Aetiology, or the study of causes, was not the sole preserve of philosophers in the classical era. Historians knew that a catalogue of unexplained events was not a narrative, and all physicians warned that the cure of symptoms would be short-lived if it did not address the origins of the sickness. As in philosophy, so in historical and medical writing it was common for the investigation of causes to be supported by a theory of causation: Each of these disciplines had its Aristotle, its Thucydides or its Hippocrates, and each had its less rational antitype in the astrologer, the mythographer or the empiric. Christian theology, in referring every event in the present cosmos or beyond it to the omnipotent will of God, did not profess to have rendered any of the three disciplines obsolete: It did maintain, however, that there can be no sound philosophy without reverence for the Creator, no history without consciousness of the Fall and its divine remedy, and no health without a loosening of our bondage to corruption. In systematic theology, at its most abstruse, metaphysics is supplemented by protology, history is prefaced by hamartiology and physical healing is only one element in soteriology. Augustine was perhaps the first theologian to leave his mark on all three of these peculiar sciences, though he did not have a name for any of them; this chapter, accordingly, is divided into three parts. In the first I shall argue that, logically adroit though Augustine is in his analysis of volition, his account of our present bondage rests on principles that are distinctly theological. In the second I shall show that, while his understanding of history was pre-empted by the poets and historians of the Latin tradition, they offered no comparable explanation of the origin and ubiquity of sin. In the third I shall show that there was precedent in writing on the ensoulment of the embryo for some theory of the transmission of psychic traits from mother to infant, though only the traditions of the church, or Augustine’s adaptation of them, could justify his belief that a child inherits the will to sin.
