem to be the case.
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Evil

Augustine called evil a privation - a lack of good.

Augustine came to believe that God created humans good but with free will. If God had created humans who always chose to do good then they would not have real free will.  Augustine believed that evil was a lack of the good that God intended for the world. Evil is an absence of good.

This theory explained how a good God could create a world that had sin in it. However, it did not account for why humans seemed so prone to sin. Nor did if fully explain why humans seem to sin against their will.

To explain this paradox Augustine developed the idea of concupiscence.  For Augustine, the Fall was not just an example of individuals falling short of good.  He believed that the Fall left lasting damage on human nature. 

The soul's rebellion against God caused a rebellion of the body against the mind.  This meant that in the postlapsarian state every human from then on would be born with rebellion (concupiscence) at the heart of their being.  

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Sexual Lust

  • Sexual lust is not the only example of concupiscence. 
  • Any action in which bodily desire or animalistic drives overrule the judgement of the rational soul would also be an example of concupiscence.
  • For Augustine, the prime example of this was to be found in the case of sex.
  • In the prelapsarian state sex was a rational act done at the bidding of the mind, since the Fall the body ruled.
  • Augustine cites as proof the fact that the sexual organs can both be active when the mind does not want them to be and passive when the mind wants the opposite. 
  • For this reason, the genitalia act as a constant reminder of humanities sinful rebellion and become parts of shame.
  • The lust inherent in all sexual activity would ensure that concupiscence continued to be passed on from one generation to the next as all people are born as a direct result of sin.
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Evaluation

To a certain extent Augustine's account of human nature seems to describe human nature accurately.  Many people would share his experience of wanting to do one thing and yet doing another.  His belief that 'bodily' desires can overthrow common sense also seems to perhaps fit with our experience of nature.

However, a big problem with Augustine's view is that it seems to be founded in outdated ideas:

•The Fall (challenged by evolution)

•Belief in a spiritual soul (challenged by materialism/physicalism)

•Inheritable corruption (i.e. original sin passed on by the lust inherent in sex)

Fundamentalists would of course have no problem with dismissing the first as irrelevant; in their view creation happened as the Bible records it and if science says otherwise then science is wrong.  Also, it is certainly possible to argue that there are some reasons to believe in the soul.

Alternatively, one could argue that Augustine's theories are not necessarily based on a literal understanding of these ideas.  

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