Augustine's ethical thought and the doctrine of original sin

Augustine is a Christian father of the late Roman Empire -- the traditional date of the "fall" of the Roman Empire is about a half-century after Augustine's death -- while Thomas Aquinas is a thinker of the medieval period. It is worth noting this substantially large time difference -- eight hundred years separates Augustine from Aquinas, just as another eight hundred years separate Aquinas from ourselves -- because we need to see Christian thought within its proper historical context. Augustine helped to consolidate early Christian doctrine, while almost a century later Aquinas served to make Christian doctrine congruent with classical (i.e., Aristotelian) science.

To understand Augustine's ethical thought within its proper context, we need to understand the centrality of the concept of original sin in Augustine's thinking. One of the clearest ways in which Augustine personally tried to clarify the doctrine of original sin was in his context with Pelagius and the Pelagian Heresy. Now the Pelagians had a reputation for a sort of sunny optimism regarding certain human phenomena, like (for example) marital love. The Pelagians believed that human love and certain other experiences were entirely redeemed on earth by God's grace, and thus perhaps gave some sense of what the divine order (or the afterlife) entailed. Augustine's doctrine by contrast was entirely scriptural: Adam and Eve ingesting the apple brought sin into the world, and that original sin was essentially one of pride. The notion that sin corrupts all human phenomena (including the stuff that the Pelagians thought was nice enough to possibly be exempt from sin) is essentially Augustine's point. Augustine's ethical view therefore emphasizes human free will.

For Augustine, free will renders humans capable of resisting evil and choosing good, and thus the sinful corrupt nature of human existence (especially when considered in contrast to an omnipotent omniscient omnipresent godhead) always has the option to choose its own salvation. In other words, Augustine had a doctrine of grace abounding even to those who violate the law -- he admits in his Confessions that as a young man he stole fruit from a neighbor "simply that I might steal, for, having stolen them, I threw them away. My sole gratification in them was my own sin, which I was pleased to enjoy; for, if any one of these pears entered my mouth, the only good flavor it had was my sin in eating it" (34). Before converting to Christianity Augustine had been a Manichee, and held to the belief, heretical for Christians, that good and evil are equally powerful and locked in struggle for control of the world. Occasionally Augustine's sense of the all-pervading nature of sin seems like a relapse into these quasi-gnostic doctrines which would later be rejected by the church, doctrines which essentially made Satan into a kind of demiurgical ruler of the world.

Aquinas, eight hundred years later, is pretty far away from indulging the Manichaean or Pelagian heresy, just as paganism is no longer an active option either. Instead Aquinas made his project to make Christian dogma congruent with pagan ethical teaching; the belief in Augustine's time was that, essentially, all scientific and philosophical enterprise was a sort of footnote to Aristotle anyway. Aquinas therefore hopes to provide a new synthesis of human knowledge, one which is suitable for Christians. This is why "scholasticism," the movement of which Aquinas is the best known proponent, was largely centered on intellectual monks. In some sense, Aquinas and the scholastics believed that God's existence was more or less self-evident, and that the soul's progress toward God could be seen as having a fundamentally rational order behind it. After all, the Pythagoreans may have predated Christ by some 500 years, but the mathematical order that they beheld in creation was not hallucinated by them -- thus the whole of Greek scientific thought was open to Christian annexation, something that was already being done with Aristotle by Islamic scholars like Averroes. The fact that Aquinas wrote an entire tract denouncing the Averroists reminds us that medieval Christianity regarded Islam itself to be a savage Christian heresy (which is why Dante includes Mohammad in the Inferno among the heresiarchs).

For Aquinas, all ethics consists of showing that there are various errors of reasoning inherent in sin, because of course the divine plan of salvation is inherently rational in the Aristotelean mold. Thus sin becomes an interiorized force in Aquinas's thought. Augustine was faced with numerous fleshly temptations -- like the fruit he stole, or the servant girl with whom he fathered a bastard child -- but Augustine turns these into matters of ethical choice. Aquinas, however, needs to inquire into the nature of ethical choice and what is taking place in the mind, so Aquinas declares that there are cardinal virtues (backed up with scriptural authority) that roughly resemble the Aristotelean conception of virtues as being a mean between extremes. Indeed "Prudence" -- which one might describe as the habit of keeping to a mean between extremes -- is one of the cardinal virtues of Aquinas, and Aquinas believed that reason directs man to instinctively act virtuously. To some extent, Aquinas deconstructs Augustine's idea of moral choice: after all, to perceive two choices at all is due to a sense of reason which apparently includes the possibility of goodness at every step, as though God's grace were built into the act of moral choosing (which somewhat undercuts Augustine's heavy emphasis on post-lapsarian corruption of all human ethical endeavors).

As a result, Aquinas is more optimistic than Augustine regarding the human ability to know or do "the good." Augustine emphasizes the post-Edenic fallenness of human nature, the fact that sin is inherent in every human action -- although he specfies that God has given man free will and the ability to choose the virtuous action. Aquinas is more optimistic, as he seems to think that the virtuous actions are also all inherently rational decisions -- in other words, man may attain salvation merely by following his reason. I suspect that these days most thinking Christians capable of a university education are more likely to agree with the scholastic philosopher Aquinas.

Part 2

Nelson Mandela basically argued that years of behaving like Martin Luther King Jr. toward the South African apartheid government had produced no results, and that therefore it was necessary to behave more like Malcolm X The fact that Nelson Mandela has a cameo in Spike Lee's Hollywood film "Malcolm X" where he speaks the words "I am Malcolm X" is an acknowledgement of the debt Mandela's philosophical stance owed to these two American activists (Lee 1992). However, in ethical terms, we are obliged to examine Mandela under the ethical philosophy of war.

A Renaissance-era political philosopher like Hobbes believed that war was the "state of nature." By this, Hobbes meant that all human beings naturally exerting all rights and options open to them would lead to a constant state of disharmony, and individual desires are therefore shaped to the common will. The difficulty of the Hobbesian view comes when we consider the role of an oppressed minority. Hobbes had just lived through the English Civil War, which was fought by different Christian sects (the Royalists who wanted the Church of England to be closer to Catholicism, and the Puritans who wanted it "purified" of Roman influence). Yet Hobbes in Leviathan asserts that a monarch should have complete ecclesiastical control of his domain. In this version of statecraft, Catholicism becomes a perpetual minority that cannot compete with the Protestant Leviathan-monarch -- and indeed this is precisely what happened in Great Britain, and why it led to Mandela-like armed resistance among the Catholic population of Northern Ireland.

Hume's ethical theory by contrast hinges entirely upon the fact that moral behavior is not rational. Hume relies heavily upon the role of "the passions" in human nature, and does not believe ethical decision-making is actually subject to reason. Thus a Humean view would hope that the non-violent approach would work, by appealing to the humane sentiments of the apartheid government. But also Hume is capable of seeing that there is no rational reason to assume that the non-violent approach would work, and certainly Hume was educated enough in history to see the persistence of warfare.

Kant provides us with an entirely different ethical worldview, one which is less hospitable to Nelson Mandela. Kant tells us that the ethical value of an action should be measured by the categorical imperative, which is the question of whether we would wish every person in the society to behave in this way. As Kant phrases it in his Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals, a person should "act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law." (IV:421) Kantianism is partly why the Gandhi or Martin Luther King style of non-violent resistance is often employed in the first place, as a pure ethical statement: we acknowledge the right of anyone to peacefully protest certain conditions. The problem comes when we consider whether armed resistance fighters pass the Kantian universalist test: certainly there are other armed resistance movements -- the Nicaraguan Contras, the Tamil Tigers, or even Al-Qaeda -- who believe themselves to be operating according to the same principles as Mandela. Kantianism is inherently pacifist and quietist because, of course, the idea of violent action is not something we would wish to see endorsed on the societal level.

Part 4

Laud Humphreys's anthropological study on "the tearoom trade" poses an interesting problem in academic ethics. Humphreys proposed to do a study on anonymous gay sex taking place between men in public bathrooms -- in the gay subculture, these bathrooms were referred to as "tearooms" and the ready availability of partners for oral sex was managed in what were essentially public environments by having someone serve as the lookout by the door, while others would perform fellatio knowing that they would be warned if a policeman, security guard, or ordinary bathroom-user was about to walk in.

Although the IRB and the Belmont Report focus on the ethical use of human subjects in research, Humphreys's errors begin with the fact that he did not enroll any human subjects for research: the people he studied did not know they were being studied. The IRB Guidebook states outright that "the voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential" (1993). Humphreys claimed that he was essentially participating in a subculture, as an act of immersive anthropology: in other words, he went to these public bathrooms and served as the lookout for the men engaged in fellatio, and effectively participated in the group behavior of those whom he claimed to "study." And in addition he tracked down some of the participants to be interviewed later, which entailed basically spying on the men who came into the bathroom by taking down their license plate numbers, then interviewing them later in disguise under false pretenses. Considering that homosexuality was still illegal in much of the country at the time -- as is "public indecency" or whatever other crime is entailed in performing fellatio on somebody in a public lavatory -- Humphreys was in some sense following the same playbook as a professional blackmailer.

The real difficulty of the Humphreys study is that it occurred at precisely the moment when an anthropological study of secret homosexual behavior would be valuable. Humphreys published his work in 1970, which was basically just at the start of the gay rights movement. And to some extent Humphreys' research was tendentious -- Humphreys himself was gay, but the fundamental argument of his study is that over half the men participating in the "tearoom trade" had wives and families, thus he saw the activity being described as inherently related to the status of "closeted" homosexuality. The problem is that there would be no way to measure a population of people who do not publicly admit to the behavior they practice sexually: there would be no way to anonymously interview men who take part in such behavior and get an accurate picture in the data of the population as a whole, because over fifty percent of those who participate in the action would never confess to it. The big difference of course now is that the Internet has vastly changed sexual attitudes and practices -- so it would be possible to interview people more or less honestly about their sexual behavior under conditions of anonymity permitted by the Internet.