1. Adam’s Fall and Original Sin
1. Knowing Our Dignity and Our Ruin
The ancient proverb had good reason to urge people so strongly to know themselves. If ignorance about the affairs of life is considered shameful, ignorance of ourselves is far more shameful. It leads us to deceive ourselves miserably about matters of the greatest importance and to walk blindly through them. Yet the more useful this precept is, the more carefully we must avoid misusing it, as certain philosophers have done. When they urge people to know themselves, their stated purpose is that they should recognize their own excellence and dignity. They want people to see nothing in themselves except what will fill them with empty confidence and puff them up with pride.
Self-knowledge consists, first, in reflecting on what God gave us at creation and still graciously gives us. We then recognize how excellent our nature would have been if it had remained intact. At the same time, we remember that we have nothing of our own but depend entirely on God. Whatever he has chosen to give us, we hold at his pleasure. Second, when we consider our miserable condition since Adam’s fall, all confidence and boasting collapse. We blush with shame and become truly humble.
God originally formed us in his own image to lift our minds toward virtue and the contemplation of eternal life. We must therefore understand that he endowed us with reason and intelligence so that we might cultivate a holy and honorable life and look toward blessed immortality as our appointed goal. Otherwise, we may heedlessly bury those noble qualities that distinguish us from the lower animals.
Yet we cannot think about our original dignity without immediately recalling the sad spectacle of our disgrace and corruption, ever since we fell from our original condition in the person of our first parent. This makes us dissatisfied with ourselves and truly humble. At the same time, it kindles fresh desires to seek God, in whom each of us may recover those good qualities that all of us utterly lack.
2. The Danger of Flattering Ourselves
When we examine ourselves, divine truth requires a kind of inquiry and knowledge that turns us away from confidence in our own powers. It leaves us no grounds for boasting and inclines us to submission. We must follow this course if we are to reach the true goal, both in thought and in practice.
I know how much more appealing it is to be invited to consider our good qualities rather than contemplate what must overwhelm us with shame: our miserable poverty and disgrace. Nothing pleases the human mind more than flattery. When told that its gifts are excellent, it readily believes far too much. It is therefore no wonder that most people have gone so badly wrong here.
The innate self-love that blinds us all makes us eager to believe that we possess no quality deserving hatred. Thus, even without outside encouragement, people generally accept the foolish idea that a person is entirely self-sufficient for a good and happy life. Some think more modestly and concede something to God, so that they do not seem to claim everything for themselves. Yet they divide matters in such a way that the chief grounds for confidence and boasting always remain their own.
If someone then delivers a speech flattering the pride that springs spontaneously from the depths of the human heart, nothing seems more delightful. In every age, those most eager to praise the excellence of human nature receive the loudest applause. Yet whatever form this praise takes, by teaching people to rest in themselves it merely charms them with its sweetness. At the same time, it deceives them so thoroughly that it drowns all who accept it in destruction.
What good is it to advance with empty confidence, to deliberate, decide, plan, and attempt what we think suitable, if from the outset we lack both sound understanding and true virtue? We still press on confidently until we plunge headlong into ruin. Yet this is the best outcome available to those who trust their own powers. Anyone who listens to teachers who occupy us only with contemplating our good qualities will make no progress in self-knowledge. Instead, that person will sink into the most destructive ignorance.
3. Our Calling and Our Inability
Revealed truth agrees with the general judgment of humanity that the second part of wisdom consists in self-knowledge. They differ greatly, however, about how this knowledge is acquired. According to the judgment of the flesh, a person knows himself fully when excessive confidence in his intelligence and integrity gives him courage and drives him toward virtuous deeds. He declares war on vice and uses every effort to attain what is honorable and beautiful.
But someone who tests himself by the standard of divine justice finds nothing to inspire confidence. The more thoroughly he examines himself, the more discouraged he becomes. Abandoning all dependence on himself, he realizes that he is utterly incapable of governing his conduct properly.
God does not intend us to forget the original dignity he gave our first parents. That dignity may well spur us to pursue goodness and justice. We cannot consider our first origin or the purpose for which we were created without being urged to reflect on immortality and seek God’s kingdom. Yet such reflection humbles us and casts us down rather than lifting our spirits. What was our original condition? One from which we have fallen. What was the purpose of our creation? One from which we have completely strayed. We grow weary of our miserable lot and groan, longing for a dignity now lost.
When we say that people should see nothing in themselves that can lift their spirits, we mean that they possess nothing on which they can pride themselves. It therefore seems right to divide the self-knowledge we need into two parts. First, we should consider the purpose for which we were created and the far from contemptible qualities with which we were endowed. This urges us to reflect on the worship of God and the life to come. Second, we should consider our abilities, or rather our lack of them. Recognizing this lack destroys all our confidence and covers us with shame. The first consideration teaches us our duty; the second shows how far we can perform it. We will discuss both in their proper order.
4. Adam’s Unbelief and Rebellion
The act God punished so severely must have been a dreadful crime, rather than a trivial fault. We must therefore examine the particular nature of the sin that caused Adam’s fall and provoked God to inflict such fearful vengeance on the entire human race.
The common explanation that it was excessive sensual desire is childish. The sum of all virtue could not consist in abstaining from a single fruit when every desirable delicacy was available. The earth, in its happy fertility, yielded both abundance and endless variety. We must look deeper. The prohibition against touching the tree of the knowledge of good and evil tested Adam’s obedience. By keeping it, he would demonstrate his willing submission to God’s command. The very name shows that the command was intended to keep him content with his allotted condition and prevent him from arrogantly aspiring beyond it.
The promise gave him hope of eternal life as long as he ate from the tree of life. The fearful warning, on the other hand, threatened death the moment he tasted from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Both were meant to test and exercise his faith. It is therefore not difficult to see how Adam provoked God’s wrath.
Augustine is not far from the truth when he says that pride was the beginning of all evil. If human ambition had not carried people beyond their permitted bounds, they might have remained in their first condition. Yet a fuller definition must come from the kind of temptation Moses describes. When the devil’s cunning led the woman faithlessly to abandon God’s command, her fall plainly began in disobedience. Paul confirms this when he says that one man’s disobedience destroyed all.
We must also observe that the first man rebelled against God’s authority both by allowing the devil’s tricks to ensnare him and by despising the truth and turning toward lies. When God’s word is despised, all reverence for him disappears. His majesty cannot be properly honored among us, nor his worship preserved intact, unless we hang, as it were, on his lips. Unbelief therefore lay at the root of the rebellion.
From unbelief sprang ambition and pride, along with ingratitude. By longing for more than his allotted portion, Adam showed contempt for the great generosity with which God had enriched him. What monstrous impiety for a creature of earth to regard being made in God’s likeness as too little, unless he were also made God’s equal!
Apostasy, by which people withdraw from their Maker’s authority and insolently shake off allegiance to him, is a foul and detestable crime. Attempts to excuse Adam’s sin are therefore futile. Nor was it merely apostasy. It also involved a foul insult against God, as the guilty pair accepted Satan’s slanders when he accused God of malice, envy, and falsehood. Unbelief opened the door to ambition; ambition gave birth to rebellion. People cast off the fear of God and gave their desires free rein.
Bernard therefore rightly says that today a door of salvation opens to us when we receive the gospel through our ears, just as death entered through that same doorway when it was opened to Satan. Adam would never have dared resist God’s command if he had believed his word. The strongest restraint on all his affections would have been the belief that nothing was better than cultivating righteousness by obeying God’s commands, and that the greatest possible happiness was to be loved by him. Carried away by Satan’s blasphemies, man therefore did everything in his power to annihilate God’s entire glory.
5. Corruption Passed to Adam’s Children
Adam’s spiritual life would have consisted in remaining united and bound to his Maker. Estrangement from God was therefore the death of his soul. It is no wonder that one who overturned the entire order of nature in heaven and earth corrupted his race by his rebellion. “The whole creation groaneth,” says Paul, “being made subject to vanity, not willingly” (Rom 8:20, 22). If we ask why, there can be no doubt that creation bears part of the punishment deserved by humanity, for whose use all other creatures were made.
Since human fault spread a curse above and below through every region of the world, it is entirely reasonable that the curse should extend to all human offspring. When the heavenly image in man was erased, he was punished by losing the qualities with which he had been clothed: wisdom, virtue, justice, truth, and holiness. In their place came the dreadful plagues of blindness, powerlessness, vanity, impurity, and unrighteousness. But he also involved his descendants and plunged them into the same misery.
This is the hereditary corruption that early Christian writers called original sin. By that term they meant the corruption of a nature formerly good and pure. The subject provoked much discussion. Nothing seems further from ordinary understanding than that one person’s fault should make everyone guilty and become a common sin. This seems to explain why the earliest teachers of the church touched on the matter only obscurely, or at least failed to explain it as clearly as it required.
Their hesitation did not prevent Pelagius from arising with his impious fiction that Adam’s sin harmed only himself and did no harm to his descendants. By cunningly concealing the disease, Satan tried to make it incurable. When Scripture clearly proved that the first man’s sin passed to all his descendants, the objection was raised that it passed by imitation rather than propagation.
The orthodox, especially Augustine, therefore worked to show that we do not become corrupt through acquired wickedness. We bring innate corruption with us from the womb. Denying this was the height of shamelessness. Yet no one who has learned from that holy man’s writings how brazen these heretics were will be surprised by the presumption of the Pelagians and Celestians.
Surely David’s confession is unambiguous: “I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me” (Ps 51:5). His purpose is not to blame his parents. Rather, to commend God’s goodness toward him more fully, he rightly repeats his confession of impurity from his very birth. David’s case was clearly no exception. It was an instance of the common condition of the entire human race. All of us descend from impure seed and enter the world infected with sin. Even before we see the sunlight, we are defiled and polluted in God’s sight. “Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? Not one,” says the Book of Job (Job 14:4).
6. Adam and Christ
We see, then, that parents transmit their impurity to their children, so that all without exception are corrupt from the beginning. We cannot find the origin of this corruption until we trace it back to the first parent of all as its fountainhead. We must therefore hold as certain that, in relation to human nature, Adam was not merely an ancestor but, as it were, a root. Through his corruption the entire human race was deservedly corrupted.
This is plain from the apostle’s contrast between Adam and Christ: “Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned; even so might grace reign through righteousness unto eternal life by Jesus Christ our Lord” (Rom 5:19-21). What evasion will the Pelagians turn to here? That Adam’s sin spread by imitation! Is Christ’s righteousness, then, available to us only as an example to imitate? Who can tolerate such blasphemy?
If it is beyond dispute that Christ’s righteousness, and through it life, becomes ours by being communicated to us, it follows that both were lost in Adam to be recovered in Christ. Sin and death, on the other hand, were brought in by Adam to be abolished in Christ. These words are clear: “As by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one shall many be made righteous.” The relationship between the two is therefore this: Adam involved us in his ruin and ruined us; Christ restored us to salvation by his grace. With the truth so clear, I see no need for a longer or more laborious proof.
Likewise, in the First Epistle to the Corinthians, Paul strengthens believers in their confident hope of resurrection by showing that the life lost in Adam is recovered in Christ (1 Cor 15:22). Having already declared that all died in Adam, he now also openly testifies that all are infected with sin. Condemnation could not reach those entirely free from blame. His meaning is clearest from the other half of the sentence, where he shows that the hope of life is restored in Christ. Everyone knows this happens only when, by a wondrous communication, Christ pours the power of his own righteousness into us. As it is said elsewhere, “The Spirit is life because of righteousness” (Rom 8:10).
The only possible explanation of “in Adam all died,” therefore, is that by sinning he brought disaster and ruin not only on himself but on our nature as well. He did this not merely through one fault in a matter unrelated to us. Through the corruption into which he fell, he infected all his offspring. Paul could never have said that all are “by nature the children of wrath” (Eph 2:3) if they had not been cursed from the womb.
The nature referred to is plainly not nature as God created it, but nature corrupted in Adam. It would have been utterly inappropriate to make God the author of death. When Adam corrupted himself, he transmitted the infection to all his descendants. Our Savior himself, the heavenly Judge, declares that all are vicious and corrupt by birth when he says that “that which is born of the flesh is flesh” (John 3:6). The gate of life is therefore closed to all until they have been regenerated.
7. The Inheritance of Corruption
To understand this subject, we need not anxiously debate whether a child’s soul is transmitted from the parent’s soul, since original sin resides in the soul. This question greatly troubled the ancient teachers. It should be enough to know that Adam was entrusted with the gifts God chose to bestow on human nature. When he lost what he had received, he lost it for us all as well as for himself.
Why worry about the transmission of the soul when we know that Adam received the qualities he lost for us no less than for himself? They were not gifts to one individual but attributes of the entire human race. There is therefore nothing absurd in saying that when he was stripped of them, his nature was left naked and destitute, and that when sin defiled him, the pollution extended to all his offspring.
Corrupt branches spring from a corrupt root and transmit their corruption to the saplings that grow from them. Children corrupted in their parent passed the infection to their grandchildren. In other words, corruption began in Adam and passes through an unbroken succession from earlier generations to later ones. The cause of this infection lies in neither the substance of the flesh nor that of the soul. Rather, God chose to ordain that the first man should lose the gifts bestowed on him for his descendants as well as for himself.
The Pelagian objection is easily answered. They say it is unlikely that children should derive corruption from godly parents, when their parents’ purity ought instead to sanctify them. But children descend through fleshly generation from Adam, rather than through the spiritual regeneration God’s servants receive from the Holy Spirit. As Augustine says, “Both the condemned unbeliever and the acquitted believer beget offspring not acquitted but condemned, because the nature which begets is corrupt.”
Godly parents do contribute in some measure to their children’s holiness, but this happens through God’s blessing. That blessing does not prevent the primary, universal curse of the whole race from taking effect beforehand. Guilt comes from nature; sanctification comes from supernatural grace.
8. What Original Sin Is
To avoid leaving our subject unknown or uncertain, we should define original sin. I do not intend to discuss every definition adopted by different writers, but only to give the one that seems most consistent with the truth. Original sin may be defined as a hereditary corruption and depravity of our nature, extending to every part of the soul. It first makes us liable to God’s wrath, and then produces in us the works Scripture calls works of the flesh.
Paul repeatedly calls this corruption sin, without adding original (Gal 5:19). The works that proceed from it, such as adultery, fornication, theft, hatred, murder, and reveling, he likewise calls the fruits of sin. Yet in various passages of Scripture, including Paul’s own writings, they are also called sins.
We must therefore distinguish two things. First, because every part of our nature is so perverted and corrupted, we deserve God’s condemnation simply because of that corruption. Nothing is acceptable to him except righteousness, innocence, and purity. This is not liability for someone else’s fault. Saying that Adam’s sin made us liable to God’s justice does not mean that we, though innocent and blameless in ourselves, bear his guilt. Rather, his transgression placed us all under the curse, and in that sense he brought us under obligation.
Through him, however, we received both punishment and the pollution for which punishment is justly due. Augustine often calls it another person’s sin to show more clearly how it descends to us. Yet he also insists that it is each individual’s own sin. The apostle states this distinctly: “death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned” (Rom 5:12). That is, all are involved in original sin and polluted by its stain.
Even infants bring their condemnation with them from their mother’s womb. They suffer for their own defect, rather than another’s. Although they have not yet produced the fruits of their own unrighteousness, its seed is planted in them. Indeed, their entire nature is, as it were, a seedbed of sin and therefore cannot help being hateful and detestable to God. It follows that this nature is rightly judged sinful in God’s sight, since there can be no condemnation without guilt.
The second point is that this perversity within us never stops. It constantly produces fresh fruits, the works of the flesh already described, just as a burning furnace sends out sparks and flames or a spring continually pours out water. Those who define original sin as the absence of the original righteousness we ought to have, although they substantially embrace the whole matter, do not express its force and energy clearly enough. Our nature is not merely entirely without goodness. It is so fertile in every kind of evil that it can never be idle.
Those who call it concupiscence use a reasonably appropriate word, provided they add what many will refuse to concede: everything in man, from intellect to will, from soul even to flesh, is defiled and permeated by this sinful desire. More briefly, the whole person is in himself nothing but concupiscence.
9. Sin Corrupts Every Part of Us
I have therefore said that sin has possessed every part of the soul since Adam rebelled against the fountain of righteousness. Not only did his lower appetites entice him. Abominable impiety seized the very citadel of his mind, and pride penetrated his inmost heart (Rom 7:12; Book 4, chapter 15, sections 10–12). It is foolish and meaningless to restrict the resulting corruption to what people call sensual impulses. Equally foolish is the claim that it is an excitement that entices, stirs, and drags into sin only the part they call sensuality.
Peter Lombard displayed gross ignorance here. In investigating the seat of corruption, he says it is in the flesh, as Paul declares, though not strictly speaking, but because it is more apparent there. As though Paul meant that only part of the soul, rather than our entire nature, was opposed to supernatural grace!
Paul himself leaves no room for doubt. Corruption does not dwell in only one part; no part is free from its deadly infection. Speaking of corrupt nature, he condemns the disorder of the appetites, but he also specifically declares that the understanding is subject to blindness and the heart to depravity (Eph 4:17-18). The third chapter of the Epistle to the Romans is entirely a description of original sin.
The manner of renewal shows the same thing more clearly. The spirit contrasted with the old man and the flesh does not mean merely the grace that corrects the sensual or lower part of the soul. It includes the complete reformation of every part (Eph 4:23). Accordingly, Paul commands us to suppress our gross appetites and also to be renewed in the spirit of our minds (Eph 4:23). Elsewhere he tells us to be transformed by the renewal of our minds (Rom 12:2).
The part in which the soul’s dignity and excellence appear most clearly, then, has not merely been wounded. It has been so corrupted that merely healing it is insufficient. It needs a new nature. We will soon see how deeply sin has seized both mind and heart. Here I wanted only to observe briefly that the whole person, from head to foot, is so flooded with sin that no part is exempt. Everything proceeding from him is therefore counted as sin. Thus Paul says that all fleshly thoughts and affections are hostility toward God, and consequently death (Rom 8:7).
10. Our Ruin Is Our Own Fault
Let us be done with those who dare to put God’s name on their vices because we say that people are born vicious. They absurdly expect to find God’s workmanship in their depravity, when they ought to look for it in Adam’s nature while it was still intact and uncorrupted. Our own fleshly nature bears the blame for our ruin, rather than God. Its sole cause is our departure from our original condition.
Let no one complain that God could have provided better for our safety by preventing Adam’s fall. The daring presumption in this objection makes it hateful to every godly mind. It concerns the mystery of predestination, which we will consider later in its proper place. Meanwhile, we must remember that our ruin comes from our own depravity, so that we do not insinuate an accusation against God himself, the Author of nature.
Nature has indeed received a mortal wound. Yet there is a great difference between a wound inflicted from outside and one belonging to our original condition. Sin plainly inflicted this wound. We therefore have no grounds for complaint except against ourselves. Scripture carefully teaches this. The Preacher says, “Lo, this only have I found, that God made man upright; but they have sought out many inventions” (Eccl 7:29). God kindly made man upright, but man fell into vanity through his own folly. His destruction is therefore plainly attributable to himself alone.
11. Natural Corruption Was Not Created
We say, then, that people are corrupted by a natural viciousness, yet that this viciousness did not originate in nature. By this we mean that it was something that happened to man, rather than an essential property assigned to him from the beginning.
We call it natural to prevent anyone from supposing that each individual acquires it through corrupt habits. All receive it under a law of heredity. We have authority for calling it natural, since on the same grounds the apostle says that we are “by nature the children of wrath” (Eph 2:3).
How could God, who delights in the least of his works, be offended with the noblest of them all? He is offended with the corruption of the work, rather than with the work itself. If it is appropriate to say that the corruption of human nature makes people naturally hateful to God, it is also appropriate to say that they are naturally vicious and depraved.
In view of our corrupt nature, Augustine does not hesitate to call those sins natural that necessarily reign in the flesh wherever God’s grace is absent. This disposes of the absurd notion of the Manicheans. Imagining that people were essentially wicked, they went so far as to assign them a different creator. In this way they tried to avoid appearing to attribute the cause and origin of evil to a righteous God.
