#saint augustine

[leatherandmossprints]

‘Saint Augustine’ (detail) by Philippe de Champaigne, c. 1645-1650.

[thoughtkick]

The world is a book, and those who don't travel read only a page.

Saint Augustine

[apenitentialprayer]

i know that as a catholic you just have to believe with what the church says but i really dont like the belief of the original sin, i feel like its such a horrible thing to believe about yourself and about other human beings too

There are actually ways of legitimately dissenting from less essential Church teachings in a way that leaves you in good standing with the Church; I'm not sure if Original Sin is one of those things, though, to be honest.

But, anon, I'm going to offer another perspective here, starting from a quote (perhaps ironically?) from my favorite heretic. One of the things that James Carroll believes is that Original Sin has been given a bad wrap. In Constantine's Sword, he says:

I referred to Augustine’s assertion of the idea that the human condition implies a perennial state of finitude, weakness, and sin, all of which will be overcome, even for the Church, only with the end of time. [...] Augustine is thus regarded as the father of a severe, flesh-hating, sin-obsessed theology, but that dark characterization misses the point of his insight. His honest admission of the universality of human woundedness is a precondition for both self-acceptance and the forgiveness of the other, which for Augustine always involved the operation of God’s grace, God’s gift. Only humans capable of confronting the moral tragedy of existence, matched to God’s offer of repairing grace, are capable of community, and community is the antidote to human woundedness. Augustine sensed that relationship as being at the heart of God, and he saw it as being at the heart of human hope, too. This is a profoundly humane vision.

I wish I had understood the spirit of this quote when I was in high school. I remember learning in my World History class that Islam teaches that all children are born good, and then the world makes them evil. And I remember my teacher asking how that compares with Christianity, and I raised my hand and said that Christianity teaches that all of us are born evil. Because I believed that at the time. And, really, the whole framing of that question was wrong and gave really simplistic representations of what Islam and Christianity teaches, but I don't think we're alone in having internalized that understanding, anon. And that's a shame.

I thin it's important to remember the worldview that the doctrine of Original Sin is actively defending us against; there was an idea, that gets called "Pelagianism" (the poor guy it got named after may not even have believed it), that said that humans were capable of being saved on their own, by their own power. Someone on this site recently asked what people's thoughts on Pelagianism were, so you can read my thoughts here. But to keep it short and sweet, I think Original Sin is an important doctrine because it saves you from the need to be perfect.

There are ways to treat Original Sin that I think are certainly unhealthy, and I think the doctrine can be a source of anxiety and fear. But I also think, very deeply, that Original Sin should be a reason why we treat ourselves and especially our neighbor with kindness and understanding. I can look at myself and say "What I do, I do not understand. For I do not do what I want, but I do what I hate. […] For I do not do the good that I want, but I do the evil I do not want" (Romans 7:15, 19). And I can say that because I know I am ontologically wounded; that all of us have our weaknesses. That while we may still be in the moral wrong for committing a morally wrong action, our wills are compromised in a way that causes us to incline towards the comfortable and the easy rather than the good.

I wish I could go back in time and tell that class that Christianity does not teach that people are born evil. I wish I could go back and tell them that it teaches that we are born in a state of dis-integration, that we are wounded beings yearning for wholeness; alienated beings seeking everlasting belonging; beings lost in darkness, seeking the light. But I can say it now: the doctrine of Original Sin doesn't have to be an occasion to think you're depraved and without value, but it can be an invitation to come to terms with your own woundedness, because doing that (to use the words of Lutheran theologian Nancy Eiesland) "opens a space for the inflowing of grace and acceptance."

[quotemadness]

The world is a book, and those who don’t travel read only a page.

Saint Augustine

[koredzas]

Sandro Botticelli - Saint Augustine. 1480

[konigs-left-pec]

Just gonna drop this here in case any of you need a little beach in your life this morning. 🌊🐚🔊

[quotefeeling]

The world is a book, and those who don't travel read only a page.

Saint Augustine

[ominouspositivity-or-else]

[onegreasygal]

I’ll say it once and I’ll say it again, Augustine was a bottom.

[perfectfeelings]

The world is a book, and those who don't travel read only a page.

Saint Augustine

[oldflorida]

I'd rather be in St. Augustine, 1880's -1897

[orthodoxadventure]

Cleanse me from my secret sins, O Lord

Confessions, Saint Augustine

[noosphe-re]

What remains today of Newton's fundamental breakthrough? Modern life, our system of education founded on the requirements of punctuality, scholastic exercises on the charts of train schedules, geographic maps—all this inculcates in us, from childhood, a very Newtonian idea of space and time. This is why we have such difficulty perceiving the absurdity of questions such as"What lies beyond the limits of the universe?" or "What existed before the creation of the world—or before the Big Bang?" We marvel at the apparent modernness of Saint Augustine, who was already addressing similar questions fifteen centuries ago: "Time did not exist before heavens and earth.” But few among us know or have really assimilated the Kantian critique of the concepts of space and time. Kant constructed this critique specifically to chart the boundaries between knowledge and faith, to free science from metaphysical presuppositions, to deliver geometry from the shadow of theology to which Newton had in fact ascribed it. For Kant, space and time are not things in themselves but "forms of intuition”—in other words, they constitute a canvas that allows us to decipher the existence of the world. According to Kant, things "in themselves" are neither in space nor in time. It is the human mind that, in the very act of perception, superimposes these categories, which are its own and without which perception would be impossible. This does not exactly mean that space and time are illusions or pure inventions of the human mind. These frameworks are imposed on us through empirical contact with nature and are not, therefore, "arbitrary.” They no more belong to things in themselves than they belong to the mind alone; rather, they exist because of the dialogue between the mind and things. They are, in the final analysis, an unavoidable product of motion itself by means of which the mind searches to apprehend—to understand—the outside world.

Rémy Lestienne, The Children of Time: Causality, Entropy, Becoming

[apenitentialprayer]

hi, this is a legitimate question, I'm not trying to start any kind of argument or debate. Where does the idea in Catholicism that the Virgin Mary was free from sin come from? Again, I'm merely asking for informational purposes, not to start anything.

Okay, lets hit this real quick.

The sinlessness of Mary was a majority, but not unanimous, opinion of the orthodox Christian community by the late fourth century. Saint Augustine can confidently say that out of all the saints, she is the only one who did not sin; as does his teacher, Saint Ambrose. Maximus of Turin likewise takes this position, but instead of talking about her lack of sinfulness, he focuses on a positive formula: she has "original grace." The Syriac Fathers, of whom Ephraem of Edessa is probably the most well known, also love, love, love drawing parallels between Mary and Eve, as well as giving her titles like "all-pure" and "most-holy."

(Lest anyone think this is a post-Nicene development in Christian theology, Hippolytus of Rome also taught that Mary was free from corruption. This is especially interesting, because Hippolytus is said to be a student of Saint Irenaeus, who could trace his teaching back to Saint John the Apostle).

But by the Middle Ages, all that was universally agreed on was that Mary was never personally responsible for committing a sin; there was a question of whether she was still under the effects of Original Sin. It was an 11th Century English theologian who first formulaically proposed the idea that Mary was free from sin from the moment of her creation; he said it was possible, it was fitting, and so God did it. (Notice that this argument expressly does not argue that Mary had to be immaculate in order to give birth to the Savior). It wasn't until Franciscan theologian Blessed Duns Scotus took up the cause that it became the controversy that it did. Duns Scotus (who, it should be noted, was also the major proponent for the absolute primacy of Christ in the Middle Ages) provided arguments from Scripture, tradition, and reason to argue in favor of the Immaculate Conception.

That being said, Mary's Immaculate Conception remained a pious opinion for a long time; even the Council of Trent, which affirms the Virgin Mary's freedom from personal sin, only suggests Mary may have been exempt from Original Sin. It is not until 1854 that the Catholic Church elevated the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception to dogma and formally defined what that doctrine meant.

As I said, this is a very, very fast overview; if you want a Scriptural reference, I would suggest Luke 1:28, in which Mary is referred by the Archangel Gabriel not by name, but by a title: κεχαριτωμένη, or Kecharitōmenē, translated as "Favored One" or "Full of Grace." This word, which is unique in Greek literature to Luke, indicates that Mary is some sort of beneficiary of God, and (as Fr. Charles Grondin says) is an identity; it's connected to her personhood.

[perfeqt]

The world is a book, and those who don't travel read only a page.

Saint Augustine

[koredzas]

Sandro Botticelli - Saint Augustine. Detail. 1480