Jesse Couenhoven offers here a philosophical defence of a theological doctrine: the Augustinian doctrine of original sin. He argues that we can indeed be ‘original sinners’, which is to say: responsible for evils of character which we inherited without our own choice. He paints this doctrine as more humane than the moralism of its Pelagian opponents, because it prompts us to mix pity with blame as we acknowledge the often tragic vulnerability of human beings to powers which form our identity without our say-so.
Couenhoven's defence goes only so far, however. It focuses on moral psychology, particularly issues of willing and responsibility, and deliberately leaves God out of the picture. Couenhoven has nothing to say about divine punishment nor does he endorse Augustine's positions on infant guilt and the ‘mass of perdition’, according to which all human beings are born deserving of eternal damnation. And, for the most part, he also steers clear of questions about the transmission of original sin. His final chapter offers an updated concept of inherited guilt and solidarity in sin which does not require a historical Adam or draw conclusions about the judgement of God. His aim is more modest: he wants to give an account of responsibility which explains why we are willing to blame people for faults which are a deep part of their identity but which they did not choose or make themselves. In achieving that limited goal it is, in my judgement, quite successful.
The book looks in two directions: back to the sometimes bewildering complexity of Augustine's texts and forwards to why we might find a modified Augustinian doctrine of original sin humane and believable today. Distinctive in the former direction is Couenhoven's attention to Augustine's later works, including the often neglected and denigrated writings against Julian of Eclanum, Augustine's most formidable Pelagian opponent. Couenhoven sees valuable insights in these massive works where many other scholars see only tedious polemics.
Characteristic of the latter direction is an unusually insightful use of analytic philosophy. Couenhoven draws upon the rich philosophical literature on freedom and responsibility inspired by the work of Harry Frankfurt, without falling into its often excessive technicality. He is attuned to recent philosophical work in moral psychology which aims to make sense of the evaluative texture of ordinary life. In place of sterile conundrums about free will and determinism, Couenhoven gives us an Augustinian way of seeing familiar social phenomena such as sins of omission, unwitting insensitivity, failures of self-knowledge, and vicious beliefs acquired from a flawed upbringing or a benighted culture (presenting Augustine's own sexism as an example of the latter). These are faults of character which people may not have chosen but which reveal who they are, and our ordinary practices of accountability assume that people cannot simply disown responsibility for these faults.
Responsibility in Couenhoven's reconstructed Augustinianism does not require voluntary control, but it does require ‘proper function’. The phrase comes from Alvin Plantinga's epistemology. The key conceptual feature of proper function is its ‘externalism’, which in epistemology means that our ability to know depends on factors which are not fully accessible or controlled by the knower, such as whether her cognitive abilities are functioning properly (she is not insane, senile, drugged, etc.). So also virtue and vice on Couenhoven's account: our virtues can be the result of an operative grace which is hidden from us and our vices may be a kind of involuntary sickness (hence the title, ‘stricken by sin’), so long as we are not sick in ways which cause drastic impairment to proper functioning. Thus bad habits and involuntary addictions don't remove all responsibility; advanced Alzheimer's does; and autism is somewhere interestingly in the middle: people are not responsible for being autistic but may (under certain circumstances, with certain kinds of help from others) be responsible for how well they cope with their autism and adjust to normal social life.
Along with voluntary control, various forms of freedom are not necessary for responsibility on an Augustinian view. True freedom or libertas is treated as a normative concept here; it is the freedom to choose wholeheartedly the good we were made for, which will lead us to eternal happiness. So when we sin, we are not fully free even though we are responsible for what we are doing. Free choice or liberum arbitrium, on the other hand, is a power of consent, the ability to say yes or no to the desire and passions we involuntarily have. In contrast to the Stoics, Augustine regards these desires and passions as fit subjects for moral evaluation, not morally indifferent precursors to our responsible decisions. We should not of course consent to sinful concupiscence, but the concupiscence in us is sinful even when we do not consent to it. Couenhoven interestingly argues that talk of responsibility and talk of freedom are typically used to articulate different kinds of goods – in effect, to do quite different conceptual work – so it is not surprising that the one does not usually require the other.
The keystone of Couenhoven's theory of responsibility is a distinction between ownership and control. We can be owners of an inheritance of sin which we did not choose and had no opportunity to refuse. It is ours because it has already formed our identity, especially our core ‘beliefs and loves’ – a phrase Couenhoven uses as a rough equivalent to Augustine's term voluntas. We are responsible for what we own in this way, Couenhoven argues, because we keep actively loving (and desiring, and delighting in) what we love. As Augustine observed memorably in the eighth book of Confessions, we may even desire to love otherwise – wanting not to have the sinful loves we actually have – and in that sense we are what Couenhoven calls ‘fractured agents’, whose will or voluntas is incoherent and divided against itself.
It would be irresponsible (and in Augustine's view, characteristically Manichaean) for us to absolve ourselves of all blame for the desires we don't desire to have. But it is also unconvincing to attribute them entirely to our own choices, as Pelagians are apt to do. Our voluntary sins can thus in an important sense also be involuntary, insofar as we desire not to will or do what we willingly do. Much of Couenhoven's task is to work out a vocabulary for saying this, perhaps more clearly than Augustine himself.
For Augustine's texts are undeniably complex and probably not as consistent with one another as Augustine himself, in retrospect, would like us to believe. The great tension is between his early anti-Manichaean writings, which insisted very strongly that all sin is voluntary, and his later writings against the Pelagians, which end up insisting that sin is often in an important way involuntary. Couenhoven's notion that we can be responsible for an active voluntas which we own but do not fully control seems to me to capture rather well Augustine's efforts to maintain this balance, which Couenhoven describes as ‘Augustinian compatibilism’. What is compatible is not free will and determinism in the abstract, but our responsibility for inherited sin on the one hand, and our identity being formed (and thus partially determined) by forces outside us on the other.
These forces are largely social, Couenhoven argues, in contrast to Augustine's theory of the sexual propagation of original sin going back to a historical Adam. If Augustine's notion of original sin helps make sense of our tragic social inheritance, a more robust sense than Augustine's of how social forces form our identities also helps provide an alternative to the sexual propagation of sin, which does not collapse into merely learning to sin by imitation (which is the Pelagian alternative to sexual propagation that Augustine rejected).
Nor is our vulnerability to identity-forming forces outside our control merely a matter for tragedy. Divine grace too is identity forming, again without undermining our responsibility for our own beliefs and loves. And even our fractured agency has its upside, Couenhoven observes, for our weakness of character, including our vulnerability to involuntary impulses of compassion, empathy and delight, can mean that we do less evil than we wanted and more good than we chose. So we need not regret that our moral character is less in our own control than Pelagian moralists would like us to think.
