www.byzcath.org Forums Faith & Christian Life The Christian East & West Original Sin - East v West

I offer this as nothing but my own personal interpretation, but I see the Fall as a story of awakening. Man desired the knowledge that only God holds (the tree of knowledge of good and evil), and by tasting of it awoke to his own mortality, free will and the burden of personal responsibility.

I think all humans then are like Adam and Eve. We undergo the same process, and that is the effect of the Fall. I do not ascribe to any notion of children born with sin or any sort of inherited guilt.

I am trying to be careful not to make an argument of what I reject, but simply what I believe. This is also why I don't see the question as one of East or West.

Dear Mardukm,
Thanks for your thoughtful reply. I am not at all comfortable, or competent enough, to give an answer to this question. It is my understanding that the east typically steers away from thinking in these terms. I will submit this link for consideration, though it is not necessarily exhaustive. http://www.antiochian.org/1141352351

That particular catechism defines sin as ‘an offense against God, by any thought, word, deed, or omission against the law of God.’

It very well could be my interpretation, but if it is simply my interpretation it is not mine alone. So I will not insist that the west teaches the inherited guilt of Adam, but that we inherit the guilt of sin if that is the language they wish to use. Who am I to say otherwise? It seems to me that the west is saying that we don’t inherit the guilt of the personal act of Adam (that belongs to him alone), but we do inherit the guilt, which is the death of the soul, in an analogous way. I have already quoted Ludwig Ott, and the Council of Trent to this effect. May I also include St. Thomas for our consideration? Looking at all these statements I add 2+2 and think I get 4. The Roman Church says that I got 4.5 (that is I overshoot in my calculations), and so I submit to her judgment.
I would be open to any discussion on the topics.
Thanks,
Bob

I suggest that the really interesting question is why Byzantine Christians continue to impute "original guilt" to contemporary Catholicism. I am not a stranger to internet apologetics. In my experience, Catholic apologists do not often talk about the "inheritance of guilt," nor do Protestant apologists often accuse the Catholic Church of teaching the "inheritance of guilt." So who is that believes and claims that the Catholic Church teaches the "inheritance of guilt"? Eastern polemicists. Why is this? I suggest that the answer lies in the politics of ecclesial identity and the desire and need to differentiate and prove the superiority of one tradition over the other.

There can be no question that the language of "guilt" (reatus) has a long history within the Latin tradition. The important question is what the the theologians of the Latin Church have attempted to express by this language. Clearly it has meant different things to different theologians over the centuries. All one need do is to read a history of the doctrine of original sin (e.g., Henri Rondet, Original Sin) to see that this is the case. One cannot simply assume that Augustine, Aquinas, Trent, the Baltimore Catechism, and Karl Rahner all meant precisely the same thing when they employed this language.

Nor is it the case that Eastern theologians have always distanced themselves from this language. I refer the brethren to Bulgakov's provocative discussion of original sin in his book The Burning Bush. Bulgakov is scathing in his criticism of what he believes the Latin doctrine of original sin to be; but he is not willing to simply jettison the primordial Augustinian concern, which he believes is grounded in the writings of the Apostle Paul:

Bulgakov refuses to think of humanity simply as an aggregate of individuals, a view he attributes to nominalism. Rather, humanity must be thought as a whole, as an ontological unity:


Whether or not one ultimately agrees with Bulgakov's analysis is unimportant. What is important is the attempt to think through the inherited language of the Church to apprehend the deep realities to which it points. This kind of theological reflection cannot occur when one's thinking is driven by polemics and identity politics.

We all like simple answers. I am sure this is one reason why the notion of "original guilt" has thrived in some quarters of the Catholic Church: it provides a simplistic answer to the question "Why should we baptize our children?" Contemporary Catholic theologians have been as quick to reject this simplistic explanation as have been their Orthodox counterparts. But ... we are still left with trying to talk about the mystery of our solidarity with the sin of Adam. If guilt is not the most accurate way to speak of this mystery (and I agree that it probably isn't), then we must find a better way.

And this is why I find the reduction of ancestral sin to mortality, such as we find in Meyendorff and Romanides, unsatisfactory. It is precisely a reduction. It does not express the whole and totality of the mystery of our sinful condition.

While the Latin Church has stepped back from "original guilt", there is no way it could stand back from a millennium of doctrine that derived from the concept. It's impossible to avoid the fact that Western Fathers going back to the Council of Carthage in the mid-3rd century, as well as individuals such as Tertullian, did indeed believe that man inherited not merely Adam's sinful nature but Adam's very guilt--something obvious in the translation of the eph' ho (because) of Romans 5:12 as in quo (in whom); i.e., Adam. Furthermore, the Western Fathers also believed that this sin was transmitted through sexual procreation, which in turn led to the rather negative view of marriage as being "for" procreation and, at best, a way of legitimizing fornication.

Over the centuries, this view got refined, both from better scholarship and from pastoral necessity, but the legacy of it remains.

As for our solidarity with the sin of Adam, it comes from our inheritance of mortality from Adam, and from our continual repetition of that which Adam did, largely as a result of our awareness of mortality.

Dear brother Stuart,

I don't agree. I don't think the Latin Church has "stepped back" from anything. The real issue is language. Unlike English, the Latin language has historically distinguished between reus and culpa, and this distinction has been inherited by several European languages (English unfortunately not being one of them). I'm sure you know the difference between reus and culpa, but permit me to explain for the benefit of others who may not know it.

The definition of the Latin word culpa is what English-speakers normally mean when they use the word "guilt." But even more, when English-speakers use the word "guilt," they commonly mean "blame" or the "moral obligation of reparation for one's action."

In distinction, the Latin word reus simply means the "moral obligation of reparation."

An example will serve to explain the distintion. Imagine that your father wrecks someone's car, and ends up owing the owner of that car money. Your father dies, and you inherit his debt.

Your father's state of indebtedness to the owner of the car would be called culpa, while your own state of indebtedness to the owner would be called reus. Do you see the distinction. Do you see how the word "culpa" in Latin is most often translated as "blame" into English?

My point is that a native user of English will not realize this difference, and his or her interpretaion of the matter will be conditioned on that lack of understanding. He or she will impose that lack of distinction in English onto Latin history and conclude, "the Latin Catholic Church has historically taught we inherit the guilt (blame) of Adam - i.e., that we are to blame for Adam's own sin - and are now backtracking." But the reality is that the Latin Catholic Church has never taught that we inherit the guilt (blame) of Adam, precisely because it makes a distinction in its language between reus and culpa. Just because the Latin "culpa" is what English-speaking people most naturally interpet as "guilt," one can't automatically presume thereby that this is what the Latins mean in the context of original sin - especially given the fact that the historic Latin theologcial texts on the matter do not use the word culpa, but rather the word reus.

Blessings,
Marduk

Glory to Jesus Christ!


God bless you for being so considerate to explain. Being a spanish speaker, I understand the culpa, as that is the word in spanish. But never heard of reus. Very insightful.

Kyrie eleison,

Manuel

Of course, the differences in the Latin terms are probably lost on most of the members of the Curia, who converse mostly in Italian, French or German. I would guess only a relative handful of Catholic theologians are at all fluent in Latin, which is why, even though Latin is "officially" the language of Church documents, it's generally better, when dealing with documents since Vatican II, to look at the original text in whatever vernacular tongue they were drafted.

I have been trying, recently, to understand this concept of sin being from the awareness of mortality. Could you explain this further?

1. In man's pristine state, he was immortal and incorruptible, but his immortality was derivative, a product of his communion with God.

2. Through Adam's disobedience, and in particular his elevation of his own desires over God's will, Adam broke that communion, and not being immortal as an element of his own nature, became liable to death, disease, injury, etc.

3. Being aware of his own mortality, man developed instincts for survival--to hunt and gather food, to fight when attacked, to run when frightened, to attain vicarious immortality through procreation, and so forth. These instincts were not of the soul or the spirit, but of the flesh.

4. Being of the flesh, they inverted the right ordering of the human person as a psychosomatic entity comprised of a body, a soul and a spirit; whereas the spirit was meant to be superior to the soul, and the soul to the body, now the bodily functions were in command.

5. No longer controlled by the soul and the spirit, the needs of the flesh could (and, inevitably did) become disordered passions: hunger could turn to gluttony, the desire for progeny into lust, fear into wrath, the desire for comfort into envy, the desire for status into vainglory, and self-sufficiency into pride. As all of these elevate human desire over the divine order, they inevitably lead to thoughts, words and deeds that are sinful, in that they mar the image and likeness of God within us, and prevent us from sharing in the divine nature.

6. As all men are mortal, all men sin.

As frequently happens, this has to be taken in its proper context in order to derive the proper meaning.

When "We [in the original] profess one baptism for the remission of sins" was inserted into the revised Creed at the Council of Constantinople, it was not in reference to original sin, or indeed, the principal purpose of baptism, but rather, as a condemnation of the common practice of the time of persons seeking re-baptism specifically for the remission of sin.

Baptism, of course, does remit sin, because in baptism one descends into the waters of regeneration to die with Christ and emerges to be resurrected with him. The "old man" dies in Adam and is reborn in Christ. It is this rebirth that remits sins, and, as the majority of catechumens in the late 4th century were actually adults, their actual sins, committed voluntarily or involuntarily, would be remitted. With the sacrament of reconciliation still in a very early form of development, many Christians who lapsed into sin were seeking rebaptism to reclaim that pristine condition they had at the time of their initiation into the Church. The Fathers at Constantinople, with this clause in the Creed, put an end to that practice.

It is difficult to find an Eastern Father who states that infants are born into a state of sin. Indeed, Augustine is something of a lone man out in his opinions, which were probably made more extreme by his anti-Pelagian polemics. Not only do the Greek Fathers disagree with his view of human nature, but also major Fathers in the West, such as Vincent of Lerins and John Cassian (who later came to be labeled as "semi-Pelagian" by some Western theologians).

Much of this seems to arise from the pastoral desire of the Church to have infants baptized and initiated into the mysteries as early as possible. Just as multiple baptisms were common in the 4th-5th centuries, so, too was adult baptism. People tried to put off baptism until their deathbeds in the belief that, having been born anew, they would then die in a sinless state and be whisked off to heaven. Constantine, notoriously, put off his baptism to the last possible moment, while Augustine himself was a mature man when he submitted to baptism.

The Fathers began teaching that infants should be baptized, and then the question emerged as to "why"?. The Eastern Fathers, with their emphasis on theosis would say that baptism is the first step in the process of becoming a partaker in the divine nature, so the sooner it begins the better. Besides, what if one should come upon death unawares and unprepared? Baptism and partaking of the Eucharist would create a bond of solidarity with the Body of Christ, and so ensure the possibility of salvation. The Western Fathers, with their fundamental anthropology derived from the Latin translation of Romans 5:12, saw all baptisms as erasing (or at least ameliorating) the stain of original sin inherited from Adam. The Western perception also had a much more compelling effect on the faithful: since all were born with this stain of original sin, those who died unbaptized would be damned eternally. The theory of "limbo" emerges from the pastorally and emotionally unsustainable nature of this belief in regard to infants, who obviously are incapable of true sin, and whose damnation would tend to paint God as a vengeful monster rather than a loving father.

But, no matter how you cut it, "I profess one baptism for the remission of sins" cannot be used to define either the meaning of baptism or the effects of Adam's fall.

I don't think I've ever thought of sin as being a kind of out of control attempt at controlling mortality.

Also, the idea that death was not a random punishment dealt out by God, but a "logical consequence" if you will, brings God out of the wrong-headed stereotype that colors so many people's ideas of Him.

I can see a bit more clearly the idea that Christ came to save us from death rather than to appease God in a sort of human sacrifice.

Please correct me if I'm wrong. I am finding Eastern Christianity holds answers for some things that were beginning to not make sense to me.

For example, I never understood why God would tell Adam and Eve not to eat of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. I'm wondering now if this has anything to do with the fact that once Adam and Eve had knowledge of their mortality, they would sin. Again, rather than God playing some sort of "gotcha" game with them, as so many modern people believe the story states.

Thank you so much.

ByzBob - your post makes sense to my "small" mind. So, whom do we follow? That, seems to be the core $64,000 question, here.

Unfortunately, my copy of Kelly's book on the creeds is hidden away in a box--hence I cannot put my hands on it--but I was not aware that the baptismal clause was inserted into the creed to specifically address the problem here mentioned. I am not disputing that this may have been the case; but I would like to see some scholarly confirmation. In fact, the entire section "In one holy catholic and apostolic Church; we acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins; we look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen" was new to the creed of Constantinople.


Surely the above statement needs to be qualified. We aren't just speaking about one lone Latin theologian. At the very least we are talking about the position of the North African Church as formulated by the 318 Synod of Carthage, the canons of which were translated into Greek and eventually received by the Eastern Church at II Nicaea. Now I am certainly not asserting that the Eastern Church understood these canons in the same way as the Western Church; but surely it would not have accepted the African Code if it disagreed significantly with the canons on baptism.

As far as I know, the question of the salvific necessity of Holy Baptism has never been a matter of dispute between the Eastern and Western Churches. Children may not be guilty of personal sins that need remission, but surely they need rebirth in the Holy Spirit and deliverance from the dominion of Satan and the passions of our fallen human nature. Is not this rebirth in the Spirit an expression of divine forgiveness?

How many Eastern Fathers can be cited to support the optimistic view that unbaptized infants are unquestionably saved? In the judgment of Didymus the Blind: "Some will enter into life, others into death, but what the fate of infants will be only God knows and those to whom it has been revealed." And again: "The infant does not commit sin, but that does not make it a child of God."

We find this same ambivalence expressed in The Book of Needs:


I know there are differences between East and West on original sin, but I remain convinced these differences do not obliterate the deeper unity.

Dear brother Stuart,

That's an interesting perspective. I've always understood this clause as a statement on the rebaptism controversy begun between Pope St. Stephen and St. Cyprian. This was in fact still an issue at that time, as attested by St. Basil. Canon VII of Constantinople affirmed Pope St. Stephen's position, accepting the baptism of the Novatians.

I know that Pope St. Athanasius and the Cappodocians all speak of an inherited fallen state (i.e. an inherited state of sin).

Blessings

The contest between Cyprian and Stephen had to do with the rebaptism of the lapsed and of heretics. Earlier, the issue was rebaptism--or rather, multiple baptisms--as a means of remitting current sins. Note that St. Basil accepted the baptism of the Novatians as a matter of oikonomia: it would not be practical to track down and rebaptize all those who had been baptized by Novatius and his followers.

When the Cappodocians and Athanasius speak of an inherited fallen state, it does not necessarily mean (indeed, it does not!) the same thing as when Tertullian or Augustine speaks of an inherited state of sin. The consensus of the Greek Fathers, at least, was the fallen state was one of mortality.