Who invented original sin

This privation, therefore, is the hereditary stain. How voluntary "There can be no sin that is not voluntary , the learned and the ignorant admit this evident truth ", writes St. Augustine De vera relig. The Church has condemned the opposite solution given by Baius [prop. But how can original sin be even indirectly voluntary for a child that has never used its personal free will?

Certain Protestants hold that a child on coming to the use of reason will consent to its original sin; but in reality no one ever thought of giving this consent. Besides, even before the use of reason, sin is already in the soul , according to the data of Tradition regarding the baptism of children and the sin contracted by generation.

Some theosophists and spiritists admit the pre-existence of souls that have sinned in a former life which they now forget; but apart from the absurdity of this metempsychosis , it contradicts the doctrine of original sin, it substitutes a number of particular sins for the one sin of a common father transmitting sin and death to all cf.

Romans sqq. The whole Christian religion , says St. Augustine , may be summed up in the intervention of two men, the one to ruin us, the other to save us Of Sin and Merit I. The right solution is to be sought in the free will of Adam in his sin , and this free will was ours: "we were all in Adam ", says St.

Ambrose , cited by St. Augustine Opus imperf. Basil attributes to us the act of the first man : "Because we did not fast when Adam ate the forbidden fruit we have been turned out of the garden of Paradise " Hom.

Earlier still is the testimony of St. Thomas thus explains this moral unity of our will with the will of Adam. Considered in the second way an act can be his although he has not done it himself, nor has it been done by his free will but by the rest of the society or by its head, the nation being considered as doing what the prince does. For a society is considered as a single man of whom the individuals are the different members St.

Paul, 1 Corinthians Thus the multitude of men who receive their human nature from Adam is to be considered as a single community or rather as a single body. If the man , whose privation of original justice is due to Adam , is considered as a private person , this privation is not his 'fault', for a fault is essentially voluntary.

If, however, we consider him as a member of the family of Adam , as if all men were only one man, then his privation partakes of the nature of sin on account of its voluntary origin, which is the actual sin of Adam " De Malo, iv, 1. It is this law of solidarity, admitted by common sentiment, which attributes to children a part of the shame resulting from the father's crime.

It is not a personal crime, objected the Pelagians. Augustine , " but it is paternal crime" Op. Being a distinct person I am not strictly responsible for the crime of another; the act is not mine. Yet, as a member of the human family , I am supposed to have acted with its head who represented it with regard to the conservation or the loss of grace.

I am, therefore, responsible for my privation of grace, taking responsibility in the largest sense of the word. This, however, is enough to make the state of privation of grace in a certain degree voluntary , and, therefore, "without absurdity it may be said to be voluntary " St. Augustine , "Retract. Thus the principal difficulties of non-believers against the transmission of sin are answered.

Our dogma does not attribute to the children of Adam any properly so-called responsibility for the act of their father, nor do we say that original sin is voluntary in the strict sense of the word.

It is true that, considered as "a moral deformity", "a separation from God ", as "the death of the soul ", original sin is a real sin which deprives the soul of sanctifying grace. It has the same claim to be a sin as has habitual sin , which is the state in which an adult is placed by a grave and personal fault, the "stain" which St.

Thomas defines as "the privation of grace" I-II ; III, ad 3 , and it is from this point of view that baptism , putting an end to the privation of grace, "takes away all that is really and properly sin ", for concupiscence which remains "is not really and properly sin ", although its transmission was equally voluntary Council of Trent, Sess.

Considered precisely as voluntary , original sin is only the shadow of sin properly so-called. According to St. Thomas In II Sent. Several theologians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, neglecting the importance of the privation of grace in the explanation of original sin, and explaining it only by the participation we are supposed to have in the act of Adam , exaggerate this participation.

They exaggerate the idea of voluntary in original sin, thinking that it is the only way to explain how it is a sin properly so-called. Their opinion, differing from that of St. Thomas , gave rise to uncalled-for and insoluble difficulties. At present it is altogether abandoned. About this page APA citation. Harent, S. Original Sin. In The Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. MLA citation. The word comes from the Latin 'limbus', meaning the edge.

This would be a state of existence where unbaptised babies, and those unfortunate enough to have been born before Jesus, would not experience pain but neither would they experience the Beatific Vision of God.

The idea of Limbo was defined in by Pope Pius X in his catechism. Babies dead without baptism go to Limbo, where they do not enjoy God, but neither do they suffer, because, having Original Sin alone, they do not deserve Paradise, but neither do they merit Hell or Purgatory. However, unease remained over reconciling a Loving God with one who sent babies to Limbo and the church still faced much criticism.

The Church, which has never claimed to definitely know who will go to Heaven apart from the Saints , or Hell, has said that the issue has long been one of speculation in the Church.

This speculation has led to an oversimplification of the matter, and some people have regarded it as fact when it was never the case. Catholics feel sure that God won't impose punishment on babies who are free from personal guilt, but they do admit they don't know what their afterlife will hold.

In April Pope Benedict XVI approved the findings of a report by the International Theological Commission, a Vatican advisory body, which found grounds that the souls of unbaptised children would go to heaven, thus revising traditional teaching on Limbo. The report said there were "reasons to hope that infants who die without baptism may be saved and brought into eternal happiness".

Parents were urged to continue to baptise their children, as the Vatican stressed that baptism is still considered necessary to achieve salvation; the report emphasised that "there are reasons to hope that God will save these infants precisely because it was not possible" to baptise them. St Augustine was Bishop of Hippo, in what is now Algeria, from to He was one of the greatest theologians in history and his ideas still influence Christian thought today.

Although he didn't invent the doctrine of original sin, his ideas about it dominated Western Church teaching. Augustine's theory shows great understanding of human psychology. It provides an explanation for human suffering and guilt by teaching that those human beings somehow deserved these things. Human beings deserve to suffer because the first parents sinned.

And since humanity deserves the bad things it gets, humanity can comfort itself with the idea that it has a just rather than an unjust God. This made the presence of evil in the world easier to understand, and answered the question of why a benevolent God would allow such a state of affairs to exist. Augustine thought that humanity was originally perfect "man's nature was created at first faultless and without any sin" , immortal and blessed with many talents, but that Adam and Eve disobeyed God, and introduced sin and death to the world.

Augustine didn't see any need to provide a good reason why Adam, who had originally been created perfect, chose to sin, or why God hadn't created a perfect being that was incapable of sin. As far as Augustine was concerned the point was that Adam had sinned and humanity had to deal with the consequences. Modern people would think it unjust that human beings should suffer for something that happened long before they existed, but to people in Augustine's time the idea of punishing later generations for their parents' crimes was familiar.

Nothing remains but to conclude that in the first man all are understood to have sinned, because all were in him when he sinned; whereby sin is brought in with birth and not removed save by the new birth By that sin we became a corrupt mass. Bible scholars think that this element of Augustine's theory was partly based on a mistranslation in the Latin version of the Bible.

However, Augustine does not base his entire argument only on that particular text, and his theory is not wrecked by this error. Having established that every human being had inherited guilt from Adam, Augustine taught that this was why that all human beings were damned, even if they didn't commit any extra sins of their own. Augustine was certain that the consequence of original sin was damnation. This even applied to people who hadn't committed any sins, like newborn babies, if they died before their souls were cleaned by baptism.

People could only escape damnation through God's grace, and the sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross for their sins. God's grace was passed on through baptism or martyrdom - but this was a route that few would choose. Unfortunately there was no guarantee that everyone who was baptised would be saved from damnation, merely the certainty that those who weren't baptised would go to hell.

The Protestant theologian John Calvin believed that humanity's unbelief and disobedience had so fundamentally changed the human race that little, if anything, of God was left in it.

We are lost, there is no means of help; and whether we are great or small, fathers or children, we are all without exception in a state of damnation if God does not remove from us the curse which weighs upon us, and that by His generosity and grace, without His being obliged to do so.

Many modern Protestants would not take quite such a gloomy view of humanity as Calvin, and would not regard humankind as evil in essence, without any trace of the divine image.

They would still teach that human beings are 'fallen' and need to 'get right with God', by believing that Christ 's death 'atoned' for their sin, accepting that they can only be 'saved' by God's freely given 'grace', and being baptised.

The Christian Orthodox churches don't interpret original sin in the way that Augustine did. They don't accept that people can be guilty of a sin they did not commit, and so reject the idea of inherited guilt passed down the generations.

The Orthodox interpretation of original sin is that the way in which human beings inherit sinfulness is that human history, culture and society have created a moral climate which disposes human beings to behave sinfully; as a result, all people need God's help to avoid sin. We believe that in Adam all have sinned, which means that the original offence committed by him caused human nature, common to all men, to fall to a state in which it bears the consequences of that offence, and which is not the state in which it was at first in our first parents, established as they were in holiness and justice, and in which man knew neither evil nor death.

It is human nature so fallen, stripped of the grace that clothed it, injured in its own natural powers and subjected to the dominion of death, that is transmitted to all men, and it is in this sense that every man is born in sin. We therefore hold, with the Council of Trent, that original sin is transmitted with human nature 'not by imitation, but by propagation' and that it is thus 'proper to everyone.

We believe that our Lord Jesus Christ, by the sacrifice of the cross, redeemed us from original sin and all the personal sins committed by each one of us, so that, in accordance with the word of the Apostle, 'where sin abounded, grace did more abound.

Search term:. Read more. Pelagius and his followers were moral optimists. They believed that human beings were born innocent. Infants do not enter the world with a special endowment of virtue, but neither do they carry the innate stain of vice.

True, we are all descendants of Adam and Eve, and we live in a world rife with the consequences of their primordial act of disobedience. But that act in the distant past does not condemn us inescapably to sinfulness. How could it? What would be the mechanism of infection? Why would a benevolent God permit something so monstrous? We are at liberty to shape our own lives, whether to serve God or to serve Satan. Augustine countered that we are all marked, in our very origins, with evil. It is not a matter of particular acts of cruelty or violence, specific forms of social pathology, or this or that person who has made a disastrous choice.

There is something deeply, essentially wrong with us. Our whole species is what Augustine called a massa peccati, a mass of sin. The Pelagians said that Augustine was simply reverting to the old Manichaean belief that the flesh was the creation and the possession of a wicked force.

Surely this was a betrayal of Christianity, with its faith in a Messiah who became flesh. Not so, Augustine responded. It is here, when Augustine must produce evidence of our individual and collective perfidy, that he called in witness Adam and Eve.

For the original sin that stains every one of us is not only a sin that inheres in our individual origins—that is, in the sexual arousal that enabled our parents to conceive us—but also a sin that may be traced back to the couple in whom our whole race originates.

And now, in order to protect God from the charge that He was responsible for the innate defects in His creation, everything depended on Augustine somehow showing that in Paradise it could all have been otherwise; that our progenitors Adam and Eve were not originally designed to reproduce as we now reproduce but that they perversely made the wrong choice, a choice in which we all participate.

To do this, Augustine would have to burrow into the enigmatic words of Genesis more deeply than anyone had done before. He would have to reconstruct the lost lives of our remote ancestors. He would have to find his way back to the Garden of Eden and watch our first parents making love. The way forward, he became convinced, was first and foremost to take the words of Genesis as literally true.

The Hebrew origin story might seem like a folktale, of the sort he had looked down on when he was a young man. The task was to take it as the unvarnished representation of historical truth—to make it real—and to persuade others to take it that way as well. Of all his many books, it was probably the one to which he devoted the most prolonged and sustained attention.

In the end, it defeated him, and he knew it. The problem is that not every word of Genesis can be taken literally, however much one tries, and there is no simple, reliable rule for the appropriate degree of literal-mindedness.

But how do you know? It is not as if the stakes were low. For Augustine, at least, they could not have been higher: it was a matter of life or death, not only for the first parents but also for all their descendants.

A malignant being is an evil being, if endowed with reason, whether he was so made or so born. And a benevolent rational being is good in the universal judgment of men, whether he was created or so born. We admit that it is repugnant to our moral judgments that God should create an evil being; or that any being should be born in a state of sin, unless his being so born is the consequence of a just judgment.

All the above theologians reject the Mediate Imputation Theory. Strong says:. Since the origination of this corrupt nature cannot be charged to the account of man, man's inheritance of it must be regarded in the light of an arbitrary divine infliction a conclusion which reflects upon the justice of God.

Man is not only condemned for a sinfulness of which God is the author, but is condemned without any real probation Sheldon, who rejects all three of these theories makes this comment on the Mediate Imputation Theory:. An evil which is matter of pure inheritance cannot rationally be made the ground of the moral reprobation of the person inheriting.

To him it is calamity, and more properly calls for compassion than for condemnation If it is irrational cruelty to blame one for a bodily deficit which was thus given, rather than acquired by personal misconduct, it is, in like manner, gross injustice to blame one for a spiritual deficit which was imposed outright and in no part was acquired. From this, we see that the dogma of original sin is proven false by its very advocates.

If, then, it is false, where did it come from and how did it come to be received as a Christian doctrine? I quote again from Finney:. It is a relic of heathen philosophy, and was foisted in among the doctrines of Christianity by Augustine, as everyone may know who will take the trouble to examine for himself. The above statement by Finney can be confirmed by a simple reading of church history.

Church history records that from the second and third centuries A. This influence was profound. There was gross licentiousness on the one hand and extreme asceticism on the other; veneration and worship of saints, relics, images, and pictures; the development of a priesthood with priestly rituals and ceremonies; magical and spiritual powers ascribed to water, sacred words, and signs; water baptism for the remission of sins; and the baptism of infants.

Heathen mythology was introduced and given a Christian form. The heathen concept of a purgatory was accepted with its doctrine of the purging of sins in the after life, and the saying of masses and prayers for the dead. Many of the theologians during these first centuries were converts from heathenism, who wedded their pagan philosophical concepts to Christianity.

These were literary men, educated in the philosophies, who gave the concepts of their heathen beliefs to Christianity, thereby corrupting its purity. To read the theological writings of some of these early "church fathers" is like reading a fantastic story! And it was these early church fathers, from the second and third centuries on, who made the first allusions to a doctrine of original sin.

Tertullian was one of the first church fathers to allude to a doctrine of original sin. His views on sin harmonize with his stoic philosophy. He believed that the soul was physical and that it was propagated by the parents in procreation. He gives an account of a Montanist prophetess, who professed to have seen a soul and attempted to describe its outward appearance.

Because of his materialistic concept the stoical idea of the essential unity of matter and spirit, i. He taught that sin is a physical taint that is propagated from the parent to the child through procreation.

Origen was another of the church fathers who taught a doctrine of original sin. He was a student of all the current philosophies and far outstripped Tertullian in wild philosophical speculation. His theology bears the unmistakable marks of both Gnosticism and Neo-Platonism. He taught the preexistence of souls and that all men sinned and fell in a former existence. His belief was that men, before their existence in this world, were spirits without bodies, and that the material world was created by God for the disciplining and purifying of these fallen spirits.

Fallen man had been banished into material bodies to be disciplined and purified. He taught that this estrangement of fallen spirits would some day come to an end, and all men would be saved. Even the devil and demons would someday be restored to God. Origen believed in a purgatorial fire where souls would be punished and prepared for the presence of God.

In the end, all spirits in heaven and in earth including the demons, would be brought back to God, after having ascended from stage to stage through seven heavens. Origen believed that sin is rooted in the human nature of man. He believed that sin is a necessary consequence of man's material nature.

Origen later assumed the existence of a sort of hereditary sin originating with Adam and added this idea to his belief in a preexisting fall. And he, like Augustine after him, supposed that there was an inherent pollution and sinfulness in sexual union. Augustine himself was deeply imbued with the heathen philosophies of his day. He first became a disciple of the Manichaeans. The Manichaeans were a Gnostic-Christians sect, with the Christian elements reduced to a minimum.

They taught, among other things, that all matter is inherently evil. Because of this view, they also taught that Christ's bodily manifestations were only apparent, and that he did not actually come in the flesh. They denied the real incarnation of Christ, as well as his bodily resurrection, because of their view of the essentially evil nature of all matter.

Augustine's nine years with them accustomed him to regard human nature as essentially evil and human freedom as a delusion. Augustine next fell under the influence of Neo-Platonism, and his theological views were strongly influenced by this philosophy as well.

However, his doctrine of sin shows the obvious influence of the Gnostic teachings of Manichaeism, in which he assumes the most ridiculous teaching of all the heathen philosophies the teaching that matter can be sinful. And this is the source of his doctrine that sin can be passed on physically from one person to another.

Harnack says:.