[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]This was a hot topic in chat. Thought I'd offer the Eastern Orthodox perspective of Original Sin for those of you that are curious or want a more comprehensive explanation. It's beefy so I chopped it into 2 parts. [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Rags of Mortality: Original Sin and Human Nature[/FONT][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]
[/FONT][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]by Archpriest Alexander Golubov, Ph.D.[/FONT][/FONT][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]
[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]It was St. Paul who first connected the events surrounding the temptation and fall of Adam in Paradise, as recounted in Genesis 3, to the events surrounding the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Christ in Jerusalem, and established between them a logical and direct inner relationship. To his mind, Adam's transgression in Paradise became the doorway through which sin and death entered into the world: "sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men for all have sinned" (Rom. 5:12).[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Commenting on this and related passages, St. John Chrysostom explains: "But what does it mean, 'for all have sinned' (Rom. 5.12) This: he having once fallen, yet they that had not eaten of the tree inherited mortality . . . From this it is clear that it was not Adam's sin, his transgression--that is of the Law--but by the virtue of his disobedience that all have been marred. What is the proof of this? The fact that even before the Law all died: 'for death reigned,' St. Paul says, 'from Adam to Moses, even over them who had not sinned' (Rom 5:14). How did it 'reign'? After the manner of Adam's transgression, he who is 'the type of Him that was to come.' Thus, when the Jews ask, how was it possible for one Person to have saved the world? you will be able to reply, in the same way that the disobedience of one person, Adam, brought its condemnation" (Commentary on Romans, X).[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Explaining Christ's redemptive role, St. Paul recapitulated this thought in his first Epistle to the Corinthians, where he proclaimed: "For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection from the dead. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive" (1 Cor. 15:21-22).[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Following St. Paul, the Holy Fathers teach that the state of general sinfulness and death is not man's original state of being, that man was not created by God to naturally live like this. Rather, this miserable condition in which we now find ourselves is the natural result of the moral disaster that occurred in Paradise with our ancient forefathers, Adam and Eve. The human race, writes St. Justin Martyr, "from the time of Adam had been subject to death and deceit of the serpent, each of us having committed sins of our own" (Dialogue with Trypho, 88). "When [Adam] transgressed the Commandment of God," teaches St. Methodius of Olympus, "he suffered the terrible and destructive fall. He was reduced to a state of death" (Banquet of the Virgins, III).[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Before their fall in Paradise, however, writes St. Athanasius of Alexandria, our forefathers "did not die and did not decay, escaped death and corruption. The presence of the Word with them shielded them from natural corruption, as also the Book of Wisdom says, God created man for incorruption and as an image of His own eternity; but by the envy of the devil death entered into the world (Wis. 2:23f.) When this happened, men began to die, and corruption spread unchecked among them and held sway over men to more than a natural degree, because it was the penalty concerning which God had forewarned would be the reward of transgressing the commandment" (On the Incarnation of the Word).[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Thus, 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?[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]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).[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]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."[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]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).[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]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."[1][/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]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."[2] 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.[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]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.[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]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.[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]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.[3] 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"[4] and scholastics, and eventually the Protestant Reformers as well.[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]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.[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Rags of Mortality: Original Sin and Human Nature[/FONT][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]
[/FONT][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]by Archpriest Alexander Golubov, Ph.D.[/FONT][/FONT][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]
[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]It was St. Paul who first connected the events surrounding the temptation and fall of Adam in Paradise, as recounted in Genesis 3, to the events surrounding the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Christ in Jerusalem, and established between them a logical and direct inner relationship. To his mind, Adam's transgression in Paradise became the doorway through which sin and death entered into the world: "sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men for all have sinned" (Rom. 5:12).[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Commenting on this and related passages, St. John Chrysostom explains: "But what does it mean, 'for all have sinned' (Rom. 5.12) This: he having once fallen, yet they that had not eaten of the tree inherited mortality . . . From this it is clear that it was not Adam's sin, his transgression--that is of the Law--but by the virtue of his disobedience that all have been marred. What is the proof of this? The fact that even before the Law all died: 'for death reigned,' St. Paul says, 'from Adam to Moses, even over them who had not sinned' (Rom 5:14). How did it 'reign'? After the manner of Adam's transgression, he who is 'the type of Him that was to come.' Thus, when the Jews ask, how was it possible for one Person to have saved the world? you will be able to reply, in the same way that the disobedience of one person, Adam, brought its condemnation" (Commentary on Romans, X).[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Explaining Christ's redemptive role, St. Paul recapitulated this thought in his first Epistle to the Corinthians, where he proclaimed: "For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection from the dead. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive" (1 Cor. 15:21-22).[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Following St. Paul, the Holy Fathers teach that the state of general sinfulness and death is not man's original state of being, that man was not created by God to naturally live like this. Rather, this miserable condition in which we now find ourselves is the natural result of the moral disaster that occurred in Paradise with our ancient forefathers, Adam and Eve. The human race, writes St. Justin Martyr, "from the time of Adam had been subject to death and deceit of the serpent, each of us having committed sins of our own" (Dialogue with Trypho, 88). "When [Adam] transgressed the Commandment of God," teaches St. Methodius of Olympus, "he suffered the terrible and destructive fall. He was reduced to a state of death" (Banquet of the Virgins, III).[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Before their fall in Paradise, however, writes St. Athanasius of Alexandria, our forefathers "did not die and did not decay, escaped death and corruption. The presence of the Word with them shielded them from natural corruption, as also the Book of Wisdom says, God created man for incorruption and as an image of His own eternity; but by the envy of the devil death entered into the world (Wis. 2:23f.) When this happened, men began to die, and corruption spread unchecked among them and held sway over men to more than a natural degree, because it was the penalty concerning which God had forewarned would be the reward of transgressing the commandment" (On the Incarnation of the Word).[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Thus, 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?[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]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).[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]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."[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]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).[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]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."[1][/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]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."[2] 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.[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]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.[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]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.[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]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.[3] 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"[4] and scholastics, and eventually the Protestant Reformers as well.[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]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.[/FONT]
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