A. Catholic and Augustine on Original Sin

So I was reading Ecclesiastes the other day, probably my favorite book in the Bible, and I ran across this passage

Ecclesiastes 8:29 'This only have I found: God made mankind upright, but men have gone in search of many schemes.'
and I thought to myself

'how in the world does this teaching not conflict with the christian doctrine of original sin?'
So I emailed Alex and asked him, this is how he responded

I should really go to sleep but if I don't respond now I may never do so. Well remember God created everything good. All of creation is good because it exists and has its origin with Infinite Goodness, i.e. God. Man was created good but due to a misuse of his free will (original sin) evil entered the world. Man (of course I mean man and woman) was created with a perfect integrity that is his reason had perfect dominion over his lower appetites. His will followed the good but since he was not created as a robot he still had the choice to choose evil. There is a certain mystery to this and I don't mean to digress but according to Catholic teaching God gave us free-will so that we may truly desire Him and eternal glory in Heaven. With original sin Adam lost this integrity and other gifts that God had created him with.

Also St. Augustine has commented on this issue in the City of God, Bk XIV:11 (forgive the length):

Chapter 11.-Of the Fall of the First Man, in Whom Nature Was Created Good, and Can Be Restored Only by Its Author.

But because God foresaw all things, and was therefore not ignorant that man also would fall, we ought to consider this holy city in connection with what God foresaw and ordained, and not according to our own ideas, which do not embrace God's ordination. For man, by his sin, could not disturb the divine counsel, nor compel God to change what He had decreed; for God's foreknowledge had anticipated both,-that is to say, both how evil the man whom He had created good should become, and what good He Himself should even thus derive from him. For though God is said to change His determinations (so that in a tropical sense the Holy Scripture says even that God repented723723 Gen. vi. 6, and 1 Sam. xv. 11. ), this is said with reference to man's expectation, or the order of natural causes, and not with reference to that which the Almighty had foreknown that He would do. Accordingly God, as it is written, made man upright,724724 Eccles. vii. 29. and consequently with a good will. For if he had not had a good will, he could not have been upright. The good will, then, is the work of God; for God created him with it. But the first evil will, which preceded all man's evil acts, was rather a kind of falling away from the work of God to its own works than any positive work. And therefore the acts resulting were evil, not having God, but the will itself for their end; so that the will or the man himself, so far as his will is bad, was as it were the evil tree bringing forth evil fruit. Moreover, the bad will, though it be not in harmony with, but opposed to nature, inasmuch as it is a vice or blemish, yet it is true of it as of all vice, that it cannot exist except in a nature, and only in a nature created out of nothing, and not in that which the Creator has begotten of Himself, as He begot the Word, by whom all things were made. For though God formed man of the dust of the earth, yet the earth itself, and every earthly material, is absolutely created out of nothing; and man's soul, too, God created out of 272 nothing, and joined to the body, when He made man. But evils are so thoroughly overcome by good, that though they are permitted to exist, for the sake of demonstrating how the most righteous foresight of God can make a good use even of them, yet good can exist without evil, as in the true and supreme God Himself, and as in every invisible and visible celestial creature that exists above this murky atmosphere; but evil cannot exist without good, because the natures in which evil exists, in so far as they are natures, are good. And evil is removed, not by removing any nature, or part of a nature, which had been introduced by the evil, but by healing and correcting that which had been vitiated and depraved. The will, therefore, is then truly free, when it is not the slave of vices and sins. Such was it given us by God; and this being lost by its own fault, can only be restored by Him who was able at first to give it. And therefore the truth says, "If the Son shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed;"725725 1 John viii. 36. which is equivalent to saying, If the Son shall save you, ye shall be saved indeed. For He is our Liberator, inasmuch as He is our Saviour.

Man then lived with God for his rule in a paradise at once physical and spiritual. For neither was it a paradise only physical for the advantage of the body, and not also spiritual for the advantage of the mind; nor was it only spiritual to afford enjoyment to man by his internal sensations, and not also physical to afford him enjoyment through his external senses. But obviously it was both for both ends. But after that proud and therefore envious angel (of whose fall I have said as much as I was able in the eleventh and twelfth books of this work, as well as that of his fellows, who, from being God's angels, became his angels), preferring to rule with a kind of pomp of empire rather than to be another's subject, fell from the spiritual Paradise, and essaying to insinuate his persuasive guile into the mind of man, whose unfallen condition provoked him to envy now that himself was fallen, he chose the serpent as his mouthpiece in that bodily Paradise in which it and all the other earthly animals were living with those two human beings, the man and his wife, subject to them, and harmless; and he chose the serpent because, being slippery, and moving in tortuous windings, it was suitable for his purpose. And this animal being subdued to his wicked ends by the presence and superior force of his angelic nature, he abused as his instrument, and first tried his deceit upon the woman, making his assault upon the weaker part of that human alliance, that he might gradually gain the whole, and not supposing that the man would readily give ear to him, or be deceived, but that he might yield to the error of the woman. For as Aaron was not induced to agree with the people when they blindly wished him to make an idol, and yet yielded to constraint; and as it is not credible that Solomon was so blind as to suppose that idols should be worshipped, but was drawn over to such sacrilege by the blandishments of women; so we cannot believe that Adam was deceived, and supposed the devil's word to be truth, and therefore transgressed God's law, but that he by the drawings of kindred yielded to the woman, the husband to the wife, the one human being to the only other human being. For not without significance did the apostle say, "And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression;"726726 1 Tim. ii. 14. but he speaks thus, because the woman accepted as true what the serpent told her, but the man could not bear to be severed from his only companion, even though this involved a partnership in sin. He was not on this account less culpable, but sinned with his eyes open. And so the apostle does not say, "He did not sin," but "He was not deceived." For he shows that he sinned when he says, "By one man sin entered into the world,"727727 Rom. v. 12. and immediately after more distinctly, "In the likeness of Adam's transgression." But he meant that those are deceived who do not judge that which they do to be sin; but he knew. Otherwise how were it true "Adam was not deceived?" But having as yet no experience of the divine severity, he was possibly deceived in so far as he thought his sin venial. And consequently he was not deceived as the woman was deceived, but he was deceived as to the judgment which would be passed on his apology: "The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me, and I did eat."728728 Gen. iii. 12. What need of saying more? Although they were not both deceived by credulity, yet both were entangled in the snares of the devil, and taken by sin.

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The key for Scripture is always understanding it in its totality and being aware that many problems will come about by taking individual passages out of context.
I responded:

So here's another question for you then. I understand original sin to be the doctrine that all men are somehow morally flawed by their very nature. I don't exactly understand how what you've said or the passage you've quoted relates to this idea. If you could, could you elaborate on 1) the correctness of incorrectness of my understanding of original sin and 2) if my understanding is somehow correct, how that relates to what you have sent me below. From what Augustine says, it seems like men have both a good nature from God and a bad nature from Adam. I guess that would be the third question, if you have a minute, because I'm still confused.

Alex responded:

Here is a passage I found in Theology for Beginners by Frank Sheed, which might shed some light on the question at least from the Catholic point of view:

Result's of Adam's Fall

So all men were involved in the catastrophe of Adam's sin. We are all born with natural life only, without the supernatural life of sanctifying grace. That was the chief thing Adam lost for each of his descendants.

A certain precision is necessary here. We sometimes slip into thinking that if he had not sinned he would have kept grace and we could have inherited it from him. But grace is in the soul, and we do not inherit our souls; each soul is a new creation. Adam's obedience was the condition on which we should all have come into existence with grace as well as nature. He disobeyed, the condition was not kept, we are born without sanctifying grace.

That is what is meant by being born in original sin, which is not to be thought of as a stain on the soul, but as the absence of that grace without which we cannot, as we have seen, reach the goal for which God destined men. We may be given grace later but we enter life without it, with nature only.

And our nature too is not as Adam's was before he failed the condition, but as it was after. The gift of integrity, guaranteeing the harmony of man's natural powers, has gone. Each of our powers seeks its own outlet, each of our needs its own immediate gratification; we have not the subordination of all our powers to reason and of reason to God which would unify all our striving; every one of us is a civil war.

At two points principally the disorder is at its worst, the passions and the imagination.

Passions are good things given for man's service; but in our actual state they dominate us as often as they serve us-more often indeed, unless we make an effort at control which costs us appallingly. They were meant to be instruments which we should use: instruments should be in our grip; only too often we feel as if we were in theirs.

The imagination is a good thing, too. It is the picture-mak­ing power by which we can mentally reproduce sights seen, sounds heard, textures touched, tastes, scents. For the intel­lect, the knowing power, it is a necessary servant. Made as we are we could not very well live in a material universe without it. But all too often it is a master, substituting its pictures for the hard effort the intellect should be making, refusing to let the intellect accept spiritual truths simply because imagi­nation cannot make pictures of them.

It is worth our while to pause here and think over this dominance of imagination in ourselves-the times when we meant to think some problem out and imagination so dis­tracted us that at the end of an hour we realized no thinking had been done; the times when we made some good resolu­tion, and the mental picture of a girl or a drink shattered the resolution in an instant. And all because in Adam we lost the gift of integrity.

But it is not only as individuals that we were all involved in the catastrophe; we were involved as a race too. In Adam the race was tested. Before his sin the race-in him-was united with God; after, the unity was broken. There had been unity between the race and God; now there was a breach between them. Remember that, for God, the race is a fact, a reality. Each man is not only himself, he is a member of the race.

Because Adam broke the unity, his children were born members of a fallen race, a race no longer at one with God--- a race, therefore, to which heaven was closed. A given man might be virtuous; but he was a virtuous member of a fallen race. Loving God, he might gain sanctifying grace, which means the power to live the life of heaven, but he still be­longed to a race to which heaven was closed. Only if the breach between his race and God could be healed, could he attain his own destiny, reach heaven; even naturally we are members one of another.

This is the problem created by the sin of the representative man. The race had been at one with God; it was no longer at one; the central problem was at-one-ment, a word whose meaning we disguise by pronouncing it atonement. With at­onement all the rest of our theology is concerned.

I responded:

Just wanted to respond to you real quick to say thanks for passing this information onto me, i think i understand this concept much better now as a result of our conversation. I can even buy into a few of the things that he says, but of course, not everything.

I can buy into the fact that we are born without sanctifying grace, especially from the christian perspective, this idea makes a lot of sense, because if we were born with this grace, what point would their be to the christian religion, we'd all have free rides to heaven. but then he goes onto say that the gift of integrity is gone because of original sin and I don't think I buy that. I think it is one thing to say that we are born without sanctifying grace, but another to say that we are born in a natural disharmony with all of our appetites and stuff. i think that some people are like this, but i don't think all people are and i dont' think it's a necessary condition of humanity that all of us are born without this harmony of our selves.

The last idea, that of disunity with god, I can totally buy into. In fact, this is the idea of original sin which makes the most sense to me and actually harmonizes with a lot of mystical thinking and eastern religious thinking, the idea that we are all one yet we are born thinking we are seperate from everything else. this also makes sense from the christian perspective as well, because the last thing in the book of revelation is God being with his people again. 'now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God.' Revelation 21:3 I think I can even buy into the idea of the fall if it is understood as a original or primordial disunity or seperation from God, and thus the idea of salvation being a reunion with God. That's what mystics are suppossed to be all about right, union with God! LOL!

So in summation, thank you very much for clarifying these issues with me. I have also been having this conversation with a calvinist friend of mine and he gave me totally different answers to the one's you have just given me above, but i think i like your answers better, especially the last one, which I totally identify with. See, I understood original sin to be 'a stain on the soul,' but this is obviously not what this gentlemen understands it to be, so I'm happy that this issue is more clearer to me know than it was before.

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