The Origins of Christian Guilt

Copyright 1993 by John R. Mabry

Christians have no monopoly on guilt. Guilt provides one of the standard topics for Jewish stand-up comics nowadays, so they certainly must have their share. But the troubling thing about Christian guilt is that it is the very antithesis of what was so attractive about Christianity in its inception and initial centuries of existance.

A recent study I did on St. Augustine of Hippo convinced me that the starting point for guilt as a staple of Christian life began with him. As Elaine Pagels points out in her marvelous book Adam, Eve, and the Serpent, what the Jews and early Christians had read for centuries as "a story of human freedom became, in [Augustine's] hands, a story of human bondage."1 Instead of being a story about the gift of moral freedom, as St. John Chrysostom proclaimed, Augustine taught that "Adam's sin not only caused our mortality but cost us our moral freedom, irreversibly corrupted our experience of sexuality...and made us incapable of genuine political freedom."2

Pagels continues: "Augustine insists that through an act of will Adam and Eve [changed] the structure of the universe; that their single, willful act permanently corrupted human nature as well as nature in general. Once harmonious, perfect, and free, now, through Adam's choice, is ravaged by mortality and desire, while all suffering, from crop failure, miscarriage, fever, and insanity to paralysis and cancer, is evidence of the moral and spiritual deterioration that Eve and Adam introduced..."3 This is surely, at best, a subjective interpretation of Genesis, and at worst, heresy.

The result of Augustine's take on the Edenic account is his concept of Original Sin, for which, though he claims biblical authority, many scholars-now and then-believe him to be solely responsible for its manufacture.

Augustine also introduced us to the doctrine of predestination, even though he insisted that his theology did not contradict free will. Amazingly, he claims that even in Christ a person is not delivered from Adam's curse. He might be relieved of Original Sin, but not its consequence, guilt; a burden inherited by infants upon their entry into the world regardless of their baptism.4 This, then, is the genesis of Christian guilt, from which not even the salvific effects of the Gospel can free us! Even those who accept the idea of inherited sin believe that baptism eradicates this defect completely, so that we can say with Didymus the Blind "now we are found once more such as we were when we were first made: sinless and masters of ourselves."5

Augustine is not without his critics, however, in the East nor the West. Orthodox scholar Fr. Michael Azkoul writes, "We do not inherit the 'guilt' of Adam. Human beings are victims of Adam's sin, not the bearers of it. We inherit not his sin, but the propensity to sin."6 Father Matthew Fox, the Roman Catholic theologian recently dispelled from the Dominican Order for his views, concurs, writing,"Too much guilt, too much introspection, too much preoccupation with law, sin, and grace rendered Augustine, and the theology that was to prevail in his name for sixteen centuries in the West, oblivious of what the Eastern Christian church celebrates as theosis, the divinization of the cosmos."7 One might even say that due to Augustine's own subjective, neurotic theology, Western Christianity has missed the whole point: freedom. Before the emperor Constantine's conversion, the gospel's message of radical freedom provided profound meaning for those Christians who felt persecuted by pagan society and traditions. Christianity gave to people a cosmic context compared to which the material realities of Roman life seemed insignificant and imprisoning. But once the empire embraced the Christian faith, suddenly the radical freedom was no longer so radical. Augustine came around at the right time politically, and his views found favor, for mostly political reasons.

It is my opinion that the roots of Christian guilt, lie here, with the notorious bishop of Hippo. At least, Christian guilt as it is known in the West. Of Orthodox guilt, I have very little information: that is perhaps, another study. But Rosemary Radford Reuther, the Roman Catholic feminist theologian even posits that Augustine so changed the face of Western Christendom that he prepared it for division with the East.8 Fr. Azkoul agrees, and quotes one Orthodox saint as saying "We can only thank God that the doctrine of the Eastern Church was formulated outside the sphere of Augustinianism, which we must consider as alien to us."9

1 Pagels, Elaine Adam, Eve, and the Serpent (New York: Random House, 1988) p. xxvi.

2 Ibid., p. xxvi.

3 Ibid., p. 133-4.

4 Azkoul, Michael The Influence of Augustine of Hippo on the Orthodox Church (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1990), p. 203.

5 Pagels, p. 131.

6 Azkoul, p. 198

7 Matthew Fox, Original Blessing (Bear & Co., 1983), p. 76.

8 Reuther, Rosemary Radford "Patristic Spirituality and the Experience of Women in the Early Church" from Western Spirituality, Matthew Fox, ed., p. 149.

9 Azkoul, p. 3.