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Human Nature
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Augustine on Human Nature
In this course Professor Lewis Ayres (Durham University) explores St. Augustine of Hippo’s views on human nature. In the first module, we introduce Augustine’s views on the experience of human nature, as told through his major works ‘The City of God’ and his ‘Confessions’. After that, we look at Augustinian ideas about the freedom of the will, and the effects of the Fall on the desires of the will. In the third module, we delve deeper into the story of the Fall of Adam and Eve, and look at how original sin shapes Augustine’s views on humanity after the Fall. We then move on to examine the power of God’s grace, to restore true human nature in an ongoing process. In the fifth module, we look at how we might interpret Augustine today, in a secular world, with a new scientific understanding of the evolutionary origins of humanity. Finally, we explore a bit beyond the curriculum, and think about Augustine’s views on desire and human relationships.
Human Nature
In this module, we examine Augustine’s views on the experience of human nature, focusing in particular on (i) individuals experiencing confusion and weakness, resulting from ignorance, and inability to control their desires (ii) society mirroring the experience of this confusion and weakness of individuals (iii) Augustine’s views on what individual and societal human nature should be: harmonious (iv) distinctive features of Augustine’s account of human nature: the clarity with which he articulates what is absent from our current nature, and his very personal phenomenological account of what it is like to be a fallen person.
Hello. My name is Luis airs.
00:00:05I'm a professor in the Department of theology and religion
00:00:08at Durham University in the north east of England.
00:00:11I'm going to be talking to you about Augustine.
00:00:15Why are you studying Augustine?
00:00:19Well,
00:00:21Augustine is one of the most influential
00:00:21thinkers in the history of Western thought.
00:00:24He is someone who was a significant authority within a few decades after his death.
00:00:27And he's a significant figure in the debates of the 16th century in the Reformation,
00:00:33and he still remains an important source
00:00:38for Christian thinkers and non Christian thinkers in the West. Even today,
00:00:41I'm going to be talking in particular
00:00:46about Augustine's views on human nature
00:00:49and his views on the fall
00:00:52and grace.
00:00:54I'm going to begin by talking about Augustine's
00:00:57experience of human nature.
00:01:00If you want to understand Augustine,
00:01:02one of the most important things you have to get right
00:01:04is that Augustine thought that none of us experience human nature as it should be.
00:01:07All of us experience a weakened and disrupted human nature.
00:01:13It's very easy for us as moderns
00:01:18to engage in
00:01:21debates about the nature of humanity, assuming
00:01:22that we know what human nature is by observation of ourselves
00:01:26and our friends.
00:01:30Augustine thought
00:01:32that when we observe ourselves or our friends, what we are observing
00:01:34is
00:01:37something weakened, something less than human nature as it should be.
00:01:38And it's worth thinking for a little while
00:01:43about what he thought we experienced both as individuals and as a society.
00:01:45As individuals, we experience
00:01:52confusion
00:01:54and weakness.
00:01:55For Augustine,
00:01:57we experience confusion. Most importantly
00:01:58in that we do not know what we should do.
00:02:01We often find ourselves
00:02:04debating about particular goods. Should we do X, or should we do? Why?
00:02:06The reason that we do so
00:02:11is that
00:02:12the good
00:02:13is not available to us.
00:02:14But even worse are those situations where we
00:02:16find ourselves knowing what we ought to do
00:02:19but not wanting to do it or not able to do it.
00:02:23We find ourselves with a certain amount of knowledge.
00:02:27But lacking willpower,
00:02:30we find ourselves then
00:02:32not just experiencing confusion
00:02:34but also weakness.
00:02:37Augustine also thinks that we find ourselves constantly subject to desires
00:02:40that we cannot control,
00:02:46and
00:02:48when he talks about human beings experiencing weakness,
00:02:49the weakness that we experience is partly
00:02:53because of ignorance and partly because of
00:02:56our inability to control overwhelming desire.
00:02:58So
00:03:02I'll give you three simple examples that Augustine himself often gives
00:03:04food,
00:03:08power and sex.
00:03:09All of us get hungry.
00:03:11Many of us find it difficult, difficult to control our desires for food.
00:03:13If I offer you another biscuit,
00:03:18you may say to yourself at some, somewhere in your mind,
00:03:20I shouldn't have another biscuit,
00:03:23but you will still take the biscuit and eat it.
00:03:25That's an example of your inability to control your desire for food
00:03:28in the same way
00:03:34we have a desire for power
00:03:35and one of the most significant aspects of Augustine's thought
00:03:37it his insistence that we are unable to
00:03:41control our desires to have power over others.
00:03:44And we'll come back to that in a moment when I talk about society.
00:03:48And, of course, there's sex,
00:03:52but we'll come back to sex.
00:03:53Let's think about society.
00:03:56Augustine sees society
00:03:59as mirroring the problems of the individual on a grand scale.
00:04:01Augustine tells us a story about Alexander. The great
00:04:06Alexander is captured by pirates,
00:04:10and Alexander says to the pirates, How do you think that you have the authority
00:04:12to capture me an emperor
00:04:17and the Pirates, says to Alexander.
00:04:19Because I try and control the seas with a few ships, you call me a pirate,
00:04:22but because you do it with a great army,
00:04:28you're called an emperor.
00:04:30And Augustine cites this story with approval
00:04:32because, as he says, societies Without justice are simply bands of robbers.
00:04:35They're simply ways in which groups of people
00:04:41expressed their desire to dominate others
00:04:44and show themselves unable to control their desires.
00:04:46So Augustin's experience of society
00:04:50mirrors directly his experience of
00:04:53the individual
00:04:56life as an individual. It's one marked by confusion and weakness.
00:04:58When we look around us at our societies,
00:05:02we see more confusion and weakness.
00:05:05We think of ourselves as able to control our surroundings.
00:05:08But in fact, as individuals and as as communities,
00:05:12we find ourselves completely unable to do so.
00:05:16One of the most important things that Augustine sees missing in both the individual
00:05:20and the society is harmony.
00:05:26The various parts of the human being body and soul are no longer in harmony.
00:05:29We have desires that come to us from our bodies like hunger,
00:05:36and we are unable to control them with that which should be controlling them.
00:05:40Our minds
00:05:45in the same way
00:05:46our societies should be harmonious.
00:05:47Associations of human beings brought together in friendship,
00:05:51meeting mutual needs,
00:05:54and what we have instead
00:05:56is
00:05:58everything that you see when you consider the
00:05:59history of the last 100 years or Augustine's own
00:06:01times.
00:06:04So Augustine is someone who works with a vision of human nature and human society
00:06:06that sees it as discordant as not harmonious,
00:06:13and that for Augustine is a revelation
00:06:18of human and societal failure.
00:06:20This means that we do not observe human nature
00:06:24as
00:06:27it is.
00:06:28It's worth stopping just for a second and asking ourselves,
00:06:30when I describe Augustine thinking all of this
00:06:34Is it new?
00:06:37What is new about Augustine?
00:06:38This is a really important question in the history of Western thought,
00:06:41because often
00:06:45people say
00:06:46such and such is an idea of Augustine's
00:06:47when, actually it's an idea that we have in the way that Augustine put it.
00:06:51But it's simply a commonplace of the ancient world or the early Christian world.
00:06:57Much of what Augustine says
00:07:02is then really rather commonplace.
00:07:04Most early Christians have a sense that human nature, as it should be,
00:07:06is not something that we experience.
00:07:10We experience a fallen state
00:07:13in which human beings do not do what they should do
00:07:15and lack certain powers that they should have.
00:07:18What is distinctive about Augustine
00:07:21is the clarity with which he can articulate exactly what is missing
00:07:24and his phenomenal, logical personal psychological analysis
00:07:29of what it's like to be a fallen person.
00:07:33Many of his observations are about society at large, but they are,
00:07:36as I've tried to show, rooted in his own personal self reflection,
00:07:41and that is quite distinctive.
00:07:46
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Ayres, L. (2022, March 01). Augustine on Human Nature - Human Nature [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/augustine-on-human-nature
MLA style
Ayres, L. "Augustine on Human Nature – Human Nature." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 01 Mar 2022, https://massolit.io/courses/augustine-on-human-nature