Augustine on Original Sin and Free Will

Adam’s enslavement to sin is such that he now seeks sin, for he sees it as his good.  As Augustine writes, “He who is a slave to sin is free to sin.”  Augustine’s notion of the enslaving power of sin becomes more cogent when one grasps his understanding of free will, which is simply doing what one wants to do.  He writes of the destruction of the human free will:

For it was by the evil use of his free will that man destroyed both it and himself.  For as a man who kills himself must, of course, be alive when he kills himself, but after he has killed himself ceases to live, and cannot restore himself to life; so when man by his own free will sinned, then sin being victorious over him, the freedom of his will was lost.

The bias to follow the dictates of the fallen nature is such that sinning is now inevitable.  The sinner sins not because he must but because he wants to.

This, then, is Augustine’s teaching of original sin and free will.  Adam’s disobedience brought him and us under the enslaving power of sin and death.  Bernhard Lohse writes:

It is clear that Augustine imparted to the traditional doctrine of sin a profundity which it had not had before.  For him sin is not merely this or that wrongful deed, hence sin is not something which can be removed by a mere appeal to the good in man, or through instruction.  Sin is, rather, the wrong orientation of all human existence since Adam’s fall, an orientation from which no one man can free himself.  It is the form of existence in which we, as humans, find ourselves.  In insisting upon this, Augustine overcame the moralism which had hitherto dominated the concept of sin.