The very day on which I returned to review this excellent work on sin and responsibility by Jesse Couenhoven, a two-year-old in the United States reached into his mother's bag, found her handgun, and shot and killed her while riding in the front of her grocery cart. This unbelievably tragic scene captured all too poignantly the issues wrestled with here: the nature of personal accountability, inevitable evil, culpability, societal influences and the need to understand how it is that we become the sort of persons we are. Couenhoven realises that Augustine is in dire need of better ‘public relations' in these sensitive areas, for nowhere is he more pilloried than for his views on salvation, sin and all the attendant issues – peccatum originale (a term he himself coined), its transmission and Augustine's belief that human sexuality was fundamentally flawed (and thus the very likely fons et origo of our innately disordered concupiscence), as well as the consequent possibility of eternal separation from God, even for those not responsible for their unbaptised souls. Overall, Couenhoven's central argument in these pages is to show that while no one brought into a post-lapsarian world may ever escape evil, we are still responsible for the types of persons that we allow ourselves to become, thereby inviting each of us toward the radical need for divine grace and the unmatchable good news that no one need try to save him or herself.

Divided into two main sections, part i (chapters i–iii) parses the Augustinian vision of original sin (along with its cause and its effects), especially as the Doctor of Grace develops these issues in his extended opposition to the Pelagians. Couenhoven begins by showing Augustinian original sin (defined most generally as a ‘condition of disordered desire, a misrelation to self and to God’, p. 37) to be a two-fold reality: both a form of Adamic solidarity or the ‘common guilt’ of proto-humanity's turn from God (as Augustine stressed from Romans v.12), as well as a ‘constitutional fault’ of our own personal disorders. The result is not simply concupiscence (a term that Couenhoven realises is adiaphorous) but carnal concupiscence and the all too readily obvious realities of all that afflicts the human person.

At this point many readers will come to sympathise with Couenhoven's Augustine whose theory of original sin is not directly linked to his theories of predestination but instead is a way of making sense of a large part of Scripture, of embracing Christ as the Second Adam and necessary new arche of the human race, the Church's liturgical practice of baptising newborn children, as well as a very poignant explanation for the destructive habits that we experience both from within and from without ourselves. We are also refreshingly reintroduced to an Augustine whose theories were not as absolute as his critics suggest and whose ideas were not always as consistent as his students desire. Couenhoven judiciously indicates where Augustine questioned himself and where he was unwilling to demand too much exactitude from the Christian story.

Couenhoven next lays out the compatibilism of Augustine, showing how, regardless of all external factors, including divine foreknowledge, we are responsible not only for our actions, but ultimately for who we have become through the formative factors of our own personal identities. Dignity, not despair, is the point for this very un-Manichean Augustinian acknowledgement: I am this and not that kind of person because, ultimately, I want to be (as Couenhoven confesses much later, ‘Sin is not simply our portion but also our preference’, p. 217). Unlike the proponents of other ethical theories, Augustine maintains that we become our fullest selves only as we are unified around the good. He knows all too well that a divided soul praying ‘Grant me chastity, but not yet’ will never be satisfied because it will never really get what it wants. Orders of desires (employing insights by Harry Frankfurt) and the self's relationship to the good are therefore central topics here. The truest self is thus the one no longer torn by disorder. For who is more free than God and (by extension) the saints in heaven? This is precisely what Augustine means by distinguishing between ‘greater’ or ‘truer’ freedom (libertas maior or uera libertas) and libertas minor, that lesser type of freedom that is still understood as the possibility of choosing good or evil.

Whereas the first half of this book is the fine work of an adroit surgeon dissecting a theological macrostructure, the second half becomes a masterful reorchestration. Chapters iv–vii thus serve as a defence of Augustine's thought. While Couenhoven distances a number of his own views from some of Augustine's core themes, like an historic fall and how to understand the guilt of infants, his representation of Augustine is admirable and attractive to the modern reader. Above all, Couenhoven wants to rehabilitate this legacy by focusing not on an innate inherited guilt, but on the bondages and misrelations that we inevitably find ourselves in, existential as well as societal. Echoing Girardian mimesis, Couenhoven emphasises how each of us begins ‘our conscious lives and discover our personal identities in a state of sin. Even prior to our action, our motives, cares, and attitudes are shot through with evils that are properly attributed to us and for which we are accountable’ (p. 210). Thus the Augustinian legacy is reworked to show how realities like sexism and other forms of hateful prejudices provide good test cases wherein we experience a lack of personal freedom but not necessarily responsibility.

In other words, we all too readily find ourselves conceived in a reality which demands a saviour outside of our own condition. This is the good news with which these pages conclude. In Couenhoven's reappropriation, sin is hence more ‘personal’ than ever, thereby calling us to greater accountability and therefore to an even greater sense of forgiveness (both personally and mutually), and receptivity of our salvation. For no one ‘did’ anything to find him or herself broken, so there is nothing anyone can ‘do’ to become whole: ‘The belief that we are not masters of our own goodness and cannot justify ourselves is not a counsel of despair but a testimony concerning our proper hope. It is good news that libertas is not an autonomous achievement but a gift’ (p. 224). As such, by sifting through Augustine's many kernels of truth, Couenhoven brings forth an equally substantial fare, but one that may just prove more palpable today.