@ Energetic Procession
Go to the original thread for the responses from others. I'm just pasting his comments about St. Augustine and original sin here for future reference.
# Symeon Says:
March 8, 2008 at 6:59 pm
—Where does Maximus say that he is guilty for the sin of another? Where does he speak of guilt in an analogous sense? Where does he condemn the unbaptised to hell on account of original guilt? I agree that he divides sin in the way you proffered. I have done pretty much the same here numerous times before. But that is not the crucial question. I am not guilty for the corruption I inherit on his account. The “sin that I caused” can’t be my fall in Adam for exactly the reasons I stated, either my nature is Adam’s person or my gnomic will pre-existed. In fact the “sin I caused” Maximus indicates is the inherited corruption, but as far as I know, he doesn’t refer to this in terms of guilt or collective culpability or blameworthiness.—
As I wrote before, I made a mistake. St. Maximus says that the “fall of the will from good to evil” and “the mutability of my free choice” is “my sin,” indeed, because of “my sin,” another is caused, which is the corruption of human nature. Further, he says that this first sin is shared by the entire human race; this sin, “culpable indeed,” that “caused” the nonblameworthy one. Now, obviously that has to be primordial, because the nonblameworthy sin wasn’t just “caused” yesterday. It sounds a lot like shared blameworthiness and collective culpability to me.
—If you think Augustine and Maximus are on the same page, then does Augustine think that reatu is correctly said of Christ? I don’t think so. How many Catholic or Protestant scholars refer to the corrupted humanity of Christ?—
No, Augustine wouldn’t say that reatu could be correctly said of Christ. Nor would Vincent. Nor would Maximus. “Reatu” does not refer to corrupted humanity. Maximus says that the “fall of the will from good to evil,” which is “my sin,” is worthy of blame. However, the corruption of human nature, the “sin that I caused,” which Christ inherits, is not worthy of blame. Indeed, it is the fact the Christ is not reatu, that he is totally guiltless, which makes his victory over Sin, the Devil, and Death, so perfectly just. He shared in our condemnation, which is death, but since he is not “reatu,” he justly overthrew this unjust condemnation. But I think I’m preaching to the converted on this point.
—Again there is only so much mileage one can get out of the distinction between original and actual sin. Augustine damns people, children even, for original sin because he views them as responsible in some way. The “some way” is the rub and he never really gets a clear gloss on how this is possible, let alone how it is transmitted. I would still like an explanation of what kind of guilt this is and how I can be responsible for it. Being under the charge or domain of sin I have no problem with that language and usage from many of the Latins, but Weaver and other monographs I have read on this, from Catholic and non-Orthodox writers, agree that Augustine is innovating at this point.—
For Augustine, it isn’t so much a personal fault in the infants as that their unbaptized status and sinful state puts them under the power of the Devil. Since they will not be found in Christ, they will go down to the left. And his doctrine of unbaptized infants going to Hell is less shocking when you realize the rule of “many stripes/few stripes” is applied to them. The end result is perhaps only slightly more harsh than when St. Gregory the Theologians says that unbaptized infants do not go to Heaven but will not be tormented in Hell. As for the more fully grown unbaptized, they’ll have all their countless personal, actual sins weighing them down. A similar idea can be found in St. Symeon the New Theologian, when he writes that Ancestral Sin puts people under the power of the devil and, apart from any personal fault, is sufficient to send men to Hell. He doesn’t mention infants, but the logic is the same. As for how its transmitted, it’s the concupiscence of carnal procreation. St. Maximus has pretty much an identical idea of how sin is transmitted.
# Symeon Says:
March 8, 2008 at 7:35 pm
I should also point out that at the time even Pelagius couldn’t bring himself to say that unbaptized infants can go to Heaven.
# Symeon Says:
March 8, 2008 at 8:07 pm
[]: The doctrine you are attacking is the idea of a “sin nature,” which St. Augustine never held and in fact strongly repudiated. He discusses all of this in his Marriage and Concupiscence.
I think its important to keep in mind what the Council of Orange says in its first two canons:
CANON 1. If anyone denies that it is the whole man, that is, both body and soul, that was “changed for the worse” through the offense of Adam’s sin, but believes that the freedom of the soul remains unimpaired and that only the body is subject to corruption, he is deceived by the error of Pelagius and contradicts the scripture which says, “The soul that sins shall die” (Ezek. 18:20); and, “Do you not know that if you yield yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are the slaves of the one whom you obey?” (Rom. 6:16); and, “For whatever overcomes a man, to that he is enslaved” (2 Pet. 2:19).
CANON 2. If anyone asserts that Adam’s sin affected him alone and not his descendants also, or at least if he declares that it is only the death of the body which is the punishment for sin, and not also that sin, which is the death of the soul, passed through one man to the whole human race, he does injustice to God and contradicts the Apostle, who says, “Therefore as sin came into the world through one man and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all men sinned” (Rom. 5:12).
We might break this down thus: The death of the soul corresponds to St. Maximus’ first original sin, and the death of the body to his second. Both come from Adam. The first “death of the soul” is Adam’s sin “that passed through one man to the whole human race.” And since, as Ezekiel says, “the soul that sins shall die” we receive the second sin of bodily death. The death of the soul renders us slaves to the devil. As Maximus says, again, “humanity did not become sin but did commit and know sin-both the deliberate “sin” which man committed first, and the subsequent natural “sin” to which the Lord submitted himself on humanity’s account…”
What worries me is that the ideas now prevailing in pop Orthodoxy, that we only receive “death” from Adam (with no elaboration), and an overemphasis on the Church as spiritual hospital, lead to a lessening of awareness of the severity of sin. You seem to have a healthy awareness of it, so I’m not reproaching you.
Symeon Says:
March 9, 2008 at 2:02 am
[]: Orange can’t possibly be “heretical and schismatic,” since it isn’t even as Augustinian as, oh say, the Council of Carthage, which has Ecumenical authority in the east through Quinisext
# Symeon Says:
March 9, 2008 at 2:16 am
Andrea: I’m Orthodox actually. My Christian name is taken after St. Symeon the New Theologian. ;)
# Symeon Says:
March 9, 2008 at 2:39 am
[]: And anyway, here’s a quote from St. Symeon the New Theologian’s Ethical Discourses 1 which perfectly parallels Orange:
“This is because Adam, when he ate from the tree which God had forbidden him to eat of, suffered the death of his soul as soon as he transgressed, but that of the body only many years later. Christ therefore first raised up, vivified, and deified the soul which had suffered first the punishment of death, and then, to the body condemned by the ancient judgment to return to the earth in death, He granted the reception of incorruptibility through the Resurrection.”
As for the “guilt” being the corruption of our wills, or the “death of the soul,” I agree with that. And as for Adam being “guilty” of our sins, thats true too.
Symeon Says:
March 9, 2008 at 7:16 pm
[]: I never said it was ecumenical. Who ever did? But I do think it offered a good summary of Original Sin for my purposes. And it’s strange, because you are the first Orthodox person to object to Orange. Perry certainly doesn’t have a problem with it. Anyway, I am not Western Rite and am in fact anti-Ecumenist. Nor do I have sympathies with Calvinism. I think its one of the worst heresies, actually.
And anyway, the East did receive Carthage as Ecumenical, and that is far more Augustinian than Orange ever was. You might want to stop being Orthodox now if this irks you so much.
Andrew: Fr. Romanides’ explanation of Orange is pretty bogus. He obviously never looked at the history of Orange, why it was called, or who called it. And because it uses the Greek, and not Latin, version of Romans 5:12, it somehow becomes a condemnation of Augustine’s views!, despite the fact that they condemn the view that it is only the death of the body we receive.
Symeon Says:
March 9, 2008 at 7:38 pm
Although I should say, I don’t think Fr. Romanides views are even all that far from the west generally. I think he mostly attacks a strawman in his book.
Symeon Says:
March 9, 2008 at 7:55 pm
—The question is what is the sense in which all share in that sin? Is it that they were personally and metaphysically united and hence collectively committed it or that they are all participate in it through its effects?—
The latter.
—Second, the culpability for the first sin Maximus ascribes to Adam, and not to everyone in the passage you cite on page 119 of blowers translation. 2ndly, in the liturgical tradition of the Church the theotokos is said to be a cause of creation. Creation didn’t occur yesterday either. Was therefore the Theotokos present prior to her own creation? I don’t think so. There is no explicit supper here for the idea that humans are collectively guilty for the first sin.—
Yes, he applies it to Adam, but that’s pretty much a distinction without a difference since he also goes on to apply these same two sins to us. Sometimes he even applies this sin to both Adam and to all humans in one and the same sentence, as when he writes, “Just as in Adam, with his own act of freely choosing evil, the common glory of human nature, incorruption, was robbed-since God judged that it was not right for humanity, having abused free choice, to have an immortal nature…” And in the section where he says the first sin is “culpable indeed” he is referring to the two sins which came into existence generally as a result of Adam. And Jaroslav Pelikan writes, “Maximus saw Adam… as the entire human race embodied in one concrete but universal person.”
As for the Theotokos being a cause of creation, I understand that as referring to God’s predestination; that the world was created for her sake and thus for the sake of the incarnation. Maybe I’m totally wrong though. How do you understand it?
—If Christ takes up our corruption and that is reatu and not culpa then it follows that Augustine would be forced to say that Christ was reatu like us. Here the confusion between person and nature becomes apparent. If reatu doesn’t refer to corrupted humanity and neither does culpa then Original Sin does not refer to human nature at all, and the distinction you proffered before, given by our Catholic friends falls apart. If reatum is inherited then it is conjoined with human nature. Let me put the question more directly. Does Christ inherit concupiscence or no? Does Augustine think that the inherited corruption is worthy of blame? He sure talks as if it is. And do you know of any place where Augustine says that Christ inherits our corrupted nature? Does Augustine make the logical space available for an inherited corruption that is not worthy of blame and hence lacks any kind of guilt? Maximus surely does, but I don’t think Augustine does.—
Again, no one is reatu for corrupt human nature, but rather for the corrupt gnomic will. Christ is not reatu for the corrupt nature he inherits. And no, concupiscence is not inherited by Christ since Christ does not have a corrupt gnomic will.
Anyway, a quick google search reveals that according to Oliver Crisp in “Did Christ have a Fallen Human Nature?” from International Journal of Systematic Theology 6 (3), “[I]t is clear Augustine believed that Christ is both sinless and yet possesses a human nature affected by the fall.”
—Augustine from my reading thinks that children are personally guilty with a kind of collective personal guilt. To speak of a “sinful state” again brings out the confusion between person and nature unless of course you mean blameless inherited corruption.—
I don’t think he thought that infants are personally guilty, since he ridicules the idea that infants are personally guilty for sins and says it isn’t even worth taking seriously enough to refute. For Augustine, personal guilt only attaches to actual sins. He sees Original Sin as proceeding from the corrupt will, such that we can do nothing good without God’s assistance.
—But if children only at that stage have guiltless inherited corruption, why send them to hell? In the broad sense, everyone is found in Christ, which is why Christ is the judge of all. Hell is hell so saying that children go there is shocking.—
But punishments in hell are proportional to the amount of wrong done, as the rule goes: “And that servant, which knew his lord’s will, and prepared not himself, neither did according to his will, shall be beaten with many stripes. But he that knew not, and did commit things worthy of stripes, shall be beaten with few stripes. For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required: and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more.” (Luke 12:47-48) And so Augustine says, “It may therefore be correctly affirmed, that such infants as quit the body without being baptized will be involved in the mildest condemnation of all.” The “mildest condemnation of all” is in all probability next to nothing.
—And from my reading Chrysostom and Gregory don’t say that children go to hell but that they aren’t ranked as high as martyrs in heaven.—
Perhaps baptized infants aren’t ranked as high as martyrs, but unbaptized infants are a different matter. It’s an important distinction. Here is what St. Gregory says in his Oration on Holy Baptism:
“Others are not in a position to receive it [Baptism], perhaps on account of infancy, or some perfectly involuntary circumstance through which they are prevented from receiving it, even if they wish… [They] will be neither glorified nor punished by the righteous Judge, as unsealed and yet not wicked, but persons who have suffered rather than done wrong. For not every one who is not bad enough to be punished is good enough to be honoured; just as not every one who is not good enough to be honoured is bad enough to be punished.”
Pelagius took this idea of a middle place for infants because he could not say they went to heaven, being unbaptized. St. Augustine disagreed that there was a middle place, and so he consigned them to hell.
—For Augustine, concupiscence isn’t per se of the procreative act, for that was created by God and same for the desire to procreate, but it is rather through the procreative act by which libido is transferred. And this is why Augustine thought that the instability and lack of control over our sexual organs was proof that libido was transferred through them. Of course Augustine could never specify how it was in fact transferred because it implied various heterodox views no matter which way he took it.—
I agree. It isn’t the procreative act itself so much as the passions that accompany it. But St. Maximus pretty much says the same thing, that ancestral sin is transmitted through the “unrighteous enjoyment” or “unlawful pleasure” of carnal generation. If its a problem for Augustine, its a problem for Maximus too.
—As for Orange, in canon 1, I agree with Augustine that human freedom is impaired after the fall, but Augustine endorses some kind of theological determinism, either in a soft deterministic variety or in a Source Incompatibilist way. Take your pick since in the end they both come to the same nonsense. In any case, Augustine is no libertarian. I don’t think Maximus thinks that human freedom is curtailed in the way that Augustine does, and I think that is a significant difference.—
Yes, there may be some truth to this. However, an attentive reading of his To Simplician will show his view of predestination to be more nuanced than it is usually presented.
Speaking of which, I am not quite clear on your own view. You reject many western views, even ones that I had thought were reasonably close approximations of the Orthodox view (like Arminianism). Do you agree with the following excerpts from St. John of Damascus on predestination? http://www.orthodoxinfo.com/inquirers/exact_freewill.aspx
Symeon Says:
March 9, 2008 at 11:16 pm
[]: It looks like Dr. Farrell has an essentially positive view of Orange also.
Anyway, Augustine’s position of predestination is laid out in To Simplician. He explains how the initial call comes from God in this way:
Here someone will say, why was not Esau called in such a way that he would be willing to obey? We see that people are variously moved to believe when the same facts are shown or explained to them. For example, Simeon believed in our Lord Jesus Christ when he was still a little child, for the Spirit revealed the truth to him. Nathanael heard but one sentence from him, “Before Philip called thee, when thou wast under the fig tree I saw thee” (John 1:48); and he replied, “Rabbi, thou art the Son of God; thou art the King of Israel.” Long after, Peter made the same confession, and for that merit heard himself pronounced blessed, and that the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven were to be given to him. His disciples believed on him when by a miracle in Cana of Galilee water was turned into wine, which the evangelist John records as the beginning of the signs of Jesus. He stirred many to believe by his words, but many did not believe though the dead were raised. Even his disciples were terrified and shattered by his cross and death, but the thief believed at the very moment when he saw him not highly exalted but his own equal in sharing in crucifixion. One of his disciples after his resurrection believed, not so much because his body was alive again, as because of his recent wounds. Many of those who crucified him, who had despised him while he was working his miracles, believed when his disciples preached him and did similar miracles in his name. Since, then, people are brought to faith in such different ways, and the same thing spoken in one way has power to move and has no such power when spoken in another way, or may move one man and not another, who would dare to affirm that God has no method of calling whereby even Esau might have applied his mind and yoked his will to the faith in which Jacob was justified? But if the obstinacy of the will can be such that the mind’s aversion from all modes of calling becomes hardened, the question is whether that very hardening does not come from some divine penalty, as if God abandons a man by not calling him in the way in which he might be moved to faith. Who would dare to affirm that the Omnipotent lacked a method of persuading even Esau to believe?
So it’s not so much “irresistable grace” as that God knew that this particular call would be irresistable to this particular person in this particular circumstance. Essentially, its closer to Molinism. But also ties this in with a sort of “passive reprobation.”
# Symeon Says:
March 14, 2008 at 1:21 am
—I don’t think that Augustine thinks that we share in the sin of our first parents by virtue of the effects. Rather I think that he thinks that we collectively sin in Adam which is why guilt can be ascribed to us, even if it is not the guilt of culpa but reatu.—
I’m not even necessarily opposed to the latter idea on some deeper metaphysical level, but for now I will argue only for the former.
Anyway, St. Augustine defines Original Sin, or at least the guilty aspect, as concupiscence itself in 1.25 of Marriage and Concupiscence: “Now this concupiscence, this law of sin which dwells in our members, to which the law of righteousness forbids allegiance, saying in the words of the apostle, “Let not sin, therefore, reign in your mortal body, that ye should obey it in the lusts thereof; neither yield ye your members as instruments of unrighteousness unto sin:”—this concupiscence, I say, which is cleansed only by the sacrament of regeneration, does undoubtedly, by means of natural birth, pass on the bond of sin to a man’s posterity, unless they are themselves loosed from it by regeneration. In the case, however, of the regenerate, concupiscence is not itself sin any longer, whenever they do not consent to it for illicit works, and when the members are not applied by the presiding mind to perpetrate such deeds. So that, if what is enjoined in one passage, “Thou shalt not covet,” is not kept, that at any rate is observed which is commanded in another place, “Thou shalt not go after thy concupiscences.” Inasmuch, however, as by a certain manner of speech it is called sin, since it arose from sin, and, when it has the upper hand, produces sin, the guilt of it prevails in the natural man; but this guilt, by Christ’s grace through the remission of all sins, is not suffered to prevail in the regenerate man, if he does not yield obedience to it whenever it urges him to the commission of evil. As arising from sin, it is, I say, called sin, although in the regenerate it is not actually sin; and it has this designation applied to it, just as speech which the tongue produces is itself called “tongue;” and just as the word “hand” is used in the sense of writing, which the hand produces. In the same way concupiscence is called sin, as producing sin when it conquers the will: so to cold and frost the epithet “sluggish” is given; not as arising from, but as productive of, sluggishness; benumbing us, in fact.”
It is the “guilt” of concupiscence that is remitted in baptism. Augustine makes it quite clear that it is only called sin in an analagous manner, in so much as it is produced by sin and produces sin.
The other two aspects of Original Sin for Augustine appear to be death and ignorance.
—I believe that Maximus applies the same two sins for us in a secondary sense, along the lines of Paul in Romans 5, death spread to all men because all men in fact sinned. The sentence you cite does use both but it strikes me as using both in terms of an antecedent, Adam’s choice and a consequent, our loss of divine power. The common glory was lost because in Adam all of the race is derived. That doesn’t seem to be the idea of a collective guilt.—
Yes, the loss of divine power is a consequent of both Adam and us, but what is the antecedent? Not only Adam’s sin, but humanity’s abuse of free will. Adam’s abuse of free will is humanity’s abuse, which is why he calls the first original sin “my sin.” In other words, Adam’s sin is our sin.
—I agree with the Pelikan quote that Maximus Christ as the font of the race, but I’d offer a note of caution. Pelikan is not a specialist in Maximus and his historical work treats themes over persons. Second, he devotes no more than 2 or 3 pages in vol 2 to the entire monothelite controversy and it least a fair amount to be desired. I’d worry about putting too much weight that slim of a reed. Secondly, it is one thing to take Christ as the archetypal man in terms of being the font of the race and the image of that race, and quite another to take Christ as the “universal person” with all persons in seminal form summed up in him as him. The latter seems to be more of what Augustine has in mind and that seems to me to be problematic.—
Pelikan’s quote was specifically in re: how Maximus views Original Sin, and it is about Adam as a universal person. I was just using it to show I’m not the only one who sees this in Maximus.
—As for the Theotokos, that depends on what you mean by predestination. Certainly she is not predestined in a personal manner with respect to her choices. Her choices are not fixed by divine decree. Since the Incarnation hinged upon her assent, there is a sense that while she is posterior to the act of creation, her choice explains the world in so far as it is related to the incarnation. In this sense I understand her to be a cause of creation. My point being that we need to be careful of being anachronistic and reading notions from other theological systems and authors back into sources based on similar terms.—
Well, that was all I was really saying about the predestination of the Theotokos. Anyway, I don’t see how the liturgical quote about the Theotokos has much bearing on what Maximus says about “my sin” and “the sin that I caused.”
—I think Augustine thinks that everyone save Christ is reatu for their corruption which is why he denies it to Christ.—
People are not “guilty,” or “reatu,” for their bodily corruption alone. Do you think St. Vincent, for instance, would say that Christ participates in the guilt of Adam’s sin? I don’t. Our nature is “guilty” in a certain sense, and so Christ took it and did away with the guilt that was in it. St. Gregory Palamas, homily 5. Translation is Veniamin:
“Before Christ we all shared the same ancestral curse and condemnation poured out on all of us from our single Forefather, as if it had sprung from the root of the human race and was the common lot of our nature. Each person’s individual action attracted either reproof or praise from God, but no one could do anything about the shared curse and condemnation, or the evil inheritance that has been passed down to him and through him would pass to his descendants. But Christ came, setting human nature free and changing the common curse into a shared blessing. He took upon Himself our guilty nature from the most pure Virgin and united it, new and unmixed with the old seed, to His Divine Person. He rendered it guiltless and righteous, so that all His spiritual descendants would remain outside the ancestral curse and condemnation.”
—If concupiscience is a corruption of nature for Augustine and we inherit it, how is it that Christ does not inherit it since he inherits our nature?—
Christ had no concupiscence because of the fact that Christ was born of a virgin, without concupiscence. And St. Gregory Palamas says the same thing in Homily 14:
“If the conception of God had been from seed, He would not have been a new man, nor the Author of new life which will never grow old. If He were from the old stock and had inherited its sin, He would not have been able to bear within Himself the fullness of the incorruptible Godhead or to make His Flesh an inexhaustible Source of sanctification, able to wash away even the defilement of our First Parents by its abundant power, and sufficient to sanctify all who came after them.”
St. Maximus agrees. Ad Thalassium 61:
“But the Lord, when he became a man, did not have a birth in the flesh preceeded by the unrighteous pleasure that caused death to be elicited as a punishment of our nature. He naturally willed to die, to take on death amid the passibility of his human nature.”
Further, St. Augustine writes, “Inasmuch, however, as in Him there was the likeness of sinful flesh, He willed to pass through the changes of the various stages of life, beginning even with infancy, so that it would seem as if even His flesh might have arrived at death by the gradual approach of old age, if He had not been killed while young. Nevertheless, the death is inflicted in sinful flesh as the due of disobedience, but in the likeness of sinful flesh it was undergone in voluntary obedience.”
And St. Maximus agrees. Christ’s death was voluntary, not a natural due. He willed his own death. St. Maximus also agrees that death is the just penalty of sinful flesh which partakes in unlawful pleasure (i.e. all of us).
—I have read Crisp’s article and I think it turns on the same kind of confusion between person and nature. First notice the gloss he gives on the medieval notion of inherited guilt.—
I agree, his article is full of the typical Reformed confusions and nonsense. I was just citing him for Augustine’s views of Christ’s human nature.
—To say that Augustine thinks that Christ possess a human nature affected by the fall is ambiguous. Augustine doesn’t think that Christ bears a corrupted human nature. Just look at how he glosses 2 cor 5 for example in the Enchiridion, On the Grace of Christ and Original Sin, and Against the Two Letters of the Pelagians. He understands “likeness” in terms of something like a similar appearance rather than after the Greek notion of, after the pattern of, found in say Romans 6, which is anthropologically meatier.—
Having a human nature affected by the fall is all I have in mind, because if it is subject to the various blameless passions. Of course his flesh isn’t actually sinful. And can you say he understands it differently than St. Basil, in Letter 261?
“It is the property of flesh to undergo division, diminution, dissolution; of flesh endowed with soul to feel weariness, pain, hunger, thirst, and to be overcome by sleep; of soul using body to feel grief, heaviness, anxiety, and such like. Of these some are natural and necessary to every living creature; others come of evil will, and are superinduced because of life’s lacking proper discipline and training for virtue. Hence it is evident that our Lord assumed the natural affections to establish His real incarnation, and not by way of semblance of incantation, and that all the affections derived from evil that besmirch the purity of our life, He rejected as unworthy of His unsullied Godhead. It is on this account that He is said to have been “made in the likeness of flesh of sin;” not, as these men hold, in likeness of flesh, but of flesh of sin. It follows that He took our flesh with its natural afflictions, but “did no sin.” Just as the death which is in the flesh, transmitted to us through Adam, was swallowed up by the Godhead, so was the sin taken away by the righteousness which is in Christ Jesus, so that in the resurrection we receive back the flesh neither liable to death nor subject to sin.”
http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3202261.htm
—a corrupt will can only be had by individual persons who corrupt it, so unless we inherit a person, this won’t be a feasible explanation.—
If our rational soul has died in Adam as well as our body, due to loss of divine grace, and human will proceeds from the rational soul (which it does), we will in essence have inherited a corrupt will from Adam. But Christ “first raised up, vivified, and deified the soul which had suffered first the punishment of death,” according to St. Symeon. And thus, he had no corrupt gnomic will, because he was God. Only later, at the resurrection, did he destroy the body’s death.
Do you mean to say that we don’t inherit our corrupt will from Adam but merely imitate his sin and thus fashion for ourselves a new corrupt will? Of course not. Obviously, our corruption affects our gnomic will.
—In any case, here we can see the problem with what constitutes nature in respect to grace. Is nature good? If so, is it pleasing to God? Secondly, he excludes them from punishment, which Augustine doesn’t and if he excludes them form punishment, then he logically excludes them from hell and so I can’t see how this citation helps Augustine’s gloss that unbaptized infants go to hell.—
Well yes, I’ve always said that St. Gregory sees unbaptized infants as in a middle place, neither heaven nor hell. What was I trying to establish? Only this: There is something that makes unbaptized infants qualitatively different from baptized ones, and that this is recognized by the Church. Augustine couldn’t see how there could be a third place between heaven and hell, and that is all it really comes down too.
It is a dogmatic fact, as the Council of Carthage established, that the form of Baptism for remission of sins is a true one in regards to infants. This council has Ecumenical status in the Church from Quinisext.
—Pelagius has the same problem in how nature and grace (as well as person and nature) relate. He just takes it in a different direction.—
Pelagius’ view is the same as St. Gregory’s in respect to unbaptized infants.
—Consequently, I don’t think Maximus has the same problem on how original sin is transmitted since it is simply the nature in a deficient or disempowered state that it is transmitted.—
I think Maximus would say that even married couples partake of “unrighteous enjoyment,” since thats how Original Sin is transmitted, in his view. For Maximus, all sexual pleasure is “unrighteous enjoyment.” Let me quote him, from his Ad Thalassium 21:
“The first man received his existence, and free from corruption and sin-for God did not create either of these. When, however, he sinner by breaking God’s commandment, he was condemned to birth based on sexual passion and sin. Sin henceforth constrained his true natural origin within the liability to passions that had accompanied the first sin, as though placing it under a law. Accordingly, there is no human being who is sinless, since everyone is naturally subject to the law of sexual procreation that was introduced after man’s creaturely origin in consequence of his sin. Since, therefore, sin came about on acount of the transgression, and the liability to passions connected with sexual procreation entered human nature on account of sin, and since, through sin, the original transgression continued unabatedly to flourish right along with this passibility of childbirth, there was no hope of liberation, for human nature was deliberately and indissolubly bound by the chain of evil. The more human nature sought to preserve itself through sexual procreation, the more tightly it bound itself to the law of sin, reactivating the transgression connected with the liability to passions. Because of its physical condition, human nature suffered the increase of sin within this very liability to passions, and it retained the energies of all opposing forces, principalities, and powers-energies which, in view of the universal sin operative in human passibility, used the unnatural passions to hide under the guise of natural passions. Wherefore every wicked power is at work, amid human nature’s liability to passions, driving the deliberative will with the natural passions into the corruption of unnatural passions.”
Humanity was bound by the “chain of evil,” and the “law of sin.” There is a “universal sin operative in human passibility” due to passionate sexual generation.
Ad Thalassium 61:
“After the transgression pleasure naturally preconditioned the births of all human beings, and no one at all was by nature free from birth subject to the passion associated with this pleasure; rather, everyone was requited with sufferings, and subsequent death, as the natural punishment. The way to freedom was hard for all who were tyrannized by unrighteous pleasure and naturally subject to just sufferings and to the thoroughly just death accompanying them.”
And:
“What I am saying is that in the beginning sin seduced Adam and persuaded him to transgress God’s commandment, whereby sin gave rise to pleasure and, by means of this pleasure, nailed itself in Adam to the very depth of our nature, thus condemning our whole human nature to death and, via humanity, pressing the nature of (all) created beings toward mortal extinction.”
And:
“Because of Adam, who by his disobedience gave rise both to the law of birth through pleasure and the death of our nature which was its condemnation, all of his posterity who come into existence according to this law of birth through pleasure are necessarily linked with this birth and serves to condemn our nature. It was time for human nature to condemned for its sin, while the birth through pleasure was ruling our nature.”
Note: See how he says human nature sinned? But of course, he is speaking analogically and not confusing person and nature.
Here’s what Fr. John Meyendorff says in Christ in Eastern Christian Thought, p. 232,
“on the psychological and practical level, Maximus was on this point very close to the Augustinian position on sin and concupiscence . . .”
So, how is the nature in a deficient or disempowered state transmitted through sexual pleasure? Obviously, there is something more.
—I don’t think that To Simplician in the end helps matters since at best his view amounts to a version of Source Incompatibilism since he doesn’t think that alternative possibilities are a necessary condition on free will. If that is so, any reasonable theodicy or defense is out the window, or so I’d argue. This will also manifest itself in problems in Christology, which bubble up in Anselm and Aquinas with respect to the free human will of Christ. In any case, Jesse Couenhoven’s article, Augustine’s rejection of the free-will defence: an overview of the late Augustine’s theodicy, in Religious Studies, 2007 (43) is a nice summation of Augustine’s views and how I understand their development.—
Well, I don’t agree with the premises of Source Incompatibilism, but I’ll cede this to you because 1.) I’m not terribly familiar with the debate and 2.) the issue is peripheral.
—As for my views on foreknowledge, I for the record think that God has complete and exhaustive knowledge of all actual and possible future contingents and all actual and possible true propositions. I do not think that God’s knowledge is necessarily a cause and I do not think that God’s knowledge fixes the actions of agents. I reject the simultaneity view offered by Boethius as well as Molinism since persons aren’t essences. In my understanding predestination is to nature and not as to person. Consequently I don’t find anything in my view that contradicts what St. John has to say on the matter. If you think there is a conflict, please bring it to my attention.—
First, how do Boethius and Molinism entail that persons are essences? I don’t follow.
Second, an objection just off the top of my head: how is predictive prophecy at all possible, since prophecy foretells the actions of free agents?
# Symeon Says:
March 15, 2008 at 10:57 am
In addition to my citations from St. Gregory Palamas, St. Basil, and St. Maximus about concupiscence of the flesh, Christ’s human nature, and how the former was not assumed by the latter, here is some additional material to chew over.
St. Cyril of Alexandria, Letter 45 to Succensus
Therefore we say that, since from the transgression of Adam human nature suffered corruption and since our intellect within us is tyrannized by the pleasures of the flesh or by the inborn motions of the flesh, it became necessary for the salvation of us who are upon the earth that the Word of God be made man in order that he might make his own the flesh of man although it was subject to corruption and sick with the love of pleasure. Since he is life and life-giver, he would destroy the corruption in the flesh and rebuke its inborn motions, plainly those which tend toward love of pleasure. For thus it was possible that the sin in our flesh be killed. We recalled also that the blessed Paul called this inborn motion in us the “law of sin.” Wherefore since human flesh became the Word’s own, the subjection to corruption has come to an end, and since as God, he who made it his own and proclaimed it as his own “did not know sin,” as I said, he also put an end to the sickness of loving pleasure. And the only begotten Word of God has not corrected this for himself, for he is what he always is, but obviously for us. For even if we have been subject to evil from the transgression of Adam, by all means there will come upon us also the good things of Christ, which are immortality and the death of sin. Accordingly he became man, and did not assume a man, as it seems to Nestorius. And in order that it might be believed that he became man even though he remained what he was, God by nature obviously, therefore it is reported that he was hungry, and was weary from the journey, and endured sleep, and trouble, and pain, and the other human blameless experiences.
St. Maximus the Confessor, Ad Thalassium 21
Taking on the original condition of Adam as he was in the very beginning, he was sinless but not incorruptible, and he assumed, from the procreative process introduced into human nature as a consequence of sin, only the liability to passions, not the sin itself.
St. John of Damascus, De Fide III.20
Moreover, we confess that He assumed all the natural and blameless passions of man. This is because He assumed the whole man and everything that is his, except sin — for this last is not natural and it was not implanted in us by the Creator. On the contrary, it grew up in our will from the oversowing of the Devil, freely and not prevailing over us by force. Now, those passions are natural and blameless which are not under our control and have come into man’s life as a result of the condemnation occasioned by his fall. Such, for example, were hunger, thirst, fatigue, pain, the tears, the destruction, the shrinking from death, the fear, the agony from which came the sweating and drops of blood, the aid brought by the angels in deference to the weakness of His nature, and any other such things as are naturally inherent in all men. So, He assumed all that He might sanctify all. He was put to the test and He conquered that He might gain for us the victory and give to our nature the power to conquer the Adversary, so that through the very assaults by which the nature had been conquered of old it might conquer its former victor. Now, the Evil One attacked from the outside, just as he had with Adam, and not through thoughts — for it was not through thoughts that he attacked Adam, but through the serpent. The Lord, however, repelled the attack and it vanished like smoke, so that by being conquered the passions which had assailed Him might become easy for us to conquer and the new Adam thus be restored by the old. Actually, our natural passions were in Christ according to nature and over and above nature. Thus, it was according to nature that they were aroused in Him, when He permitted the flesh to suffer what was proper to it; whereas it was over and above nature, because in the Lord the things of nature did not control the will. For with Him nothing is found to be done under compulsion; on the contrary, everything was done freely. Thus, it was by willing that He hungered and by willing that He thirsted, by willing that He was afraid and by willing that He died.
And as a bonus, here is St. John of Damascus on what is concupiscence.
St. John of Damascus, De Fide IV.22
For, once we succumbed to the suggestion of the Evil One and freely violated the law of God, we allowed this suggestion to gain entrance and sold ourselves to sin. For this reason our body is easily brought to sin. Hence, the odor and sense of sin which is inherent in our body, that is to say, the concupiscence and pleasure of the body, is also called a law in the members of the flesh. Accordingly, the law of my mind—my conscience, that is to say—rejoices in the law of God, or His commandment, and wills it. On the other hand, the law of sin—that is to say, the suggestion that comes through the law in our members, or the concupiscence and base tendency and movement of the body and the irrational part of the soul—fights against the law of my mind, that is to say, my conscience, and captivates me. It does this by insinuating itself, even though I do will the law of God and love it and do not will to sin, and it deceives me and persuades me to become a slave to sin through the softness of pleasure and the concupiscence of the body and the irrational part of the soul, as I have said.
I could also cite such modern theological giants as Fr. Georges Florovsky that Christ did not assume Original Sin. But I think the point is made. It is not Orthodox to say that Christ assumed Original Sin, and so we should not fault St. Augustine for this plainly spurious issue.
By Carrie Gress
WASHINGTON, D.C., JAN. 31, 2008 (Zenit.org).- Even though the modern world talks of the hope in terms of progress and social justice, these concepts are "inhuman" aberrations of the true meaning of the theological virtue, says Father James Schall.
The Jesuit professor of political philosophy at Georgetown University is the author of "The Order of Things," and "Another Sort of Learning," both published by Ignatius Press.
In Part 1 of this interview with ZENIT, Father Schall comments on how Benedict XVI, in his encyclical "Spe Salvi," defends the theological virtue of hope by showing that without God human fulfillment and happiness is impossible.
Part 2 of this interview will appear Friday.
Q: Why do you think that this consideration of the theological virtue of hope is particularly timely?
Father Schall: We might state the issue briefly, but with some irony, by saying that in fact the secular world is itself full of "hope." However, the intellectual origins or implications of the ideas it uses for hope are no longer recognized. The modern words used instead of hope are "progress," or "making the world safe for democracy," "social justice," or the "scientific" eradication of suffering and evil. The theological background for this "secularization" of hope comes from Joachim of Flora and Francis Bacon, among others.
The modern idea of hope always means dissatisfaction with the present in the light of some presumed future that is not only better, but is the man-made answer to what we mean by complete happiness.
Even the word "education" has overtones of hope. Stress on education as a solution also has a Socratic background. Socrates evidently thought that at the origin of all the human disorder we find "ignorance." Thus, education, both general and universal, comes to be considered a universal "cure" for the moral disorders manifest in human nature wherever and whenever it appears in our experience. If we can just eliminate "ignorance," it is "hoped," we will eliminate evil.
This view clearly presupposes that we know and define properly the nature of the evil that we seek to eliminate. Perhaps no ideology is more stubborn than this educational one. The fact is that it is not primarily ignorance that causes evil. Education as an ideology always refuses to face the core problem of evil, its relation to free will, virtue and grace.
Aristotle was clear that, while intelligence was indeed a major factor, there was a recurring element of "wickedness" in human nature. The most intelligent and well-educated were often the ones closest to the greatest evil. The classical tractates on tyranny always presupposed this relationship of the greatest evil to the greatest finite intelligence, angelic or human. Lucifer is one of the most intelligent of the angels, which is why he is so dangerous.
Following Augustine and Aquinas, we understand the place of will, free will, in our lives. Evil is not located outside of us. Aristotle had recognized that virtue and vice are acquired habits based on repeated choices. We do not become virtuous or vicious simply by knowing what virtue or vice is. We have to "do" them repeatedly.
Behind this emphasis on will, we find the doctrine of original sin with its relation to pride.
My point here is simply this: The billions of dollars of wealth that sundry modern states and private charities pour into education in order to improve the world are almost always justified by a version of hope that essentially maintains that what causes human ills is lack of knowledge. Since the whole story of human disorder includes more than knowledge, we must recognize that this modern enthusiasm for "knowledge alone" betrays utopian overtones of a this-worldly solution of ultimate human problems.
The point is not to abandon the valid aspect of education in our lives. No religion -- or philosophy -- is more dedicated to intelligence than Catholicism. The point is to put it in proper order. We should seek and know the truth. But it does not automatically follow that those who seek education necessarily choose to live by the truth.
What this Pope is able to do, in an almost revolutionary manner, is to sort out the unrecognized theological strands of hope that exist within the secular order.
Modernity's very search for its own self-sufficiency is charged with Christian overtones that exist in the culture, but are not recognized. One of the results of the loss of faith, itself a choice, is the sense of no longer knowing how Christian themes were implicit in the culture.
Students and faculties today, including often those in Catholic institutions, have little notion of the Christian origins and limits of their favorite enthusiasms. Ever since we stopped studying heresies as heresies, we have often adopted them in enthusiastic terms whose origins we no longer recognize. There is not only ignorance, but a willed ignorance.
We do not want to know that our most basic desires are best explained by a reasoned faith, which we have uncritically, without examination and virtue, rejected as untenable.
Q: You have made a connection between Eric Voegelin's phrase "immanentize the eschaton" and the encyclical. What does this phrase mean? How do what connection do you see?
Father Schall: Eric Voegelin was a German political philosopher who came to the United States during the Nazi period. He had begun a distinguished academic career in Germany that he continued at Louisiana State and Stanford Universities. His voluminous and profound writings are published by the Louisiana State University Press and the University of Missouri Press.
After long studies in philosophy, language, scripture, history and theology, Voegelin concluded that the main motivating force behind modern philosophic movements was their effort literally to achieve the transcendent goals found in classical philosophy and Christianity, such as heaven, happiness, but within this world. He called these efforts at systems "ideologies." He explained that their effort was to "immanentize the eschaton."
Realist philosophy and Christian theology are not, in this sense, "ideologies," though this is what they will often be called in universities. This is why, from a Catholic view, the defense of philosophy and revelation as such is so important. Their realism is what distinguishes them from ideologies. Neither philosophy nor revelation is merely a projection onto reality of humanly concocted ideas that have no further justification other than the construct in the mind of some thinker now transformed into political action.
The word "eschaton" refers to the last things. We traditionally call them: death, purgatory, hell, and heaven. We will quickly notice that these are the four things to which Benedict XVI addresses himself in "Spe Salvi." We are so used to writing off any serious consideration of these topics that we can't easily appreciate the depth of what the Pope is about. As I often like to point out, Catholicism is an intellectual religion. We had better be prepared to understand why.
I know the expression "immanentize the eschaton" sounds formidable. It is something only a German academic mind could drum up, I suppose. But it is apt. It has the advantage of accurately identifying what is going on in the modern mind as it seeks to find a human meaning outside of a realist philosophy to which revelation is addressed in a coherent fashion. In other words, it means that modern thought does not escape Christianity even when it tries to do so. What it does is to strive to relocate it within the world as a rejection of Christianity.
The brilliance of the Pope's encyclical is that he is also a German philosopher and reads German philosophy. He knows that the great German thinkers, upon whom, in fact, most of modern thought depends, simply bring back in Christian ideas, only now in some distorted form. They try to locate "eternal life" down the ages. They try to escape death by projecting ages of man to 200 years. They try to imitate paradise by ecological fantasies of eternal earth.
Q: Can you briefly philosophic sketch how our contemporary world has distorted the vision of man? How does this idea of "progress" fit into the Pope's analysis?
Father Schall: In the beginning, modern ideology often proposed a humanism that was supposedly independent of revelation. Now, classical philosophy is independent of revelation, even though, as the Pope said in the Regensburg Lecture, that already in the Old and the New Testaments we find ideas of philosophy and revelation that are directly related to each other, the principle ones being the notions of truth, love, being and happiness.
What revelation argues in the face of modern thought and politics is that "humanism" has gradually become more and more "inhuman." Chesterton often predicted this would happen. The concepts of the length of human life in terms of years, of love in terms of sex, of happiness in terms of individual creation of its own ends are aberrations, much like those found in book five of Plato's "Republic," which in the name of justice sought to eliminate the family and to produce perfect children by a combination of genetics and state education.
"Progress" is an idea coming from post-Enlightenment thought. J.B. Bury's famous book "The Idea of Progress" reads like a book on salvation history. I like your expression, "How our contemporary world distorted the vision of man."
The theological virtue of hope, the subject of this encyclical, is precisely the virtue that most directly involves modern philosophy whose main claim to fame is that it can in fact produce a better "humanism." Taking it at its own word, the Pope systematically shows that without God it is impossible, really, to give actual human men and women any hope for themselves and their kind.
The Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the body, something that has intimations in Aristotle's notion of friendship, is the only real doctrine that addresses itself to the salvation of each individual in his own particular being, but within the notion of a community of love and friends, which is what we all want. What we hope for in the Christian sense is precisely that we see God "face to face." We already seek to know one another '"face to face." There is no guarantee that this condition can ever be realized outside of the hope that God exists and has saved us. We must include our sins and destiny.
The Pope reestablishes the importance of purgatory as a sensible position precisely because he knows, as we do, that few of us die with absolutely pure souls. There is nothing irrational about this much-maligned doctrine that alone addresses the fact of sins of the past and their proper atonement.
One almost has to laugh at this encyclical that boldly takes the eschatological doctrines -- heaven, hell, death, purgatory -- and shows us that they have direct meaning on our lives and culture. The encyclical is called "hope" but it is also "bold." It is bold precisely because it is intelligent and aware of the meaning of modern ideologies. Modern thought is, as was much of ancient thought after the Resurrection, an effort to avoid the truth of revelation. We cannot ever prevent anyone from rejecting this truth. Nor do we want to do so. This is what free will is about. The truth of God and of his purpose for man in the world must be chosen as well as understood.
What "Spe Salvi" does is spell out in lines too clear to miss the implications of rejecting the "eschaton" as it is presented in Christian faith. It is no doubt true that these doctrines must be understood accurately. Much of the heresy in history arises from a misunderstanding of what is actually taught.
This encyclical is a representation of what is actually taught. This is why it is so astonishing and revolutionary in itself.
Our eyes have not seen what our ears have heard because we do not want to receive what we are as a gift. We want to make what we are. And when we do, we find that we create mostly monsters. The Pope also sketches the monsters in this encyclical.