Of all things for which Augustine is remembered, perhaps the most notorious is his description of what we have come to call a theory of "original sin". Leaving aside the history of that idea, we see Augustine writing about the "sin of my infancy" (I.vii). "For in thy sight can no man be clean from his sin, not an infant of a day old upon the earth."
I have written elsewhere of the proof of "original sin" which I have seen exemplified in my very own household. But what is this all about in the Confessions? Augustine sets out a few principles in the first few chapters of Book I. In chapter vi he gives us a description of how our present nature reflects God's intention in Creation: the harmony seen in the nursing mother and the hungry child reflects something of the original goodness of Creation. The mother provides (and even needs to provide) for the infant who needs the milk. In this relationship their is a kind of harmony. Yet, Augustine writes, the infant goes beyond wanting what is necessary (vii), and there is a universal desire to "have more" than what we need. He writes that "I myself have seen and observed a little baby to be already jealous; and before it could speak (literally the meaning of in-fans) what an angry and bitter look it would cast at another child that sucked away its milk from it." (vii) The infant, he says, is capable of a jealousy of others, even though that particular infant is fully fed and has all it needs. It is this reaction of jealousy, this self centredness, which leads Augustine to write:
...it is not the mind of infants that is harmless, but the weakness of their childish members
If the will of infants could be fully expressed, it would be mayhem beyond belief (side note: we see remnants of this in the toddler's sandbox). We "grow" out of childishness - on many levels. Yet the root of sin is there: the desire to have more, the desire to have it all, even though we have what we need, and a covetousness of others.
He is fascinated by infancy - the age at which one does not speak - and how it is that we come into speech. His theory of speech in I. viii seems to leave no doubt that speech, for Augustine, is 'natural' to the rational mind made in the image of God. Speech gives us access to a whole new 'world'; not just in the next stage of human growth (puertia), but in our ability to grasp rationally universal ideas, and to realize that there exist beings besides ourselves.
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