Soul Saint Augustine was one of the first Christian
ancient Latin authors with very clear anthropological vision. Augustine saw the human being as a perfect unity of two substances: soul and body. He was much closer in this anthropological view to Aristotle than to Plato. In his late treatise *
On Care to Be Had for the Dead", sec. 5 (420 AD), he insisted that the body pertains to the essence of the human
person: Augustine's favourite figure to describe
body-soul unity is marriage: – "your body is your wife". According to N. Blasquez, Saint Augustine's dualism of substances of the body and soul does not stop him from seeing the unity of body and soul as a substance itself. Following ancient philosophers he defined man as a "rational mortal animal" – .
Original sin 's painting of the sin of Adam and Eve from the
Sistine Chapel ceiling Augustine wrote that original sin is transmitted by
concupiscence and enfeebles freedom of the will without destroying it. They refused to agree that original sin wounded human will and mind, insisting that human nature was given the power to act, to speak, and to think when God created it. Human nature cannot lose its moral capacity for doing good, but a person is free to act or not to act in a righteous way. Pelagius gave an example of eyes: they have capacity for seeing, but a person can make either good or bad use of it. The
Catholic Church accepts the doctrine of original sin as Augustine taught.
Predestination For Augustine God orders all things while preserving human freedom. Prior to 396, Augustine believed that
predestination was based on God's foreknowledge of whether individuals would believe, that God's grace was "a reward for human assent".
Theodicy and Free will The
problem of evil is the question of how to reconcile the existence of
evil with an
omnipotent,
omnibenevolent, and
omniscient God. Augustine develops key ideas regarding his response to suffering. In
Confessions, Augustine wrote that his previous work was dominated by
materialism and that reading the works of
Plato enabled him to consider the existence of a non-physical
substance. This helped him develop a response to the problem of evil from a theological (and non-Manichean) perspective. He wrote that "evil has no positive nature; but the loss of good has received the name 'evil'." Both moral and
natural evil occurs, Augustine argued, owing to an evil use of free will, which could be traced back to the original sin of
Adam and Eve. He believed that this evil will, present in the
human soul, was a corruption of the will given to humans by God, making suffering a just punishment for the sin of humans. Because Augustine believed that all of humanity was "
seminally present in the loins of Adam", he argued that all of humanity inherited Adam's sin and his just punishment. However, in spite of his belief that free will can be turned to evil, Augustine maintained that it is vital for humans to have free will, because they could not live well without it. He argued that evil could come from humans because, although humans contained no evil, they were also not perfectly good and hence could be corrupted. ==Comparison==