Beyond Knowledge of Good and Evil

According to Augustine, divine Grace is both a necessary and a sufficient condition of human goodness, i. e. is a deliverance to the City of God from the sinful illusion of 'knowledge of good and evil' that governs the City of Man. However, this doctrine is weak in two respects. First, presumed Biblical support is compromised by the passage at Genesis 3:22--God's statement that "the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil"--which asserts that that knowledge is substantive in the City of God, an implies that one resident of that community is the alleged unsaved perpetrator of 'original sin'. Second, as entirely independent of human conduct, divine Grace is an idea with no consequences, i. e. no human conduct can be known to effectively promote it, and, hence, is meaningless, according to Pragmatism. So, what seems, in Augustine's doctrine, to lie beyond the knowledge of good and evil, is Moral Nihilism.