Original Sin is one of the hardest concepts in the Christian religion. In fact it can seem almost undefinable and its necessity difficult to justify. Let us try to explore how far reason can take us in this matter.

Defining the State of “Fallenness”

Christianity contains the specific claim that men are to be “like God”, through what is “transformation” and “regeneration” of their souls. Now this is something that is not found in any other religion, even the Abrahamic faiths, so take a moment to dwell on that. For a full discussion of it go here Participation in the Divine Life of Jesus. Given this, we can infer that the state of a soul in absence of such transformation is different from its state with it, and that is the “fallen state” of humanity. This “ground zero” state which all humans are born into is not just the condition of babies, rather it is the condition of all the unbaptized. Further it is a condition that is fully remedied by Baptism. We note that an unbaptized person challenging the doctrine of the Fall is challenging it from that very state of fallenness.

What A Christian is really saying is that there is a real difference in the “state” in relation to God, and of a person’s soul when they are baptized. That difference is that “Sanctifying Grace”, that Grace which effects the transformation in Christ, which is just specified is incomprehensible in any other religious tradition, does not face any obstruction in this state, and in fact its work is begun. Prior to this state, Grace is also available to an individual, and it is termed “Prevenient Grace”. This is the Grace that calls a person to conversion without itself effecting that transformation. Transformation cannot occur until the consent is given to Christ.

That in the simplest terms is how this works. What Adam has to do with all this is what we need to address.

The Puzzle of the Fall

This universal “pre-Grace” state of man we hold to be in some manner, handed down to us from the first humans, who themselves were not initially in that state. The Riddle and the puzzle in all this, is simple- why is it that the “fault” is ascribed to Adam? Is this “fellness” simply not just the manner in which God willed to create us anyway, that we may be in need of his transforming Love?

Thus there are two parts to the argument. The first is not hard to argue: “That we are in need of God’s transforming love”, but a full description is here Sin and Redemption- Jesus’ Sacrifice of Atonement. “That it is Adam’s fault that we stand in that need” is harder to explain, perhaps even impossible to explain, and this is what I address here.

So in addressing this we ask: Why not simply create Adam and Eve out of Grace like the rest of us to start with, that is to say, why create them in the Garden at all? Or else we could ask the corollary- why not simply create everyone in Grace like Adam and await their falling, to whatever degree? This is to somewhat assume that the original state of Adam is the same as the state of the Baptized Christian, and that is not necessarily true. It is one of the tenets of the Faith that what Adam lost through the Fall is less than what we have gained through being redeemed in Jesus. Perhaps we already have the beginnings of an answer here: God created Adam in the Garden so that man would know that without Jesus, even in a Paradisal state, we could not attain the the state that God desired of us. God created the first human beings in the Garden, but he desired for us something better. That is why God did not create us all like Adam in the Garden, nor did he create Adam outside the Garden.

What really is the “state in the Garden”, how is is superior and yet is what respect specifically is it deficient at the same time. What is was not, was the “new Life in Christ” (2Cor5:17, Gal.6:17, Eph.4:24, Col.3:10, Eph.2:15), which is the Rolls Royce of the spiritual life, even though it might not always feel like it. How was that state superior to the state of the unbaptized? That’s harder to describe precisely, and we won’t fully know what it was. But we can say that Adam was born as an adult without sin, which is unique for a human being, and this was obviously thanks to the fact that he did not have a history prior to the point of his creation. He also enjoyed a closeness to God and the real Presence of God which we do not see around us today. This is not the beatific vision of the angels and the saints who enjoy the direct vision of God. Perhaps it is more like the closeness of Moses, who also like Adam “saw God face to face” when God met with him. That’s as far as reason takes me in this matter, I’m not aware that this contradicts church doctrine, I’d certainly want to know if it did.

The Council of Trent state that the the absence of sanctifying grace in the newborn child is also an effect of the first sin, for Adam having received holiness and justice from God, lost it not only for himself but also for us (loc. cit., can. ii- sorry I’m not sure exactly where this reference is, I just copied it). If he has lost it for us we were to have received it from him at our birth with the other prerogatives of our race. So we see that there is a real privation of grace caused us through the fault of Adam, and yet what was lost is not the same as what was to be gained by it. That is quite in keeping with the manner in which God acts which Christians are familiar it, in that he causes from great evil to come an even greater good. For Christ on the Cross took on the effects of Sin the World and by that act, caused us to receive that Grace which makes us to share in his own Life.

Was the First Sin a Mortal Sin?

Having described that Adam and Eve’s original state was not quite the state of “new Life in Christ”, the fall from that state is not quite to the same degree as a Fall from the Life in Christ. I my description of Adam’s initial state is correct then it somewhat ameliorates the enormity of his sin. If I’m wrong then it would imply that the sin was truly heinous, on the level of a mortal sin (like rape, murder, denying God). For we believe all Christians commit sins even though they are in Grace. But we know that the only type of sin which is capable of separating us from Grace totally is grievous sin, or what in the Catholic tradition would be called “mortal sin”, a sin which is itself to turn one’s back on God through the sheer heinous nature of it. It certainly is possible for a person in a state of Grace falls into grievous offence, since persons who are baptized as babies, for example (as is the practice in Catholic/Orthodox and other similar Faith traditions – henceforward C/O) might not cling to the Faith at all in later life. Again (and this too is mainly C/O) the Church views even sexual sins as mortal, as well as willfully missing Sunday obligation. There’s many Baptized persons who might undertake these and those Baptized non-Catholics who do not define sexual sin and abortion in the manner that Catholics do.

How was it Adam’s Fault?

At the beginning of Creation it was down to one Human Being to maintain the “graced state”. It was his fault that the state was not maintained inasmuch as there was no other human beings to whom that fault might be accorded. Adam is not the reason that we commit particular and personal sins, rather he is the paradigm reason for why we are deprived of Grace at our births. Perhaps therefore it is right to express it in this manner, that Adam is not responsible for our particular personal sins, but he bears a responsibility for us being in the particular state of deprivation of Grace in which we commit those sins, as opposed to being able to sin from the state which he was in. In this case the difference there being and not being Original Sin is the difference between us sinning in the present state of being deprived from Grace prior to Baptism, and then being Baptized and in that state perhaps faring better than what we would have had Baptism not been available in the absence of Original Sin…and the state of sinning from the state in which Adam was in.

We cannot really articulate the reason “how” this is Adam’s fault. It is absurd to state that every personal sin ever committed is the fault of Adam, every Christian would agree with this. But if this is so then what exactly is Adams fault? Like I said, it is not possible to articulate this “what exactly” or “in what sense” it is indeed Adams fault, except to say that it is his fault in some sense. And it is probably also correct to state that it is in that same sense, the collective fault of all of us that there is sin in the world, for does the doctrine itself not state that we inherit a “fault”? How could Original Sin be a fault if we were not at fault? Original Sin is never taught as something of an offense that is inflicted upon us by Adam, rather it is in some sense our own fault, if only collectively. In this sense even to say with St. Paul that “sin came through one man”, retains an ambiguity, for it seems that in some sense sin also comes through us all if we do in fact bear s collective “responsibility”.

All of us would have completely fallen if not for the Holy Spirit whom we receive at Baptism, as did Adam fall without the Holy Spirit dwelling within him (I’m presuming, since it is not stated). Original Sin is not personal sin, the Church is quite clear about this, and so if Original Sin is the fallen state, which is the state which is bereft of Sanctifying Grace, then this is not through an offence that will be counted against us in itself. What Adam is personally responsible for is disobeying God, this is how any sin works. But it is not to be held against Adam that he intentionally deprived all of humanity of Grace. That aspect of his action of disobedience seems not to be intentioned or at least it is unlikely that Adam could have comprehended the theological implications of his act or that he would “personally” by it be responsible for calling down the Second Person of the Holy Trinity of God to die. Adam’s personal culpability is for his personal act of disobedience, and in this sense his “fault” is no different from the fault than any man may incur in sin even if it be grievous sin.

It seems to make sense to view the “fault” of Adam in this manner rather than a manner which makes him out to be the greatest sinner in human history, which would seem the necessary alternative.

We came to be ungraced through the falling of the first member from which we all are descended. I would also contend that this falling was in a sense inevitable, in that sense Adam does not single-handedly bear the moral responsibility for all the sin in the world. That would be a guilt much too great for one man to bear, and would also make him single-handedly responsible for the Crucifixion of Christ. Rather humanity would always sin, and at the time of Adam, there was no other human but him, so right enough, he fell, and he fell through his free choice, which was the result of his creaturely nature. Again, if one is to say that the sin is not personal, rather communal (which is what we say), the sort of shame that the family bears through the sins of its father, then one could possibly state that it was not personal also in the case of Adam. This is not to take responsibility completely away from Adam, for as we said, Adam is still culpable for disobedience at the personal level. But if the whole human race is then marked for destruction through the fault of one man, as the cause of all the suffering in the world, then it would seem to accord to Adam a role that would usually be ascribed to Satan. Even Satan through his choice could not deprive an entire species of sanctifying Grace, it might be said.

The Original Sin should not really imply that if not for the Fall, the world would be without any sin whatsoever. We could all have sinned even in that initial graced state, just as Adam did. Perhaps the magnitude of sin in the world would have been ameliorated through this, although it is really hard to say anything on these lines with any confidence, since we have seen that the angels were created not just in Grace, but in the Beatific Vision and the depth of their fall, or of the ones that did fall seemingly would exceed any extent to which even man has fallen (again I only make this comparison very tenuously, yet one could possible not say that their fall was of lesser magnitude through being in Grace.

Estimating the Effects of Original Sin

Further any such effects, however great, are washed away at our Baptisms, and so that causative (that sin in the world “came through one man”) relationship if true, only holds up to this point and only persists were the person to willfully choose to remain unbaptized. So essentially whether the sinful effects of the Fall materialize in the form of the increasing downward spiral into evil, rests upon personal decision, hence the person in this sense assumes responsibility for the effects of Original Sin, even though he is not personally responsible for having Original Sin, the original deprivation of the graced state of Adam.

The unbaptized are separated from that Life of Grace until such a time as they do choose to be baptized into it. As a consequence of the Fall, we do not anymore fall out of Grace in which we are created, rather we must accept Grace (or even have it accepted for us as babies, as in C/O) which we are not created in a state of (this infant baptism becomes an outlier to my explanation- if the point is that we choose grace, then why do we baptize babies? If the Baptism of babies is valid, as is held by C/O, then we can see just how easily God has made it possible that all the effects of Original Sin be averted. Just as we inherit Original Sin, the state in which we are deprived of Grace not through personal sin but through the human community we are born into and the neglect of our ancestor, so also if infant Baptism holds, then God has made it possible that we be washed of it also, through no personal action of our own, but the observant and meritorious action of our community.

Further, through that very fall and fault of the first humans, it is true that the world gained an immeasurable good, such a good that even Jesus said:

““Truly I say to you that many prophets and righteous men longed to see what you see, but did not see it, and to hear what you hear, but did not hear it”. And in verse 16, “Blessed are your eyes because they see and blessed are your ears because they hear”. Joyously happy are you for seeing and hearing the things you do. Or, “How privileged you are!!” (Matthew 13:17, cf. 1 Peter 1:12)

Given this, it would seem untenable to hold that God indeed “tricked” Adam through setting him up for failure as it were, and the greatest possible failure in history, rather, the Fall of Man is the result of a battle in the Heavenly Places: it is Satan who is tricked, and while he would have believed he had gained a victory over the human race through his intervention in this embryonic and innocent stage of human history, like some cosmic genetic scientist interfering with the very fabric of our make-up, it would come to pass that he could only stand back and watch as the greatest conceivable Grace was showered upon our race, literally as St. Paul says, “every spiritual blessing in the Heavenly places” (Eph.1:3)

Inevitability of the Fall?

Had Adam not fallen out of Grace, I do not consider that this would preclude sins arising from other humans falling out of grace too, for by what merit would the entire human race be conferred with such an infallibility- by the merits of Adam? This would seem to confer a Christ-like status upon him, which would be totally unacceptable theologically. What I am saying here is that whatever the actions of Adam, they would not have conferred immunity from sin upon every human being had those actions been different. So when St. Paul says “sin entered through one man”, it could only refer to the particular mode of sinful state in which we find ourselves. There might have been, in fact would have been a different state from which we sin had Adam not committed that first sin. At least that’s how I see it, but I’m glad to be challenged and corrected here should it be considered fit.

Further, even the hypothetical “had Adam not sinned” has questionable validity, as although we are free not to sin, it is actually inevitable that we do sin, and to varying extents In this sense we could state that had Adam refused the fruit, it could not be that kept refusing every single apple- equivalent in his life inevitably and necessarily. To me this seems to be a question on the level of “had God not created this world but another”– it is a hypothetical whose validity should not just eb taken for granted. But that’s a different issue we are not tackling here.

Further, although sin does arise as a consequence of the deprivation of Grace, and evil increase as a result of it, so also it is correct to hold with St. Paul that “grace increased all the more”, for great as was the Fall of Man due to it, so also greater was the holiness to which he would now be called in Jesus, who would redeem him from this Fall. In this sense it seems that there is a strong case to be made for the inevitability of the Fall, that it was just as inevitable that Adam should fall as it is inevitable that all humans sin, what is not inevitable is solely the extent to which they sin. But further, it is not clear that the Fall of Adam was a bad thing for humanity at all, for the Grace which it brought is even greater than the Grace that was lost- it gained for us so great a Saviour – from the words of the Easter Vigil Mass.

Could it really be that in the absence of the choice that Eve made and then Adam, that they would have been in the life of Grace and Baptism would be redundant, and so would the Incarnation? This is unthinkable for a Christian, and Aquinas’ view, which is that Jesus would have come anyway seems rather tenuous, and perhaps not his best insight. There is a difference between “inevitability” and “choice”, and we can use those two paradoxical terms in a sentence without contradiction: “it was inevitable that they would choose sin”, in a similar manner that it is true for any of us. I speak of problems of Foreknowledge of God, Pre-Destination and Free Will here, and do not believe that they are part of this discussion no Original Sin.

This is the point also where real difficulty is experienced in synthesizing the two religions of Judaism and Christianity- did Adam and Eve need a Redeemer in the state they were in? We would have to answer that since as it turned out that they did need a Redeemer in Christ, and since they also got one, and that which they gained thereby was much greater than that which they had lost. The God who himself walked with them in the Garden then came to bring them back to the Garden, redeemed, pure and holy.

“Sin Entered through one Man”

I think that the reading “sin entered through one man” is subtly different from “one man caused every other man to sin”. There is certainly a paradox here in that although Adam is seen as an “enabler” yet he certainly does not personally bear moral responsibility for all our sins. After all, it is sound Christian teaching that the responsibility for personal sin rests with the person, not with Adam. So it would seem we can only take this as paradigmatic- if the first man sinned, we can presume that any of us in his place would have done likewise. Adam lost grace for all of us , yet it is also true that any of us would have done the same- without a redeemer, we are not really equipped to deal with the serpent and temptation. In fact, and again I am merely speculating here, but it does not on the surface, seem like Adam and Eve were “filled by the Holy Spirit”, for they offer no resistance to the snake whatsoever, and there seems to be no thought of resisting at all, no notion of the “prompting of the Spirit”. Is this merely a textual omission?

It seems as though Adam was “innocent” only inasmuch as he had “not yet sinned”. What he lost then was a certain relation with God and the state of being innocent itself, which lasted only until he was not- he did not “lose the Holy Spirit”.

The heretic Celestius said “in every possible hypothesis Adam would have fallen/ died”. The heart of the question is this: what different situation were Adam and Eve presented with that we are not, prior to Baptism? And the answer might either be the Presence of God. I do not think it right to say that they had as did the angels the Beatific Vision. I might see this as the childlike state of innocence and trust persisting. We cannot state that he was created in a state in which he “did not need to be redeemed”, since after all he did fall and did need redeeming. But to fall from the state of being in Sanctifying Grace? This is not impossible, since it is the case with the angels.

We ourselves are not created in sanctifying Grace, but we can enter it just as we can fall from it like Adam. The former is the fault of Adam, the latter our own. That’s a lot for Adam to answer for, as the deprivation of Grace for the human race might be seen as the cause of much evil caused by disbelief. But that is partially offset by Adam’s ignorance in the matter and partly in that persons are personally culpable for evil and moral choices, especially the grace of declining Sanctifying Grace. Adam’s sin was to Fall from Grace, while our sin is to refuse it, it is not immediately apparent which is the greater sin.

What we Need

In the Christian belief, 100% of us as adults will be deserving of Hell, without Baptismal regeneration. Baptism does not remove the tendency to sin (“concupiscence” that which is in us which draws us to sin even after we are Baptized), but it removes that whereby man is incapable of not remaining prey to the sinful state. I hope that demarcation is clear- in the state of Original Sin, nothing will prevent a person from not falling prey to sin as their eventual outcome. A fuller treatment of sin is available here Sin and Redemption in Christianity- the Atoning Sacrifice. Prior to Baptism we merely have the ability to choose to be baptized. I have written on Baptism and Baptismal Regeneration here (coming soon).

Could we really have done without the Doctrine

There are certainly those that find it hard to accept the doctrine of Original Sin, and indeed there is no doubt that the concept is extremely difficult to explain, I’ve merely done the best I can here and don’t claim that my explanation is best or completely satisfactory. At least in the Christian paradigm, of man being destined for such “divinization” which is the transformation in Christ that is the goal of Christian life, given that it is true, the doctrine cannot be dispensed with. The reason being that had we not lost the state (or had the state not been lost for us) of original Grace, we would never have been in need of the Sanctifying Grace of Christ that was to Come. I think therefore that the lack of Original Sin was never an option, Adam was going to fall, none of us in his place would have stood, Mother Mary was always going to be Immaculately conceived (in the C/O tradition, in order that she might conceive the One “who though without sin was made to be sin so that in him we might become the righteousness of God”. (2Cor.5:21)

What of Babies

We speak of Free Will in another article Foreknowledge of God, Pre-Destination and Free Will, but the mere mention of the term “free will” is simply inadequate to explain why 100% of humans choose to sin in spite of being free. Free Will is part of the discussion of the human psyche, but that discussion is not complete without explaining the tendency to sin. Baptismal regeneration takes the human being out of that situation in which they have “no chance” of gaining victory over sin by introducing them into the life of Grace.

Baptism removes personal sin from the followers of Christ and enables them to attain the divine virtues in the life of Grace. That process of “divinization” does not occur without Baptism and we discuss it specifically here in more detail: Participation in the Divine Life of Jesus

So a baby does not go to Hell because it is not baptized, since Hell is the consequence of personal sin. There is not a problem for babies here.

The Catholic Church’s View on Original Sin

There are excerpts from Catholic.com (also seen on NewAdvent website):

the full article is here https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/original-sin

Sanctifying grace therefore enters into the moral order, not as an act that passes but as a permanent tendency which exists even when the subject who possesses it does not act; it is a turning towards God, conversio ad Deum. Consequently the privation of this grace, even without any other act, would be a stain, a moral deformity, a turning away from God, aversio a Deo, and this character is not found in any other effect of the fault of Adam. This privation, therefore, is the hereditary stain.

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 (De pecc. orig., xxiv). 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., IV, civ). St. Basil attributes to us the act of the first man: “Because we did not fast (when Adam ate the forbid-den fruit) we have been turned out of the garden of Paradise” (Horn. i de jejun., iv). Earlier still is the testimony of St. Irenaeus; “In the person of the first Adam we offend God, disobeying His precept” (Haeres., V, xvi, 3).

Celestius, a friend of Pelagius, was the first in the West to hold these propositions, borrowed from Theodorus: “Adam was to die in every hypothesis, whether he sinned or did not sin. His sin injured himself only and not the human race” (Mercator, “Liber Subnotationum”, preface). This, the first position held by the Pelagians, was also the first point condemned at Carthage (Denzinger, “Enchiridion”, no 101-old no. 65). Against this fundamental error Catholics cited especially Rom., v, 12, where Adam is shown as transmitting death with sin. Second, there is an allusion in this verse to a passage in the Book of Wisdom in which, as may be seen from the context, there is question of physical death, Wis., ii, 24: “But by the envy of the devil death came into the world”. Cf. Gen., ii, 17; iii, 3, 19; and another parallel passage in St. Paul himself, I Cor., xv, 21: “For by a man came death and by a man the resurrection of the dead”.

In that state all that man is capable of is opening oneself to God’s promptings and no more (this has been called “prevenient grace”, but we do not require to get caught up in terminology at this point).

“We do not know how many of these creatures God made, nor how long they continued in the Paradisal state. But sooner or later they fell. Someone or something whispered that they could become as gods—that they could cease directing their lives to their Creator and taking all their delights as uncovenanted mercies, as ‘accidents’ (in the logical sense) which arose in the course of a life directed not to those delights but to the adoration of God… so they desired to be on their own, to take care for their own future, to plan for pleasure and for security, to have a medium (?) from which, no doubt, they would pay some reasonable tribute to God in the way of time, attention, and love, but which, nevertheless, was theirs not His…” (Lewis, Problem of Pain p.75))

CCC 704 “God fashioned man with His own hands…and impressed His own form on the flesh He had fashioned, in such a way that even what was visible might bear the divine form.”-St Irenaeus. Disfigured by sin and death, man remains “In the image of God”, but is deprived “Of the glory of God”, of His “likeness”. The promise made to Abraham inaugurates the economy of salvation, at the culmination of which the Son Himself will assume that “image” and restore it in the Father’s “likeness” by giving it again it’s Glory, the Spirit who is ‘’the giver of life”.

Romans 5:12 “Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned”

Psalm 51:5 ^“Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me.

1 Corinthians 15:22”For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.”

CCC 403 “Following St Paul, the Church has always taught that the overwhelming misery which oppresses men and their inclination towards evil and death cannot  be understood apart from their connection with Adam’ sin and that he has transmitted to us a sin with which we are all born afflicted.” 404 “…Original sin is called a sin only in an analogical sense. It is a sin “contracted” and not “committed”- a state and not an act…. (409): “…By our first parents’ sin, the devil has acquired a certain domination over man, even though man remains free. Original sin entails “captivity under the power of him who thenceforth had the power of death, that is, the devil…”