| In this study I engage St. Augustine's doctrine of original sin, both to understand what that doctrine really is, and to see whether it can still be believed. While the doctrine has been disputed on many fronts, I focus on a central, moral worry: it seems unfair to hold people responsible for an inherited fault. This leads me to explore enduring questions about the nature of freedom and responsibility, human and divine. My main contention is that currently popular accounts of responsibility that imply original sin is morally indefensible are wrong-headed; an Augustinian view of responsibility that implies we can be accountable for inherited faults is more persuasive.; I begin by expositing Augustine's doctrine of original sin, thereby clarifying the issues at stake in a critique of the doctrine and correcting misunderstandings about what the doctrine is or implies. In Chapter Two I explore the recurring scandal of the conceptual core of the doctrine of original sin: the idea that we are born sinners because of an inherited fault. With the help of theological and philosophical discussion partners, I compile a list of reasons for holding that it is unfair to consider persons responsible for original sin.; Chapter Three presents Augustine's own defense of original sin by giving a reading of his late views about freedom and responsibility. In essence, he argues that necessity can be compatible with responsibility, since God, for instance, both necessarily and responsibly wills the good. In Chapters Four and Five I appropriate and systematize Augustine's views, first offering an array of criticisms regarding assumptions commonly made about freedom and responsibility, and then providing an alternate account of responsibility as self-disclosure, on which we can be responsible for inherited sins. I close by arguing that we can appropriate the conceptual core, if not the rest of the doctrine of original sin, in a doctrine of "original sins" that states we each meet our first moral choices with fundamentally disordered loves and beliefs. This view has a compassionate upshot, since it makes us more realistic and humane in our understanding of and response to sin. |
