Original Sin

Original Sin. In Christian theology, the state of sin in which mankind has been captive since the Fall (q.v.). The scriptural foundation of the doctrine is the Pauline teaching that ‘through one man [i.e. Adam] sin entered into the world’, so that ‘by the trespass of the one many died’ (cf. Rom. 5: 12–21 and 1 Cor. 15: 22). St Irenaeus began to develop the doctrine in his struggle against the Gnostics, defending the teaching that evil came into the world through the sin of Adam, as against the dualist systems of the heretics. The Greek Fathers generally emphasized the cosmic dimensions of the Fall—since Adam men are born into a fallen world—but at the same time they held fast to the belief that man, though fallen, is free. The precise formulation of the doctrine was left to the W. Here Tertullian, St Cyprian, and St Ambrose taught the solidarity of the whole race with Adam not only in the consequences of the sin but in the sin itself, which is transmitted through natural generation. Beyond this two schools of thought developed. St Augustine and his followers maintained that Adam's guilt was transmitted to his descendants by concupiscence, making of humanity a massa damnata and much enfeebling, though not destroying, the freedom of the will. St Anselm separated Original Sin from concupiscence; he defined it as ‘the privation of the righteousness which every man ought to possess’ and held that it was transmitted by generation, since the whole human race was present in Adam seminaliter. St Thomas Aquinas distinguished, in the state of Adam before the Fall, ‘pure nature’ from the supernatural gifts which perfected it. Hence Original Sin consists in the loss of those supernatural privileges which had directed man to his supernatural end and enabled him to keep his inferior powers in submission to reason. This conception leaves to the reason, will, and passions of fallen man their natural powers. According to Aquinas, Original Sin is transmitted not as the personal fault of Adam but as a state of human nature, yet constituting a fault inasmuch as all men are regarded as one great organism of which Adam was the first mover. The instrument of transmission is generation, regardless of the accompanying concupiscence.

In the 16th cent., both M. Luther and J. Calvin again equated Original Sin with concupiscence and affirmed that it destroyed liberty and persisted after Baptism. D. Soto, on the other hand, in restating the doctrine of Aquinas eliminated the element of concupiscence from the definition altogether and identified Original Sin with the loss of sanctifying grace; his views were widely influential in the RC Church, though the Jansenists inclined towards the old Augustinian pessimism. From the 18th cent. the dogma of Original Sin was attenuated by the Enlightenment's confidence in human progress and belief in evolution, but in some form it persisted and was strongly reaffirmed in the 20th cent. by K. Barth and his followers. Modern treatments of Original Sin tend to regard it as belonging to the nature of man rather than to the individual person; they derive it less from heredity than from the social character of man.