Augustine’s view of history also involved a great and influential pessimism. The fall of Rome, for example, coloured his doctrine of original sin, which would form such a central part of the Western Christian vision. Augustine came to believe that God had condemned humankind to eternal damnation, all because of Adam’s original sin. This ‘inherited sin’ was passed on through what Augustine called concupiscence, the desire to take pleasure in sex rather than in God. This image, of the higher life of devotion, dragged down by ‘the chaos of sensation and lawless passion’ was paralleled by the
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