MacDonald, Scott - Primal Sin

07/17/2009

The Augustinian Tradition, G Matthews ed. University of California Press, 1999 Ch 6

This paper tries to give a satisfactory account of St Augustine's concept of the primal sin of Adam & Eve and of the angels who turned against God. For Augustine, primal sin had to be voluntary, which meant it had to be a free act of will. The difficulty here is that a free act of will to sin suggests a bad will, or some bad efficient explanation. Augustine is constrained because of his debate with the Manichaeans, a sect that believed that there were two powers in the universe, one good and one evil. Augustine believes that there is only one power: God's, and it is supremely good. So Augustine does not want to admit that there is such a thing as a bad efficient cause to a free act of the will. Instead he claims that primal sin (turning away from the perfect goodness of God for an imperfect, lesser good) is a deficient act of the will-- a failing-- rather than one that was properly motivated. Yet this leaves Augustine in a difficult position: that of claiming that primal sin involved a free act of will that has no efficient origin. The unpleasant alternative is to admit that primal sin had origins in a bad will, but such an admission could implicate the creator (God) in the sin, since God created everything and God is only good (pg114-5). The author tries to resolve these problems. Note: this is not an attempt to deal with 'original sin', which is transmitted through the generations from the first sinful human beings. Instead it is an attempt to show how good creatures like angels and Adam & Eve can, through a deficiency, take a voluntary action of turning from God. (pg114)

Augustine's famous resolution of the problem of evil lies in its being a corruption from essence, having no actual essence of its own. Since God made everything good, evil must not be a thing but instead a 'privation' (pg114) or defection from good nature. In the same vein, for Augustine primal sin is corruption of 'rational nature' (pg115) that is done voluntarily and solely by the agent. The cause of primal sin must reside solely with the angels or humans; God must be totally blameless (e.g. God didn't make a faulty product) (pg115-6). Furthermore, primal sin must not be coerced or the result of some irresistible impulse-- the agents must have had the capacity to choose otherwise from what they did do. (pg117-8) Author couples this with Augustine's conception of sin here, which is a turning away from the ultimate, unchanging good (God's) to a lesser, temporal good-- this is a 'disordered' act of the will. (pg118) What explains this disorder, since it is irrational to turn away from God's goodness (and God didn't make humans to be irrational), and the angels and Adam & Eve weren't ignorant in any sense (if they were, they couldn't have full responsibility for their choices). (pg119-120)

Author argues that it must be a carelessness of practical reasoning that was the source of primal sin. (pg121) The carelessness consists in failing to attend to the goodness of God and attending instead to other good things. Primal sinners may still harbor the belief of God's ultimate goodness, but fail to attend to the fact when deciding to commit the primal sin. Author gives an example from modern life: about to go home from work, asks you to coffee; even though you had promised to take your children to the park, you fail to consider your other desires/beliefs and agree to go to coffee. Essentially, you fail to attend to all the reasons you have for going home instead of going for coffee. (pg123) If you managed to consider all your concurrently-held beliefs/desires, you would go home, but you have a failure in practical reasoning and you go to coffee instead. (pg124). Author considers this failure to be not an efficient reason but a deficient reason for willful action. This limitation isn't a defect, but a side-effect of the 'flow of conscious experience' that 'cannot help but make certain of [our] reasons more and others less immediate at any given moment.' (pg127) And the limitation is due to the fact that angels and Adam & Eve were created 'ex nihilo', from nothing (pg127).

There are two objections to this explanation that the author addresses:
1) This kind of failure might be possible, but it only represents momentary lapses or small errors and don't represent some sort of deep-seated corruption, the kind of corruption required for the gravity of primal sin. (pg128)
Reply: small lapses can build up into a pattern of the same behavior, small peccadilloes can create a pattern of thought that results in a characteristic lapse. (pg129-130)

2) This explanation still doesn't give the reasons for primal sin-- now you need to explain why the primal sinners had the motives and desires to fail in their practical reasoning.
Reply: while perhaps every willful action must be explained by appeal to reasons/beliefs/desires/motives, we don't insist on the same for every time we don't do something. And this explanation for primal sin entails a failure to act-- a not-doing of something-- not an action. (pg130-2)

Author ends the paper by broadening the account of primal sin into a genuine explanation of culpable irrationality that can be added to the cannon of moral decision-making.