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Must Be Incomprehensible:
A Critique of Augustine
Robert F. Brown
ABSTRACT
The thesis of this paper is that an absolute origin of evil, arising from the
free will of a creature, must be incomprehensible. Although Augustine
occasionally acknowledges this point, nevertheless in a number of betterknown passages (chiefly in The City of God) he attempts to give a causal
account of the fall of Adam and/ or Satan. Much of the subsequent Christian
tradition has unfortunately followed his lead, and major recent
commentators routinely ignore or passively approve of his conceptual error.
Augustine offers three unacceptable explanations of the fall, which conflict
variously with his own doctrines of divine omnipotence, the goodness of
creation, and creaturely free will and responsibility, as well as violating the
canons of sound argumentation and explanation. First, his contention that
free creatures made "out of nothing" inevitably fall makes the fall seem
ontologically necessary (unfree) and thereby lays the ultimate responsibility
for it on the Creator. Second, the appeal to pride as an explanation is a
spurious causal account, for "pride"is only a synonym for "fallenness"itself
and not a possible antecedent condition in a being created good and not yet
fallen. Finally, his assertion that the first sin is intrinsically comprehensible,
but not comprehensible to us because we are fallen, is an obfuscation
masquerading as an explanation, for we have no warrant for supposing that
this assertion is true or even meaningful.
Instead of seeking causal explanation Augustine should have stayed with
his own wiser observation that an evil will has no efficient cause. Theology of
the Augustinian sort (which comprises much of the Christian tradition)
ought to concede that the fall as a work of genuine freedom is an absurd
"fact," an incomprehensible given which steadfastly and in principle resists
causal explanation. The concluding section of the paper draws upon
Ricoeur's insights to tell why the narrative structure of the "Adamic myth"
(which has important positive functions of its own) begets as an unfortunate
byproduct this tendency to spin out a causal account of the first evil, with the
conceptual confusion resulting from it.
Robert F. Brown (Ph.D., Columbia University) is Associate Professor of Philosophy
at the University of Delaware. His publications include The Later Philosophy of
Schelling: The Influence of Boehme on the Works of 1809-1815 (Bucknell University
Press, 1977), and Schelling's Treatiseon "The Dieties of Samothrace": A Translation
and An Interpretation, AAR Studies in Religion, 12 (1977).
315
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Robert R. Brown
Introduction
317
offers various explanations why a free being would turn away from God. In
doing so Augustine makes the pretense of showing the absolute origin of evil
to be understandable. He should instead have left it as a "brutefact" which the
theologian can only point to but in no way comprehend.
The prevalent view in the Christian tradition since Augustine's day has
been that he rendered coherent and rigorous the account of how the first
persons (and Satan before them) could and did freely choose to fall away from
God without God in any way being the cause of, or a responsible party to, the
act. Augustine carries out this task in part by making three contentions. The
first two serve as explanations for why the first creatures choose evil as they
did. The third tries to persuade us to believe that there is a good explanation
even if we cannot know what it is. The three contentions are:
1. Free creatures made "out of nothing" have an inherent weakness which
makes their falling inevitable.
2. Pride is the cause of the fall.
3. The first sin is "enormous," beyond the comprehension of fallen beings
but not totally incomprehensible in principle.
The major interpreters of Augustine's thought almost uniformly applaud
these assertions, or at least cite them with no further comment as if they were
satisfactory / 2/. On the contrary they ought to be castigating Augustine's
inconsistency, for each of the contentions runs counter to the spirit of the
voluntarism which Augustine himself instigates in the western tradition of
philosophical theology / 3/. The correct move for Augustine would have been
to forego any such rationalizations and face directly the consequences of
holding that the initial willing of evil by Adam or Satan is uncaused, hence
incomprehensible (in principle).
Although in the ensuing exposition and critique I speak often of Adam
and Satan, the main issue is not a narrowly theological one. For Augustine all
persons after Adam are inescapably blighted by Adam's fall, hence not truly
free themselves. Therefore if we wish to see what the Augustinian
philosophical doctrine of will has to say about the circumstance of freely
willing evil, we must look to his statements about Adam (and Satan). In an
Augustinian analysis of free will, but one stripped of the theological doctrine
of the transmission of original sin down through the generations, every free
person would be viewed as at least initially in the original position of Adam
before the fall.
Foundations of Augustine's Voluntarism
Augustine's reflections on the nature of will derive from two convictions
which are shared by most of the philosophers and theologians who could also
be called "voluntarists"/4/. The first is the belief that humans are in a
condition other and less than they ought to be. They are fallen from an ideal or
primordially possessed superior status. The second shared conviction is that
humans are themselves responsible for their fallen condition. The com-
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Robert R. Brown
319
320
Robert R. Brown
321
angels appear not to be truly free at all, but determined, for God has actually
"caused" a behavior that is supposedly freely willed (XII, 9 says they "were
more abundantly assisted"). If we are to count the foregoing as a causal
explanation of the differential behavior of the two groups of angels, then the
only truly free angels turn out to be those who are about to fall, and the price
of this freedom is an inevitable fallenness. Moreover, the inevitability of their
fallenness evidently throws the entire responsibility back onto the Creator's
shoulders.
I have discussed the angelic example at lengtn because in it Augustine
ventures too far, showing inadvertently the untenability of this type of
explanation. In other contexts he also speaks of Adam's mutability as a cause
of his falling. In fact Adam and Eve, like the bad angels, also are afflicted from
the outset with an uncertainty as to how long they will perseverein blessedness
(XI, 12). This affliction seems to be a contributing factor to their eventual fall.
These passages, too, risk laying the whole matter at God's doorstep.
Apparently Augustine doesn't recognize consistently that this explanation
an
appeal to an inevitable mutability of the creature won't do for his
by
purposes, for two reasons. First, it militates against the freedom and therefore
the responsibility of the creature, because the specified mutability makes it
impossible that the unassisted creature not fall / 6/. Augustine doesn't seem to
be bothered by this rather obvious point as long as he can arrange things so
that this inevitable weakness of the creaturecannot be blamed on God, for if it
were the Creator rightly could be held responsible for evil. The second
difficulty is that to stick by this position is to imperil his own conception of
God's sovereign creative power. Consistent with his doctrine of divine
omnipotence, Augustine ought to hold that there can be only one feature of
the creation over which God cannot have perfect control, namely, the initial
acts of will on the part of free creatures. To bring in a second such feature, an
inherent weakness which necessarily plagues all creatures, a disability which
neither they nor God can prevent, is to yield too much ground to Platonism
/ 7/. Moreover, even if this move be allowed, it absolves God of responsibility
for evil at the cost of also relieving creatures of the responsibility. If they must
succumb to this congenital weakness, then this explanation hardly serves as a
satisfactory account of why the first evil willing occurred on the part of afree
creature.
II. Pride is the cause of the fall.
This is the rationale for the first instance of willing evil which Augustine
reiterates most frequently and with the most variations. Perhaps because of
this fact it is the one most often echoed with approval in the subsequent
theological tradition, which is unfortunate because its very familiarity blinds
our sensitivity to its total failure as an explanation. Pride is variously said to
be: "the origin and head of all these evils" (i.e. the vices of the devil) (XIV, 3); a
"defect of nature" (XIV, 13); "the craving for undue exaltation" (XIV, 13);
"the beginning of sin" (XII, 6); what occurs when a soul becomes
"inordinately enamoured of its own power" and thus rejects higher authority
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Robert R. Brown
(XII, 8); the seeking of an excuse for one's sins (XIV, 14). The pride of the evil
angels is seen in their lust for self-advancement (XI, 33) and goes hand in hand
with their love of deception and their envy.
Augustine begins XII, 1 along the proper lines by crediting the original
difference between good and bad angels not to their created natures, but to
their diverse wills. He immediately goes astray, however, by attributing the
diversity of will to pride on the part of the bad angels. What a grand solution
this is: Satan turned away from God because he was proud, and thereby
became a self-centered rebel. But just a minute! Why was he proud? Did God
create him proud? Certainly not, for then God would be responsible for his
fall. Did he make himself proud by the free exercise of his will? So he must
have done, if Augustine's intent to defend the initial freedom and
responsibility of the will is to remain intact. If Satan made himself proud, then
this act of will is itself the fall, and not a "cause"of his falling. Pointing to pride
therefore cannot constitute an explanation for the fall (an account of why the
first evil will willed as it did). It is only the substitution of a synonym for the
inexplicable free act of falling itself. This substitution of "becoming proud"
for "falling"or "first willing evil" is attractive because, by drawing an analogy
to the everyday human sin of pride, it makes Satan's act more vivid, more
appealing to the imagination, more amenable to dramatization. But it
explains nothing, it in no way renders Satan's fall understandable.
Augustine repeats essentially the same account when it comes to Adam,
for he avoids the easy way out of depicting Adam as a witless victim of Satan's
deception or superior power. He heavily underscores Adam's freedom and
responsibility. Adam was corrupted by his own will (XIII, 14). He was proud
as well, his evil will preceding all his evil acts as a deliberate "falling away"
from God, so that he was not deceived (XIV, 11). He would not have
succumbed to the devil's temptation had he not "already begun to live for
himself" (XIV, 13). Adam's pride is not the origin of evil, absolutely
considered, but it is a comparable origin so far as the human race is concerned.
In Adam's case no more than in Satan's does an appeal to it explain why
Adam fell.
It is pride which Augustine puts on center stage, although its defect as an
explanation is patent. In this circumstance it is emphatically not true that
"pride goeth before the fall." Instead, pride is the fall. Because no causal
explanation of this first instance of pride can be given (other than the
unacceptable one of ascribing it to God's creative work), appeal to it fails in its
aim, which was to make the fall understandable.
III. The first sin is beyond the comprehension of fallen beings.
Augustine makes one other attempt to dispel the difficulty, in his evasive
declaration that the first instance of willing evil is understandable in principle
but in fact is beyond the powers of comprehension of fallen humans /8/. (He
handles this issue in terms of Adam's fall, not Satan's.) Because all humans
after Adam are fallen, none can grasp what it was like to be Adam before the
fall. Hence none can in fact comprehend why Adam fell, although we are
323
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Robert R. Brown
325
serpent-Satan with his tempting words; Eve with her gullibility and her
influence upon Adam. What functions do they fulfill?
Ricoeur's ingenious proposal is that the narrativestructureitself conveys a
second aspect of evil as we suffer it here and now. Not only do we know evil in
one sense as something which we initiate by our decisions and for which we are
personally responsible. We also encounter it as something already on the
scene before we are, which lures us into its web. In order to impart both
dimensions of the present experience of evil the Adamic myth must be a myth,
that is, a temporal narrative. The figure of the serpent especially symbolizes
the aspect of evil as "already there." By their roles in the plot both the serpent
and Eve serve to spread the guilt around, so that it seems not to be concentrated entirely on Adam (257). On one hand Adam does the evil deed by
himself. Yet on the other hand he doesn't, for it is also told that the serpent and
Eve do it for him. The narrative format is indispensable for expressing
simultaneously both aspects of evil. The final mythic product resists complete
demythologization, for it depicts a paradoxical teaching about the nature of
evil, a paradox which rational theology cannot resolve. Ricoeur expresses
these points very well. However it is now necessary for me to go beyond
Ricoeur in order to make a specific application of his insights to my critique of
Augustine.
The narrative structure of the myth, indispensable for representing the
aspects of evil as "already there," creates the difficulty for Augustine and
others. Although a vital constituent of a symbolic expression of the
experience of actual evil in the present events of one's life, it only brings
confusion to a theological treatment of the very first instance of willing evil.
For if the one who first wills evil be genuinely free, responsible, and alsofirst,
then evil cannot in any manner have been "already there" (given the other
features I have pointed out in Augustine's Christian doctrines of God and
creation). The error is that Augustine and many others take this mythic
expression of evil as "already there"to be a part of the account of the very first
instance of evil. As so mistakenly employed, it appears to present causes or
reasons for Adam's decision: causes, such as factors bearing on Adam which
predispose him to succumb (the serpent's guile, Eve's influence, his own
naivete); reasons, such as the external motivation ("ye shall be as gods").
Human curiosity seeks to know the causes of everything. Kant contends
(and I am inclined to agree with him) that the very way our minds operate
compels us to suppose that all events in time have causes which are other
events in time. Therefore we are driven to seek to discover in each case what
those causes are. Part of what it means for something to be comprehensible to
us is our ability to view it as caused, as a member of the universal system of
cause and effect which constitutes our world. Something absolutely uncaused
would resist successful integration within the system of other things which we
know. It is of course logically possible that there might be such a thing. But, if
so, it could not be known by us (in the foregoing sense of "know").We would
find it absurd. We might wish to acknowledge it as a very strange sort of
"fact," posited as the absolute starting-point of a particular causal series. But
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Robert R. Brown
327
NOTES
I use the term "incomprehensible" throughout the paper, as well as a few
/ 1/
synonyms such as "inexplicable." By these terms I wish to convey the notion of
something which cannot be fitted rationally into our knowledge of the world as a
closed causal system, even though it might well have been anticipated from a
preliminary consideration of the thing in question that it could or should have been so
fitted in. Perhaps loosely analogous is the case of an odd puzzle piece which cannot be
fitted into any of the remaining spaces, even though one picked it up with the
expectation of adding it to the jigsaw puzzle. More precisely, I mean something which
cannot be fitted into our ordinary world view because it resists being regarded as the
effect of something else which is its cause, and does so steadfastly and in principle. Of
course some philosophers deny that there ever could be such a thing. What I maintain
is that if one wants to speak of a very first instance of willing evil, and to do so within
the Augustinian theological context I describe, that instance must be such an
"incomprehensible" thing.
Aside from passing references to pride one doesn't find any serious discussion
/2/
of whether or not Augustine's accounts of the first sin are actually satisfactory in a
number of full-scale studies (Peter Brown; Portalie; Teselle). Bonner more fully
elucidates, but does not challenge, the thesis that the fall is due to the inevitable
imperfection of creatures (359). Gilson discusses pride, albeit ambiguously, so that it
could be a synonym for the evil will itself ratherthan a cause of it (150f.),and also refers
to Augustine's Platonism in saying that " ... [these principles] . .. even prove that
since God did create, evil was inevitable . . ."(145), but in neither case does he criticize
Augustine's views. Despite Green's detailed analysis of the historical and biographical
factors in Augustine's preoccupation with pride as the initial sin (405-31), he doesn't
step outside the role of historian to ask the critical question: Is Augustine's treatment
of the first instance of willing evil theologically or philosophically satisfactory?
/3/
Sontag maintains that Augustine's intellectualistic metaphysics controls his
theory of free will and thus makes it deterministic (300). On the contrary, I hold that
Augustine's theory of will is at odds with his metaphysics and that he disguises the
inconsistencies. If one takes the Augustinian theory of will at its best without the
overlay of metaphysical "explanation" for the will's willing as it does, and develops it
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Robert R. Brown
more consistently, one discovers the vital impetus for the subsequent voluntarist
tradition in the West (Duns Scotus, some nominalist theologians, Luther, Fichte,
Schelling, et al.). A process metaphysics (as Sontag outlines it, but not by name) is not
the only alternative to Augustinian intellectualism.
The main focus of my analysis and criticism is on the position presented in The
/4/
which is the one typically taken as the philosophically most important
God,
City of
presentation by the mature Augustine of his doctorine of the will and its fallenness. All
parenthetical citations of Augustine in the text of this paper unless otherwise identified
refer to The City of God. Quoted phrases in the text are from the Dods translation. It
was necessary, however, to go to the later anti-Pelagian writings for the textual basis of
the third (and somewhat peripheral) of Augustine's attempts to defend the intellectual
plausibility of the fall.
Cf. On Free Will III, 49: "But what cause of willing can there be which is prior
/5/
to willing? Either it is a will, in which case we have not got beyond the root of evil will.
Or it is not a will, and in that case there is no sin in it . Either, then, will is itself the first
cause of sin, or the first cause is without sin" (Burleigh: 200).
Rist says that the weakness of Adam and Satan "can only be explained
/6/
metaphysically"(233). He goes on to explain correctly that the necessary sinfulness of
these creatures is not due simply to their being created out of nothing, but ratherto the
combination of this weakness with the power of free will which they are given. He
points out that free will is incompatible with the possibility of sinning only in the case
of God. However, it would be a mistake to read this exposition of Rist's as a
legitimation of the explanation for the first willing of evil by an appeal to being created
out of nothing. All it accounts for is the possibility of falling. It in no way shows how or
why this possibility was actualized, other than to shift the ground away from the free
creature'smetaphysical origin to the will that willed the evil. If, on the other hand, it is
suggested that the creature's ontological mutability itself somehow causes the willing
of evil, then the fall is necessitated and not truly free after all.
/7/
Among the Patristic theologians some others have a similar difficulty. For an
example, see my article on Irenaeus. It is possible to circumvent this difficulty at least
partially (Irenaeus does it), but only by jettisoning the traditional doctrines of the
original perfection of Adam and Eve, and of an unrestricted divine omnipotence.
Augustine is not prepared to sacrifice either of them.
Rist links this point with the appeal to pride: "That he failed to do this was
/8/
the mark not of a failure of God's grace but of an inexplicable submission to pride.
Adam's enormous sin is thus beyond the range and beyond the imagination of
contemporary sinners. . ."(230). The texts he cites are: Opus imperfectum contra
Julianum IV,104; Contra Julianum haeresis Pelagianae defensorum I, 7, 33. In both
passages Augustine refers to Adam's falling by his own will as "that enormous sin
(peccatum illud grande), "yet in this immediate context he makes no direct referenceto
pride. Augustine himself doesn't develop fully this third contention about the first
willing of evil (which is actually an unpersuasive rationale for failing to have a good
explanation). In a critique of Augustine it perhaps ought not to be as important as the
first two. However I have given it equal attention because I think it is capable of
standing alone as a separate point, and because it is of interest as the sort of inadequate
answer one often hears from some other religious thinkers.
329
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1963
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n.d.
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Dods, Marcus, trans.
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1960
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