Paul J. Griffiths on annihilation as the fate of the lost and Augustine’s view of sin

 

Paul J. Griffiths on annihilation as the fate of the lost and Augustine’s view of sin

“The depiction of sin’s damage by way of images of ontological loss, of decrease in being, is everywhere in the fathers of the church. Augustine depicts it often, and lyrically:

[The rational soul] does many things because of perverse desire, as though it had forgotten itself. It sees in an interior way certain beautiful things which are in that more eminent nature which is God. And although it should keep still so that it might enjoy them, it wants instead to make them subject to itself, and not to be like him [God] because of him, but to be what he [God] is all by itself. And so it turns away from him [God] and slips and slides into what is less and less, which it imagines to be more and more. Neither itself nor anything else suffices for it as it moves away from that one [God] who alone suffices. In its destitution and difficulty, it becomes increasingly intent upon its own actions, and upon the disquieting delights it gets from them. (De trinitate, 10.5.7; cf. De trinitate, 12.9.14)

Elsewhere (De immortalitate animae, 7.12), Augustine writes explicitly that the soul can tend toward nonexistence: this is what lack means (id ipsum esse minus habet, quod est deficere). All this is talk about diminution toward nonexistence, the dying fall of a diminuendo that will (or may) end in silence. It involves error: the sinner takes to be more what is in fact less. But it also and more importantly involves will or intention: the sinner wants to move away from the LORD and toward himself, and does what is necessary to bring this about.

The language of destitution (egere, egestas) is scriptural—that is, it is found in the Latin versions of Scripture read by Augustine. He is echoing the story of the Prodigal Son from Luke’s Gospel, and that story, uniquely in the New Testament, uses the language of substance (substantia; Greek, ousia) to depict the process of loss involved in sin. What the prodigal demands from his father (from the LORD) is the portion of substantia due him. This is (Augustine thinks) to demand ownership or control over what he is: your substantia is what you essentially are, what makes you you. It is a gift freely given by the LORD, and to demand it for yourself is to make it less than it is by turning it into an object wholly owned instead of a gift freely received. The result is loss, and not just the simple loss of an object, but rather a cumulative process of loss, loss piled upon loss—labitur in minus et minus, “[the soul] slips and slides into what is less and less”—loss tending exactly toward nothing. The prodigal becomes destitute: he has consumed his substance (dissipavit substantiam suum … omnia consummasset; Luke 15:13-14) until there is almost nothing left. And this is just what it would mean to go out of existence altogether: to be devoid of substantia is to be annihilated. The prodigal turns back from the brink: he repents, and has his substance returned to him as a result. His destitution leaves him still the capacity for repentance, a sole remaining human capacity as he lives with the pigs and eats what they eat. And when he exercises that capacity, everything else—all the rest of his substance—is returned to him by the merciful father.

This language of loss and diminution clearly suggests the possibility of coming to nothing, of annihilation stricto sensu. That is what gives it the undeniable power it has. For Augustine, as for most of the fathers of the church, the possibility of self-annihilation is suggested by a grammar of participation and gift. On this view, the fact that you are is sheer unmerited gift, and what you are is a participant in the LORD. Sin is the rejection of gift, and thereby the rejection of participatory being. The result is loss of a properly ontological sort, and it is a loss that proliferates and multiplies as the sinner, the loser, attempts to grasp ever more firmly what is not there at all: the illusion of a mode of being independent of the LORD. This proliferative loss eats away at the soul, causing the progressive loss of its distinctive properties (freedom, choice, judgment, understanding, virtuous habit, and so on) to the point where the soul returns to that from which it came: nihil, nothing, the void, simple absence. The prodigal approaches this condition. All that is left to him is the capacity to repent and ask the father to be given once again the substance he has consumed. Were he to have lost even that capacity, he would have ceased to be, for that was the last remaining capacity that distinguished him from the pigs, the last remaining property that distinguished him from nonhuman existence. When the flesh is sufficiently corrupted, it dies; when the soul is sufficiently corrupted, it ceases to be. In both cases, what remains is the trace, what Augustine calls the vestigium. For the flesh, that means decaying material components; for the soul, it means psychic detritus of various sorts. But in either case, it means annihilation on the definition in play here.

Augustine, along with most other Christian thinkers, does not accept this conclusion even though his language and his assumptions suggest that he might—suggest, that is, not only that the soul’s definition permits the possibility that it come to nothing, but also that there is much about the soul and its powers that suggests that it inevitably does tend toward the nothing from which it came. He is representative of most Christian thinkers in this refusal, but unlike many, his language often undercuts this refusal even when it is being explicitly offered. Consider the following passage:

The human soul is truly said to be immortal, but it nevertheless has its own kind of death. To call the soul immortal is to say that it does not cease to live and to experience, no matter how little. But the body is mortal because it can be abandoned by all life since it does not at all live from itself. The death of the soul happens, therefore, when God abandons it, just as that of the body happens when the soul abandons it. And so the death of both together, which is to say of the whole human being, occurs when a soul deserted by God deserts the body. For then the soul does not live from God, and the body does not live from the soul. In this way there occurs the death of the whole human creature, which the authority of divine eloquence calls the second death. (De civitate dei, from 13.2; in referring to the divinum eloquium, Augustine has in mind the use of the phrase mors secunda in Rev 20)

The central analogy that Augustine uses to link the first death with the second in this passage is that of desertion or abandonment. When the body is abandoned by the soul, it is left behind completely and irreversibly. That is what abandonment means. When the body is left in this way, death is the result, as Augustine explicitly says. This death is the death of the body; it is also, in the terms of this study, the annihilation or bringing to nothing of the body. The body’s lifelessness just is its annihilation. All that is left of a soulless body is the physical trace. The dead human body is no longer a corpus humanum, a human body, at all; neither is it a corporeal substance. It is detritus, to be scattered, pulverized, buried, or burned. By analogy, one might expect Augustine to say, when the LORD has completely or irreversibly abandoned the anima humana, the human soul, it too is brought to nothing, annihilated. Augustine does say that the soul dies, and he gives no reason in the quoted passage not to read the LORD’s desertion of the human soul in the same way as the soul’s abandonment of the human body. The language is strong: the mors of the whole human creature (totius hominis) occurs upon the desertion of the body by a soul deserted by God—cum anima Deo deserta deserit corpus. If the soul’s desertion by the LORD is read in the same way as the flesh’s desertion by the soul, the conclusion is that the soul bereft of the LORD no longer exists as such. On this interpretation, the second death would be the bringing of the soul to nothing, its annihilation. And the plausibility of this reading is deepened by recalling the pervasiveness in Augustine of emphasis upon the idea that the anima humana is brought into being out of nothing and has a constant tendency to damage itself by losing being, by tending toward the nothing from which it came. A soul bereft of the LORD would necessarily be nothing, for only the LORD’s graceful act brought it into being, and only the LORD’s graceful act sustains it in being. Without these, it comes to nothing. The second death does to the soul what the first death does to the body: brings it to nothing.

But Augustine resists this conclusion, in the passage quoted and consistently elsewhere. And he does so in spite of the fact that the grammar of his thought strongly supports it. “The human soul is truly said to be immortal,” he says, which is to say that it never ceases to live (vivere) and to experience (sentire). But why is this so? Why is it necessary to say that an anima humana related to the LORD as a dead body is to a soul separated from it continues to be a subject of experience, and does so without end? What sustains, in Augustine and in the later tradition, the view that the human soul is necessarily immortal, no matter what damage it does to itself?

Sin, on a broadly Augustinian understanding, reduces sinners by moving them toward what they seek, which is the nothing from which they came. Repeated sin, as it approaches the necrophiliac purity of invidia or acedia, may bring sinners to the point where they lack the energy—the very being—to turn their gaze toward the LORD who is the only possibility of re-creation, of setting sinners on a path of remaking, away from the nihil and toward the LORD.” (Paul J Griffiths, Decreation, chapter 23)