In
1946, Pius XII maintained that ‘men no
longer remember sin, and thus, one might say, forget their existence.’
(Radio broadcast to the US National Eucharistic Congress at Boston). He saw, in
this progressive loss of the sense of sin in the modern West, and above all, in
the loss of an understanding of Original Sin, the root of all others, ‘the greatest danger in the present day.’
Because in denying, or in failing to recognise, his sinful state, a human being
ceases to understand why he needs a Saviour. He lives, and therefore dies, a
long way from Jesus Christ, whom he imagines he can do without, even though ‘there is no other name under heaven by
which we can be saved.’ (Acts 4:12)
Which
is why, as John Paul II emphasised fifty years later, it is so important ‘to reflect, first of all on the truth of
(Original) Sin in order to find the true meaning of the truth of the Redemption
won by Jesus Christ.’ (Introduction to Catechesis on Original Sin, General
Audience, 27 August 1986)
I Original Sin
Only the light of divine Revelation
clarifies the reality of sin and particularly of the sin committed at mankind’s
origins, the
Church teaches us (CCC §387). It is, therefore, to the Church that we must
turn, in order to understand the evil that prevails in us, and not as Pascal
said, to the ‘superb insights of our
reason’; otherwise known as our simple natural understanding of reality.
Holy
Scripture, the foundation of Revelation, teaches us in this way that which we
could not divine for ourselves. Here are the principal lessons, taught us by
the first chapters of the book of Genesis.
1
Humanity before the Fall
Everything
started well. So much so that the Creator was delighted with it: God looked on all that He had made and saw
that it was very good. (1:31) The first couple were endowed not only with a
faultless nature, but also with supernatural gifts, which reinforced the
strength of that nature, and also enhanced its beauty. And to crown it all, the
supreme gift: the state of grace, which raised Adam and Eve infinitely above
their natural state, making them familiar with the Holy Trinity.
And
because the Creator wanted to invite humanity into a relationship of love with
Him, and not force them into a servile relationship, He also gave them a
formidable faculty: free will. And so man was able to accept or refuse the
marvellous plan that God had for him. One precept was to prove the free trust
that man ought to place in the Creator: the prohibition on eating the fruit of
the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
(2:17)
2
Man’s first sin
Man, tempted by the Devil…abusing his
freedom, disobeyed God’s command. That is what man’s first sin consisted of. (CCC §397) The first sin in
human history, therefore, is a sin of disobedience to the divine law, due to a
bad use of that liberty with which God had endowed man. How are we to
understand this failing? Two factors joined together to push Adam and Eve
towards it:
- A loss of trust in God, due to the calumny of Satan,
who made Eve believe that the Creator wanted to keep them in an infantile
dependence on Him: No, you will not die!
God knows, in fact, that on the day you eat it your eyes will be opened. (3:5)
- Pride, towards which the Devil pushed them. We
should note here the Serpent’s ingenuity, who achieved his ends by flattering a
legitimate aspiration of the human being’s. The temptation ‘you will be like gods’ corresponds
effectively with the vocation to which God was calling them, as the Catechism
suggests (§398) ‘Created in a state of holiness,
man was destined to be fully ‘divinised’ by God in glory.’ Only, and this
is the problem, Satan invited Adam and Eve to attain that state not by the
grace of God and according to His ways, but by seizing if for themselves, by
force, with their own hands; ‘without
God, before God and not in accordance with God,’ as St Maximus the
Confessor summarises it.
The deadly consequences
In that sin, man preferred himself to
God, and by that very act, scorned Him. (CCC 398)
St
Augustine describes the double movement of that sin like this: ‘aversio a Deo, conversio ad creaturam’
that is to say the simultaneous rejection of God and the turning in on himself
and on other created beings.
In
practice, that implies: The breaking of
friendship with God (Adam hid himself from God afterwards, and God drove
him out of the Garden of Eden) and that loss of the supernatural gifts and of
sanctifying grace, whose whole purpose was to enable man to live in friendship
with God;
And
by way of consequence, a wrong
relationship with created beings (himself and others) due to a surge in the
passions, which would from now on pull him in all directions, obscuring
understanding and making it ever more difficult to love the true good. We call
this state of our nature, which is since then always inclined to sin,
‘concupiscence.’
II Original
Sin as it is passed on to all of humanity
1 Every
human person is affected by Adam and Eve’s sin
By one man’s disobedience, many (that is
all mankind) were made sinners. (Romans, 5:19)
‘There is nothing, Pascal said, which shocks our reason more than to say
that the sin of the first man has made those guilty who are so far removed from
it and seemingly incapable of participating in it. That consequence seems not
only impossible but also unjust.’
Nonetheless,
that truth can be understood, if we consider these things:
Firstly:
The authentic responsibility with which God endowed Adam and Eve – for the
whole human race, of which they were the head. ‘Adam had received original holiness
and justice not for himself alone, but for all human nature. By yielding to the
tempter, Adam and Eve committed a personal sin, but this sin affected the human
nature that they would then transmit in a fallen state.
(CCC
§404)
Secondly: the fact that every human being is descended from this single
primitive couple (which is called monogenism). In opposition to the theory
of polygenism (which suggest that the human race descends from several couples)
Tradition has always seen in Adam and Eve more than just a figure of speech,
and more than just some moral characters who represent in fact a multitude of
primitive couples. On this topic, Tradition has always read the first chapters
of Genesis literally. As the Catechism teaches clearly and without ambiguity: ‘from one ancestor God made all nations to inhabit the whole earth.’ (CCC §360)
2
Original Sin in Adam’s descendants
We must be clear that our first parents’ descendants
cannot be held accountable for this fallen state. There is no question that
God, who never acts in an arbitrary fashion, should consider Original Sin to be
a personal fault in each human being, since none of the descendants of Adam and
Eve committed that act.
Original
Sin is only present in us as a state: by Adam and Eve’s disobedience, we are
deprived of grace and the supernatural gifts, and the nature we receive at our
conception is damaged. To put it another way, our nature is, from the start, in
an inferior state compared to what it would have been if it had never been
raised to the state of grace in the first place. As G K Chesterton summed it up
in Heretics: ‘Take away the supernatural, and what remains is the unnatural.’
That
does not mean that our nature is totally destroyed (some beauty remains in it!)
but that it finds it easier, alas, to turn to evil than to good, and that the
human being is spontaneously inclined to fall into the same error as Adam: to believe, through pride, that he can
reach his final end without the help of God.
III The Plan of Salvation: The Redeeming
Incarnation.
1
What do we mean by this?
Happily,
the Creator did not leave the Human Race to its sad fate. From amongst the many
ways He could have chosen to save us, His Wisdom opted for the plan which made
His infinite love for us the clearest: His eternal Son came Himself to pay the
debt we had contracted by our sin. In order to do that, He became one of us, so
as to share in our human condition, and He endured everything up to and
including His sacrifice on the Cross.
The
Redeeming Incarnation was the lever which did not simply allow each human being
to escape from the rut of sin, but which also raised him up to a higher level
than ever before. That is what St Leo the Great explained: The ineffable grace of Christ has given us blessings even better than
those which the envy of the devil had denied us.’ That helps us to
understand the great Easter chant, the Exultet,
when it proclaims: ‘O happy fault, that
won for us so great a Redeemer!’
2 The
choice facing each human being
Because
we still retain our free will, as it is more noble for a creature to cooperate
with his own salvation than to receive it by force, and so that we may merit to
enter one day into glory in the presence of the three Divine persons, God has
willed that the salvation of Jesus Christ should be offered to each individual,
who may accept or refuse it. That is the choice, ultimately quite simple, which
the greatest Christian theologians present us with: to opt for life according
to the flesh, or according to the Spirit (St Paul); for the darkness or the
light (St John’s Prologue); for the city where ‘the love of God is pursued even at the expense of oneself’, or the
city ‘where the love of self is pursued
even at the expense of God.’
Today
we see the clear proclamation of a proud transhumanism, formalised in 1947 by
the biologist Julian Huxley, a eugenicist who was a believer in the redemption
of man by way of technology, which he thought could improve the quality of
human nature.
In
the context of the 2011 Courtyard of the Gentiles, Fabrice Hadjadj questioned
those who followed such ideas in these terms: ‘Is man’s greatness found in a technical ability to live a life of ease?
Or is it rather found in that tear, in that opening like a cry towards Heaven,
in a call to that which completely transcends us?’ (Brief reflection on the
Transhuman, 24 March, 2011). He recalled that the word ‘transhumanise’ was coined
by Dante, in a completely different context – a Christian one (cf The Divine
Comedy). Dante meant that man infinitely
surpasses man, to put it in terms Pascal used. That is to say, that he is
not fully a man unless he accepts his finite and sinful condition, and unless
he understands that he was not created to remain in that state, hitting his
head against the walls of his finitude, or distracting himself so as to forget
it; but rather, by living in Faith in Jesus Christ, to surrender himself to the
Divine work. In that way, and only in that way, can he attain his true stature,
which, according to his Creator’s design, is not only human, but humanity
divinised. In this we recognise
something that St Augustine says: ‘If you
(only) love earth, you are earthly; if you love heaven, you are heavenly; and
if you love God, you are, in some way, changed into God.’
Is
there an image that speaks more eloquently than that of the pierced Sacred
Heart; from which blood and water flow, to make us understand in a truly
incarnational way that the human person cannot attain the fullness of
fruitfulness which God wills for him (and thus become a perfect man) except to
the extent that he allows his heart of stone to be transformed into a heart of
open flesh, similar to that of Jesus?
‘Jesus,
sweet and humble of heart, make my heart like yours!’
.jpg)
No comments:
Post a Comment