Augustine and the West

David Knowles begins his chapter on St. Augustine in The Evolution of Medieval Thought by noting Augustine's almost overwhelming influence not only on Medieval thought but on all Western Christendom. In fact, Knowles' judgment could, and should, be extended to Western thought as a whole in many important respects:

St Augustine, it would be generally agreed, has had a greater influence upon the history of dogma and upon religious thought and sentiment in Western Christendom than any other writer outside the canon of Scripture. (29)

Even in this day, Augustine's influence remains paramount in the West. For example, in the Catechism of the Catholic Church it is Augustine and not Thomas Aquinas who is--with the exception of Scripture--the most frequently cited authority. Nor is Augustine's influence confined to religion, for the roots of most of our political and philosophical ideas in the West can be found in the various attempts to resolve the problems that Augustine bequeathed us and the implications of his thought.


Thus, almost immediately after he notes Augustine's great influence, Knowles goes on to point out what may appear at first to be a paradoxical "dark side" to Augustine's influence:

Yet, strangely enough, there is an obverse to this brilliant medallion. If Augustine was a second Bible to the dark and middle ages, he was all but the gospel of the three great heresies, Lutheranism, Calvinism and Jansenism, that absorbed so much of the mental activity of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries... Not only has his teaching on grace, free-will and predestination been pressed into service against orthodox belief, but his teaching on the Eucharist has been interpreted in a non-Catholic sense. (30)

Original Sin: The Later Fathers

J. N. D. Kelly resumes his discussion of original sin in Chapter XIII of Early Christian Doctrines, “Fallen Man and God's Grace.” Having dealt with the earlier Fathers, up to the 3^rd Century, he now turns to the later Fathers. He once again contrasts the relative optimism of the Greek Fathers with the decidedly pessimistic Western view of man, especially the Augustinian tradition that was passed on to the Western Middle Ages. He then notes the unsettled state of opinion regarding the origin of the soul. Early Christians were in general agreement that man is composed of body and soul, but there was some disagreement on the specifics. The opinion of most of the Greek Fathers--that the soul for each individual is created by God at the moment that the body is ensouled--ultimately won the day.

That, however, was not at the time a universal opinion. We have seen that Origen—an influential figure—held that the soul pre-existed the body and was attached to a body as punishment for sins that were committed by the soul in its pre-existing state, i.e., before being “assigned” to a body. This was definitely a minority opinion, but was not formally condemned until the 6^th Century. Hilary, Ambrose (d. 397) and Jerome all accepted the dominant Greek view, which was to become the orthodox view in both East and West. Pelagius (d. 420), of course, also held that view.

There was also a third view, the traducian view of Tertullian, which held that the soul of the offspring is somehow generated from the souls of the parents. Tertullian, as we have seen, held a materialist view of human nature. In the East, Kelly notes (345) that Gregory of Nyssa (d. 394) seemed to share something like Tertullian's view, for he argued (against Origen) to the effect that the soul comes into being simultaneously with the body but that “the power of God work[ed] mysteriously on the human sperm to change it into a precious living being.”

However, by far the most important figure who tended toward Tertullian's views was Augustine (d. 430). While Augustine never fully made his mind up on the matter, and while he was critical of Tertullian's materialist views, he also realized that “a spiritual version of the same theory [traducianism] fitted in best with his teaching about original sin.” (345)