Original Sin

Original sin is the state of privation of sanctifying grace into which every man comes into the world. Sanctifying grace is the divine life set in the soul, the life that makes man a child of God and his friend. The newborn is deprived of it from the first instant of his existence: he receives in heritage the consequence of the fault committed at the origins of humanity.

The state of innocence

In the beginning, God raised man above his own nature. He created him in uprightness, adjusted to God, to himself and to the world: this is what is called original justice, where the word justice means this harmony, this adjustment of man to his Creator. “God made man right, and he hath entangled himself with an infinity of questions.” Ecclesiastes 7:29 This uprightness rested on two gifts that human nature could not give itself.

The first is sanctifying grace, which united man to God in his friendship. It is a supernatural gift, the word designating what surpasses every created nature and belongs to the proper life of God. Created in the image of God, man received through this grace to bear also his likeness, sharing in the very life of his Creator. “Let us make man to our image and likeness.” Genesis 1:26

The second is a set of gifts called preternatural, the word meaning beyond nature: they raised human nature above its own powers, in the body and in the faculties. Tradition counts four. Integrity, the full submission of the passions to reason. Immortality, exemption from death. Impassibility, exemption from suffering. And an infused knowledge: created as adults, with neither childhood nor parents to instruct them, Adam and Eve received from God the knowledge needed to guide their life and to raise their offspring. This last gift alone would not have been transmitted, for their children, born small and growing up under their guidance, would have acquired it by education; the other three would have passed to all their descendants.

The harmony of the passions

Integrity ordered man’s inner self. The passions are the spontaneous movements of the soul before what it perceives as a good or an evil: desire, joy, fear, anger. Tradition sorts them into two registers. The first, called concupiscible, arise before a sensible good or evil and carry one towards it or away from it: love and hatred, desire and aversion, joy and sorrow. The second, called irascible, rise before a good hard to attain or an evil hard to avoid, and sustain effort: hope and discouragement, daring and fear, the anger that rises against the obstacle. All are forces given to man so that he may act.

In the state of innocence, man knew hunger, desire, fear; these movements rose only at reason’s command and yielded to its judgment, without the spirit having to struggle to be obeyed.

This order descended from God. Reason governed the passions because it held itself under God, and the body obeyed the soul because the soul obeyed its Creator. Integrity rested on this union with God, not on any strength man held of his own: as long as the soul remained under God, all remained in order under the soul. Scripture gives its sign at the threshold of the account. “And they were both naked: to wit, Adam and his wife: and were not ashamed.” Genesis 2:25 The body was then transparent to the spirit: nothing in it rose that the soul had to subdue against itself.

The loss

Put to the test of obedience, Adam preferred his own will to God’s, wanting to decide good and evil for himself. This first refusal is the fault of the origins. Its root is pride: the will to set oneself up as master of one’s own destiny, God’s equal, which is what the tempter promised. “you shall be as Gods, knowing good and evil.” Genesis 3:5 Man, called to receive from God the measure of the good, wanted to fix it himself, and the outward disobedience did no more than express this inner refusal to depend. By turning away from God, he broke at one stroke the three accords that original justice held together. Friendship with God first, lost by the one who now hides from his friend. The inner accord next: reason, in leaving God, lost its hold over what was subject to it, and the passions escaped its governance. The accord with the world last. “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread till thou return to the earth out of which thou wast taken.” Genesis 3:19 The earth turns rebellious, work becomes toil, and death enters the human condition.

A sin contracted, not committed

This privation received at birth bears the name of sin, and Scripture already speaks thus. “For behold I was conceived in iniquities; and in sins did my mother conceive me.” Psalm 51:7 The word is nonetheless used here by analogy. Sin, in the proper sense, is an evil act that the will chooses freely; original sin designates a state, the absence of sanctifying grace and the separation from God at the root of one’s being, though no personal fault has been committed. The newborn has not committed it, he contracts it: he comes into the world deprived of the holiness for which he was made. It is this privation, and not a guilty act, that properly constitutes original sin, and from it all the rest follows. Tradition here distinguishes two realities that the same word covers. There is first original sin called originating: the free act by which Adam sinned in the beginning. There is then original sin called originated: the state that his fault left and that each one receives at birth. The first was a personal and voluntary fault; the second is the privation of holiness and of original justice in which we come into the world.

The transmission

What one man lost, all lost with him. Adam did not stand before God as an isolated individual: he bore within him the whole human family, and what he had received for it, then lost, he transmits to all, as the members hold their life from the head. “By one man sin entered the world, and through sin death, and death passed upon all men.” Romans 5:12

This transmission takes place by generation, not by imitation. Original sin does not spread from man to man in the manner of a bad example that the descendants would copy: it is received with nature itself, at the instant each one holds it from his parents. Every man receives from Adam human nature as the fault left it, deprived of grace and inclined to disorder. The state marks him thus from his conception, before any act and any choice, and no one frees himself from it by his own powers. The Church fixed this language at the close of a controversy. In the fifth century, the monk Pelagius taught that Adam had harmed his descendants only by bad example: each one would be born as sound as the first man and would sin only by imitating him. Against him, Saint Augustine established that the fault reaches nature itself and is received with it. The Council of Trent gathered this doctrine, declaring that original sin is transmitted by propagation and not by imitation, that is, by the generation that gives nature, and not by an example one would copy.

Concupiscence

The loss of original justice leaves man with a wounded nature. Wounded, not destroyed: it is here that the Catholic faith parts from an error that denies it. The fault stripped man of the gifts that raised him above his nature, but it did not annihilate nature itself. Reason, free will and the image of God remain in him, weakened and not abolished: fallen man is still capable of knowing the true and of willing a good, though he can no longer, without grace, either hold firmly to it or give himself to God. One cannot therefore say, as has been held, that nature would be wholly corrupted and man reduced to being able only to sin. His passions no longer obey reason spontaneously: they often pull towards evil before the will has even chosen. This disorder bears the name of concupiscence, the inclination to evil that the fault of the origins left in every man. “For the good which I will, I do not: but the evil which I will not, that I do.” Romans 7:19

This inclination draws towards evil without imposing it, and is not itself a sin. The Council of Trent declared this expressly: concupiscence comes from sin and inclines to sin, but it is not sin itself; if the Apostle sometimes names it so, it is only because it proceeds from sin and leads to it. As long as the will does not consent to it, man does not sin; the struggle it imposes becomes even the place where freedom is exercised and strengthened, and God himself calls man to it. “if ill, shall not sin forthwith be present at the door? but the lust thereof shall be under thee, and thou shalt have dominion over it.” Genesis 4:7

The remedy

Christ came to restore what the first man had lost. The new Adam, head of a renewed humanity, he communicates life where the first had communicated death. “And as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all shall be made alive.” 1 Corinthians 15:22 What one had lost for all, one restores to all. “For as by the disobedience of one man, many were made sinners: so also by the obedience of one, many shall be made just.” Romans 5:19

Baptism erases original sin and restores to the soul sanctifying grace, God’s friendship regained. One human creature alone never bore this privation: in view of the merits of Christ, God preserved his Mother from original sin from the first instant of her conception, which is called the Immaculate Conception. What baptism restores to others after their birth, grace gave to Mary beforehand, so that the Saviour might be born of an all-holy mother. The angel already greets her as wholly filled with God’s favour. “Rejoice, full of grace: the Lord is with you.” Luke 1:28 The preternatural gifts, however, remain in waiting: concupiscence, suffering and death remain in the life of the baptised, now taken up in the grace of Christ and ordered to eternal life. At the resurrection, the full harmony will be restored, and the body itself raised, made like the glorious body of the risen Christ. “It is sown a natural body, it rises a spiritual body.” 1 Corinthians 15:44 What the fall had undone, Christ restores, and raises higher still.