INHERITED GUILT?

© 1998, 2000, 2002, 2003 by Orchid Land Publications

[updated 20030712]

     All human beings are unable to obey God and, after reaching the "age of reason [responsibility]," fall into sinning.  This catastrophic misfortune results from the loss of the [h]omoíosis ("Assimilation, Cognation, Connaturalization"; the traditional rendering, "Likeness," would be correct only if the Greek had [h]omoíoma) of God at the Fall--i.e. in the sinning of first ancestors. 

(In Hebrew, Gen. 5:1 has the same word for Assimilation or Cognation as Gen. 1:26:   demut.  Note:  (1) "Assimilation" or "Cognation" is active—[h]omoíosis—not (as just pointed out) passive [h]omoíoma in Greek.  [The last verse of Ps. 16/17 says in Greek that we will find fulfillment in beholding [God's] Glory; the Hebrew says "when I awaken in Your munat (not the word for "Icon" or "Image" in Gen. 1:26-27, which is selem.)]   (2) Reason is "logos" in Greek; the Creator is called the Logos in the opening verses of the Gospel according St. John the Evangelist; the Father is the Source of eternal Being, but the Son created "all things" and "apart from Him was made not one thing that was made."  The Spirit was also present at the creation of the cosmos, as at Jesus's Baptism.  The logos "reason" in which humans have been created by the Logos-Creator was accompanied by freewill.  Without reason (lógos) and freewill (aftexousía), i.e. the Icon of God, we would not differ from animals--or, better, robots.  Reason and freewill are therefore inalienable parts of adult human nature, though we see them damaged in the feeble-minded and insane.  That  humans can inherit ontological defects (e.g. defective genes) like the loss of the Cogntion and pass on death (mortality) and decay to future generations is a very different thing from the error of claiming that moral acts--sin and virtue or merit--can be inherited from one invidual to another. 

As St. Maximos the Confessor affirmed,

Thus nothing of nature opposes God, for all natural things were clearly produced and generated by Him. We are not subject to any accusation because of any of the things that exist in us essentially; but we are clearly subject to accusation because of our perversion of those natural things.

So what of Eph. 2:3, belovëd by the Reformers?   The last words of the verse (which follows) are redolent of the Reformers thinking:

Among which [sons of disobedience] all of us in those days also whiled our lives away in the hankerings of our flesh [or "humanity"], satisfying the drives of flesh and thoughts, and were by nature children of wrath just like the rest.

Can the words "by nature" reasonably mean that those not yet converted are children of wrath because--contrary to the meaning of Dt. 24:15 and Gal. 6:5--they bear the guilt the sins of a remote ancestor?  Isn't the statement more readily interpretable to mean that, because humanity or human nature lost the Assimilation to God ([h]omoíosis Theõ, not of course the Icon of God) and inherited the defective gene of mortality contracted by Adam [literally:  human being] through his sinning, we have been therefore by nature unable to avoid falling into disobedience and sins that have entailed sufficient personal guilt to justify the divine anger?  The Reformers paradigm read the verse one way; we read it in another sense, viz. that God's anger arises out of things that we personally do but not out of  things that we are not responsible for.  We see no way in which the divine Majesty would become wrathful over sins he had, as some taught (and as some doubtless still teach), imputed from the first human being (i.e. "Adam") to us.   (The Reformers spoke of our being in Adam's "loins" in some literal or imputative manner; but who blames an infant born with syphillis or AIDS because of his mother's having contracted the disease through either sin or licit intercourse?)  As different paradigms impose their bounds on the possible meanings of the words of the Bible common to all sides, what is obvious in one paradigm is nonsense in another.

The Latins mistranslation of Rom. 5:12--having the verse ending with et per peccataum mors, et ita in omnes homines mors pertransiit, in quo omnes peccaverunt ("and through sin death, and thus did death spread into all humans, whom [i.e. Adam, referred to at the beginning of the verse as the "one human" in whom sin began] all sinned."   Augustine championed the idea of all humans' having sinned "in Adam," as being  "in Adam's loins," against the Pelagians.  But the Greek of Rom. 5:12 ends thus:  "and thus did death spread to all humans, for which [cause] all have fallen into sinning."  Yet, the Bible clearly repudiates the idea of transferable guilt (and by implication, merit); see Dt. 24:16 (quoted twice later in the historical books of the Old Testament) as well as Gal. 6:5 in the New Testament.  In Orthodoxy, newborn infants (including the sinless Mother of God) are not guilty of Adam's trespasses.

A good example of how a given expression is understood differently in different paradigms is "state of sin"; it carries different meanings in East and West.  In the West, it is equivalent to a state of being guilty.  In the East, the very expression is wrong; it is better to say "State of hamartía," where the word in the Greek Bible is understood to be a condition or state that is conducive to sin brought on by death and the the separation from God's Life (Grace, uncreated Energies) that resulted from Adam's disobedience.  No guilt is implied in the term.  Reader are recommended Dr. A. Kalomiros's "River of Fire."  Greek has other words for the act of sinning and its result, viz. (h)amartíosis & (h)martíoma.

The Orthodox honor and revere Christ's Suffering in the Crucifixion for many valid reasons, Crosses are very evident  in and on Orthodox temples, as are icons of that event ; the Orthodox frequently cross themselves and fast on Wednesdays and Fridays to remember our Savior's betrayal and Suffering.  But it is the Resurrection that overcomes the separation of God and humanity consequent on the Fall; Christ's Resurrection makes real the potential of the En-flesh-ment of the LOGOS that sanctified matter (John 6:53-54) and time (tradition) so that they might be able to function as vehicles of Grace--the Life of the Being beyond Being--if not His Essence, certainly His uncreated Energies.

Works are contributory to Salvation only when they are energized by Christ in His members.  Philp. 2:13 says:  "For it is God energizing in you all both to will and to energize for the sake of [His] good pleasure."  Uncreated Grace--the Life of Christ conveyed to believers through the Mysteries--is the efficacious cause of Salvation; a repentant  believer's acceptance (if s/he is an adult of sound mind) of this Grace is the conditional cause of Salvation.  Accepting and using Grace results in more Grace on top of Grace (John 1:16).

     Think of the damage done to innocent women, e.g., who feel guilt because of atrocious abuse against them by husbands or previously unknown rapists.  One could scarcely imagine a worse belief than transferable guilt, though there is one--that a "wrathful" God punishes humans for the sins of Adam that He has allegedly imputed to all of Adam's descendents!!  The horrible doctrine of inherited guilt (confused with original sin [viz. Eve's and Adam's] by sloppy thinkers on the Internet) should be banished from the thinking of every religion of love and reason.  If Christ is the divine LOGOS ("Reason"), He could never condone such an abomination.   Pope Gregory XIII reportedly stated that modern Jews inherit the guilt of the Jews who called for Jesus's Death (the pope in question reportedly went further than this), thus justifying every horrible abuse against Jewish people.  No logic or morality can justify the heresy of inherited guilt.
    The Icon (Image) of God (reason and freewill) remains a potential (a power or dýnamis) without actualization (energization in Greek) for Salvation until the Grace of the  Assimilation to God has been restored through the Mysteries received with faith; for the Grace of the Life of Christ, which is received back when the faithful are incorporated into Christ's Body the Church, energizes reason and freewill, making fully actual their potential for saving belief in God and obeying Him.  (CLICK HERE for the divine Energies.)    In their defective state (the result of loss of the Assimilation to God), reason and freedom can function only partially; but finite reason can never understand the divine Essence--only His uncreated energies revealed in His energizations in the cosmos (or the economy of creation, as we say). 
    That  humans can inherit ontological defects as a punishment (a Western idea) for or as an ontological consequence of being separated from the source of Being (the Eastern view) of an ancestor's sinning does not mean that humans can inherit moral things like guilt and merit.   Physically inheriting a moral trait is a category error.  If you pin advocates of transferable guilt and merit down, they say either  (1) that it is virtual guilt and not guilt at all but just concupiscence, a tendency to sin; or   (2) that God imputes Adam's sins to Adam's descendents and then punishes them for this (virtual) guilt He has imputed to them if they don't accept Christ, on Whom our sins and imputed guilt have been laid--but if they believe, then this point of view holds that God imputes Christ's merits to them.  The pope can, for the Latins, impute a Saint's merits to a believer or even a soul in "purgatory."  None of this is remotely Orthodox--or Biblical.  Nor is it logical (logos-like) to confuse morality with ontology. 
      Before the age of reason and true freewill, humans become gradually able to sin and to do good.  But until the Grace to use reason and freewill to serve God is restored to adults as ontological members of Christ's risen Body, they cannot use reason and freewill fully.  Some hardly try to use the one or the other.  Obviously the Icon of God is a potential, so far as Salvation is concerned, until it is complemented by the Assimilation (omoíosis Theõ[i])  and our Savior's Life-giving Energies.  Reason and freewill function--finitely and rather imperfectly--in ordinary human dealings to understand and undertake things temporal.
      There are  three situations:  (1) sinfulness; (2) the sinlessness or innocence of those who have not reached the age of reason or who are too feeble-minded or insane to use their reason and freedom properly; and (3) Life in Christ, when lapses may occur but can be healed through the Grace of Confession, the most holy Eucharist, and the faith, prayer, fasting, and obedience that necessarily accompany all holy Mysteries.   While the loss of the Assimilation is not the same thing as sin, it leaves one prone to sin.  One must not forget, with regard to the Gnostic idea of "a sinful nature," that natures cannot sin,  because sinning is a moral act, viz. the ACT--or intention to act, perhaps blocked by some obstacle--of an individual's (ontological)  will, rather than something just reasoned or thought about.  If human nature were sinful because sin is claimed to be inherited, then the sinless Jesus did not fully share our nature; and if so, human nature has not been renewed, nor has any individual been saved--assuming that Salvation requires a total assumption of and sharing of our nature by our Savior (as well as requiring that the Savior has got to be sinless Himself); this assumption is made by all traditionalists.  If an ontological defect like loss of the Assimilation , death and decay, a defective gene, etc. can be inherited from one's ancestors,  this is not true of moral acts--disobedience, sin, and virtue or merit.  These cannot be transferred from one individual to another except by a person's becoming ontologically (not morally) one with Another, as when the faithful become members of Christ and share His actions that save us through the Grace of the All-Holy Spirit.   The divine Liturgy says that Christ  is the real Offerer in the faithful when the faithful offer up His Body and Blood--and ourselves, His members, in Him, Who is a perfect, bloodless Sacrifice and the return of a pure part of the creation to its Creator--the Worship God is due.    But one cannot sin or be virtuous without will power, which is still potential in sinless infants.  
     The ontological effect of Baptism on infants is to incorporate them into Christ with the Life-giving Energies of His divine Nature; the moral effect is to free them from Satan and His works, but not (as with rational adults) to remit any sin they may have inherited from their first ancestors.  The restoration in the faithful of the Assimilation that humanity lost at the Fall energizes or actualizes the potential of the Icon of God, enabling, through the Grace it embodies, one's natural reason and freewill (the inherited Icon of God) to worship and obey God through Grace with saving beliefs and intentions to follow the will of the all-holy Trinity.  Without the actualization of the ontological potential that the Icon of God is--through the uncreated Energy of Grace and the Assimilation of God--humans' decisions easily go wrong as the result of failures of enfeebled reason or judgment.   The potential of the Icon of God can even be blocked because one is, say, pinned down with an illness or injury--and of course evil-doing.  In any event, the Icon cannot attain to true faith and everlasting Life without the Grace of the Assimilation .
      As for the Baptism for the remission of sins, no one questions its biblical or credal reference to adults; infant baptism came much later than adult Baptism, which has always been by immersion in the holy Church.   Baptism has two effects, the negating effects of freeing one from the rule of Satan and of washing away sins of believers--its moral side--and a positive effect--its ontological side--of uniting both (non-believing, non-consenting) infants and believing and consenting adults with Christ--as His members.   The baptized begin to receive the Assimilation of God and--when the human body rises again--become fully divinized by the uncreated Energies of the Divine Light, becoming partakers of the divine nature (2 Pet. 1:4; not partakers of the divine Essence but of the uncreated Energies of God). 
      There are non-Orthodox Christians whose thinking assumes that will is prior to and superior to being and reason in every way--to the extent that it can overrule being and reason to create a virtual reality that for the believer in this is more real than ontological reality; they reject being (ontology) as relevant to Christianity and contend that Baptism can only wash away moral defects--sinfulness--and then only symbolically or viturally.   Logically, from their point of view, they refuse to baptize infants; illogically, they baptize the feeble-minded and insane.  They argue that Adam's sins are imputed to every human; they do not even pretend this is just or righteous in human terms, but they also do not pretend that morality can be ontologically inherited, as the Latins have got to do.  The latter may contend that original guilt is only virtual guilt resulting from virtual sinning; how any of this can make sense has not been made clear to some of us.    What God did to punish humanity, we believe, was to lay on human nature an ontological punishment--the deprivation of the Assimilation as well as bodily death and decay--ontological aspects of nature that can be inherited down the generations in a way that a moral act of vice or virtue cannot thinkably be.  The Reformers' God, Who punishes us for sins that He Himself has imputed to us from Adam and laid on us, is a caricature of the divine Majesty.
       We should avoid confusing righteousness or   justice with mercy--somethat that remits or softens the punishment of one who is unrighteous--not one who is righteous and undeserving of punishment.  God can overrule our just desserts and forgive us our sins for the sake of and through the uncreated Grace of Christ.  If  He keeps His promises, He also, like anyone, can also go beyond His promises and extend mercy; this is not something that one has a right to predict or depend on.  Humans often overlook bad deeds because of admiration for or gratitude toward the forebears of an evil-doer; for mercy is a prerogative of anyone--especially a Christian.   Compassion is both good and moral, but it is not not "just"--for if it were just, it would lack the quality of mercy.   If  justice requires freeing an *innocent* person, it is a pardon that remits punishment of a guilty person.  (I am not denying that when a civil governor pardons a prisoner who has been later found to have been innocent, it is praiseworthy--but we praise it as rendering justice rather than mercy.)   The long and short of it is that, while we can inherit the effects of Adam's sin, we cannot logically or morally inherit his sinfulness.
     Those who speak of our being born "in" Adam must be using a metaphor; for it blends morality with ontology (nature) in a manner that makes no sense.  We have Adam's human nature with the defects in it caused by his sinning; but nature is not a hypostasis that is capable of sinning--and Adam is a different hypostasis from you or me.  Morality (guilt, merit) goes with hypostasis; ontology goes with nature. 

     There is an inveterate tendency in the West to confuse ontology and moral acts in thinking about the deprivation we inherit from Adam (and in discussions of the Trinity, when the All-Holy Spirit is spoken of as the Love of the Trinity--as though that could explain the ontology of His procession).  There is also an idea that the absence of Grace means being sinful--even in an infant or in a feeble-minded or insane person--all being human beings with a stunted reason and/or will.   This is equivalent to relating the possession of Grace and being sinful as mirror-images of one another, with no middle-ground of infantile innocence prior to Baptism; it is closely akin to equating the line between Grace and sin with the line between saved Christians and unsaved non-Christians.  Thus, infants are sinful, whether virtually or really, and the highest virtue of a non-Christian is "sinful," even one that would with benign motives sacrifice oneself to save a Christian.  What this gains us is far from being evident, as the compulsion to think this way manifests itself in the confusion between what is (the ontological Loss of the Assimilation of God) and an act.  One can be happy that Orthodoxy rejects those outlooks, especially the untenable notion of inherited guilt.  That ontology and morality are without effects on each other is not in dispute.  For just as the lack of reason and freedom in infants, the feeble-minded, and the insane keeps them from doing "moral" acts--of sin or virtue--so the absence of the Assimilation of God deprives the potential of the Icon of God (reason and freewill) from being realized to the degree that they could keep a person sinless, let alone have the ontological effect of uniting a person to Christ as a saved and divinized member of His Body.   Sin can block Grace and the restoration of the Assimilation of God--saving Grace is not irresistible as the Calvinists contend--just as the absence of the Assimilation leaves no adult free from sinning.   If Grace is ontological for the Orthodox and Latins alike--energetic and uncreated for the Orthodox, a created state for the Latins--it is not so for Denominationists, who view Grace as imputation and original guilt as imputed rather than as ontologically inherited in the Latin manner.  The last view lacks the problems of the Latin view (though entails other problems even worse), but the Latin defence of inherited sin/guilt as what one can properly term virtual sin/guilt is equally problematic.  The Latin goes wrong in attributing sin to nature and in thinking that an act of sin is inheritable as guilt in the descendents of the sinner-actor; this confusion of ontology (nature) and (im)moral acts (by individuals) is not mitigated by calling the inheritance concupiscence or virtual sin.  If concupiscence is inherited--as an inclination to sin--in the Latin view, there is still no way that this potential can be called a(n act of) sin.  Orthodox logic is not vulnerable in these ways:  For without the Assimilation of God and the help of Grace--both ontological--adults cannot use the reason and freewill of the inherited Icon of God (also ontological) in any way that would save an adult in possession of one's senses--other than by consenting to the truths of the Faith and to the reception of saving Grace in holy Baptism, the holy Eucharist, and the other Mysteries; moreover, this defect (the Loss of the Likening or Assimilation) is inheritable and makes reason and freewill sufficiently impotent that, as Scripture says, all who dispose of reasoning and freewill fall into sin.  But infants do not able to reason or choose freely on the basis of reasoning what is better and worse in this or that respect; so how can they sin? 

REPLY TO INQUIRER ON AN INTERNET FORUM

[This has to do with QQ 404, 405 of the new Roman Catechism.]

     First, I will observe that the new Catechism evidently departs from what was written in the manuals before Pope John-Paul I.  There was a complex matter of reatus poenae (liability to punishment) vs. at least one other reatus.  I’ve read these things various times and find they simply throw sand in one’s eyes.  But the authors of the Catechism apparently assume that all of that warrants their saying what you quote as 404 and 405.  A linguistic examination suggests otherwise.    
     That all men are implicated in Adam’s sin [and] Christ’s justice (i.e. righteousness is good English).”  There are four or five ways this can be so.  Ontologically, it would be a category confusion between ontolgoical nature and moral-intentional person to say that we share Adam’s sinning/guilt.
     The Orthodox ontology escapes this by saying humans are born with an ontological privation--of the Assimilation to God.  (One can ontologically inherit death and the absence of the Assimilation = ‘omoiosis in Gen. 1:26.)   
     Non-ontologically, we can share Adam’s sin metaphorically, by imputation (but then God would be the Cause of evil), covenantally (but that would be an agreement we haven’t signed on to), or intentionally-conceptually (the way we are united, according to Thomists, with God’s ideas).   None of the being “implicated in” proposals avoids grave difficulties, like the one that makes God the Cause of sin.  No wonder the Catechism says that it’s “a mystery that we cannot fully understand”; it's rather a conundrum that makes no sense!  Neither does the phrase “in an analogical sense” make sense unless someone can figure out how that differs from metaphor.   
     If you go on, you fall into a category confusion--of nature and person and of a moral trait with physical inheritance.  These are total confusions from a rational point of view.  We don’t physically inherit Adam’s morality--or Christ’s, for that matter.  Deut. 24:16 is very clear; cf. Gal. 6:5.
     Q 405 comes nearer the truth with the term “deprivation.”   But then it gets lost.  The natural powers (dynámeis) are not wounded, etc.; they are potentials that are simply deprived of the energizations that would energize them to function to please God--the uncreated Energies of the (lost) Assimilation to God.  Calling this “an inclination to evil” or concupiscence doesn’t help.  The loss is ontological, not analogical.  Without the energies to use reason and freewill (dynámeis or capacities or potentials of the Icon of God; also in Gen. 1:26) to please God, we live in “a sin-prone condition” (a phrase not in the Catechism).   
     “Baptism erases original sin.”  So negative; above, the authors call a deprivation something positive (concupiscence); here they call something positive a negation--an erasure.  Baptism rather  “adds” (restores) the lost Assimilation to God.   
     I hope this clears up your quandary.  The authors take a straightforward matter and mess it up with pseudo-logic. 

POSTSCRIPT 1

    Semantic theory considers it a form of word magic to suppose that saying something makes it real.  This applies to the reatus stuff.  Notice that the Catechism (at least the two paragraphs under discussion) avoid the concept.
     As the best living Orthodox theologian I know or have heard of, one who has read the Fathers in Greek all of his life,  pointed out to me, translators confuse 'amartía "a sin-prone condition" (in the singular; the plural is usually like the plural of the next term) and 'amártema "a sin [hat one has committed]."  The Oxford Greek-English Lexicon confirms this, though (my memory is a bit vague) the Oxford Patristic Greek Lexicon is less clear. 

POSTSCRIPT 1

     I highly recommend that you read Dr. George Gabriel's translation of Protopresvyter John Romanides's The ancestral sin ('amártema) for further clarifications and much else that goes way beyond the narrow title!!  
    Secondly, there are taboos (eating the apple on the tree; Uzzah's dying for touching the Ark to keep it from faling; etc) that constitute things one should not do, even though they harm the nature of no being (they just insult God) except in terms of a subsequent punishment.  But they do involve disobedience or at least ill-will of some kind.  So while most sins are against someone's or something's nature (unless you are a positivist-juridicalist, like most Western Christians), there are other offences than anti-natural behavior--something that has proved very hard to define (helping one person's nature may harm another's, as in the case of deciding whether to save the newborn's life or the life of the already existing mother). 

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