by alecto » September 8th, 2008, 9:32 pm
I think that the reasonableness of a concept of original sin depends on what the definition of original sin is, and there seems to be a plethora of such definitions.
When I was a kid, original sin seemed to be a kind of curse. Because Man disobeyed God, God cursed man with not living in the Garden and having various other difficulties like pain in childbirth. This was never very satisfactory. Cursing Seth for Adam's mistakes seems evil, and God should not be evil, therefore this reading must be wrong. The same argument works for every other place offspring seem to be cursed because of the sins of their parents.
Later, I thought of it as a kind of causation, of which there were two types. One was that life was just hard outside the Garden, but there were rules for living in the Garden that were violated so now the Humans had to live outside and suffer the natural consequences. The second type was a kind of metaphysical power exerted by Adam and Eve over creation. By their actions they "magically" altered the physics of themselves and possibly Nature and changed things so they were now mortal and suffered from various conditions. Both of these types still begged the question of why the injustices are allowed to propagate to children. Why were Adam and Eve allowed a choice, but their children were not?
Today, I don't believe in the literal truth of the story. This eliminates some trouble but causes others. It is self-evident that all human beings (at least every one I have interacted with) have within them the ability to do evil. One could call this "original sin" as Aquinas seems to do, but "original" harks back to Adam and Eve and gets us into the problems of causation, so maybe this is not a good term. Also, though Paul said that death entered the world of human affairs because of Adam but would leave because of Christ, I do not believe this necessitates a literal interpretation of original sin as being caused by Adam. If the story is only a metaphor pointing out the condition of sinfulness, the condition is still very real and Paul points to it exactly.
My understanding of the Jewish belief is that Adam and Eve are the exemplars of our own condition. We are born as exactly morally pure as they are, but just as they did, we all degrade ourselves with bad choices that cause us to fail. This power corresponds to original sin but it is not caused to exist in me because of Adam. I do not know how the Jewish tradition handles the physical difference between the cosmos before the disobedience of Adam and Eve and after their disobedience.
One should note in any case that the sin of Adam and Eve is not the eating of the fruit itself. Eve suffers no effect of this. It is only when she shares it that there is an effect. The "knowledge of good and evil" comes into existence only when the one person gets the other person to do wrong. This is yet another example of this notion, pre-eminent in Scripture, that evil is first and foremost a kind of contamination. That the exemplary sin is a sharing of contamination is very important and yet this is missed in most exegesis of this story. The immediate effect of "knowledge of good and evil" is not wrath or violence or any will to hurt someone, but shame. It is not fear of having eaten the fruit that causes them to hide, but fear of nakedness, which seems to have no intrinsic harm of its own. It is as if original sin and "the knowledge of good and evil" do not consist of a will to do harm but a mistaken belief about reality: shame where none should exist, yet strong enough to cause one to fear a beloved father. I have never seen an exegesis of this either.
There seems to be a corollary issue to original sin with the notion of salvation, and associated heresies. If original sin is a kind of mark on human nature that always exists, then there can then be arguments about how to ameliorate it. Differences about this have become huge issues of theology. Some believe no amelioration is possible, ever, without God's direct intervention. Some believe that some amelioration is possible but being "cured" of sin can only occur by direct Divine intervention. Others believe Christ's teachings are sufficient, that they (plus the fact of the Resurrection) enable Man to thereafter remove sin completely on his own. Yet others believe any person can do this, if by proper attention to the Natural Law they apprehend Christ's teachings on their own. For all four of these options, there are opinions of theology which consider not the total elimination of sin but the creation of a state by which entry into God's Kingdom is possible despite sin. E.g. that it is only possible by direct Divine intervention, that it requires Divine and Human cooperation, that it can be accomplished by Man directly by following Christ's teachings after the Resurrection, and that it can be accomplished by any person who understands a critical part of the Natural Law. People have died because of fighting over these issues.
It can be seen that this issue is very complex and deep, and perhaps only minor headway can be made in understanding it. In any case, we cannot get anywhere unless we know exactly which issue we are addressing. I can easily see someone getting bent out of shape about the issue of salvation because another person's definition of original sin is so different than that of the first that they think the other is contradicting their position, when in reality they are simply not starting in the same place but think that they are.
Sentio ergo est.