Saint Augustine of Hippo (CE 354-430) was one of the key architects of Christian theology.  He alone is the author of the Christian doctrine of original sin.  A cynic to the core, Augustine believed the very nature of humanity prevented people from living a sinless life regardless of all efforts.  As he defined it with the support of Paul’s writings, “original” sin is an inheritance of all human beings passed down through sexual intercourse.  His belief was that procreation was achieved only through sexual acts borne of sinful lust.

You undoubtedly see how critical he was to the very foundations of Christianity.  He is, for all intents and purposes, a founding father of Christianity who should be revered by the religion’s followers as an absolute authority on how they should behave.  Were it not for him, the faith would be quite different than its current incarnation — if it existed at all.

I was compelled to make clear who he was and how important his opinions were to Christianity, especially in light of the fact that said opinions formed the religion’s foundation and beginning.  Keep that history in mind.

The following is a quote from De Genesi ad litteram libri duodecim (“The Literal Meaning of Genesis”) written by St. Augustine (as translated by J. H. Taylor in Ancient Christian Writers).  Facing the task of interpreting the Bible while knowing the light of scientific knowledge would fall upon the faithful claims of followers, Augustine was compelled to give direction to his new religion’s believers with the following:

Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he hold to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods and on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.

Need I explain the relevance of this straightforward address by one of the most critical founding fathers of Christianity?