Augustine's Hellish Mistake: Methodological Inconsistencies in Augustine's Treatment of the Proportionality Objection to Hell

This paper argues that St. Augustine of Hippo provides an inadequate and methodologically inconsistent defense against the “proportionality objection” to the eternal, conscious torment view of hell. The proportionality objection argues that since man’s crimes on earth are finite, eternal and infinite punishment in the afterlife would not be “proportional” and therefore not just. In Book XXI of his City of God, Augustine approaches this argument in two variants: the “duration” variant and the “effect” variant. The duration variant argues that a just punishment should be temporally proportional, or equal, to the time taken to commit a crime. The effect variant argues that a just punishment should be proportional, or equal, to a crime in its effect, or intensity. In his defense of eternal conscious torment, Augustine successfully defeats the weaker, duration variant by developing a framework which utilizes moral intuition and normative justice to dispel with the claimed necessity of temporally proportional punishment. However, when Augustine turns to attack the effect variant, he abandons this intuition and normative justice framework in favor of theological dogmas, substantially weakening his argument structure and contradicting his methodology in the process. In the extension to this methodological shift, Augustine defends against the effect variant by applying it to the case of Adam in Genesis as someone who does deserve infinite punishment, but he thereby is forced to use questionable dogmas to extrapolate Adam’s guilt onto the rest of mankind. There certainly are viable defenses against the proportionality objection, but Augustine’s dogmatic assertions leave the effect variant inadequately answered at best and deconstructs his “moral intuition” methodology at worst.