Few topics, if any, were of greater significance to the theology of Saint Augustine than the theme of this book. If we can believe Augustine’s own account in the Confessions, inquiry into the origins and nature of evil animated his intellectual development from his earliest years. Search for the cause of evil had led him to the Manichaean sect in his early twenties, and disenchantment with the Manichaean account of God and evil led him eventually to abandon its tenets nearly a decade later. Reading the “books of the Platonists” at Milan in his early thirties, Augustine tells us, provided him with a convincing metaphysical account of God and evil, one that finally detached him from Manichaean materialism and paved the way for his ultimate conversion to catholic Christianity. In the final decade of his life (that is, from roughly 420 to 430), Augustine’s engagement with followers of Pelagius and the so-called Semi-Pelagians led him (perhaps reluctantly) to dwell on the darkness of evil in the human heart and the mysterious workings of divine grace and predestination. From his earliest to his latest writings, some features of the problem of evil seem always to have exercised his mind.1
Since the topic of Augustine and evil opens up such wide horizons, it is necessary to limit my discussion here to manageable proportions. I focus on a period of life and a selection of writings somewhere between Augustine’s first philosophical dialogues and his final polemical treatises. Specifically, I examine his discussion of evil in works composed roughly between 410 and 420. My choice of this decade of Augustine’s life is not arbitrary. Augustinian scholars usually look to the year 396 as the crucial watershed in Augustine’s theological development, and there is good reason to do so. As Augustine himself observed in his Retractations, when he wrote his two books To Simplicianus (the successor of Ambrose, bishop of Milan) in response to questions on the apostle Paul, he had finally grasped the overwhelming power of grace in freeing humans from their sinfulness.2 The best-known fruit of this conversion of 396 was the Confessions, which presented Augustine’s reading of his own early life in terms of the inexorable attraction of divine grace.3
Why, then, should I start my account a decade after the Confessions and nearly fifteen years after his books To Simplicianus? The reason is that there appears to be a cluster of writings from around 410 onward in which Augustine began to reflect in a new way on the nature of human embodiment, and these reflections, I argue, had a profound impact on his treatment of the problem of evil, particularly in its manifestation as human, moral evil. These reflections are found initially in his Literal Commentary on Genesis (esp. book 9, composed around the year 410), but the repercussions of this development can be most clearly seen in the middle books of his City of God (books 11–14), composed between 417 and 420.4 My aim in this essay is to suggest that Augustine’s new reflections on human embodiment—which show a more positive view of the body and its relationship with the soul—gave a new and, this time, more permanent shape to his grappling with the problem of evil.
Before proceeding to that critical decade in Augustine’s thought, I observe that several features of his teaching on God and evil never changed. There are certain options that Augustine always considered unacceptable, and on these matters his thought remained consistent from his earliest to his latest writings. These ideas will be very familiar to most of you, since they are found in the Confessions and were commonplaces in the Christian literature inspired by Platonic philosophy.5 Yet they are worth recalling here because they provide the stable framework within which the developments I later sketch took shape.
The first of these points is that God can never do evil in any way. By definition, God is supreme Goodness. As Augustine put it in his early treatise Free Will, “To hold God supreme is most truly the beginning of piety; and no one holds Him supreme who does not believe him to be omnipotent and absolutely changeless, Creator of all good things, which He Himself transcends in excellence, and the most just Ruler, as well, of all that He has created.”6 After struggling in his earlier years with the Manichaean notion of the good God as vulnerable to invasion by the forces of evil, Augustine was determined never again to allow that the transcendent God might be affected in any way by the presence or persistence of evil.7 While modern theologians might be inclined to deal with the problem of evil by positing either mutability or passibility within God, this was an option that Augustine would not entertain, and this was largely a legacy of his anti-Manichaean (i.e., Platonist) philosophical mind-set.
Another position that Augustine held as axiomatic, at least from the time of his conversion to the teachings of the Platonists, was that all created beings, by virtue of their creation by a good God, must be good. Even though corruption might harm or diminish the good in created things, in their essential being they remain good. As Augustine put it in the Confessions, even the possibility of corruption showed that created things were good, for if they had no good to corrupt, they could not be corrupted: “Therefore as long as they exist, they are good.”8 The corollary of Augustine’s recognition of the essential goodness of all created things (that is, of all that exists) was the insight—again derived from Neoplatonic sources—that evil could not have existence as a “substance.” Again, Augustine put it succinctly in the Confessions: “Accordingly, whatever things exist are good, and the evil into whose origins I was inquiring is not a substance, for if it were a substance it would be good. Either it would be an incorruptible substance, a great good indeed, or a corruptible substance, which could be corrupted only if it were good.”9 All being, Augustine insisted, is good by virtue of its being.
This second principle of Augustine’s led inexorably to a third: if God and all existing things are good, then evil itself must be a “nothing,” a lack or a privation of the being or goodness of a thing. In the case of rational creatures (humans or angels), this loss of goodness can be attributed only to a movement of the will, to a “perversity” in the literal sense of a “thorough turning away” from the source of being and goodness that is the supreme substance or God.10 The possibility of a turn to the worse arose because all things were created out of nothing and were, by that fact, mutable. But the actual defection from good was the fault of the will. From his earliest to his latest writings, Augustine always insisted that the cause of evil could be neither God nor the created world itself but only the perverse will of a rational creature that chooses to reject or turn away from the divine source of its own being.11
If these three points formed the stable framework of Augustine’s metaphysics of evil, the stability of his views ended there. For in the first two decades of his literary career—between the dialogues at Cassiciacum (386) and the Literal Commentary on Genesis (begun 405)—Augustine’s thinking on the nature of this perverse will underwent significant development. In a brilliant (and, I think, still underappreciated) essay, Robert A. Markus has traced the evolution of Augustine’s reflections on the primal sin—pride—that began with the devil and eventually fractured both the human heart and human community. Building on the work of Oliver O’Donovan, Markus has argued that Augustine’s understanding of pride changed in important ways between his writing of the early philosophical dialogues and the composition of the Literal Commentary on Genesis.12 Although pride was always the primal sin for Augustine, in the early works he tended to view pride as a violation of the divine order of the cosmos, a deliberate turning away from higher to lower goods. This perspective is still evident in the Confessions where Augustine describes evil thus: “I inquired what wickedness is; and I did not find a substance but a perversity of will twisted away from the highest substance, you, O God, towards inferior things, rejecting its own inner life and swelling with external matter.”13
By the time of the Literal Commentary, according to Markus, Augustine’s understanding of pride had shifted from this hierarchical concern to a more social one. Pride had become a perverse self-love that seeks its private good over the common good. As Markus has put it:
Augustine’s thought in his fifties [when he composed the Literal Commentary on Genesis] began to be dominated by the notion that the roots of sin lie in the self’s retreat into a privacy which is deprivation: the self is deprived of community. All community—with God, with one’s fellows, and even with one’s own self—is fatally ruptured by sin. The radical flaw in human nature is now transcribed in terms of a retreat into a closed-off self.14
The social character of Augustine’s new understanding of pride is especially evident in the following passage from the Literal Commentary on Genesis, to which Markus has pointed. Here Augustine described this new sense of pride (and its opposite) as two types of love, which in turn have formed “two cities”:
There are, then, two loves, of which one is holy, the other unclean; one turned towards the neighbor, the other centered on self; one looking to the common good, keeping in view the society of saints in heaven, the other bringing the common good under its own power, arrogantly looking to domination; one subject to God, the other rivaling Him; one tranquil, the other tempestuous; one peaceful, the other seditious; . . . one wishing for its neighbor what it wishes for itself, the other seeking to subject its neighbor to itself; one looking for its neighbor’s advantage in ruling its neighbor, the other looking for its own advantage.15
These two loves, Augustine suggested, created two cities: one, the city of the just; the other, the city of the wicked. In his Literal Commentary, Augustine even promises to write someday about these two cities, “if the Lord is willing,” a promise he was able to keep during the next decade as he composed The City of God.
What, you may ask, does all this have to do with “evil, suffering, and embodiment,” the topic of my discussion? Quite a lot, I would say. In his account of the shift in Augustine’s understanding of pride, Markus has offered some tantalizing hints—though only hints—of another development in Augustine’s thought, one that pertains directly to the question of evil and embodiment:
The aim of the whole discussion of sin and pride in Book XIV of the City of God is to shift the stress from sin as the result of the soul’s entanglement in the flesh to sin as the result of the will’s own decision. Augustine registers this shift by the strenuous effort he makes to establish that the biblical category of the “flesh” is not sensual indulgence, not a case, in other words, of the superior allowing itself to be seduced by the inferior, but a fault within the mind itself. Sin is a matter of pride rather than sensuality.16
These comments of Robert Markus point toward another development in Augustine’s thought: Augustine’s new understanding of pride as the perverse choice of a private good over a public one was accompanied (perhaps even preceded) by an increased emphasis on the soul—not the body—as primarily responsible for sin. Augustine’s exoneration of the body from responsibility for sin, while not entirely new in 410, was part of a far-reaching revolution in his thought that first reached its full expression in the later books of the Literal Commentary on Genesis. This new emphasis on the original harmony of body and soul, then, became the context within which Augustine treated the problem of evil and human suffering. In Augustine’s new vision—the vision of the decade from 410 to 420—all human evil and suffering came to be seen as a fracturing of the original unity and harmony of creation, a gaping fissure between body and soul, caused by the pride of the soul. I first say a word about this new positive sense of embodiment and then turn to the question of the impact of sin upon it.
Creation and Embodiment
Numerous scholars have noticed that Augustine’s Literal Commentary on Genesis marked a significant turning point in his understanding of the body and its place in God’s original creation. Those who have studied the development of his views on sex and marriage, such as Peter Brown and Elizabeth Clark, have observed that it is only in book 9 of the Literal Commentary that Augustine finally accepted the notion that God originally intended Adam and Eve to “increase and multiply” in a physical way even before their sin. This was a significant step away from some of the Greek fathers and away from some of Augustine’s own Latin contemporaries, who tended to consider procreation to be a consequence of the fall, merely an act of compensation to humanity for the mortality brought about by sin. As Peter Brown has observed, after the Literal Commentary “Augustine invariably wrote of Adam and Eve as physical human beings, endowed with the same bodies and sexual characteristics as ourselves. God had created them for the joys of society. . . . Compared with the notions of many of his most vocal contemporaries, it was a singularly sociable and full-blooded vision.”17
Other scholars, more concerned with philosophical questions, have pointed to the years around 410 as the period when Augustine began to emphasize that a natural relationship existed between the soul and the body, an intimate union analogous to marriage. John Rist, for example, has observed that in Letter 140, composed in 412, “Augustine spoke of the ‘sweet marriage bond [dulce consortium] of body and soul,’” citing Ephesians 5:29 (“No one hates his own flesh” [NABRE]).18 In contrast to the Platonism of Porphyry—who demanded that everyone must “flee the body” (omne corpus fugiendum est)—and even repudiating his own earlier infatuation with Neoplatonism,19 the later Augustine insisted that a human is a true union of the two “substances” of body and soul, a union best characterized by the word “person” (persona). Indeed, as Rist has argued, by the year 411, “Augustine became almost as hostile to ‘spiritual’ reductionism as he had been since his conversion to ‘material’ reductionism.”20
Even the scholars who accept the theories of Robert O’Connell—that for much of his life Augustine held that human embodiment resulted from a “fall” of the soul into the body—acknowledge that a radically different teaching is present in the Literal Commentary on Genesis.21 Again, Rist has summarized this point nicely: “According to the Literal Commentary, Adam had an ‘animal’ body before the fall, that is, he was a mixture of soul and body and so did not fall into body. His fall was with his body [emphasis added], and so in a different way was ours. . . . The Confessions may be the latest major work of Augustine in which he thought that we are souls fallen into [Rist’s emphasis] rather than with a body.”22 The consensus of contemporary scholarship is that the key insight in this new phase of Augustine’s development is that body and soul belong together and that this was God’s intention from the beginning of creation.
In the remainder of this essay I take this scholarly consensus as a point of departure to explore the implications of Augustine’s new understanding of embodiment for his teaching on evil and its influence. I suggest that there are three areas of human experience in which Augustine tended to emphasize the impact of sin: sex, politics, and death. By examining these three examples of how evil has affected human life, particularly in its embodied character, I believe we can arrive at a richer and more nuanced account of his teaching than most previous commentators have recognized.
Sex and Sin
It would be a great understatement to claim that Augustine’s views on sex have attracted negative attention from some modern scholars. In books such as Ute Ranke-Heinemann’s Eunuchs for the Kingdom, Augustine’s teaching on sexual desire and sin has been subjected to nearly systematic misrepresentation. We are told by Ranke-Heinemann, for example, that the man “who fused Christianity together with hatred of sex and pleasure into a systematic unity was the greatest of the Church Fathers, St. Augustine. . . . Augustine was the father of a fifteen-hundred-year-long anxiety about sex and an enduring hostility to it. He dramatizes the fear of sexual pleasure, equating pleasure with perdition in such a way that anyone who tries to follow his train of thought will have the sense of being trapped in a nightmare.”23 It is difficult to square these harsh judgments with anything that Augustine actually says, especially if one takes seriously the developments that began with the Literal Commentary on Genesis. Augustine hated neither sex nor pleasure, and more than most of his contemporaries, he taught that both sex and pleasure were good creations of a good God.24
What Ranke-Heinemann and other critics of Augustine have in mind is the fact that Augustine did come to believe that the sin of Adam and Eve had damaged human nature and that one symptom of this damage was a disorder in the way that sexual desire, or libido, now operates in humans. This is a topic to which I turn in a moment. But it is critical first to look closely at Augustine’s teaching on the creation of sex and the body in order to properly understand the impact of sin upon them.
I begin with a passage from The City of God, in which Augustine describes the original reason why God created all humans from one. Noticing the difference between the way God created other animals (several members of the species all at once) and the way God created humans (all from one), Augustine argues that the reason for the latter is to produce a solid social bond—first between the original couple, and then among their descendants:
God therefore created only one single man: not, certainly, that he might be alone and bereft of human society, but that, by this means, the unity of society and the bond of concord might be commended to him more forcefully, mankind being bound together not only by similarity of nature, but [also] by the affection of kinship. Indeed, God did not even create the woman who was to be united with the man in the same way as He created the man. Rather, it pleased Him to create her out of the man, so that the human race might derive entirely from the one man.25
Here Augustine stresses that the purpose of the creation of all humans from one was precisely to establish a social bond characterized by “unity” and “concord,” first between Adam and Eve, and then among all the members of the human race. Even though God foreknew that humans would sin and that human society would become more fractured by wars than any animal kingdom ever could be, Augustine insisted that “God had caused the human race to be derived from one man, in order to show how highly he prizes unity in a multitude.”26 No matter how discordant human society may become, Augustine argued, the example of Adam should stand as a reminder of that original unity, “either to prevent discord from coming into existence, or to heal it where it already exists.”27 Again, as he puts it in book 12 of The City of God: “God chose to create one individual for the propagation of many, so that men should thus be admonished to preserve unity among their whole multitude. Moreover, the fact that the woman was made for him from his side signifies clearly enough how dear the union between a man and his wife should be.”28 For the later Augustine, it is clear that the purpose of the creation of man and woman as physical and physically sexed beings was precisely to establish community—both personal and social—in which harmony and unity might flourish. This was the purpose of God’s original blessing and command to “increase and multiply” (Gen. 1:28 Vulgate), Augustine said, and most importantly, this blessing has not been abrogated, despite the pernicious effects of sin. As Augustine states in the Literal Commentary on Genesis, “It is by virtue of this blessing that the earth is now filled with human beings who subdue it.”29 So much for Ute Ranke-Heinemann and Augustine’s “enduring hostility” to sex!
But, of course, something did go wrong, according to Genesis, and we cannot escape Augustine’s novel reading of the fall and its impact on the bodies and sexuality of the first humans. What went wrong, according to Augustine, was precisely a fracture of the original unity and harmony between body and soul that characterized the first humans. Pride was at the root of the first sin, and for Augustine, this pride led to disobedience. Adam and Eve were commanded not to eat of the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” There was nothing noxious about the fruit of this tree itself, Augustine insists. What was evil was the disobedience of those who violated the command. Since the first parents were placed in a state of dependence on God, it was only fitting that they should have been given some commandment so that they could exercise the virtue of obedience and thereby please the Lord. “I can truthfully say,” Augustine states, “that this is the only virtue of every rational creature who lives his life under God’s rule, and that the fundamental and gravest vice is the overweening pride by which one wishes to have independence to his own ruin, and the name of this vice is disobedience. There would not, therefore, be any way for a man to realize and feel that he is subject to the Lord unless he is given some command.”30
What follows, of course, is disobedience, and this disobedience proceeds from the arrogance of a creature that tries to be like God. Augustine’s own account of this fall is worth repeating because it stresses the element of the first sin (the willful disobedience) that was so repugnant to him:
It is impossible for the will of a man not to come tumbling down on him with a thunderous and devastating crash if he so exalts it as to prefer it to that of the One who is his superior. This is what man has experienced in his contempt of God’s command, and by this experience he has learned the difference between good and evil, that is, the good of obedience and the evil of disobedience, namely, of pride and contumacy, of the perverse imitation of God, and of pernicious liberty. The tree which was the occasion of this experience for man received its name from what happened there. . . . For we would not feel evil except by experience, since there would be no evil unless we had committed it.31
For Augustine, the primal sin was the free choice of Adam and Eve to reject their creaturely dependence on God and to opt for their own private good. By attempting to take their salvation into their own hands, so to speak, they had rejected the grace of God and turned in upon themselves. The effect of their disobedience was to lose the grace that God had given to preserve their bodies from death and to live in peace with themselves and all the rest of creation. And here we have come to the problem of embodiment.
Vulnerability to death, for Augustine, was not the only effect of the sin of Adam and Eve. At the moment of their sin, the first parents experienced another wound as well: a disordered motion or movement that he calls the “concupiscence of the flesh.” It was the presence of this new impulse in their bodies that caused Adam and Eve to feel shame at their nakedness. As Augustine put it, “As soon, then, as they had violated the precept, they were completely naked, interiorly deserted by the grace which they had offended by pride and arrogant love of their own independence. Casting their eyes on their bodies, they felt a movement of concupiscence which they had not known.”32 Not only did the bodies of Adam and Eve become liable to disease and death, like other animals, but they also became “subject to the same drive by which there is in animals a desire to copulate and thus provide for offspring to take the place of those that die.”33 Although the sin of Adam and Eve in no way involved sexual relations, the effects of this sin were felt directly in the “animal instinct” (bestiale motum) now present in their bodies.
We are here at the crux of the problem of sin and embodiment that has troubled so many modern readers of Augustine. Is sexual desire, as it is now experienced in the human body, something evil, a symptom or product of the original sin of Adam and Eve? This was precisely the issue at the center of Augustine’s last great controversy with the Pelagian bishop Julian of Eclanum, during the final decade of his life (420–30). I do not wish to engage in a detailed analysis of that conflict, nor do I wish to defend Augustine’s account of the corruption of human nature. But I do point out that Augustine’s teaching is not as outrageous as it first appears, especially when it is viewed in the light of his fuller understanding of creation and embodiment. First, we must acknowledge that Augustine always maintained that the original purpose of sex, the procreation of children, remained something good. As I noted earlier, he explicitly stated that the original blessing to “increase and multiply” remained in force even after original sin. Second, it is important to notice that Augustine never said that the “animal instinct” (the bestiale motum) was something evil in itself. Humans have animal bodies, and now that these bodies have become mortal, it is good and “natural” for people to experience the instinct for procreation. What Augustine could not accept, what he saw as “evil” and an effect of original sin, was the way in which these instincts assert themselves and are experienced apart from any assent by the mind or will. In other words, it was the fractured state of the human person—the tension, if you will, between the body and the soul—that was the real “evil” brought about by sin. In the case of sex (Augustine liked to use the example of male erections), the natural instincts even controlled the bodily parts apart from the consent of the mind or will (as in the case of impotence). This, to Augustine, was a sure sign that some unfortunate chasm had opened up between the body and the soul, one that was not part of God’s original intention for the human race. This split within the person—the soul’s loss of control over the body in this crucial area of human experience—was, for Augustine, a just punishment (though a self-inflicted punishment) for the pride and disobedience of Adam and Eve. By opting for autonomy, the first humans had lost control even over themselves.34
But there is yet a third consideration that should somewhat temper our judgments on Augustine’s teaching, one that will lead into my next topic, the impact of sin on human social relations. When Augustine spoke of the “lust” or “concupiscence of the flesh,” he sometimes meant specifically this experience of disruptive sexual desire. Quite often, however, the “lust of the flesh against the spirit” referred to any one of a number of other disordered impulses of the human heart. In book 14 of The City of God, Augustine devoted a lengthy discussion to the issue of what it means to “live according to the flesh” and to “live according to the Spirit.” Starting with Paul’s list of vices in Galatians 5:19–21, he observed that the apostle included many vices pertaining strictly to the mind and not involving fleshly pleasures at all, such as idolatry, hatred, wrath, and sedition.35 The devil himself, Augustine declared, is the prime example of living “according to the flesh,” yet he is not a physical being at all and is supremely proud and envious.36 The “works of the flesh,” Augustine concluded, cannot refer primarily to bodily experiences but must refer to the corruption caused by the prior sin of the soul. To live “according to the flesh,” therefore, is to live “according to oneself” (secundum se), that is, according to humanity rather than according to God. It is, essentially, the vice of pride.37
We have returned here to the point raised earlier by Markus: if pride lies at the root of a vicious self-love—one that ignores the common good and looks to domination—then, for Augustine, the fractured unity of body and soul experienced in sexual desire was merely a microcosm (though also the starting point) of the broader social fractures wrought by sin. It was practically inevitable, therefore, that Augustine’s new insights into sin and embodiment in his Literal Commentary on Genesis would eventually lead him to reflect on the social and political dimensions of sin. In other words, The City of God was, quite literally, the logical outcome of the Literal Commentary on Genesis. So let us briefly follow Augustine’s logic as he moved from sexual to social sin.
Sin and Society
In the remainder of this essay, I can offer nothing like a full account of an Augustinian political theology or full exposition of The City of God. I can, however, point to certain ways in which the issue of embodiment is woven into Augustine’s account of the progress of social sin in The City of God. We must begin with the recognition that the very separation of the sexual and the social may be an anachronism. In the opening paragraphs of The City of God, Augustine describes the earthly city (the community of those seduced by pride) in terms that recall the self-inflicted punishment of sexual concupiscence: “That city, . . . when it seeks dominion, is itself dominated by the lust for dominion [libido dominandi] even though all nations serve it.”38 Later, in book 14, he repeats similar sentiments: “In the earthly city princes are as much dominated by the lust for domination as the nations which they subdue are by them.”39 Margaret Miles once observed that the tendency to separate the “lust of the flesh” in a sexual sense (libido carnalis) from the “lust for domination” (libido dominandi) is a recent, modern invention. As Miles argues, Augustine “did not assume or envision any division between them.”40 That is to say, the libido dominandi of the earthly city is merely the social extension of the more personal lust of sexual desire. The fracture between the body and soul, therefore, is writ large in the fracture of the body politic.
Augustine envisioned clear parallels between the two forms of lust. After Eden, both social life and sexual life have become problematic. Though both are grounded in the original, creative will of God, both have become corrupted by evil. While both continue to function as goods within God’s providence, both the sexual and the social lives of humans have become weakened by self-love and pride. Social unity and harmony, as we saw earlier, were the original purpose of human procreation, and that purpose has not changed, despite the damage done by sin. But social life, like sexual life, is shot through with the effects of self-willed agents, just as the body has been riddled with competing lusts and desires.41 And yet, as Augustine indicated, both social life and sexual life have become essential instruments in the process of salvation, for God willed that the Savior should be born from the people of Israel, who had been propagated by sexual intercourse.42 As Augustine put it in book 19 of The City of God, “How could the City of God have first arisen and progressed along its way, and how could it achieve its proper end, if the life of the saints were not social?”43
A concrete example will help to illustrate the point. According to Augustine, the original reason for sexual copulation was to produce human beings with ties of kinship (of blood), so that the bonds of society would be stronger than if people had been created independently of one another. But Augustine was not encouraged by the history of the first siblings. The first founder of the earthly city was a fratricide. Overcome by envy, Cain slew his brother Abel, who was a citizen of the eternal city. To Augustine, it was no surprise that this crime became what he calls an “archetype” that was mirrored at the founding of Rome in the slaying of Remus by his twin brother, Romulus.44 Both cases of fratricide show the power of envy and self-will (the “lust of the flesh”) to sever the bond of kinship created by sexual union. As Augustine noted at a later point in The City of God, citing the words of Cicero, “There is no treachery more insidious than that concealed under a pretense of duty or by the name of kinship.”45
Augustine could have left the matter there, but the lesson he ultimately drew from the stories of the two fratricides is that social strife will exist even among those who are good and between members of the heavenly city. In this life, even within a good person, “the flesh lusts against the Spirit, and the Spirit lusts against the flesh.” As a result, social conflicts will remain, even among those who are destined to be saints. “While they are still making their way towards perfection,” Augustine writes, “and have not yet attained it, there can be strife among them inasmuch as any good man may strive against another because of that part of him with which he also strives against himself.”46 The internal division caused by sin, “the concupiscence of the flesh,” simultaneously cuts more deeply and extends more broadly than the fissure between the body and the soul evident in disordered sexual desire. For Augustine, the struggle to turn from the “lust of the flesh” to the “lust of the Spirit,” to move from self-satisfaction to joy in another, to embrace the common good rather than the lust for domination—that is a lifelong task, one that can be accomplished only with the aid of divine grace. In this life, social harmony and peace, like the integration of sexual desires, remain something incomplete, the object of eschatological hope, not present possession.
Sin and Death
This brings me to the final example of Augustine’s teaching on the impact of sin on the body: death. Fortunately, given the limits of my essay, this topic can be treated more briefly because Augustine’s thought in this area is clearer than on the earlier topics. Moreover, the question of Augustine’s view of death has been the object of some notable studies.47 Here, too, we are dealing with a matter in which there has been some development in Augustine’s thought. In his early writings, when he was still very much under the influence of Platonic philosophy, Augustine echoed the philosophical tradition in regarding death as a good. In an early work, The Greatness of the Soul, Augustine could speak of death as “the sheer flight and escape from this body, . . . now yearned for as the greatest boon.”48 By identifying the death of the body as a good, Augustine gave his assent to two classic Platonic teachings: that the soul is the true identity of the person and that the body is the source of the evils experienced by the soul. The teaching had been given Christian approbation by Ambrose, who wrote an entire book, The Good of Death (De bono mortis), in which he essentially echoed the Platonic teaching.
By the time he composed book 13 of The City of God, which has been called “a short treatise on the subject of death,”49 Augustine had moved far beyond this position. As we have seen, at least from the time of the Literal Commentary on Genesis, Augustine had come to accept the union of the body and soul as constituting one “person.” Moreover, he now held that the evils suffered by the soul were not the result of its imprisonment in the body, as the Platonic tradition (in both its Christian and non-Christian varieties) held. For Augustine, the evils of the soul derive from its own willful self-assertion in abandoning its union with God. After the fall, the coexistence of body and soul was characterized by sufferings of many kinds, which Augustine took to be a just punishment for sin. But it was sin, and not the union of body and soul in itself, that caused these sufferings. These reflections led Augustine to a new and decidedly un-Platonic approach to death.50 Now he came to see the separation of the body and soul as a genuine evil, suffered by humanity as a result of original sin.
In The City of God, Augustine directly addresses the character of death in the light of his new emphasis on the original and natural harmony of body and soul:
As regards the death of the body, then—that is, the separation of the soul from the body—it is a good to no one while those who are said to be dying are suffering it. For a sensation of anguish, contrary to nature, is produced by the force that tears apart the two things which had been conjoined and interwoven during life; and this sensation persists until there is a complete cessation of all that feeling which was present by reason of the union of soul and flesh.51
Even when circumstances intervene to shorten the period of suffering involved in death—for example, a swift blow to the body or some other quick snatching away of the soul—Augustine insists that death must be seen as an evil and indeed as a punishment for the primal sin. In Augustine’s mature reflections on death, I argue, we have another example of the way in which his new thought on embodiment led to a reconsideration of the impact of evil. Like the existence of sexual concupiscence, death fractures the original fellowship of body and soul. The separation of body and soul, like the treachery of siblings or the disorder of sexual desire, is something “contrary to nature,” a perversion of the original creation. It is an evil, though one that will be redressed ultimately at the resurrection of the dead.
Conclusion
At the beginning of this study, I observed that one of the constant elements in Augustine’s teaching on evil is his insistence that God cannot be the cause of evil. Only the willful perversity of a rational creature, a turning of the will away from God, can bring about the defects in human nature that we all experience as real. The problem, one might say, is anthropological, not theological. The consequence of the original disobedience, Augustine believed, was the disobedience of one’s own body, manifest in sickness, aging, and, finally death: “For what is man’s misery if not simply his own disobedience to himself, . . . that is, his very mind, and even his lower part, his flesh, does not obey his will. Even against his will his mind is often troubled; and his flesh endures pain, grows old, and dies, and suffers all manner of things which we should not suffer against our will if our nature were in every way and in all its parts obedient to our will.”52 For Augustine, the alienation of sin is evidenced, par excellence, in the alienation of the soul from the flesh. Hope and healing, therefore, could come only from another incarnation.
It is paradoxical that Augustine the former Manichaean and Augustine the convert to Neoplatonism should eventually develop a theology of evil and suffering that virtually requires salvation by means of the embodiment of God, the incarnation. For Augustine, Jesus is the model of divine humility, taking on our feeble humanity and healing its pride. For Augustine, Jesus is the one example of a fully integrated union of body and soul, a “person” in the full sense of the word. In The City of God, Augustine can even present the emotions that Jesus experienced—grief, anger, joy—as proof that emotions can be natural and good.53 We should remember this side of Augustine when we hear him dismissed (as he so often is) as a Platonist or a crypto-Manichaean.
Finally, by way of evaluating the relevance of Augustine’s theology, I shall first state the obvious. Many features of his teaching are no longer tenable: our contemporary understanding of evolution and the origin of species requires a radical rethinking of the mythic characters of Adam and Eve and their contribution to human evil and suffering. But, again paradoxically, the success of contemporary science and the failure of Augustine’s science may lead to a better understanding of the biblical story and a chastened reappropriation of Augustine’s theology. For the myth of Adam and Eve was never really “about” the natural origins of the human race. It was, as Augustine saw, a story about who humans are now in their alienation from God, community, and themselves. We still have much to learn about Genesis and ourselves from Augustine of Hippo.
1. Cf. John M. Rist, Augustine: Ancient Thought Baptized (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 261, who observes that the question of the origin of evil “was the most important and most enduring challenge to Augustine throughout his life.”
2. Augustine, Retractationum libri II 2.1.1 (CCSL 57:89–90): “In cuius quaestionis solutione laboratum est quidem pro libero arbitrio uoluntatis humanae, sed uicit dei gratia.” To Simplicianus = De diversis quaestionibus ad Simplicianum.
3. Cf. Robert A. Markus, Conversion and Disenchantment in Augustine’s Spiritual Career, Saint Augustine Lecture 1984 (Villanova, PA: Villanova University Press, 1989), 22, who states: “His rereading of Saint Paul in the mid-390s is one of the great divides of Augustine’s intellectual development. It marks the end of his belief in human self-determination and the beginnings of the theology of grace he would deploy against Pelagius.”
4. I follow the dates given by Goulven Madec, Introduction aux “Révisions” et à la lecture des oeuvres de saint Augustin (Paris: Institut d’Études Augustiniennes, 1996), 162–64.
5. Parallels to all of the points in the next three paragraphs can be found in the writings of Gregory of Nyssa. See, e.g., his Oratio catechetica 5–6.
6. Augustine, De libero arbitrio 2.12, trans. Anna S. Benjamin and L. H. Hackstaff, Saint Augustine: On Free Choice of the Will, Library of Liberal Arts (New York: Macmillan, 1964), 6; cf. Augustine, De natura boni 1: “The Supreme Good beyond all others is God. It is thereby unchangeable good, truly eternal, truly immortal”; trans. John H. S. Burleigh, Augustine: Earlier Writings, LCC (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1953), 326.
7. In Confessions (= Conf.) 7.1.1, Augustine says that even prior to reading the libri Platonici he was convinced that God must be “incorruptible and inviolable and unchangeable.”
8. Augustine, Conf. 7.12.18, trans. Henry Chadwick, Saint Augustine: Confessions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 124; this translation is cited as Chadwick.
9. Augustine, Conf. 7.12.18, trans. Chadwick, 124–25. For a later statement of this view, see De Genesi ad litteram 8.14.31.
10. Cf. Augustine, Conf. 7.16.22.
11. As J. Patout Burns has observed, this point, which Augustine first developed at length in De libero arbitrio, was already a step away from the positions of Ambrose and other Platonists: Augustine “separated himself from the tradition, however, by insisting that the temptation was not related to the bodily condition of humanity. . . . Augustine refused to admit a conflict between mind and bodily appetite in the original world order. He insisted that this division arises from and punishes a sin of the spirit.” See his essay “Augustine on the Origin and Progress of Evil,” in The Ethics of St. Augustine, ed. William S. Babcock, JRE Studies in Religious Ethics 3 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991), 67–85, esp. 77.
12. Markus, Conversion and Disenchantment, 24–42, acknowledging his debt to Oliver O’Donovan, The Problem of Self-Love in Augustine (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980).
13. Augustine, Conf. 7.16.22, trans. Chadwick, 126.
14. Markus, Conversion and Disenchantment, 31–32.
15. De Genesi ad litteram 11.15.20, trans. John Hammond Taylor, SJ, St. Augustine: The Literal Meaning of Genesis, ACW 42 (New York: Newman, 1982), 147; this translation is cited as Taylor.
16. Markus, Conversion and Disenchantment, 32. See also his essay “De civitate Dei: Pride and the Common Good,” in Proceedings of the PMR [Patristic, Medieval, and Renaissance] Conference 12/13 (Villanova, PA: Augustinian Historical Institute, Villanova University, 1987–88), 9: “Sin is pride rather than sensuality; and sensuality [is] the consequence and the penalty of pride.”
17. Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 400–401. Essential on this question are the essays of Elizabeth A. Clark, “‘Adam’s Only Companion’: Augustine and the Early Christian Debate on Marriage,” Recherches Augustiniennes 21 (1986): 139–62; “Heresy, Asceticism, Adam, and Eve: Interpretations of Genesis 1–3 in the Later Latin Fathers,” in her Ascetic Piety and Women’s Faith: Essays on Late Ancient Christianity (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1986), 353–85.
18. Rist, Augustine, 111.
19. See De civitate Dei 10.29, where Augustine attacks Porphyry on this point; and Rist, Augustine, 97.
20. Rist, Augustine, 101; on 100, Rist points to Letter 137, composed in 411, as the point at which Augustine first uses the term “person” for the body-soul relationship.
21. In his recent study of the O’Connell thesis, Saint Augustine and the Fall of the Soul: Beyond O’Connell and His Critics (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2006), 211, Ronnie J. Rombs has remarked: “The later books of the De Genesi ad litteram and The City of God reveal a mature Christian metaphysics within which there is no place for a Plotinian ontological fall. Individuation and plurality, Augustine insists, are the result of the creative will of God.”
22. Rist, Augustine, 112.
23. Ute Ranke-Heinemann, Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven: Women, Sexuality and the Catholic Church (New York: Doubleday, 1990), 75, 78.
24. See, e.g., De bono coniugali 16.18, where Augustine explicitly acknowledges that the pleasure accompanying eating and sex is, in itself, not morally problematic.
25. De civitate Dei 12.12, trans. R. W. Dyson, Augustine: The City of God against the Pagans, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 533; this translation is cited as Dyson. Already in De bono coniugali, Augustine had articulated this theme.
26. Augustine, De civitate Dei (= Civ.) 12.23, trans. Dyson, 534.
27. Augustine, Civ. 12.28, trans. Dyson, 539.
28. Augustine, Civ. 12.28, trans. Dyson, 539; cf. the similar view in Civ. 14.1.
29. Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram (= Gen. litt.) 9.3.5, trans. Taylor, 73.
30. Augustine, Gen. litt. 8.6.12, trans. Taylor, 42.
31. Augustine, Gen. litt. 8.14.31, trans. Taylor, 53–54.
32. Augustine, Gen. litt. 11.31.41, trans. Taylor, 164.
33. Augustine, Gen. litt. 11.32.42, trans. Taylor, 165.
34. Cf. Augustine, Civ. 14.15.
35. Ibid., 14.2.
36. Ibid., 14.3.
37. Ibid., 14.3–4; cf. Markus, Conversion and Disenchantment, 32.
38. Augustine, Civ. 1, preface.
39. Ibid., 14.28.
40. Margaret R. Miles, Augustine on the Body, AAR Dissertation Series 31 (Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1979), 68. Miles acknowledges and cites the foundational work of Gerald Bonner, “Libido and Concupiscentia in Augustine,” StPatr 6 (1972): 303–14.
41. The connection between the manifestations of evil in the sexual and social spheres is evident, one might argue, even today. For example, the English expression “sexual conquests” implicitly acknowledges a violent or at least manipulative element in sexual promiscuity. Even more tragically, the use of rape as a weapon of war to humiliate conquered populations attests to the overlap between sexual and political expressions of evil.
42. See Augustine, Contra Secundinum Manichaeum 22 (CSEL 25.2:940): “Since it was necessary that Christ come in the flesh, both the marriage of Sarah and the virginity of Mary served to propagate that flesh.”
43. Augustine, Civ. 19.5, trans. Dyson, 925.
44. Augustine, Civ. 15.5.
45. Augustine, Civ. 15.5, quoting Cicero, In Verrem 2.1.13.
46. Augustine, Civ. 15.5, trans. Dyson, 640–41.
47. Éric Rebillard, In hora mortis: Évolution de la pastorale chrétienne de la mort au IVe et Ve siècles dans l’Occident latin (Rome: École française de Rome, Palais Farnèse, 1994); John Cavadini, “Ambrose and Augustine De bono mortis,” in The Limits of Ancient Christianity: Essays on Late Antique Thought and Culture in Honor of R. A. Markus, ed. William E. Klingshirn and Mark Vessey (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 232–49.
48. Augustine, De quantitate animae 76, cited in Miles, Augustine on the Body, 106; cf. Robert J. O’Connell, St. Augustine’s Early Theory of Man, A.D. 386–391 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1968), 204, who notes that “the Dialogues of Cassiciacum regularly refer to death as the moment when the soul is liberated from the toils of the body.”
49. Cavadini, “Ambrose and Augustine,” 232.
50. According to Cavadini, Augustine’s approach to death in Civ. 13 was a deliberate repudiation of Ambrose, De bono mortis.
51. Augustine, Civ. 13.6, trans. Dyson, 547.
52. Augustine, Civ. 14.15, trans. Dyson, 612–13.
53. Augustine, Civ. 14.9. In this chapter Augustine also argues that the Stoic idea of living “without passion” (apatheia) is a corruption of true humanity.