Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [357]
Theologically, these life-changes also had consequences for Augustine. He gave up the positive and hopeful interpretation of the story of the garden of Eden. For him, the moral of the story of the first humans no longer represented the human achievement of enough wisdom to chose good over evil. Ever after it represented the story of our fall into slavery which had to be compensated by asceticism, self-mastery, and the sacraments of the church, available only to those who adhered to its civil and religious laws. The doctrine of Original Sin provided a justification for staying true to the church when the feeling that the end was near had abated; infant baptism both counteracted the notion and promulgated it. It is not hard to see behind this notion of human deficiency a new Christian justification for imperial and episcopal control of Christendom for the benefit of its adherents.
Augustine and Interior Experience
YET, THERE is another side to Augustine as well. He was also a master at understanding the value and quality of human experience. He was able to relate internal experience to the doctrine of the soul in a way that has been fundamental to Western culture ever since. While his solution to these problems shows that he was a savvy reader of the social position of the church, his solution to the problem of the “self” shows him to be a very accomplished and sensitive philosopher.
Augustine had read the Neoplatonists, especially Plotinus, and was extremely impressed by the Neoplatonic attention to interior experience. Perhaps this was because his own internal experience, his own multiple conversions were such cruces in his life: Augustine went from conventional Christian to pagan orator and philosopher, from philosopher to Manichaean, from Manichaean to Christian, from Christian to priest, and finally from priest to Bishop of Hippo. Not only did Augustine travel a long and self-conscious spiritual odyssey, he wrote about each step and used his own interior feelings and experiences as a model for the progress of the soul towards redemption. He is exquisitely self-conscious of the values of each of these changes.
But Augustine’s unique synthesis also derives from his education. He was taught in a center of Christian Neoplatonism by Ambrose who took Plotinus’ spiritual inwardness seriously. Augustine took the interior consciousness of the Neoplatonists and turned it, even converted it, into a new Christian spiritual inwardness. In so doing, in Phillip Cary’s estimation, he created the internal life of the soul with which we are so familiar today. Because Plotinus had described in detail the interior experiential process by which the intellect carries the soul upward to the divine, even in life, Augustine can take the attention to interiority into the meditations of the Christian life.100
At first, Augustine simply reproduced the Neoplatonic notion of the immortality of the soul. The soul was divine because it contained the “intelligible world,” the world of the intellect, and thus could be nothing else than immortal itself. But, this argument becomes less possible for a Christian philosopher as time goes on. Augustine needs to deny the natural immortality of the soul when he takes on his role as church spokesperson.101 Augustine does not avail himself of the Philonic argument that the soul is immortal but not indestructible, because he wants to emphasize the saving role of Christ and because it would never have led him to account for the resurrection of the body. So he needs to provide a real and palpable hell to punish sinners.
To be sure,