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It is questionable whether Augustine offers the only feasible model of a theological or "relational" anthropology. Regardless, in the first section, Griffiths does a nice job of laying out his interpretation of Augustine's basic theological ideas in a lucid and accessible manner. This is no small feat. Griffiths begins by explaining how Augustine presents an orthodox understanding of creation in the speculative language available to him. All things, he explains, have their being insofar as they "participate" in God in some manner. This means that God is the cause of the being of all things: created things are certainly "other" than God; they have both their origin and their ongoing subsistence and well-being as a result of God's abiding providential care. Griffiths means to highlight the radical sense of dependency of the creature upon the Creator (as opposed to any sense of "autonomy"), and therefore emphasize creation as a gift: "To think of things independently of thinking about God is therefore to fall short of thinking about things as they are, for they are only in terms of God and by gift of God."
A consequence of this view of creation is a hierarchical picture of the cosmos. Everything made by God is good, but some things are "more good" than others: spiritual goods are of greater value than earthly goods; creatures endowed with reason claim a higher order of "participation" in the life of God than animals or plants, and so on. For Augustine, sin enters the picture when a "lesser good" is mistaken for a higher good: more precisely, when a created good is mistaken for God. This is idolatry. Sin by this account is a confusion about the proper order of things, and therefore the proper way in which things should be loved. All created things exist for the purpose of turning our hearts to God as their origin and ours. When we take something such as money or worldly prestige as an end worth seeking for its own sake, we make that thing into a god. The act of sinning is therefore its own punishment, Griffiths says (echoing Dante and many Christian moralists before him); what is intended to satisfy does not, and cannot, and we are inevitably unhappy. Eve, he says, knows perfectly well that the apple will taste like ashes, nor will it fill her belly.
Sin is therefore a kind of deception, even if it is actively desired. Griffiths links this to language, making lying a paradigm for sin in general. Even more, he makes it the ur-Sin from which all other sin derives. This move requires a rhetorical misconstrual of Augustine's larger project.
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