Saint Augustine and the Fall of the Soul: Beyond O'Connell and His Critics (review)

Robert J. O'Connell, S.J., was arguably the most prominent interpreter of the thought of Augustine of Hippo in the last decades of the previous century, and at the heart of his reading of Augustine's thought was the influence of Plotinus and in particular the doctrine of the fall of the soul. Most other Augustinian scholars during this period have been either ardent fans or strong opponents of O'Connell's interpretation, especially of his position on the fall of the soul. In his study Rombs tries to move the world of Augustinian scholarship beyond its present state in which the two sides have become firmly entrenched. Previous scholarship has, as Rombs argues, posed the question about the fall of soul in either-or terms, that is, whether the fall is to be understood as Plotinian or non-Plotinian.

Rombs' study has two principal parts. In the first he sets out to present clearly the positions of Plotinus and of O'Connell of the fall of the soul, and he succeeds admirably in this endeavor, especially with regard to the fall of the soul in the later works of Augustine. In the second part he attempts to work out a reconciliation between O'Connell and his critics by showing where and to what extent O'Connell's interpretation of Augustine was correct. Basically Rombs claims that O'Connell correctly interpreted the early Augustine, but was mistaken in his interpretation of the later Augustine.

Key to Rombs' position is the distinction between three senses of the fall of soul in Plotinus and in Augustine, namely, a cosmogonic, an ontological, and a moral sense of the fall. The fall is moral insofar as it is sinful. The fall is ontological insofar as it entails the soul's individuation and composition with the body. The fall is cosmogonic insofar as it is the efficient cause of the coming to be of the lower or sensible world by giving it form. Rombs argues that all three senses of the fall are found in the early Augustine, as they were in Plotinus, and clearly shows this in Augustine's first commentary on Genesis, De Genesi contra Manichaeos.

O'Connell held that Augustine had abandoned the doctrine of the fall of the soul around 417 when he came to realize the import of Romans 9:11, but he also held that Augustine returned to a modified doctrine of the fall in his later works, such as De Genesi ad litteram and De trinitate. Rombs argues quite persuasively that O'Connell misinterpreted the later Augustine, who according to Rombs had definitely abandoned any cosmological or ontological sense of the fall, but retained much of the Plotinian language of the fall to present a psychology of sin. In the later writings, as Rombs argues, individuation and embodiment are in no sense the result of the fall, a view quite incompatible with the Christian doctrine of the goodness of creation, as Augustine came to realize. The amazing thing is that the greatest of the Western Fathers of the Church held in his early writings the fall of the soul in all three senses.

Rombs' book clarified for me O'Connell's views and persuaded me that the bishop of Hippo did not return in his later writings to a fall understood in the ontological sense. Rombs agrees with O'Connell on the fall in the early writings, and that I suspect will be too much for many of O'Connell's critics to swallow.