ORIGINAL SIN AND ORIGINAL GRACE
Most of us see a lot of good and a lot of evil in the world. Depending on our experience, we could have a very optimistic or a very pessimistic viewpoint; at least we meet people of one or the other extreme. The optimistic humanist seat everyone as good. Sin does not exist. "There is no such thing as a bad boy;" he only lacks love or is suffering from a psychological trauma which needs attention. The psychiatrist Karl Menninger challenges this attitude in his book Whatever became of sin?. (1) Yet this was the attitude of the Renaissance and of the 19th and early 20th century philosophers of inevitable progress. On the other hand those who have gone through wars and other tragedies often have an opposite viewpoint: Human nature is hopelessly corrupt and will always remain so. We must save ourselves from this wicked world and prepare for the world to come when alone we will experience true goodness. Even the best of us are inveterate sinners, and every good thing we do is riddled with self-seeking; so we can only be saved by relying exclusively on the Lord's mercy by faith.
Can we maintain that there is any real goodness in man? Can we also maintain that there is sin? And in maintaining the fact of both goodness and sin, can we go into the reason or source of both? That is the subject of this talk.
The state of original innocence and grace
Pope John-Paul II at his weekly audiences since 5 September 1979 has been giving a serial commentary on the first chapters of Genesis in order to give a teaching on Christian marriage. To say anything about the fact and origin of sin and grace we too have to start by looking at Genesis.
In chapter 1, the Priestly account, God saw each thing he made and said it was good. Among all the things he made, man, both male and female, bore his image and likeness, in that his rational nature gave him dominion over the rest of creation, The Yahwist account, in chapter 2, goes on to describe man's original state of innocence. Man saw that he shared the world of the animals, yet saw himself alone and apart, needing a mate like himself. The man and the woman created from his side cleaved to one another in naked sexual union which knew no shame because it included full personal appreciation and love. Their state is not one which can be recaptured simply by a return to nature, because it was built on grace, and a level of grace which we do not experience, even in our redeemed state, and since it not only joined them to God himself by faith and love, but also gave them a state of physical and phychological integration that enabled them to live in perfect harmony with themselves and one another.
Before going further, we must consider the question whether in point of time man ever existed in a state of innocence. Physical anthropologists have long maintained the likelihood that man arose by an evolutionary process, since archaeology evinces the gradual appearance of life on this planet, beginning from the simplest forms and proceeding as time went on to more complex forms. The exact lines of evolution are by no means clear, because recent discoveries by the Leakeys and others have overthrown theories that were hold and taught in textbooks up to a very few years ago. Church pronouncements, although sometimes reserved, such as Pius XII's encyclical Hunani generis in 1950, (2) have neither condemned the theory that man evolved nor adopted this theory. The only point the Church has insisted on is that the transition to rational man, or the creation of a human soul, must take place by divine intervention. (3) Pope John-Paul II makes no direct reference to evolutionary theory in his commentaries on Genesis, but in the talk of 26 September 1979 he refers to the "mythical character" of the 2nd and 3rd chapters of Genesis, and says that the state of innocence is part of man's "theological pre-history", while sin has been part of man's "historical state" from the first man until now; the same idea is taken up in the talk of 13 February 1980. In other words, we need not hold that there was a period of innocence in the history of man preceding the state of primitive man as we. know of him through archaeological discoveries. Rather, the state of innocence is a lost dimension of our present state; it is an ideal of earthly bliss and perfection which we constantly yearn and cry out for, because at the root of our nature is a need for such a measure of fulfillment and realization.
It is natural for us, in the language of Genesis, to desire dominion over the earth rather than to meet resistance and frustration, thorns and thistles. It is natural for us to desire health of body and mind, satisfactory job performance and harmonious relations with others in naked openness, with no misunderstandings, deceit or pretense, and no need to explain or justify ourselves to anyone, because we have nothing to be ashamed of and perfectly understand and love one another.
Anyone might call this the good and ideal life, and yet there is another dimension which is more important. That is, as traditional primal religions put it, our relation io the gods, especially The God. It is not enough to be at peace with them just in order to assure the blessings just mentioned, but we want to approach them for their own sake, in so far as this is possible for man. The later Greek philosophers, especially Plotinus, (4) saw cearly the principle that man's happiness consists primarily in returning to his source; as man came from God, so the culmination of his happiness consists in somehow being rejoined to God.
The problem of how to be rejoined to God is not solved by a purer monotheism, getting rid of intermediate divinities and focusing only on the first, because that still leaves him remote and inaccessible. No man can cross the divine that separates creature and creator. God must bridge the divine by coming himself to us in revelation. There are many ways he reveals himself. He shows his guidance and care through the events of history, through messages to the patriarchs and prophets, and finally he. comes in his eternal Word which united to himself a human nature. Yet we could shake the hand of Jesus, eat with him and walk with him, and God would still be just as remote from us if he did not send his Spirit into our hearts to let us recognize him and adore him. The Spirit of the Father and of Jesus his Son works in us a transformation that enables us to relate to God himself in his inner life. This transformation is called grace.
The word "grace", however, can have many meanings. In its source it is God's favour or eternal love for us which is identical with his own being. Yet God's love for us is not purely extrinsic, something that remains in himself alone, but it makes a difference in us, creating a goodness and loveableness directly proportionate to God's love for us, as St. Paul explains through the image of different clay pots, in Rom. 9:19 ff. This goodness and loveableness consists precisely in an ability to react and respond to God's goodness. This grace is a dynamic principle uplifting our human nature to possess, even if in a limited way, God himself. The fruition of grace, of course, is the glory of the next life when we will see God face to face and love him without tiring. In this life, through the transformation of grace, God engages our love in the same way as it will be in the next life, since love does not pass away (cf. 1 Cor. 13). But without the beatific vision of God, we journey through this life by faith and hope. So the life of grace involves first of all and fundamentally a supernatural dynamism in our very spirit or soul; this is called habitual or sanctifying grace. Secondly, our intellect, will and emotional powers are strengthened by infused virtues, such as faith, hope, love, prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance, along with other gifts of the Spirit.
Ideally, grace colours all our natural inclinations and activities and orients them to God. It is the foundation and capstone of all the other gifts of original innocence and the key to our recovery of these gifts to some extent. For all that we can admire in the natural world of science, technology, literature, art, sport, psychological well-being, and physical health and beauty, our use and enjoyment of these gifts can never be on a purely natural level, isolated from any reference to God. They are either consecrated to him in a life of grace or they are used against him in some way. The whole purpose of our life in this world is the consecration of all our human endowments and activity to God in truth. That is our goal; that is our struggle.
Original sin
One obvious imposing fact of life, however, is our failing short of this goal on a personal and social level. A second fact of experience is that there are many degrees or levels of grace and of failing short of grace, ranging from the fullness of grace. we attribute to Mary to a total lack of grace and reference to God. Sin, then, in general terms, is a failing short of what we should be; it is a lack of grace to some extent. Concretely, it is a partial or total defect in our love of God.
The terms "falling short", "lack" of love, "absence" of grace lead us to a very basic distinction before we can say any more about what sin is. Sin can mean a positive turning away from God or it can mean a simple privation of turning to God from the start. In the latter case it is not a turning away from God, because the person was never turned towards God in the first place.
The first meaning of sin is clear, as is exemplified in cases of disobedience, injury, hatred or culpable negligence. Sin, in this case, is a positive choice of something in preference to God, a violation of the order and harmony of his creation to satisfy some private craving; it can also result in a perduring state of sinfulness when, because of some choice or action, we . unrepentantly remain out of harmony with God, our neighbour, or what we should be in ourselves.
The second meaning of sin is quite different; it is a simple lack of development in relation to God. From the first moment of man's existence in the womb, what kind of relationship does he have with God? He has no hostility, disobedience or anything for which he could be blamed, but on the other hand does he have any positive relationship with God, any love, any faith: any regard for his neighbour? If this relationship is a grace, a gift from God, man does not have it from his nature, but it is added to human nature. Original sin, then, is exactly this lack of ever being related to God by grace. It is called "original", accorrding to St. Thomas Aquinas (Summa theologiae, I-II, q. 81) not primarily with reference to Adam's first sin, but because each man has it from his own origin, or conception. Original sin essentially is the same in everyone not reborn in grace, because it is a privation of grace in the essence or depths of the soul. Popularly, however, people identify original sin with its effects, and these are different from one individual to another. A catechism statement lists these as "darkness of the intellect, weakness of the will, disorder of the emotions, and finally susceptibility to ill-health". When there is no original innocence or grace assuring the integrity and harmony of our personality, each of us is left to his own natural psychological temperament as this is determined by heredity, environmental conditioning or personal modification. Thomas Aquinas is emphatic that the lack of grace does not entail a total depravity of nature, as Luther maintained, but only a partial disorientation (I-II, q.85).
Although redemption, or restoration of grace, brings us into harmony with God, in this life it does not at once remove all the effects of original sin. We can see this in the strange anomaly of some well-intentioned Christians who have to struggle to do good in spite of psychological limitations, whereas many a secular humanist, with no apparent concern for God or religion, goes through life with a charming personality and few inner tensions. But a close examination of even the most admirable personality will reveal faults. Experience as well as speculation can tell us how much better our natural endowments are under the influence of grace, and how much worse our natural defects are without the presence of grace.
Source of original sin
Whether we talk about original sin in its radical sense as the lack of original grace, or in its secondary sense as the upheaval and damage of our personalities, one thing is clear: that it is not our own fault. Of course, we commit personal sins and they damage our character in many ways, but it is obvious, if only from the study of psychology, that much (but not all) of what is wrong with us and our society is not of our making. We just are what we find ourselves to be, in the condition of fallen nature. The question asked in every age is: Hasn't God created us good? Why, left to ourselves, should our natures be in such a sorry shape?
Here, for purposes of comparison, I would like to refer to the teaching of the Qur'ân on this subject. The Our'ânic creation stories never state, like Genesis, that creation is good. There seems to be a concern to reserve goodness to God, who is described as "the best of creators" (ahsan al-khâliqîn, 23:14). Nevertheless, Islamic tradition holds that man was created good, and much polemical literature is devoted to attacking the Christian teaching that something went wrong with the human race as a whole, especially if the trouble is presented as the sin of Adam being visited upon his descendants. The beginning of sura 7 (al-A`râf), however, graphically describes the sin of Adam and Eve and emphasises their individual responsibility together with the influence of Satan, who boasted: "I will sit along the right way to ambush men. I will attack them from in front and from behind, from their right and from their left. And you will find most of them become thankless" (v. 17). Thanklessness here is a term for unbelief, the worst evil for man. The passage repeatedly states that only few men remember or thank God (e.g. vs. 3, 10, 17; cf. also 2:243). Other passages (such as 14-34,17:83,18:64, 21:37,33:72, 70:19-21, 96:6-7,190:6-7) even point to a congenital proneness of man to evil. Thus the Qur'an recognizes the generally pathetic condition of mankind and sees as its dispositive cause the condition of human nature and the influence of Satan, but emphasizes that its actual cause is the individual responsibility and free choice of each man.
Christians can agree that Satan has much influence on man's fallen condition, but we can look into other suppositions as well. Are we psychologically determined by an evolutionary heritage that confers on us a predatory possessive instinct and aggressivity common to all animals? Authors such as Robert Ardrey think so. (5) Or are we simply conditioned by a corrupt environment? The obvious evil people experience in any surroundings of any age does tempt many to flee the world. Not just monks, but groups of born-again married couples have created villages apart, where they attempt to live a utopian Christian life. Yet people who live in such insulated religious communes experience the some problems with their children and one another as anyone else. In 1 Cor. 5:10 Paul says, "To avoid immoral people you would have to get out of the world completely." To live in a monastery or priory (as I do) is no escape from the world, because the spirit of the world chases each of us, no matter where we try to hide, as the 4th century St. Anthony experienced in the Egyptian desert., Entering religious life, just like baptism or any religious conversion experience, is not a one-time salvation event which solves all our problems forever after, but is the beginning of an on-going salvation experience.. A religious community can only provide an environment and support to our personal response to God's purifying grace, which he gives us to the extent that we submit to him in accord with the community rule and put ourselves at his disposal in the service to which he calls us.
To come back to the question, we have to admit that both heredity and environment are responsible for our being set on the wrong track, so that St. Paul says, "Jews and Gentiles alike are all under the power of sin" (Rom. 3:9), and as a result even the Jew who has the Law must say, "I don't do the good I want to do; instead, I do the evil that I do not want to do" (Rom. 7:19). Paul goes on to show that only Jesus can and does break this cycle, but even with "the Spirit as the first of God's gifts", we are left to "groan within ourselves as we wait for God to make us his sons and set our whole being free" (Rom. 6:23). In other words, the Christian life is a struggle as long as we are in this world, because we are members of the human race and inherit the accumulated effects of everyone's personal sins from our first parents until now.
We are used to thinking, in accordance with Ezekiel ch. 18, that we are only punished for our own sins, and not for the sins of our parents. Likewise the Qur'ân frequently says, "No soul shall bear another's burden" (6:164 etc.). This is true as far as our friendship with God and our eternal reward or punishment is concerned, but Exodus 34:7 is still true, where God says he punishes children and grandchildren to the third and fourth generation for their fathers' wickedness. God does not love the children any less because of their ancestors' sins, and their parents cannot compel the free will of their children to choose evil, but the truth remains that parents' sins redound on their children by polluting their moral environment and hurting them psychologically. How many problems of both children and adults are not traceable to bad experiences with their parents? The reverberations of a single sin can go on for many generations before the resiliency of nature and the action of grace counteract it. How many social complexes and historical enmities and mistrust between races and nations are not traceable to practices of centuries ago, such as the slave trade? Catherine of Siena, a great Dominican saint of the 13th century, was so convinced of and impressed by the effects of even slight sins that, as the result of the knowledge of herself which God gave her one morning at Mass, she was filled with shame at her imperfection and thought it was the cause of all the evil that was being done throughout the whole world. (6)
These, then, are the reverberations of sin. And yet St. Paul and all authoritative Church teachers maintain that alienation from God and the consequent disorder of human life is not a normal condition for man. God could have made friendship with him and physical and psychological integrity part of our human inheritance, but since this was not the condition of our first parents, whether from their historic beginning or after their first sin, all their descendants inherit a fallen nature. This is not a punishment for the sins of our ancestors which we did not commit, but simply a fact of life, a deprivation which we share in solidarity with our first parents. God is not obliged to sanctify us in grace and does not automatically do so, yet without his grace we are lost. Even Muslim critics of the concept of original sin must admit the Qur'ânic teaching that without God's guidance no one can have faith or do what is right, as the following select verses show: "God does not guide an evil-doing people" (6:144); "God leads astray those he wishes and guides those he wishes" (14:4 etc.); and "No one can have faith except by God's permission" (10:100).
Redemption
If the reverberations of sin are such that St. Paul could say, "Many men died because of the sin of one man," still, he could go on to say, "But God's grace is much greater, and so is his free gift to so many men through the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ" (Rom. 5:15). Even more than sin, one good act, one act of love, has wide reverberations far beyond what we can foresee. This is true on a purely natural level, but even more so when we are joined to Jesus Christ, so that, as Paul tells the Galatians (2:20), "It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me." Because of this life Paul could tell the Philippians (113): "God is always at work in you to make you willing and able to obey his own purpose." In this way God makes use of us as his instruments to redeem the world.
We have already indicated that our victory over sin and its consequences .and our- restoration to the friendship of God come through Jesus Christ. This victory may be more obvious in the case of someone who has faith, is baptized, and practises the Christian life. The question comes up, what about those who do not have the Christian faith, both before and after the coming of Christ, and the non-baptized infant children of Christians? If they die like this are they excluded from heaven? Is this the meaning of Jesus' words when he sent his disciples out to the whole world and said, "Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved; whoever does not believe will be condemned" (Mk 16:16)?
The Catholic Church has long recognized two equivalents of baptism. Under the Roman persecutions many catechumens were fed to the lions, and their death was recognized as a "baptism of blood". Other catechumens who did not suffer such a fate and died from other causes were, nevertheless, recognized as having received "baptism of desire". Such also was the case of Cornelius and his friends, as described in Acts ch. 10, who received the Holy Spirit before being baptized.
These catechumens had faith in Jesus Christ, but what of the millions of other people who never knew Christ? The New Testament insists on faith both in God and in Jesus Christ who is the way of salvation. For an adult preparing for baptism this faith must be explicit, but explicit faith is not absolutely required for salvation. Thomas Aquinas taught that the Jews of be Old Testament, with Abraham as a model, were saved by faith in the Christ who was to come; for a few of them this faith was explicit to some extent; think of the "Servant Songs" of Isaiah. But for most it was only implicit. For Gentiles who had not even the Old Testament, Thomas postulated the possibility of a special revelation about Christ, but said it was sufficient for them "to have implicit faith in divine providence, believing that God frees men in the ways he chooses" (II-II, 2:7, ad 3). Any such people, he says, really belong to the New Testament (I-II, 106:1; 107:1, ad 2). Vatican II says clearly: "Those also can attain to everlasting salvation who through no fault of their own do not know the gospel of Christ or his Church, yet sincerely seek God and, moved by grace, strive by their deeds to do his will as it is known to them through the dictates of conscience" (The Church, n. 16).
Note also what Vatican II says about the faith of atheists: "Some form for themselves such a fallacious idea of God that when they repudiate this figment they are by no means rejecting the God of the gospel" (The Church Today, n. 19). The existence of God which these atheists deny explicitly they affirm implicitly. In the same way we can suppose that many Muslims who deny explicitly that Jesus is the Way to the Father may affirm this truth implicitly by their acceptance of God's providence.
When we talk about implicit faith we must not think that a person must take time out and do some philosophical reflection about the meaning of his life. Our very nature derives us to seek happiness by the choice of certain goals which guide our day to day routine and practical decisions. These goals are either final or are steps towards a further goal. An infinite series of intermediate goals is impossible; otherwise it would be impossible to act. So we must have some ultimate goal which we think is good and will make us happy. St. Thomas says that if a non-baptized child in his first human act chooses the "proper goal" (debitum finem) he will be freed from original sin. If not, he sins mortally (I-II, 89:6). According to this theological theory, which is sometimes called the theory of fundamental option, our choice of an ultimate goal involves a vision of goodness with an implicit recognition of the distinction between the relative goodness of created contingent being and the absolute goodness of the uncreated necessary Being on which all other being and goodness depends. A young person would not be able to analyse his experience in these terms; on a psychological level he would experience an openness to truth and a reaching out to a reality beyond and superior to herself, thus avoiding the sin of pride and self-centeredness. Implicitly he would be submitting to God himself and choosing him as his supreme good and happiness.
The theory of fundamental option is only a theological theory, but it accords well with the statement of Vatican II on non-Christians and explains how it is possible for millions of non-Christians to be living a life of grace. Such people are united to us and to their saviour Jesus Christ, the only way to the Father, in a way that is not obvious by ordinary appearances. Such people, nevertheless, lack the fuller happiness of knowing Jesus explicitly and sharing the rich life of his Church; so we should not complacently abandon them as they are.
God's Spirit has many ways of letting the grace won by Jesus Christ flow outside the channels of his visible Church and its Scripture and sacraments. Whatever way original sin is replaced by the grace and. friendship of God, the first reception of grace is only a beginning, a seed. There is an enormous difference between the beginning and a fully developed life of grace, especially as lived by some famous saints. Jesus came not just to give us life, but life in all its fullness (cf. Jn. 10:10). The vast majority of the world is living spiritually at a subsistence level, and only a very few people have a relative fullness of the life of God. This imbalance is not a question of equalizing the distribution of goods, because spiritual goods are unlimited and available to everyone. "The man who has something will be given more, so that he will have more than enough," we hear in Matthew 13:12. God normally gives the fullness of his grace through the ministry of the Church. "There is a great harvest, but few workers to gather it in. Pray to the owner of the harvest that he will send out more workers to gather in his harvest" (Mt. 9:37-38).
1. London: Sioughton, 1973. Acta Apostolicae Sedis, 1950, pp. 561-578.
3. Ibid., p. 575.
4. Cf. Ennead 5:1, 6:1.
5. In African Genesis (London: Fontana, 1961, reprint of 1958), and The territorial imperative (London: Fontana, 1967).
6. Il Dialogo, ed. G. Cavallini (Rome: Edizioni Cateriniane, 1968), p. 4.