Augustine, the Guilty Optimist
Fallenness transformed by love and grace
On my first day of divinity school, the girl who sat beside me (who would, incidentally, become a very close friend of mine) took a look at the Murillo painting on the cover of my copy of Augustine’s Confessions and said: “What’s happened to his clothes? He looks like he’s been ravished!”
She wasn’t wrong, though I had never noticed. An odd thing, I know, with Augustine being one of history’s most famously lustful rakes. His is the paradigmatic story of a young man exhausting himself on every worldly pleasure only to find his interior life abysmally barren. His story has also become another kind of model: That of the once-liberated pagan, happy and free in sexual innocence, now dour and beset by torturous guilt on account of his Christian morals, the consummate pessimist.
You can find this model of Augustine everywhere. Bertrand Russell once attributed “much of what is most ferocious in the medieval church” to Augustine’s personal “gloomy sense of universal guilt.” More recently, Harvard’s own Stephen Greenblatt wrote an entire New Yorker essay arguing, inter alia, that Augustine “invented sex”; the piece is apparently an entry in a longer project on the Adam and Eve story.
Greenblatt adopts the usual picture of Augustine’s life as bifurcated into a sexually free pre-Christian pagan period (emblematic, one is led to believe, of the general sexual license available before Christianity became widespread in the Latin west) and a repressed, guilt-ridden post-Christian period, which one is welcome to associate, as Russell does, with the medieval period. Greenblatt contrasts Augustine’s theory of original sin, tied up in sex, with Augustine’s contemporary, the heresiarch Pelagius:
Pelagius and his followers were moral optimists. They believed that human beings were born innocent. Infants do not enter the world with a special endowment of virtue, but neither do they carry the innate stain of vice. True, we are all descendants of Adam and Eve, and we live in a world rife with the consequences of their primordial act of disobedience. But that act in the distant past does not condemn us inescapably to sinfulness. How could it? What would be the mechanism of infection? Why would a benevolent God permit something so monstrous? We are at liberty to shape our own lives, whether to serve God or to serve Satan.
Pelagius represents the moral theology, per Greenblatt, of original innocence: We’re all rational and morally competent creatures, and each of us can forge his or her own moral perfection through personal effort. “We are at liberty,” Greenblatt writes, “to shape our own lives.” We’re born free, and then we learn unfreedom; we’re first at liberty, and then in chains. Pelagius represents the classical humanists, with all their faith in the moral fortitude and mental faculties of humankind, and then there’s Augustine, the pessimist. Greenblatt again:
Augustine countered that we are all marked, in our very origins, with evil. It is not a matter of particular acts of cruelty or violence, specific forms of social pathology, or this or that person who has made a disastrous choice. It is hopelessly shallow and naïve to think, as the Pelagians do, that we begin with a blank slate or that most of us are reasonably decent or that we have it in our power to choose good. There is something deeply, essentially wrong with us. Our whole species is what Augustine called a massa peccati, a mass of sin.
In the doctrinal battle between Augustine and Pelagius, Augustine won, and the Church contends we are indeed marked by original sin, and unable to perfect ourselves through our own efforts alone. Thus Augustine “invents” sex, in that he imbues the act with a moral background that laces it with guilt which it did not carry before.
Of course, as Greenblatt seems to submit in his brief discussion of Augustine’s foray into Manichaeism, the notion that human beings carry some frailties or inherent inclinations to evil wasn’t novel. The mechanics and specifics of original sin were largely his, but neither was antiquity humankind’s childhood, guiltless and uncomplicated. The ancients had their own taboos and reasons for feeling sexual guilt, and they did; Augustine was no pioneer of shame, even if we more often experience his version because our tradition follows closer to his than to various species of sexual shame in antiquity.
But Augustine did pioneer — or at least help to formalize—a profound theological explanation of mercy. As the incomparable Peter Brown writes in The Ransom of the Soul, Augustine’s argument against the Pelagians held that
the church was a church of the non valde boni—of the “not altogether good”: of twilight persons, rendered incomplete by sin…Ordinary Christians, as sinners, occupied the ever-widening zone between the saints and the reprobate. The victory of Augustine over Pelagius was their victory.
Augustine insisted that none of us are capable of achieving our own salvation; we need God’s grace to do that. God’s grace not only heals the wounds of sin—soothes us in our guilt and shame, and comforts us in our pain—but strengthens us against future temptations. We usually fail again, and are offered the same round of treatment and inoculation again. Thus the world around you is not filled with people who, if they cared to, could perfect themselves —a vision of profound pessimism— but with people who are doing, well, the best they can, and maybe it isn’t much, but it isn’t all there is, either. God loves us enough to help us along.
In Greenblatt’s vision, Augustine’s chastity is an effort to revert to a pre-lapsarian state, to be as unencumbered by lust or sin as Adam before the fall. But this is not Augustine’s wish. It’s the fantasy of all those who dream about a pre-Christian pagan paradise, and imagine they can find their way back to something like it if only they roundly denounce figures like Augustine. But of course, that can’t happen: Augustine was right, and we can’t self-perfect. Decry the authors of late antiquity all you want, and we’ll find other things to feel anxious and guilty about, and other reasons to feel that way.
Of course, Augustine does love Eden, and the idea of being healed entirely of sin — in heaven, of course, transformed, finally, by love. A professor of mine wrote in her book Dostoevsky’s Unfinished Journey about a similar disagreement between Dostoevsky and Rousseau, who, not coincidentally, had his own Confessions.
Dostoevsky’s polemic with Rousseau takes on a new form here: unlike Rousseau, he refuses to idealize a perhaps nonexistent past, although he expresses love for it. He can appreciate its lost beauty, but both he and his character actively love humans even more in their fallen (civilized) state. That paradoxical yet accepting love is nowhere present in Rousseau’s Discourse.
Dostoevsky was able to sense what Augustine did: That fallenness isn’t as much a historical phenomenon as a spiritual one, and that the fallen state has its own beauty, in that God loves those more who need it more. It’s a paradox, but it’s the source of the compassion that permeates Augustine’s work, and it’s the reason he was willing to pour his heart into writing for a church of not-altogether-good people: Because God loves them all the more, offers his grace that much more freely the more we, twilight persons rendered incomplete by sin, need his grace.
In my view, this is the far more optimistic vision, and the far more realistic one.
