Originally posted by Orthodox Catholic:
Dear elexeie,
I would still argue that "sin" is something that is not limited to personal acts of sin, but also to our fallen human nature via Original Sin.
If one wants to get REALLY technical, if, as the Augustinian tradition would have it, babies are born with the one stain of Original Sin - then how is that "sins" in the plural to which your quotes refer?
Again, the remission of sins is a blanket phrase that refers to both the personal sins of adults and to the innate sinfulness, lack of Grace (but not totally) that a baby is born with due to Original Sin.
The idea that someone can inherit by biological transmission the "stain" of a sin (as opposed to its effects on our nature) committed by someone else is an innovation - and surely against all reason.
Dear Alex,
according to the Fathers, our present condition is the result of a freely-willed choice, the natural consequences of the disobedience of Adam and Eve, the penalty for failure to heed God's warning that death, indeed, will be the catastrophic outcome of eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. It might occur to some, however, that it is exceedingly cruel of God to condemn the entire human race for the sin of two individuals. Why, indeed, should we, who were not around at the time of Adam's transgression, have to pay the rather stiff penalty for something that we did not, of ourselves, do? Isn't this guilt by association?
The source of this moral problem is not God, of course, as the author of evil and death, for God is not such. "We must understand," writes St. Gregory Palamas, "that God 'did not make death' (Wisdom 1:13), whether of the body or of the soul. For when He first gave the command, He did not say, 'On the day you eat of it, die,' but 'In the day you eat of it, you will surely die' (Gen. 2:17). He did not say afterwards, 'return now to the earth,' but 'you shall return' (Gen. 3:19), foretelling in this way what would come to pass" (One Hundred Fifty Chapters). Neither is the source, explains St. Theophilos of Antioch, the tree of knowledge of good and evil. For it is not, he writes, "as if any evil existed in the tree of knowledge, but from the fact of his disobedience did man draw, as from a fountain, labor, grief and, at last, fell prey to death" (To Autolycus, II, 25).
The problem, rather, has to do with the nature of Divinely-mandated freedom and the autonomous functioning of the natural law of creation, directly pertaining to issues of heredity and genetics, being analogous to something which contemporary medicine would define as "fetal addiction syndrome" or "fetal AIDS syndrome." In such a case, a mother who carries a gene for hemophilia, for instance, will transmit it to her offspring by the biological laws of heredity, though the processes of meiosis and mitosis, by means of which cell division naturally occurs. Or, in a similar way, a mother addicted to either drugs or alcohol, or who is HIV-positive, by virtue of the fact that from the moment of conception she shares with the child in her womb both blood and other bodily fluids, will naturally transmit to her child what she herself carries in her own blood. We easily understand that in this case, the child that is in the womb of the mother, will, of course, without any movement of the will, without agreement or disagreement with the particular moral choices of the mother, and, importantly, without any guilt on his part, participate in the affliction of the mother ("Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me," Ps. 50[51].5). It is in this vein, indeed, that the Fathers explain the concept of what has become known in theology as "original sin."
St. Cyril of Alexandria, for instance, observes: "Since [Adam] produced children after falling into this state, we, his descendants, are corruptible as the issue of a corruptible source. It is in this sense that we are heirs of Adam's curse. Not that we are punished for having disobeyed God's commandment along with him, but that he became mortal and the curse of mortality was transmitted to his seed after him, offspring born of a mortal source . . . So corruption and death are the universal inheritance of Adam's transgression" (Doctrinal questions and answers, 6). Elsewhere, commenting on St. Paul's teaching, he explains: "Human nature became sick with sin. Because of the disobedience of one (that is, of Adam), the many became sinners; not because they transgressed together with Adam (for they were not there) but because they are of his nature, which entered under the dominion of sin . . . Human nature became ill and subject to corruption through the transgression of Adam, thus penetrating man's very passions" (On Romans 5.18).
Summarizing this patristic teaching, the Greek theologian John Karmiris writes that "the sin of the first man, together with all of its consequences and penalties, is transferred by means of natural heredity to the entire human race. Since every human being is a descendant of the first man, 'no one of us is free from the spot of sin, even if he should manage to live a completely sinless day.' . . . Original Sin not only constitutes 'an accident' of the soul; but its results, together with its penalties, are transplanted by natural heredity to the generations to come . . . And thus, from the one historical event of the first sin of the first-born man, came the present situation of sin being imparted, together with all of the consequences thereof, to all natural descendants of Adam."
Held, in general, as Orthodox teaching by both Eastern and Western Fathers, the theological concept, or doctrine, of "original sin," as the Russian theologian Fr. Michael Pomazansky points out, "has great significance in the Christian world-view, because upon it rests a whole series of other dogmas." As a distinct concept of Christian theology, however, it was first defined and introduced in the fifth century by Blessed Augustine. Bishop of Hippo Regius in Northern Africa.
Blessed Augustine developed his doctrine in the context of a rather hot polemical confrontation with the heretic Pelagius, who, fleeing Rome after its sack in 410 by Alaric, chieftain of the Western Goths, had the misfortune, together with some of his followers, to settle in Africa, where his preaching came under the intense scrutiny of the bishop of Hippo. Pelagius, who was not a theologian, but essentially an itinerant ascetic preacher and moralist, whose chief interest was in correcting the moral laxity of contemporary Christians, had the further misfortune of permitting a local lawyer named Coelestius, who was seeking ordination to the priesthood, to become his disciple and interpreter of his views. In the view of the Pelagians, the low level of morality and rampant moral laxity had its source not only in what they saw as the denial of individual moral responsibility in the teaching about the consequences of Adam's sin, but also in the definition of the clergy as an elite group in the church, which in their eyes permitted the laity to abjure their moral responsibilities and adopt unacceptably low standards of Christian living. Some time later, after Pelagius had already left for Palestine (where he had yet the further misfortune of running afoul of the hot-tempered Blessed Jerome, translator of the Bible into Latin), Coelestius and his followers began preaching and explicating the views of their teacher, and in the process questioned the practice of infant baptism, the efficacy of the Incarnation and redemptive death of Christ on the cross, and denied the inheritance of Adam's sin. While man does indeed follow Adam into death, they taught, man sins only by example, through imitation of Adam, not through an endemic, hereditary defect of his nature. Despite the facts of sin and death, man's nature nonetheless remains as he was originally created, innocent and pure, as was first-created Adam himself. Disease and death are thus not consequences of original sin, but are characteristic of human nature from creation.
Blessed Augustine very correctly noted the dangerous implications of this argument for Orthodox theology. The total dismissal of the concept of an original, systemic sin inherited from Adam and present in human nature by virtue of genetic heritage results not only in an overly high valuation of man's physical and spiritual capabilities apart from God, but more importantly, perhaps, places in doubt the entire economy of our salvation by Christ, by obviating such essential Christian doctrines as the Incarnation and Redemption.
It should be remembered that the Pelagian controversy, which originally sparked the theological debate, was essentially a Western, more specifically, a Northern African controversy, which only incidentally involved Palestine and the East. While Pelagius himself died in obscurity some years after his condemnation by the Council of Carthage in 416 and the Local African Council of 418, and before the Council of Ephesus in 431, the theological controversy to which he involuntarily lent his name was to involve quite a few Latin Fathers, and was to have far-reaching effects on the formulation of doctrines of sin and grace, free will and predestination. Thus, the theological debate that arose out of these issues eventually was to involve, directly or indirectly, not only Blessed Augustine and Blessed Jerome, but also Augustine's disciples Caesarius of Arles and Prosper of Aquitaine, as well as John Cassian, Vincent of Lerins, Gennadius of Marseilles, Faustus of Riez, and Arnobius the Younger, not to mention the later "augustinians" and scholastics, and eventually the Protestant Reformers as well.
Technically speaking, in their writings the Eastern Fathers and Orthodox theologians do not use the Latin term introduced by Blessed Augustine in his treatise "De Peccato originali," but instead translate this concept by means of two cognate terms in both Greek and Russian, namely, progoniki amartia (= pervorodnyi grekh in Russian) and to propatorikon amartima (= praroditel'skii grekh), which is properly translated "ancestral sin." These terms allow for a more careful nuancing of the various implications contained in the one Latin term.
In the East, then, the concept of original sin has come to mean, as Fr. Michael Pomazansky very succinctly defines it, "the sin of Adam, which was transmitted to his descendants and weighs upon them." Or, as John Karmiris puts it in an expanded definition, original sin is " 'sin-sickness,' the sinful situation of human nature which deprived man of Divine Grace, and subjected him to death, to departure from the Divine life, [and] has been transmitted by means of natural heredity to all of the descendants of the first-born, along with the stigma, the consequences, the fruits of that Original Sin." Indeed, Karmiris reminds us, "it was for this reason that the ancient Church instituted the Baptism of infants, specifically that they might be freed from the stigma of sin of their ancestors, although the infants possessed no guilt of 'actual sin.'"
And these statements as I see articulates the Catholic position on Original sin.
The Western temptation to define the doctrine of original sin too precisely
has historically led to overstatements and exaggerations on both sides of the issue, of both definition and reaction. Because they framed their arguments in the context of and in response to the Pelagian position, Blessed Augustine and his disciples tended to exaggerate the sinfulness and depravity of human nature, and their teaching thus tends to emphasize the "punitive aspect" of the consequences of the fall, leading also to exaggeration and overstatement on the question of free will. Interestingly enough, both extreme tendencies in Western interpretation (which the Catholic Church cautions)can be seen to be rooted in the writings of Bl. Augustine: first, that man suffers death because he is guilty for the sin of Adam, and second, that the nature of man is so corrupt as to render man incapable of exercising free will in the work of salvation (the doctrine of predestination).
The Fathers and Orthodox theologians are perhaps more circumspect in not "dotting the i's," as it were, in relation to things that we cannot possibly know about the specific nature of Adam's sin. Thus, instead of discussing or stressing the many possible secondary and fleshly aspects of original sin, the Orthodox prefer to see it primarily in spiritual terms, as being rooted in spiritual pride and disobedience. "The Original Sin," writes Karmiris, "was a free transgression of our First Parents which grew out of egoism and boasting. Thus, through the envy and influence of Satan, directed against our First Parents, 'the sin and transgression entered,' and our First Parents transgressed the Law of God, motivated by a desire to be equal with God, or, as Chrysostom says, the 'anticipation to become God'; man wanted to become independent from God, finding, by means of sin, divine knowledge, blessedness, and perfection." In a similar vein, Fr. Michael Pomazansky observes:
The eating of the fruit was only the beginning of moral deviation, the first push; but it was so poisonous and ruinous that it was already impossible to return to the previous sanctity and righteousness; on the contrary, there was revealed an inclination to travel farther on the path of apostasy from God. Blessed Augustine says: 'Here was pride, because man desired to be more under his own authority than under God's; and a mockery of what is holy, because he did not believe God; and murder, because he subjected himself to death; and spiritual adultery, because the immaculateness of the human soul was defiled through the persuasion of the serpent; and theft, because they made use of the forbidden tree; and the love of acquisition, because he desired more than was necessary to satisfy himself.' Thus, with the first transgression of the commandment, the principle of sin immediately entered into man--'the law of sin' (monos tis amartias). It struck the very nature of man and quickly began to root itself in him and develop. . . . The sinful inclinations in man have taken the reigning position; man has become the servant of sin (Rom. 6:7) . . . With sin, death entered into the human race. Man was created immortal in his soul, and he could have remained immortal also in body if he had not fallen away from God. . . . Man's body, as was well expressed by Blessed Augustine, does not possess 'the impossibility of dying,' but it did possess 'the possibility of not dying,' which it has now lost.
It can be said that while we have not inherited the guilt of Adam's personal sin, because his sin is also of a generic nature, and because the entire human race is possessed of an essential, ontological unity, we participate in it by virtue of our participation in the human race. "The imparting of Original Sin by means of natural heredity should be understood in terms of the unity of the entire human nature, and of the homoousiotitos of all men, who, connected by nature, constitute one mystic whole. Inasmuch as human nature is indeed unique and unbreakable, the imparting of sin from the first-born to the entire human race descended from him is rendered explicable: 'Explicitly, as from the root, the sickness proceeded to the rest of the tree, Adam being the root who had suffered corruption'" [St. Cyril of Alexandria].
The Orthodox view of fallen human nature is remarkably sober and balanced, gravitating neither to the unwarranted optimism of the Pelagian view, which sees human nature as having remained essentially in its pristine innocence and goodness, nor to the equally unwarranted pessimism of the predestinatarian view, which sees human nature as hopelessly perverted and corrupt. "Man fell unconsciously, unintentionally; he was deceived and seduced," writes the 19th-century Russian bishop and ascete, St. Ignatius Brianchaninov. "For this reason his natural goodness was not destroyed, but was mixed with the evil of the fallen angels. But this natural goodness, being mixed with evil, poisoned with evil, became worthless, inadequate, unworthy of God who is perfect, purest goodness. Man for the most part does evil, meaning to do good, not seeing the evil wrapped in a mask of goodness on account of the darkening of his mind and conscience."
The Orthodox view of original sin is profoundly related to the Orthodox concept of theosis and deification. Thus, Pomazansky observes, while the physical, mental, and emotional faculties have become corrupted in man, the greatest loss to man was deprivation of the blessedness of Paradise and life eternal. "Both the mind and the feelings have become darkened in him, and therefore his moral freedom often does not incline towards the good, but towards evil . . . The physical consequences of the fall are diseases, hard labor and death. These were the natural result of the moral fall, the falling away from communion with God, man's departure from God. Man became subject to the corrupt elements of the world, in which dissolution and death are active. Nourishment from the Source of Life and from the constant renewal of all of one's powers became weak in men . . . However, the final and most important consequence of sin was not illness and physical death, but the loss of Paradise . . . In Adam all mankind was deprived of the future blessedness which stood before it, the blessedness which Adam and Eve had partially tasted in Paradise. In place of the prospect of life eternal, mankind beheld death, and behind it hell, darkness, rejection by God."
Theosis, or, as St. Seraphim of Sarov defines it, "the acquisition of the Holy Spirit," is both the possibility and the reality, the goal and the gift, of overcoming the stain of original sin and repossession of what has been lost through it, the sole dominant purpose of Christian life. Despite the "rags of mortality" in which the human race has clothed itself through the fall of the first Adam in Paradise, Christians live in the hope of once again "ascending to their former beauty" by virtue of their redemption by the suffering, death, and resurrection on the third day of the second Adam. Walking between hope and despair, repenting of our sins, and living a life of Christian struggle, we await the fulfillment of the promise of St. Paul, so that together with redeemed first Adam we can sing the song of victory: "So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?" (1 Cor. 15: 55-56).
:p
