Human Nature

Critically assess the significance of Augustine’s teaching on human relationships before the Fall. [40]

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This AS question from 2018 is possibly the worst I have seen, and the mark-scheme does little to show that it is a reasonable question to have asked students, let alone AS students, in an examination. Nevertheless, because it is a past question student might encounter it and it is certainly worth considering how it might be answered.

St Augustine taught that human beings existed in a state of CARITAS before the Fall, loving God and loving each other as themselves in an ideal state of AMOR or agape and friendship.  In the City of God Book 14 St Augustine described how God “created man with such a nature that the members of the race should not have died”, such as being IMMORTAL and so in no need of SALVATION.  For St Augustine, human beings had BONA VOLUNTAS before the Fall, much the same as what Kant later describes as a GOOD WILL.  Their choices were directed by REASON and they had, therefore, a UNIFIED WILL and not the DIVIDED WILL that characterizes human nature after the Fall.  It follows that, for St Augustine, the whole blame for the FALL and the evil, suffering and death that it caused, lies within human beings and not with God.  St Augustine’s teaching on human relationships before the Fall is, therefore, a highly significant part of his Theodicy and particularly his Free Will Defence; without his teaching about human relationships before the Fall, St Augustine could not explain how God, being OMNIPOTENT and OMNIBENEVOLENT, allows evil and suffering to exist within His creation.   

Firstly, St Augustine’s teaching on human relationships before the Fall shows that the original choice to disobey God and sin was free in the sense that there were ALTERNATE POSSIBILITIES.  St Augustine is clear that with a unified, good will (BONA VOLUNTAS), human beings would have no reason to disobey… it made no sense to do so.  Although St Augustine saw LUST as the explanation for human beings choosing to do what it made no sense to do, he is also clear that “they are in error who suppose that all the evils of the soul proceed from the body”.  If the body was the source of LUST and what caused us to sin, God as the creator of the body would still be responsible for our sin and its consequences, nullifying St Augustine’s Theodicy.  For St Augustine, it was “the sinful soul that made the flesh corruptible”, so the choice to disobey God was internal to Adam as the agent and not determined by any external factor, even his own body.  The fist sin was man having the PRIDE to live according to his own desire and not God’s, so disobeying God and following his CARNAL WILL.  It follows that St Augustine’s teaching on human relationships before the Fall is highly significant, making his THEODICY and particularly his FREE WILL DEFENCE work.   

Secondly, St Augustine’s teaching on human relationships before the Fall shows that everybody is a SINNER in need of SALVATION through God’s GRACE.  For St Augustine, all human beings were “seminally present” in Adam (God “was pleased to derive all men from one individual”), meaning that all human beings were originally created having BONA VOLUNTAS and existing in CARITAS, not just Adam and Eve, and all human beings sinned against God and earned the punishment for sin which is death (Romans 5), not just Adam and Eve.  This shows that all human beings are capable of CARITAS and that AGAPE as a moral imperative has force, being towards something that our PRE-LAPSARIAN STATE shows that we can do.  In this way, we fully deserve God’s punishment in this life and the next for existing in a state of CUPIDITAS.  Indeed, if God did not punish us (harshly) for our CUPIDITY, God could not be just because then there could be no incentive to change and do what we know we should.  Further, St Augustine’s teaching on human relationships before the Fall supports his teaching about the Fall and Original Sin, which in turn supports his teaching that we depend on God’s GRACE for SALVATION and can in no way deserve or earn it for ourselves.  St Augustine utterly rejected PELAGIANISM, pointing out that it limits God’s OMNIPOTENCE (suggesting that we decide who is saved, not God), OMNISCIENCE (suggesting that the future is open and unknown to God) and OMNIBENEVOLENCE (suggesting that God only saves those who deserves it, when in fact His goodness extends to saving all those who don’t deserve it).  St Augustine agrees with St Paul, who wrote

“For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”  Romans 8:38-39

If we are saved, then we are pre-destined for salvation by God’s Grace, and nothing on earth can change that. For these reasons as well, St Augustine’s teaching on human relationships before the Fall is highly significant in his wider THEODICY and THEOLOGY for that matter.   

Nevertheless and despite is significance, St Augustine’s teaching on human relationships before the Fall is problematic.  

Notwithstanding the damning consequences of accepting the story of the Fall as conveying deep truth about human nature (Centuries of SEXISM, MISOGYNY and repressed SEXUALITIES flow from the story of the fall, including our pre-lapsarian state – being seen as ARCHETYPAL in the way that St Augustine’s teaching encourages) St Augustine’s teaching about human relationships before the fall depends on seeing the Bible as containing deep truth, when BIBLICAL CRITICISM casts doubt on this.  Textbooks are wrong to claim that St Augustine was a naïve literalist in the modern sense, seeing the Fall as historical, when he was fully aware of the different genres that the Bible contained and was amongst the first to develop rules for the interpretation of scripture, and yet St Augustine did rely on the Bible conveying truth, albeit in a more complex way.

Further, St Augustine’s teaching on human relationships before the Fall and how they relate to human nature today depends on an antiquated notion of how human beings reproduce.  Although Aristotle’s theory from “On the Generation of Animals” that the male is the efficient cause of his children (the woman only providing the material causes) was commonly accepted in St Augustine’s day, making his claim that all humanity was “seminally present” in Adam seem plausible, the discovery of the human ovum in the 17th Century undermined St Augustine’s claim.  It may be that the potential for all life was contained within Adam and Eve, but while Adam was fully culpable for his sin in the Fall, arguably Eve was not. Eve’s relationship with God was secondary and God’s command not to eat from the tree given to Adam before she was created. Eve’s sin would in breaking God’s commandment would be towards Adam, who she had been created to help… but then she thought she was helping Adam as the fruit was “as good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom…” If all humanity was not, as St Augustine suggested, “seminally present” in Adam it does not follow that all human beings sinned in his sin or are justly punished in dying for it.

Also, as John Hick pointed out in “Evil and the God of Love” (1966) p173, St Augustine’s attempt to use human nature to explain the fall and justify God in allowing evil and suffering “considered as a contribution to the solution of the problem of evil… only explains obscurum per obscurius.”  Even if we ignore the problems with taking the story of the fall literally in either a historical or scientific sense, St Augustine blaming human nature for the fall – whether in the body or the soul – does little to excuse God from responsibility for the evil and suffering that frail nature causes, because God created that frail nature and God is supposed to be both OMNIPOTENT and OMNISCIENT… in other words he could have done better and should have known how it would turn out.  

It seems that St Augustine’s teaching on human relationships before the Fall is BOTH highly significant AND deeply problematic.   

The extent to which this is true can be seen in Immanuel Kant’s “Religion within the boundaries of reason alone” (1794).  Kant, as a Lutheran, was deeply influenced by St Augustine, but wanted his philosophical system to work without relying on faith.  Like St Augustine, Kant believed that human beings are born FREE, that we choose to do what is wrong against reason and that this has a permanent effect on our moral character, limiting our freedom.  While Kant called what limits the human ability to have a good will RADICAL EVIL rather than ORIGINAL SIN, the concepts are sufficiently similar for Goethe to claim that Kant had “criminally stained his philosophers’ cloak with the shameful stain of original sin.”  For Kant, as for St Augustine, the possibility for human beings to have a good will (BONA VOLUNTAS) is significant, because it ensures that we can do what we rationally know we should do.  Without evidence that it is possible to have a good will, Kant would be arguing that we should do what nobody can do, which is irrational.  Without evidence that it is possible to have a good will, there would be no CATEGORICAL IMPERATIVE or reason to believe that we really are free or that the universe is really ordered as it appears to be.  For Kant, living in an age where Biblical Criticism made taking Genesis literally impossible, Jesus was the evidence that it is possible to have a good will and live in a state of what St Augustine called CARITAS, so in this way through Jesus we are “saved” from despair through the knowledge that in Jesus what we know we should do is possible.  Jesus is the evidence that human nature “before sin” is and can be good and so the evidence that we should be good, despite the otherwise seeming impossibility of having a good will by Kant’s definition.  Despite this, like St Augustine, Kant’s teaching on the good will is deeply problematic because human beings are born and grow up through a state whereby that are not capable of having a good will – childhood.  As children we are bound to do what is right, not out of a sense of duty, but out of fear, deference to authority or habit… all of which would make the “right” action pollute the will as much as an obviously wrong action, and pollute it permanently, holding us back from ever achieving a good will as an adult.  While Jesus shows that it is possible for a human being to have a good will, there is no sense that Jesus was like us subject to ignorance and tutelage as a child or that as an adult his will was encumbered with the effects of childhood choices.  Because of this, Kant’s teaching about a good will is no more convincing than St Augustine’s.  Like St Augustine, Kant asserts our freedom but provides no real evidence that we have ALTERNATE POSSIBILITIES to choose from.  Like St Augustine, Kant asserts that we are morally responsible for not having a good will (BONA VOLUNTAS) and for living in a state of RADICAL EVIL (CUPIDITAS) without evidence that we could ever have done otherwise.  Just as Kant’s teaching about a good will shows that Kant has no basis for postulating GOD (the universe is not fair, so there is no need to believe in God to explain its fairness), St Augustine’s teaching about human relationships before the fall shows that St Augustine has no basis for believing that God is both OMNIPOTENT and OMNIBENEVOLENT in the face of evil and suffering in the world that He created.   

In conclusion, St Augustine’s teaching about human relationships before the Fall is highly significant.  Without this element of St Augustine’s teaching, St Augustine’s THEODICY and particularly his FREE WILL DEFENCE could not work and St Augustine’s wider THEOLOGY of Grace could not work either.  St Augustine’s teaching about human relationships before the fall are crucial in defending the possibility of God being both OMNIBENEVOLENT and OMNIPOTENT, human FREEDOM real and the universe FAIR, so much so that even Immanuel Kant relied on a similar, albeit unsatisfactory and contentious, theory to explain the human condition.  And yet, St Augustine’s teaching about human relationships before the Fall relies on some degree of Biblical LITERALISM and on scientific NAIVITY. It does not provide the needed evidence that human beings are capable of being good or responsible for all the evil and suffering in the world, because as St Augustine put it, all the evils that affect mankind are “either sin or punishment for sin”.  In the end, the very significance of St Augustine’s teaching about human relationships before the fall undermines his wider attempt at THEODICY and THEOLOGY.   

“Religious faith requires belief in a separate soul” Discuss (40)

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Assuming that the statement refers to Christian faith, through the history of Christianity there have been Christians who have believed in a separate soul (e.g. Descartes) and others who have not (e.g. St. Matthew) but the crux of the issue is whether such a belief is required.  This begs the question “by who or what standard?”  Obviously, belief in a separate soul is not required by the Creeds; the Apostles’ Creed affirms “I believe in the resurrection of the body and life everlasting” which suggests that Christian faith requires not a dualist but an avowedly monist position.  Further, the Catechism of the Roman Catholic Church 1059 affirms that “The holy Roman Church firmly believes and confesses that on the Day of Judgment all men will appear in their own bodies before Christ’s tribunal to render an account of their own deeds”.  It is clear that no belief in a separate soul can be required by orthodox Christian faith, although I will argue that belief in a separable soul might make it easier to sustain faith in the face of life’s challenges and apparent inequities.

Christian faith promises salvation; union with God and restitution for the injustices apparent in this life.  Nevertheless, the New Testament is unclear about how this salvation will come about and whether the afterlife will entail bodily existence or be purely spiritual.  The Synoptic Gospels suggest an immanent eschatology; descriptions of heaven and hell are earth-like and seem to suggest that people will have resurrected bodies to experience reward or punishment much as we experience these in the coming Kingdom of God.  Matthew 25 (the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats) suggests that the evangelists expected that Jesus will soon return to judge the living and the dead and supports a physical understanding of hell ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels” (Matthew 25:41)  Luke 16:23-24 also supports this view “So he called to him, ‘Father Abraham, have pity on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, because I am in agony in this fire.’ Other references to the final judgement are similar “And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. ‘He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death’ or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.” (Revelation 21:3-4) and this vision of the end-times seems consistent with Old Testament references, such as those in Ezekiel and Isaiah.  Christian faith supported by references in the synoptic gospels would require no belief in either a separate or a separable soul, only a belief in physical resurrection. Nevertheless, belief in physical resurrection is difficult to sustain in the modern world.  There is a complete lack of supporting evidence and it is difficult to see how it could deliver the promised reward (or punishment) in a fair and just manner.  Surely, those who died hundreds or thousands of years before the final judgement would be at greater risk of their bodes having disintegrated.  Surely, those who died as infants, after losing limbs, in extreme old-age or whose bodies were destroyed utterly would seem less likely to get their just deserts.  While “all things are possible with God” (Matthew 19:26) and Christian faith requires a belief in God’s omnipotence, it is clear that this cannot extend to God doing the logically impossible, or else most theodicies would collapse and God could not also be all-good. While God resurrecting people out of nothing by reassembling them from dispersed dust into their ideal form may not be logically impossible, it comes close to being so in some cases.

It is obvious why many 21st Century Christians prefer to believe in an eternal life, reward or punishment which begins soon after each person’s death.  A belief in immediate reward and punishment would work either with dualism, belief in a separate soul, or with a belief in re-creation into a parallel dimension.

Immediate reward or punishment through dualism, in a purely spiritual sense, is superficially easier to reconcile with science and reason.  There have been many reports of Near Death Experiences which, if credible, would to support belief in disembodied existence immediately after death.  Pam Reynolds’ experience during standstill surgery in 1991 is often seen as one of the best documented cases. More recent research conducted by Dr Sam Parnia at the University of Southampton might suggest that the soul could continue after death without a body.  In addition, a spiritual interpretation of the afterlife would be more rationally defensible than physical resurrection.  It is easier to see how a soul could survive eternally; a risen body would still be physical and so subject to aging, sickness, disability and other associated limitations.  It is easier to see how a soul could come “face to face” with God, who is not normally seen to have a physical existence as human beings do. Further, parts of John’s gospel, the Johannine letters and Paul’s letters seem to support a more spiritual interpretation of eternal life. Verses such as “So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.” (2 Corinthians 4:18) and “So then, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; what is old has passed away – look, what is new has come!” (2 Corinthians 5:17) and “Whoever sows to please their flesh, from the flesh will reap destruction; whoever sows to please the Spirit, from the Spirit will reap eternal life.” (Galatians 6:8) seem obviously Platonic in their influence and are closest to dualism. However, although faith with a purely spiritual eschatology seems easier to reconcile with science and reason, it comes with significant problems and has been relatively rare through the history of Christianity. Belief in a separate soul – dualism – is difficult to defend in philosophical or scientific terms and suggests other beliefs and practices which are incompatible with Christian theology. Descartes argued for a Christian dualism, but struggled to provide a coherent account of why the soul would be enfleshed, how soul and body interact and how a disembodied soul could experience reward or punishment in the way that would be necessary for Christian promises of eternal life to be meaningful.  The Catholic Church never accepted the idea that eternal life could be purely spiritual and disembodied because this might seem to dilute the punishment of hell – annihilation or distance from God would scarcely seem a disincentive to people who have decided to commit mortal sins after all.  Further, by the Middle Ages the Church realized that dualism supports an utter contempt for the physical body, which can lead people towards extreme and unhealthy asceticism or towards a disregard for the sins of the body and the belief that its sins – sexual sins included – are less significant.

Belief that the body can be re-created in a parallel dimension after death to receive reward or punishment is far preferable.  Seeking a middle-way between the difficulties of basing faith on a future physical resurrection and basing it on dualism and a purely spiritual eternal life, St Thomas Aquinas developed his Theology on the basis of Aristotle’s Philosophy.  Rejecting the dualism proposed by his teacher Plato, in his Metaphysics, Aristotle had set out how all beings have four different types of cause; material causes (physical ingredients), efficient causes (agents), formal cause (what makes something what it is, its definition) and a final cause (the purpose or end to which its existence pertains). Aristotle understood that the soul is the formal cause of the human being, what makes it what it is and defines its existence.  Unlike Plato however, Aristotle did not see the form of a being having any separate metaphysical existence.  The form depends on the materials it specifies, and the end towards which it works.  The soul is, in effect, the function of the body – what Gilbert Ryle later described as “the ghost in the machine” – it gives the impression of being a separate entity but in fact it depends entirely on the physical body for its existence. This is where Aquinas departed from Aristotle; he argued that on death the body is re-created in a parallel heavenly dimension and that the new unity of soul and heavenly body is subject to punishment and reward.  Arguably, this idea of re-creation has a basis in scripture; references such as “They are buried as natural human bodies, but they will be raised as spiritual bodies.” (1 Corinthians 15:42-44) can be interpreted as Biblical support for Aquinas’ “modified dualism”.  Further, John Hick developed a defense of re-creation into a parallel dimension through the “replica theory” which he developed in Death and Eternal Life (1976).  As Hick argued, provided that the replica retains the memories of the original, difficulties with spatio-temporal continuity can be overcome.  When Captain Kirk said “beam me up Scotty!” there was no doubt that Kirk remained Kirk although there was a break in his spatio-temporal existence. Aquinas’ theory of re-creation supports Christian faith far better than either monism and physical resurrection or dualism and purely spiritual reward/punishment.  It avoids both the challenges presented by science and reason to belief in physical resurrection and the theological pitfalls of dualism, while straining credulity to a lesser extent because it requires only that the soul could be briefly separable, not that it must be sustained in a separate state.  For this reason, Aquinas’ theory was adopted into the doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church at the Council of Trent in the 16th Century.

In conclusion, it is clear that orthodox Christian faith does not require belief in a separate soul.  Christian faith can be sustained through a belief in physical resurrection, either in the future starting with the final judgement as the Synoptic Gospels, Creeds and Catechism suggest, or through re-creation into a new body in a parallel dimension as St Thomas Aquinas suggested.  Re-creation does not require belief in a separate soul, but does suppose that the soul is separable.