Per Caritatem

Some Contemporary Reflections on Sin:
Matt Jenson’s use of St. Augustine in The Gravity of Sin

By Jason Ingalls, M.Div. Princeton Theological Seminary

Matt Jenson’s recent book The Gravity of Sin: Augustine, Luther, and Barth on Homo Incurvatus in Se (London: T&T Clark, 2006) contributes to contemporary Augustinian scholarship and hamartiology.  Perhaps most interesting is that Jenson attempts to resuscitate contemporary use of Augustine’s theology for the purpose of talking about sin (a brave feat!).  In this post, I will summarize Jenson’s argument, describe how Jenson appropriates and critiques Augustine for his project, and trace the line through Jenson’s remaining interlocutors before briefly concluding with some thoughts on Jenson’s contribution to the way we talk about sin.

In brief, Jenson argues that the metaphor homo incurvatus in se (”humanity ‘curved in on itself’”), coupled with a relational anthropology, is the best way to construe the human person and sin (Jenson 2, 4).  He claims the coupling does not fall into the traps linked to substance and existential ontologies, is true to Scripture and tradition, and provides a way to appreciate and appropriate feminist theological critiques.  His argument starts with Augustine, moves through Luther, considers Hampson’s critique of Luther, and ends with Barth, to show that incurvatus in se can, in fact, do the theological work that he claims for it.

Jenson is quick to use Augustine for his project since Augustine already offers a relational account of sin.  Jenson explains that Augustine sees our prelapsarian state as necessarily relational and social in character, and that Augustine’s ideas of “participation” in God through Christ shows that this participation is basic to human beings qua human beings (Jenson 8).  Even Augustine’s explication of St. Paul’s “in Adam all sinned” is basically relational in character (16), the origin of evil is placed squarely in the human will (cf. 20), and evil is described as a privation of the will, a turning away from the will’s proper object, in other words, a break in relationship.  Jenson summarizes: “Self-love and love of God are simply incompatible” (15).

The problem for Jenson is that Augustine has not reflected on this account as systematically as Jenson would like, and Jenson is particularly worried about Augustine’s telos for humanity: the beatific vision of a fleshless God.  This is not yet “sufficiently Christian,” and Jenson will look to Luther (and eventually Barth) to fill in this gap.  Jenson’s treatment of Augustine seems tentative at points, as if he feels like he is addressing an audience that is predisposed against St. Augustine for any number of reasons.  In some ways, this account of Augustine’s doctrine of sin is meant to rescue the saint from theology’s dustbin.  This should be noted and applauded, I think.  But, for now, we will look at Jenson’s specific objections.

In the end, then, the Christian tradition seems to have been convinced that Jesus really does offer the best remedy for sin, the ‘medicine of immortality’, as many Fathers described the Eucharist.  If our sin involved us more than anything in a parasitic love affair with ourselves, what more fitting counter could there be than to look outside ourselves to one who is not ourselves?  Despite the legacy of his inward turn, Augustine was himself aware of this; and his call for humility suggests a move in this direction.  Nevertheless, while the features of a relational understanding of sin were set up by Augustine, he did not follow them through to a sufficiently objectivist, extrinsic, and materially mediated account of the Christian life (Jenson 45-46, emphasis mine).

First, Jenson believes that Augustine’s account is insufficiently objectivist.  A sufficiently objectivist account would focus the human person outside of him- or herself on Christ, the unceasing advocate and Lord.  But, Augustine pushes the individual, especially in The Trinity, to look beyond Christ, even after all of Augustine’s stress on Christ’s mediatorial role.  “Christ’s humanity seems ultimately instrumental and of only temporary importance. . . . [O]ur hope is in the day when his office of mediator will cease and we will participate in the divine life directly” (Jenson 35; cf. The Trinity I.iii.20.80).  This bothers Jenson because to be insufficiently objectivist is to be insufficiently Christological and therefore insufficiently Christian.

Second, Jenson believes that Augustine’s account is insufficiently extrinsic.  While Augustine shows human beings to be relationally constituted, this is again a soteriologically-focused Christological problem.  Instead of asking the human person to look to Christ, the counsel of The Trinity is to look in, then up.  The problem lies in looking for the imago dei within when The Imago Dei already comes to meet us without in the pages of the apostolic witness and in the life of the Church.  “Instead, the fleshly Christ is merely the way to the ‘homeland of peace’ [Augustine] has caught a glimpse of from ‘a wooded summit’, a land also glimpsed by the Platonists” (43).  Augustine’s “ambiguous inwardness” (37) focuses attention within rather than without, and thereby misplaces emphasis which should be reserved for the Christ.

Third, Jenson believes that Augustine’s account is insufficiently materially mediated.  It is St. Augustine’s use of the humanity of Christ that causes Jenson’s worries.  City of God, Book XIV, according to Jenson, contains healthy reflection on humanity’s participation in God but holds back from talking about its “mechanics.”  Jenson is disappointed.  For him, “that Augustine can speak directly of deification without reference to Christ is indicative of a wider concern,” probably, an “insufficient Christology” (Jenson 11, cf. Jenson 11, n. 24).  The incarnation is a kind of “short-cut” to participation in Christ’s divine nature (Jenson 12; cf. Augustine, City of God, IX.xv).  Once the way is paved, then Christ’s humanity (and his office as mediator) is no longer eschatologically needed to mediate the glory of God.  Jenson: “But in the end, Christ remains a glorious via rather than the redefinition of Augustine’s God” (Jenson 43).  This Christological lack is sufficient reason to move on to Luther and, ultimately, Barth.

Martin Luther radicalized and reorganized Augustine’s insights Christologically around the guiding metaphor of homo incurvatus in se.  Accepting Augustine’s basic emphasis on pride and humility, Luther applies incurvature not only to the totus homo but also to homo religiosus, thereby rejecting any type of incremental growth in righteousness that remained in Augustine’s thought.  Luther also radicalizes Augustine’s ideas about the order of loves in which the soul climbs higher and higher through desire until it finds its rest in God.  Since even the religious person is curved in on itself, desire has no place.  Pride is the paradigmatic sin, as it was in Augustine, and the prideful person can desire nothing but themselves.  Our desires cannot take us to God. Only faith can do that.  In radicalizing incurvature, however, Luther retains the basic structure of ascent in Augustine’s thought while replacing desire with faith and grounding it in the mediation of Christ in a way that Augustine did not.  According to Jenson’s reading of Luther’s famous dictum simul iustus et peccator, we are all – even the most pious among us – completely trapped and curved in on ourselves while simultaneously being turned out from ourselves by our faith in Christ.  This account begins correcting some of the problems that Jenson spotted in Augustine.  Luther’s account is objectivist by being grounded in the completed work of Christ.  It is extrinsic in that what Christ opens for us is a radical type of outward focus first on Christ and (then only subsequently) on the other.  It continues to be materially mediated.  The reason Jenson moves beyond Luther is less Christological than it is practical.

Pride is the paradigmatic sin for both Augustine and Luther, but Jenson does not think this account is adequate. This leads him to interact with feminist theologian Daphne Hampson’s post-Christian critique of Luther in order to complicate the pride-as-sin paradigm.  Hampson critiques the Augustinian tradition’s understanding of incurvature by arguing that considering pride to be the paradigmatic sin does not account for women’s experience of sinfulness.  Hampson argues that women’s cardinal sin is not pride, but is rather a lack of self-assertion, a falling back into oneself that she names self-diffusion or sloth.  It is here that Jenson does his best work in applying Hampson’s insight that the pride-as-sin paradigm is insufficient while offering a substantial critique of her post-Christian feminism.  Challenging Hampson’s implied gender essentialism, Jenson acknowledges that he himself needs the grammar of sloth and self-diffusion to speak of his own sinfulness and that it would be a tragic waste if we were to deny women and men the ability to speak of their sinfulness as either pride or sloth, for they are “complementary aspects of the same pathology” (129, quoting McFadyen, Bound to Sin, 156).  Whether, to follow Kierkegaard, the sin is “in despair willing to be oneself” (pride) or is “in despair not willing to be oneself” (sloth), the basic pathology is still an incurvature, either in activity or passivity.

It is in conversation with Karl Barth that Jenson finally develops the “sufficiently objectivist, extrinsic and materially mediated account of the Christian life” that he wanted from Augustine (46).  Barth defines human sinfulness by means of Christology and plots his three forms of sinfulness (falsehood, pride, and sloth) along a Christological grid.  The first sin, and the covering for the other two, is falsehood in which the human being denies the knowledge that the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ includes them and was for them by grace.  But once human beings become aware of this claim, their reaction is characterized by the other two forms of sinfulness: pride or sloth.  In pride, we deny our participation in Jesus Christ’s servant humility, thus trying to establish our own being.  In sloth, we deny our participation in Jesus’ royal resurrection and ascension where we are set in him at the right hand of God the Father.  In pride, we amplify our being in order to deny the call to humility.  In sloth, we subsume our being in order to deny the call to victory.  Whether by self-assertion or self-diffusion, we try to deny what is basically true of us in Barth’s account: we are established from all eternity in the person and work of Jesus Christ.

In conclusion, Jenson offers contemporary theological thinkers something of great worth.  First, he sets about to rescue Augustine for contemporary reflection.  For some, Augustine never needed saving, but for others the saint has been coupled with degrading and oppressive ideas of sin and humanity.  When Jenson argues that St. Augustine’s account of the human person and sin is itself relational in character and thus in harmony with many contemporary concerns, he gives the latter group the opportunity to reread Augustine with fresh eyes.  Second, Jenson’s argument is strongly Christological.  While the book is ordered historically, it draws its material circle around Christ.  Granted, his account of Christ is strongly influenced by Barth and Luther, but its strong theological grounding allows for its profound pragmatic, personal, and pastoral value.  Which brings me to the last part of Jenson’s contribution, he provides a grammar for sin.  The grammar is Christologically grounded (and therefore objectivist, extrinsic, and materially mediated), and this concreteness saves it from the navel-gazing that might come from a similar, contemporary account.  I personally have been helped by his description of homo incurvatus in se and his dipolar exposition of sin as pride and sloth, and I have seen this vocabulary ignite people’s eyes as they, in a number of situations, came to understand a part of themselves for which they had struggled for words.  While ordered very differently, Jenson shares Augustine’s concern that our theological language be useful in some way, that it not only bear witness to God but also to who we are in relationship to the Holy Trinity.  For as critical as Jenson is of Augustine’s legacy, Jenson has done us a great service by drawing him back into our conversation about sin and allowing him to again speak words of grace.  I cannot help but think that somewhere the old saint from Tagaste smiles.