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Chapter Seven: Evil, Sin, and Death: Thomas Aquinas on Original Sin
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Seven Evil, Sin, and Death Thomas Aquinas on Original Sin . Although the idea of original sin is not one of the most popular topics of Christian teaching, it is still considered to be an essential part. According to this doctrine, the first sin of Adam has been passed on to the whole of mankind by way of origin, that is, transmitted through sexual reproduction from generation to generation. That the sin of Adam, acting as head of the human race, is the cause and source of original sin is strongly suggested by the famous statement of St. Paul in the Letter to the Romans (:): “By one man sin entered into this world, and by sin death.” Human nature was created at first faultless and without sin; but as the result of the sin of Adam, that nature has contracted a culpable defect.The first sin has led to the fall of all of humanity in this world. The first Christian thinker to attempt a coherent explanation of this seemingly mythical notion of original sin was Augustine of Hippo.1 His emphasis on the sexual act of procreation as the locus of transmission of original sin from one generation to another may impress us as highly paradoxical. All human beings are said to be somehow “infected” by sin, simply by reason of their being born from human parents.The paradox consists in the strange combination of the moral category of sin and guilt with the biological notion of infectious transmission. From the perspective of modern moral theory, based on human autonomy and Rudi A. te Velde individual responsibility, the idea of original sin is likely to be rejected as some sort of relic from a “dark” religious past, which lacked a genuine moral conception of sin and guilt. For many people it is difficult to accept that newborn children—the paradigm of pure innocence in our still romantic age—are already tainted with guilt contracted from their parents, in consequence of which they should be ritually cleansed by baptism. But it is not only modern enlightened thought, with its emphasis on the autonomous individual, that finds this concept problematic. Aristotle also would probably have had difficulties with the notion that people are born with a moral defect. In his Nicomachean Ethics he observes, as a matter of moral fact, that no one would reproach a person blind from birth, but rather one would pity him.2 The doctrine of original sin seems to be in flat contradiction with this common moral intuition. For Thomas Aquinas the doctrine of original sin is neither a relic of a religious past nor, as I will argue, some sort of rational theory that pretends to explain the moral shortcomings of mankind in history in terms of a hereditary defect of human nature. For Aquinas, original sin is in the first place an integral part of the Catholic doctrine of faith. It is one of the elements in which the inexhaustible meaning of faith has been articulated throughout the theological tradition . Perhaps one should start by saying that the idea of original sin, as a culpable failure which bears on the whole of mankind in its relationship to God, has arisen from the faithful experience of the redemptive suffering of Jesus Christ, who is said to have died on the cross for “our sins.” Aquinas’ treatment of the doctrine of original sin has its place in the Prima Secundae (I-II.‒) of his Summa Theologiae, where it is part of a wider treatment of the moral categories of peccatum and vitium. The second part of the Summa is devoted to what is usually called moral theology. Its general subject matter is characterized by Aquinas as “the movement of the rational creature towards God.”3 It is about the ultimate end of human life and about the free human acts by means of which man strives to attain his end, which consists in the blessed union with God himself (visio beatifica).Within the systematic framework of the moral consideration of human acts, the moral category of sin is defined as an evil human act, that is, a voluntary act that fails to conform to the measure for attaining the human end. And original sin, one might say, denotes a more structural failure on the part of humanity to live and act in a free responsiveness to God’s will. Original sin is placed by Aquinas in the category of moral evil, which in its...