Augustine in His Own Words (continued)
On the City of God 351 es worthy of that blessed place, and that lovely babies would have flowered from a love untainted by lust. Unfortunately, to show just how that could be we have no present experience to help us.57
Original Sin
For Augustine, the problem was the will, not the body. He came to define original sin as narcissism, the turning-in of the will "to live according to oneself " (secundum se vivere). Here is his classic account from On the City of God, Book 14:
(13) Moreover, our first parents fell openly into the sin of disobedience only because, secretly, they had begun to be guilty. Actually, their bad deed could not have been done had not bad will preceded it. What is more, the root of their bad will was nothing else than pride. For "pride is the beginning of all sin" (Sir 10:13). And what is pride but an appetite for inordinate exaltation? Now exaltation is inordinate when the soul cuts itself off from the very Source to which it should keep close and somehow makes itself—and thus becomes—an end in itself. This takes place when the soul becomes inordinately pleased with itself, and such self-pleasing occurs when the soul falls away from the unchangeable Good which ought to please the soul far more than the soul can please itself. Now this falling away is the soul's own doing, for if the will had merely remained firm in the love of that higher immutable Good which lighted its mind into knowledge and warmed its will into love, it would not have turned away in search of satisfaction in itself and, by so doing, have lost that light and warmth. And thus Eve would not have believed that the serpent's lie was true, nor would Adam have preferred the will of his wife to the will of God nor have supposed that his transgression of God's command was venial when he refused to abandon the partner of his life even if it meant a partnership of sin.
Our first parents, then, must already have fallen before they could do the evil deed, before they could commit the sin of eating the forbidden fruit. For such bad fruit could come only from a bad tree. That the tree became bad was contrary to its nature, because such a condition could come about only by a defect of the will—and a defect is whatever goes against nature. Notice, however, that such worsening by reason of a defect is possible only in a nature that had been created out of nothing. In a word, a nature is a nature because
57. Civ. Dei 14.21–23 (CCL 48:443–45); trans. Walsh and Monahan, FOTC 14:396–99. On the broader context of Augustine's meditation here, see David G. Hunter, Marriage, Celibacy, and Heresy in Ancient Christianity: The Jovinianist Controversy, OECS (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
it is something made by God, but a nature falls away from That Which Is because the nature was made out of nothing.
Yet the human person did not fall away from Being so that he completely disintegrated into non-being. But insofar as he turned himself toward himself, he became less than he was when he used to cling to the One who is supreme Being. Thus, no longer to exist in God but to exist in oneself is to approach nothingness. For this reason, Holy Scripture gives another name to the proud. They are called "rash" and "self-willed" (2 Pt 2:10). Certainly, it is good for the heart to be lifted up, not to oneself (for this is the mark of pride), but to God (for this is a sign of obedience which is precisely the virtue of the humble).
There is, then, a kind of lowliness which in some wonderful ways causes the heart to be lifted up, and there is a kind of loftiness which makes the heart sink lower. This seems to be a sort of paradox, that loftiness should make something lower and lowliness lift something up. The reason for this is that holy lowliness makes us bow to what is above us, and, since there is nothing above God, the kind of lowliness that makes us close to God exalts us. On the other hand, the kind of loftiness that is both defective and a defection refuses this subjection to God and so falls down from the One who is supreme, as Scripture says, that "when they were lifting themselves up you cast them down" (Ps 72:18). Here the Psalmist does not say: "When they had been lifted up," as though they first lifted themselves up and afterwards were cast down, but: "when they are lifting themselves up, at that moment they were cast down," which means that their very lifting themselves up was itself a fall.
Hence, humility is the virtue especially esteemed in the City of God and thus recommended to its citizens in their present pilgrimage on earth, precisely because it is particularly outstanding in Christ its King; just so, pride, the vice contrary to this virtue, is, as Holy Scripture tells us, especially dominant in Christ's adversary, the devil. In fact, this is the main difference which distinguishes the two cities we are speaking of. The humble City is the society of holy human beings and good angels; the proud city is the society of wicked human beings and evil angels. The one City began with the love of God; the other had its beginning in the love of self.
The conclusion, then, is that the devil would not have begun by an open and obvious sin to tempt humanity into doing something which God had forbidden, had not humanity already begun to seek satisfaction in itself and, consequently, to take pleasure in the words: "You shall be as gods" (Gn 3:5). The promise of these words, however, would much more truly have come to pass if, by obedience, Adam and Eve had kept close to the ultimate and true Source of their being and had not, by pride, imagined that they were them-