Augustine on human nature

• Jean-Jacque Rousseau on human nature

  • Humans are naturally good but due to situations, are forced to act otherwise. 
  • He thinks society should remove barriers so that humans can be good. 

  “Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.” 
• Thomas Hobbes on human nature   

  • Humans are selfish and brutish. 
  • The only difference from animals is that we recognise that working together can be used for personal gain. 

  “Life of man, solitary, poor, brutish and short” 
• Foucault on human nature

  • Human nature, like any other quality, is taught to us. We are socialised and educated to think and behave in a particular way. 
• Marx on human nature

  • There is no such thing as human nature. Humans have to work and create to guarantee their survival; everything else is a product of their environment. 
• Augustine's early life 

  • Born in North Africa in 354 AD 
  • Mother was a devout Christian, but Augustine didn’t share faith 
  • He was very intelligent, which his father saw and sent him to study rhetoric at Carthage. 
  • Here, he read Cicero for the first time which fueled his pursuit for wisdom and the idea that the Bible was full of contradictions. 
• Augustine was also influenced by  

  • Manicheism: a form of Christianity that argued suffering and evil was not caused by God but a lower power. Humans have two souls: a higher soul that desires God and a lower soul that desires evil. 
  • Platonists: admirers of Plato that believed soul and body are unable to work in harmony because the body is lustful therefore truth, wisdom and happiness can only be achieved once soul has separated from material desires. Platonists also said that Jesus did not die for our sins but was enlightened by the One however Plato disagreed.  
• Despite this, Augustine was still not satisfied so he saw Bishop Ambrose who advised him to reread the Bible. 

  • “Not in reveling and drunkenness... and make no provision for the flesh to gratify its desires” - Romans, Bible.  
• Augustine describes his moment of conversion:

  “For in an instant, it was as though the light of confidence flooded into my soul and all darkness of doubt was expelled” - Confessions, Augustine. 
• Augustine also wrote a book called Confessions which was an autobiography of his mistakes to clear his conscience and be an example/ warning to others. 
• All these sinful actions made him unhappy and even after conversion, he had to struggle against evil to do the right thing. 
• Pelagians argued that humans have sufficient free will to overcome personal sin: 

  • Even if Adam had not sinned, he would have still died 
  • Adam’s sin only harmed himself not the whole human race 
  • Children are born in the same state as Adam before his fall 
  • The whole human race does not die through Adam’s sin 
  • Even before the coming of Christ, there were men who lived without sinning 

  Augustine famously disagreed with this view. 
• Before the fall was a time where body, will and reason are in complete co-operation with each other. 
• Sex was secondary to Adam and Eve’s friendship before the fall. 

  “Then the man would have sowed the seed and women would have conceived the child when their sexual organs had been aroused by the will, at the appropriate time and in the necessary degree and had not been excited by lust” - Augustine, City of God 
• After the fall, humans became prideful

  Augustine thinks that pride is a negative quality because it is the belief that you are better than God. 

  “After his fall, his ambition was to worm his way, by seductive craftness, into the consciousness of man, whose unfallen condition he envied, now that he himself is fallen” - Augustine. 
• Augustine believes that the fall was because of humans joining Satan and the abuse of free will.

  “The evil will precedes the evil act” - Augustine 
• Divided Will: Despite knowing what good is, humans are continually weakened by desires to do the opposite. 
• “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not what I want but I do the very thing I hate... Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but the sin that dwells within me.” -Romans, Bible 
• “I was overcome with shame, because I was still listening to the futile mutterings of my lower self.” - Augustine 
• Continence: self-restraint, especially to abstain from sexual pleasures. Augustine describes continence using the metaphor of a beautiful women. 
• Concupiscence: Sexual lust but can also refer to uncontrollable desires of all kinds.
• “Human nature then is, without doubt ashamed about lust and rightly ashamed.” - Augustine 
• Augustine on Original Sin

  • Ontological condition of human existence  
  • Double death – kills friendship with humans and God but also the moral state of every human 
  • Transmission of sin 
• Augustine on Predestination 

  • All humans are inevitably prone to sin 
  • Only God knows who is deserving of his grace to be rewarded in heaven 
  • Humans must simply hope and keep faith 
• Ambrose and Origen – takes the fall too literally. They interpret the fall to be a metaphor for the progression of life or the realization of flaws. 
• Richard Dawkins says that we should not be good for reward but because we recognise that it is the right thing to do. Therefore, it is immoral.  

  • Collective responsibility is not just 
  • Does not follow with human evolution 
  • Even symbolic accounts of the Fall, have an unhealthy obsession with sin, guilt, violence and suppressed sexuality 
  • Killing Jesus for our sins is sadomasochistic and irrational 
• “What kind of ethical philosophy is it that condemns every child even before it is born to inherit the sin of a remote ancestor?” - Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion.
• Christopher Hitchens says that the fall is ‘too human’. Religion facilitates sexism and control of elites – it was only accepted due to lack of science and so to still believe in it is irrational. 
• “Invention of religion was the original sin” - Christopher Hitchens. 
• Freud 

  • Religion is a mental illness caused by trauma sustained in childhood due to sexual attraction to parents. Because of this, we look to God to replace parental figures. 
  • Agreed with Augustine that lust is natural but said that it should be channeled, and we should not feel guilty. 
• “The behaviour of a human being in sexual matters is often a prototype for the whole of his other modes of reaction in life.” - Freud