11 Augustine’s Theology of Sin Jesse Couenhoven
Augustine is known as the great theologian of sin. Many who read his Confessiones presume that the testimony offered there is a confession in our sense of the term, a litany of guilt. For this he has been celebrated as a realist and criticized as a pessimist. What modern readers often miss is the deeply humane source and character of Augustine’s views about sin. We tend to think of Augustine, especially the mature Augustine, as a perhaps astute or perhaps grumpy observer of humanity whose setting in the midst of the slow demise of an empire provided ample material for reflection on the darker side of life. But Augustine’s doctrines of sin and evil were less a product of empirical observation than that picture suggests. He did, of course, believe that his hamartiology explained much of the human behavior he saw. But he did not arrive at his views by aggregating particular observations into a general theory. Rather, he began with a doctrine of grace and a conception of the good. His ideas about evil and sin were driven by those commitments and laced with compassion for the plight of all those whose lives are a disappointment to them (though also with scorn for those who are self-satisfied). In his Unfinished Work in Answer to Julian, Augustine noted that talk about sin can have at least three referents. One might have in mind the primal sin for which Adam was responsible when he fell from his immature perfection — about which Augustine suggested that ‘he had nothing evil in him by which he was urged against his will to do evil. So from his sin he was free to hold back.’ Second, one might be interested in the penalty of that first sin, felt by the entire human race and indeed the world. Augustine called this the ‘evil that one does not but suffers.’