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Augustine and the Legacy of Guilt Mary Grey
The task facing a feminist theologian when asked to reflect on the legacy of St Augustine and sin is indeed daunting. For when confronting contemporary understanding of sin and guilt, it is frequently assumed that the legacy of guilt and the whole burden of responsibility for sin which women have borne in Christianity is somehow to be laid at Augustine’s door. So the problem underlying this paper is basically a historical one: how much responsibility for pessimistic views of human nature can be traced to what Augustine actually wrote and taught? Secondly, to reflect critically on Augustinian notions of sin will inevitably obscure the positive dimensions of his thought-in particular, his views on community, sacrament and Christology. For this I apologize in advance. But no one will thank me for tracing the legacy of Augustine’s teaching on sin through the anguishings of Luther and the rigorous extremism of Baius and Jansenius to the Papal encyclicals of this century. Instead, I begin by sketching sin-consciousness today. I then look briefly at Augustine’s doctrines in the context of 4th-century Christianity. Thirdly, I focus on certain threads, presumed to be the Augustinian legacy, and in the last section I look at attempts to represent ‘the sin of the world’ suggesting an alternative based on feminist psychological research.
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I: Whatever happened to sin?
What is striking today is a distinct absence of guilt feelings. Karl Menninger’s book Whatever Became of Sin? (Hodder and Stoughton, 1973)’ drew attention to the growing absence of sin as a meaningful category, a factor which he attributed to the ‘original sin’ of our day, namely, flight from responsibility. A survey by the Dutch sociologist Kerkhofs (The Tablet, 26 February 1985) of Christian European attitudes to sin and guilt revealed that about 40% of those interviewed had never experienced any feelings of regret about their actions! Seemingly we are presented with a lack of moral awareness on a terrifying scale, as leading statesmen are exonerated from corruption scandals and SS officers from the Nuremberg trials onward present themselves as guiltless and blame-free. We ourselves have been presented with the underlying causes of African famine which point to the responsibility of our society: but if Britain feels any guilt, she has learnt to live with it; guilt must not interfere with the politics of consumerism. 476