The easy dismissal of Medieval Theologians by Modern Ideologues reminds us that, from the perspective of time, we are all provincials.

A stunning change occurred between Augustine and Anselm.  The Stoic and Platonic model of the (immaterial) soul falling into the (material) body by way of (spiritual – fateful) descent had been forgotten.  Now, the potential for human action consists of faculties, powers and capacities that are “of nature”.

Yet, the Stoic and Platonic model remained – like an apparition – in fantasy, legend and ideal.  St. Thomas felt its presence through both Augustine and Aristotle.  He proposed a narrative theme of humans coming from and returning to God.

At the same time, St. Thomas used Aristotle to further Anselm’s model.  Consider human purposes or “ends”.  Human faculties “of nature” are designed to achieve finite ends.  Human faculties “of spirit” are designed to achieve transcendent ends.  Our daily struggles are in-between, situating our faculties “of nature” and being contextualized by our faculties “of spirit”.  Without supernatural gifts, we can never properly achieve transcendent ends.  We fall into sin, where finite ends are substituted for infinite ends.

The Fall of Adam and Eve corresponds to a withdrawal of supernatural gifts – “sanctifying grace” – and the sacrifice of Jesus corresponds to a re-establishment of a proper relation between God and humans.

The divine presence was not lost with the Fall.  Sanctifying grace – the ability to order our spiritual faculties to proper transcendent ends – was lost.

Excuse the dramatic flourishes.  Let us first consider Anselm’s answer in terms of nestedness:

Thirdness: Jesus the Messiah re-establishes the Original Justice (through the Sacraments of the Church) that once oriented Adam and Eve (and, by extension, all humanity).

Secondness: There are two social constructions; those built by humans who turn away from God and those built by those who obey God.  The former creates injustice.  The latter keep justice.

Firstness: The intellect and will are the highest material faculties.  But, the orientation of these material faculties can only come through the spiritual faculties.

In short, Anselm pictured the Fall after Jesus as:

Saved Humanity(acts of obedience and justice(human faculties “of nature”)

And the Fall before Jesus:

Fallen Humanity(a. o. disobedience and injustice(human faculties “of nature”)

Anselm of Canterbury (d. 1109) considered Original Sin when feudalism reigned.  The keystones of feudalism were obedience and honor.  So the Lord was the first Lord.  Adam was the first subject of the Lord.  Adam disobeyed and so dishonored his Master.

One can almost feel the flutter as the ladies of the court looked up from their illuminated manuscripts, decorated in indigo and gold, to hear Anselm speak in that wonderful Medieval way.  One can almost smell the warning to the knights and dukes, always conniving in their service of the king: Disobey and you will be cast from the Eden that is England.

The price – the retribution – for Adam’s insult was to “no longer have the Lord as Master”.  As soon as the Eden disappeared behind the flaming sword, the descendants of Adam and Eve no longer had the supernatural gift (a faculty “of spirit”) of “Original Justice”.  This supernatural gift permitted the reason and will (the highest faculties “of nature”) to fulfill the transcendent purpose of humans: First, to obey God.  Second, keep justice.

Adam and Eve’s transgression was an act of “freedom” that covered over the true nature of “freedom”; “the absence of sin”.  In concert with Paul, Anselm concluded that “in Adam, all sinned” (Romans 5:12).

With the coming of Jesus the Messiah, freedom is restored.  His sacraments pour Sanctifying Grace into the faculties of the spirit.  Eat his flesh.  Drink his blood.  Look at those illuminations.  They tell the story in purple and gold.

Let us look at this synopsis in a nested frame:

The powers of humans that are “material” or “of nature” belong to the realm of possibility.

The powers of humans that are “not material” or “of spirit” belong to the realm of mediation, because they take what is material and turn it into a (distinctly different) actuality or “form”.

The “human exercising her faculties, powers and capacities” belongs to the realm of situation.

So the Medieval model of the human could be written as:

“Powers ‘of spirit’(exercise of powers(powers ‘of nature’))”

Remember, the Medieval could never have written their own model in this fashion, because the Peircean categories of thirdness, secondess and firstness had not been formulated.  By the time that Peirce formulated the categories, the medieval world was long gone.

Today, the Medieval world exists in the same way that the Roman world continued to exist during for Anselm; as fantasy, legend and ideal.

In the 1100 years between Augustine and the Council of Trent, the Idea of Original Sin both changed and stayed the same.  Chapter 4 covers some highlights.

Augustine wrote at the time when the Roman Empire (now officially converted to Christianity but still very much in the ancient Pagan milieu) was decentralizing.

Anselm, writing in England around 600 years later, wrote at a time when the Roman world was remembered through fantasy, legend and ideal.

Augustine wanted to protect Christianity from a host of Pagan assimilators.

Anselm just wanted to make sense of this concept of Original Sin.

The once Pagan concept of a hierarchy of natures had been internalized.  Human faculties, powers and capacities ranged from digestive to visionary.  At the low end, human natures were “material” or “of nature”.  At the high end, human natures were “not material” or “of spirit”.

The intellect and the will were faculties “of nature”.  The “capacity for justice” on the other hand, was “of spirit”.

In sum, it seems to me that many Modern Commentators interpret Augustine from their Modern point of view, not from the point of view of Augustine’s audience.  The people that Augustine called to Christ were steeped in Traditional, Magical, Stoic, Platonic, and Aristotelian thought.  Augustine should be seen as taking “what was familiar” and giving it a new twist.  It must have been exciting to hear him preach.

Ironically, the attitudes and ideas of Augustine’s audience have been lost over time, leaving no counterpoint to Augustine’s texts.  Still we can imagine.

The lack of thirdness in Augustine’s definition of concupiscence brings me to that category.

Augustine replaced “the need for an ascent of the soul” with “Original Sin”.  Original Sin has the same structure as a descent and ascent of the soul.  Yet the axis of movement is different.  Instead of moving back to the heavens, or the Celestial East, the Christian is to move towards Jesus the Messiah.  Baptism was the first Sacrament opening the vault of the body, pouring in Sanctifying Grace.  What happens after has the same self-denying characteristics of an ascent of the soul.

Augustine’s move set the stage for a new, Christian, way of looking at the “soul”.  The soul was not preexisting.  It did not descend into corrupt matter.  Instead, it was made, like pottery, by God.

In secondness, the realm of actuality, the Stoic “body” parallels “acts of moral impotence”.

The parallel makes sense in terms of the Pagan Worldview.  The Platonic “body” was not so much “the temple of the soul” as it was the “prison of the soul”.  The Divine World was good and immaterial.  Earthen Matter was evil and a thing to escape.  The goal of the individual was to ascend, to return to the source, and to leave this body behind.

Thus, Augustine’s parallel resonated with his listeners, who had converted from various Pagan religions.  Yet, there was a twist.

He introduced his own version of “concupiscence”.  Instead of the person’s weaknesses coming from the hard knocks of a descending soul accreting a body, they came from a prior descent, the Descent of Adam and Eve.

This removed the spirit-descent and replaced it with “the readily observable consequences of a historical moment”.

It also removed the “soul” as the normal context that animates the “body”.   Concupiscence is “soul-less”.  As soon as one puts an animating principle over “the moral impotence that is the body”, one is constructing a delusion.

The parallels in firstness explain why Augustine struggled to depict a huge Fall, a Fall so big that it would feel like a descent.

At the top, before the Fall, Adam and Eve were in the state of Original Blessedness, where even their sexual organs were at the command of reason.

Of course, this is impossible, given the nested form of “concupiscence”.  I put “no normal context” instead of “Original Sin” because, well, the workings of the sexual organs have a way to avoid contextualization.  This fact made Augustine the butt of jokes by rowdy agnostics for centuries.

Still, Augustine’s logic defying claim served a purpose.  It elevated the perception of height for the start of the Fall.  “Original Blessedness” had to be at least as high as “the Blissfulness of the Platonic Soul before its Descent”.

A literal “descent from Adam and Eve” deepens the pit of the Fall, far deeper than “the Platonic Body that Receives the Soul”, for now the poor babe – that sweet innocent – comes from the reason-less heaving of body parts plus, some sort of flaw in the seed.  That babe comes from concupiscence itself.

Baptism was needed just to get back to innocence.

Today, this makes no sense.

However, it makes sense if Augustine was speaking in a world of Greek and Roman Paganism.  The conversion of the Empire to Christianity did not provide a remedy for the collapse of the Western Roman Civilization.  It gave a shelter for people desperate enough to abandon their ancestral ways.

The parallels in firstness show that Augustine took the Platonic model and re-oriented it.  The axis of descent was no longer set by gravity, but by a Celestial Axis; the Axis between the Father and the Son; the Axis that is the Holy Spirit; plus another Earth-based Axis; between Adam and Jesus; the Transgressor and the Redeemer; the Fallen and the Savior.

Augustine altered the heights and depths of the Platonic model.

The “union of spirit with descent” that allowed the soul to animate the body was thus transformed.  At the same time Augustine spoke to the Platonists and Stoics, he was taking their model from them.

The resulting model was evocative and stunningly superior to more primitive explanations carried into the West by the invading tribes.  Thus Augustine preserved the soul of a dying civilization by drawing it into his own Christian perspective.