You are viewing a free preview of this lesson.
Subscribe to unlock all 10 lessons in this course and every other course on LearningBro.
Augustine of Hippo (354–430 CE) is among the most influential theologians in the history of Christianity. A North African bishop, philosopher and prolific author, he shaped Western Christian thinking on sin, grace, free will, predestination, the nature of evil and the relationship between Church and state. His ideas dominated Catholic and Protestant theology for over a millennium and remain central to AQA A-Level Religious Studies (specification 7062). His two greatest works — the Confessions (c. 397–400) and The City of God (De Civitate Dei, 413–426) — are foundational texts of Western civilisation. For this course his significance is sharply focused: human nature before and after the Fall, original sin and concupiscence, the divided will, the necessity of grace, evil as privatio boni, and the two cities.
Augustine's biography is essential context, not mere decoration, because his theology grows directly out of his own experience of bondage and conversion. Born in Tagaste, North Africa (modern Algeria), he was raised by a devout Christian mother, Monica, and a pagan father, Patricius. As a young man he was drawn to rhetoric, philosophy and a dissolute lifestyle that he later recalled with anguished regret in the Confessions.
At the heart of Augustine's anthropology is a sharp contrast between humanity as originally created and humanity as it now is. AQA candidates should be able to state both states precisely, using Augustine's own fourfold scheme of the will:
Key term: the Fall. The first sin of Adam and Eve (Genesis 3), understood by Augustine not merely as a private lapse by two individuals but as a catastrophic rupture that corrupted the nature of the whole human race that descends from them.
This before/after structure is the spine of Augustine's whole system: original sin describes the damage, grace describes the repair, and the two cities describe the destinies of the repaired and the unrepaired.
A natural objection arises immediately: if Adam was created good, with a rightly ordered will, how could he fall at all? Augustine's answer draws on his metaphysics of evil. Adam was good but mutable — a creature, made from nothing, and therefore capable of turning away from the highest Good towards lesser goods (ultimately towards himself). The Fall was not caused by any defect God placed in human nature, nor by any positive evil "thing," but by a deficient act of free will: a turning-away (aversio) from God that had no further cause beyond the will's own perverse choice. This is why Augustine can hold both that creation is wholly good and that real evil entered it: evil is not a created substance but the wound the will inflicts on itself when it abandons the Good. The Fall is thus the first and paradigm case of privatio boni in action.
Augustine's doctrine of original sin is one of his most distinctive and controversial contributions. Drawing on Genesis 2–3, Romans 5:12–21 and Psalm 51:5 ("in sin did my mother conceive me"), he argued that the Fall corrupted not only Adam and Eve but every subsequent generation.
Key term: concupiscence (concupiscentia). Disordered desire — the appetite's tendency to crave lower goods out of all proportion to reason and to God. Augustine treats it as both a result of original sin and the vehicle by which it is transmitted, and he associates it especially with the loss of rational control in sexual desire.
Augustine's stress on concupiscence, and his linking of it to the transmission of sin through ordinary human generation, is one of the most criticised features of his thought, and a strong evaluation should engage it (see below).
"Through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin; and so death passed upon all men, in whom all sinned." — Augustine's citation of Romans 5:12 in On Marriage and Concupiscence, I.10. (Augustine read the Latin in quo as "in whom [Adam] all sinned," the basis of his doctrine of inherited guilt; modern translations render the Greek as "because all sinned.")
One of Augustine's most psychologically acute insights — and a favourite of examiners — is his account of the divided will. In Book VIII of the Confessions he describes the agony of his own conversion: he wanted to give himself to God and yet found himself unable to will it wholeheartedly. The body obeys the mind instantly, he observes, yet the mind does not obey itself.
"The mind commands the body, and it obeys at once; the mind commands itself, and is resisted." — Augustine, Confessions, VIII.9 (paraphrasing his analysis: the will commands the will, "and yet it does not" obey).
For Augustine this is direct experiential evidence of the Fall. A healthy, integrated will would simply do what it chooses; the fact that we find ourselves divided against ourselves — willing and not-willing the same thing — shows that the will has been wounded and is no longer master in its own house. There are, he says, "two wills" in the unconverted person, neither of them whole, "and while they contend, they tear the soul apart." Only grace can reintegrate the divided will and make it whole.
This analysis is one of Augustine's most enduring philosophical achievements, and its influence runs well beyond theology. The phenomenon he identifies — akrasia, weakness of will, knowing the better and doing the worse — had been discussed by Plato and Aristotle, but Augustine gives it a new depth by locating it not in mere ignorance or weakness but in a self-division at the root of the person. It anticipates later accounts of inner conflict in thinkers as different as Pascal, Kierkegaard and even, in a secularised form, Freud, whose divided psyche of ego, id and super-ego echoes Augustine's warring wills. For RS the key point is that Augustine treats this universal experience of inner division as evidence for his doctrine of the Fall: the data of the moral life, he argues, only make sense if human nature is damaged in the way Genesis describes.
This account also frames Augustine's most famous prayer, which scandalised his Pelagian opponents:
"Give what you command, and command what you will." (Da quod iubes et iube quod vis.) — Augustine, Confessions, X.29.
The prayer's logic is decisive: if God can rightly command obedience, and yet the fallen will cannot supply it, then God must himself give what he commands. Even the ability to obey is a gift of grace.
If human nature is so corrupted, salvation cannot come from human effort. Augustine therefore placed overwhelming emphasis on divine grace (gratia) — God's unmerited, free and sovereign gift of salvation. His mature views were forged in controversy with Pelagius (c. 354–420 CE).
The Pelagian controversy is worth setting out as a genuine debate, because AQA rewards candidates who can do justice to both sides. Pelagius was not a careless thinker; he was a moral reformer alarmed by the laxity he saw in Roman Christianity, and he feared that Augustine's prayer "Give what you command" would become an excuse for sloth — why strive, if everything depends on grace? His emphasis on responsibility and effort has real moral appeal. Augustine's counter is that Pelagius has misdiagnosed the human condition: the problem is not that we lack good advice or good examples, which Pelagius could supply, but that we lack the power to follow them, because the will itself is sick. You cannot exhort a paralysed man to walk. The dispute thus turns on a question of fact about human nature — is the post-Fall will merely weakened or genuinely enslaved? — and the rest of each system follows from the answer. The Church sided decisively with Augustine: Pelagianism was condemned at the Councils of Carthage (418) and Ephesus (431), and a later "semi-Pelagian" compromise (that humans take the first step towards God, who then supplies grace) was itself rejected at the Council of Orange (529).
This led Augustine to a strong doctrine of predestination:
It is worth seeing why Augustine is driven to predestination, because students often present it as an arbitrary harshness rather than the conclusion of an argument. The logic is tight. If (1) the fallen will cannot turn to God without grace, and (2) grace is God's free gift, not a reward for anything we do, then (3) whether a person comes to faith depends ultimately on whether God gives the grace — which is to say, on God's prior choice. Election is simply the name for that choice. Augustine reinforces this with scripture, especially Paul's "It depends not on human will or exertion, but on God who shows mercy" (Romans 9:16) and the image of the potter and the clay (Romans 9:21).
The doctrine nonetheless generates the gravest objections in all of Augustine's thought. If salvation hangs on an election no one can influence, what becomes of human responsibility, of the urgency of preaching, of the sincerity of God's offer of mercy to all? Augustine's reply is that God's justice and mercy are both displayed — mercy in those saved, justice in those justly left to the fate all deserve — and that the reasons for the particular distribution are hidden in the inscrutable counsel of God. Critics across the centuries, from the semi-Pelagians of his own day to Jacobus Arminius and John Wesley, have found this reply inadequate, insisting that grace must be genuinely resistible and universally offered if God is to be both just and loving. This live tension between divine sovereignty and human freedom is one of the most examinable debates in the whole specification.
Subscribe to continue reading
Get full access to this lesson and all 10 lessons in this course.