Augustine, Sin, and the Mind

Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire, Destruction, 1836, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY. Wikimedia Commons.

Anyone who has had a conversation with me recently has probably noticed an uptick in Augustine quotes – perhaps inspiring hope in some and boredom in others. This is mostly because of the reading I’ve been doing with Dr. Copeland (Classics is awesome!). As Collegium often emphasizes engaging with the past and the Catholic tradition, Augustine presents a unique challenge in this regard. He continually refuses to fit into whatever little box modern readers might want him to. So, I’ll invite everyone to come and do some engagement with the past. The way is hard but the end is light. 

At the beginning of book two of the City of God, Augustine, in responding to critics, drops a bit of a confounding doctrine. He bewails the weak understanding of the ordinary man, which resists reason and truth. Using a medical analogy, he says that this understanding needs the medicine of sound teaching and divine assistance to be cured. Later, he says that “the intelligent are infected by a gross mental disorder which makes them defend the irrational workings of their minds as if they were logic and truth” (City of God, II.1). He concludes that they must be either blind or stubborn. He also uses some more traditional polemic, saying his critics have resolved never to think before they speak as long as they are contradicting Christian arguments. 

At face value, this may be read as a simple polemic – and a lazy one at that. The ancient equivalent of “you don’t understand because you’re a dumb snowflake!” However, if considered in light of Augustine’s broader doctrine of sin, the idea could bear fruit. Augustine believed that all humans born since Adam had “original sin” passed to them. In some ways, this acts as a sort of generational guilt on all of humanity, making us guilty of crimes against God. But it is also progressive, it leads us to commit more sin, distancing ourselves farther from God if we are left to our own devices. It affects many parts of our lives beyond just our actions, also twisting our love and affections inward, so that we love ourselves more than the God and neighbors we were created to love. This was a deeply personal doctrine for Augustine. His most famous and profound use of it was not in sanctimoniously hurling thunderbolts on the non-Christians, but applying it to his own life through a spiritual and intellectual autobiography, Confessions. 

In light of this, Augustine seems to be thinking about another effect of sin, the brokenness of our minds and intellects (noetic effects, if you’re a Greek nerd). Augustine is applying this critique in a polemical context to his critics, but he clearly thought that he himself was also under these effects for a long period of his life (See Confessions III.6.11-7.12, IV.15.25, VII.1.1, etc.). Moreover, he thought that a cure from our own reason or powers was not really possible, and that divine assistance was needed for a human’s mind to really be healed. 

If this idea is true, there are a lot of implications for philosophy and theology, but I would point you towards one: this application Alvin Plantinga makes of the doctrine in an apologetic context. His basic point is that a materialist has no real grounds to criticize a religious thinker. That would imply intellectual norms, like reason, which don’t have a material existence. This point is further defended here. However, a Christian does have grounds to say that there is something wrong about an atheist’s thinking. Moreover, there is an objective standard for how thinking is supposed to be, and what a healthy mind looks like.

Finally, I would end with the thought of a well-known agnostic philosopher, Anthony Kenny. In his book, God of the Philosophers, he makes his case for not believing in the God of traditional Christianity. However, he ends with a striking and astonishingly personal point. Discussing the possibility of sin darkening the mind and referencing Paul’s writings in Romans 1, he says: “there is no reason why someone who is in doubt about the existence of God should not pray for help and guidance on this topic as in other matters” (Kenny, 1979, p. 129). Further, “It is surely no more unreasonable than the act of a man adrift in the ocean, trapped in a cave, or stranded on a mountainside, who cries for help though he may never be heard… Such prayer seems rational whether or not there is a God” (ibid). If you feel that your mind is limited and perhaps even wounded, or that we cannot find the truth in this dark and broken world, you have nothing to lose in praying that God would give you light and healing. Augustine not only believed that this healing was possible, but he saw it profoundly in himself as the God of peace brought the renewing of his mind. 

Bibliography:

Augustine. Concerning the City of God against the Pagans. Translated by Henry Bettenson. London, England; New York, N.Y.: Penguin Books, 2003.

Augustine. Confessions. Translated by Henry Chadwick. Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 1998.

Kenny, Anthony. The God of the Philosophers. Oxford : Clarendon Press ; New York : Oxford University Press, 1979.