The Case for God

by Karen Armstrong

That same year Alaric and his Visigoths invaded Greece, the first of the barbarian hordes that would bring the Roman Empire to its knees: in 410 Alaric sacked the city of Rome itself. The fall of Rome plunged Western Europe into a dark age that lasted some seven hundred years, its culture preserved only in isolated monasteries and libraries, bastions of civilization in a sea of barbarism. When Augustine died in 630, the Vandals had besieged Hippo and would burn the town to the ground the following year. This is the context of Augustine’s doctrine of Original Sin, one of his less positive contributions to Western theology. He produced an entirely novel exegesis of the second and third chapters of Genesis, which claimed that the sin of Adam had condemned all his descendants to eternal damnation. Despite the salvation wrought by Christ, humanity was still weakened by what Augustine called “concupiscence,” the irrational desire to take pleasure in beings instead of God itself.