LIVESTREAM - Born Broken? Aquinas on Original Sin - Fr. Gregory Pine, O.P.

what does it mean to say that one is born into original sin for us this poses a very significant uh theological problem a hurdle in explaining how the catholic faith is coherent and that it has reasons to martial in its defense just at the outset uh quite a few conundra arise are we to say that we are born broken that we are born bad that we are born bent in what sense is that a coherent claim and what does that say about a good god who so fashioned us we could also ask how is it that we can sin inevitably while still being held responsible it seems as if we are caught in the trap of human nature from which we cannot hope to escape by our own resources such seems a terrible fate we can ask further how can guilt which again seems a moral characteristic be inheritable which seems like a natural feature so at the heart of this mystery there are a lot of different features that require explanation and though we cannot probe the depths of them we can at least begin to inquire as to how the mystery itself is not irrational or how the mystery can give reasons in its defense martial in its defense and how it can further illumine the human condition so let's just begin with a small point then about scriptural exegesis some of us will kind of be inclined to say that original sin is very patent there in the scriptures it seems undeniable so how could people have objections to it well we just begin by noting that genesis 3 the famous passage there the sin described in genesis 3 5 and the fallout described in the rest of the chapter is not well it's not to say that that is the only way by which to read the text so for instance if we consult the jewish interpretation of the scripture there are a wide variety of ways in which to kind of identify what precisely transpires in this event and it's not universally agreed upon that what we have here is an original sin furthermore the next big passage that's often marshaled comes from romans 5 and here again we find a point of contention so the pertinent passage is in romans 5 verse 12 where we read therefore as sin came into the world through one man and death through sin so death spread to all men because all men sinned i take this particular quotation from the revised standard version but for many many years theologians were working with the vulgate and the translation of the hebrew excuse me the translation of the greek text in this passage would have used slightly different words which would have given rise to a slightly different interpretation so instead of because we would have read the words in quo with it kind of being understood in quo omine or in quo picato which is to say in which man or in which sin all sinned so saint paul can seem to be read depending on the translation and depending upon interpretation to say that our individual deaths are the result of our own personal sinfulness not of adam's primordial sin there are others this is kind of prescending from the different exegetical comments others who will say that original sin is just an invention of saint augustine it's the kind of outworking of his own tortured conscience now so here we have problems well then let's consult a passage which will shed light and which will circumscribe our our inquiry at the council of trent uh in its decree on original sin in the second canon we read this if anyone asserts that the prevarication of adam injured himself alone and not his posterity and that he lost for himself alone and not for us also the holiness and justice received of god which he lost or that he defiled by the sin of disobedience has only transfused death and pains of the body into the whole human race but not sin also which is the death of the soul let him be anathema inasmuch as he contradicts the apostle who says by one man sin entered into the world and by sin death and so death passed upon all men and whom all have sinned so here we have a kind of revelatory datum the way that the church has received and interpreted the scriptures in her life and in her liturgy and so we're working within the bounds of this doctrine our task or our time together will be spent in excavating this doctrine and so as uh in such a way as to bring to light the reasons for which so let's then briefly pause on some testimony to the doctrine and then we'll talk about nature and all of its different implications and then we'll talk about original sin in say and then we'll talk about briefly about its transmission before we have time for questions so testimony to the doctrine reinhold nibor writes this the truth is that absurd as the classical pauline doctrine of original sin may seem to be at first blush its prestige as a part of the christian truth is preserved and parentally perennially re-established against the attacks of rationalists and simple moralists by its ability to throw light upon complex factors in human behavior which constantly escape the moralists so from a variety of testimony we come to discover that original sin reasserts itself as a relevant doctrine throughout the ages throughout the centuries so when you think about this in terms of its place within catholic theology original sin arises as a kind of implication from our prior belief in god's goodness and omnipotence it is the fact that he is good it is the fact that he is all-powerful and yet we have to explain the introduction of moral evil into the world so we have these doctrines and original sin is an associated doctrine that fits within the network of interlocking things and also from christ's universal mediation of salvation this seems to be the most important point of romans 5 namely if we have not all fallen in adam if we don't have a kind of sinful solidarity then we cannot hope in some way to enjoy the graced or saved solidarity to be foreseen in christ so there's these different theological reasons reasons which give lie to to original sin there's also the fact of sacramental praxis namely the ancient tradition of infant baptism why does it make sense to cleanse a child of sin if the child is not yet of the age of reason if the child is not yet competent to commit sins so we have to take this practice of the church and understand it in light of what it entails uh we can also think of a kind of proof by negation anatol france wrote never have so many been murdered in the name of a doctrine as in the name of the principle that human beings are naturally good so as christians oftentimes we hear of different persons utopian plans they have scripted a kind of social situation in which they have accounted for racial and economic and gender injustice and they project a future in which all will live in relative peace and stability and comfort mutual sharing and forgiveness and no one will lack for anything and we as christians not cynically but just honestly can look at those plans and say that they are almost definitely destined to fail why well because the seeds of discord are thrown excuse me are sown in our hearts they're not just a matter of social factors they're something that we ourselves bring in each situation so that's a kind of proof by negation whenever we try to assert that we need not account for original sin we come to discover that our well-laid plans fail edward oakes uh the late great jesuit wrote this on its own on its own terms the doctrine stands as a cipher pointing to what everyone senses in his or her own heart that sin after adam always takes the form of acquiescence and not of origination we are born that is in a world where rebellion against god has already taken place and the drift of it sweeps us along so without having been given his background then let's turn to a consideration of nature because distinguishing nature will help us to appreciate what exactly original sin is and as a result what it is not so the notion of nature is one that's operative in theology and philosophy practiced uh beyond the bounds of the catholic church or the christian intellectual tradition but one which has a particular application within those bounds so we think about nature obviously aristotle describes it uh well before the coming of christ so it's something that we inherit and something that we elaborate namely that it's uh it's a principle of motion or rest and that to which it pertains per se and not per accidents which is a kind of long way of saying that it's a principle both of identity and of unfolding which is to say that nature sets the terms for what a thing is and what it's flourishing is so by insight into nature we know what it is that we're dealing with and how that thing is to operate best in order to come to its term so nature we can talk about it as proportioning a being to operations for its end nature the word is just taken from natus meaning to have been born uh it's communicated by generation okay so there's a kind of specific likeness between uh the parents and the child insomuch as the parents beget a child of a like nature we think about this in the plant animal and human kingdom so we can speak of a kind of community of nature and you'll see how this is important in what comes now in the case of our nature specifically human nature is open to divine action in the sense that god can do for it what is not repugnant to it so our nature is broken open to the advent and growth of grace in our life this is a really kind of sensitive uh and controverted theological question and i don't intend to wade into it or to settle it settle it by any stretch of the imagination but here we're just kind of grounding the fact that nature is open to grace and a common kind of medieval dictum that is repeated is that grace does not destroy nature but rather perfects it so we're going to be thinking about grace as healing and as elevating in nature which has fallen now given a god who creates freely created natures have a kind of right to the means that are indispensable for their flourishing now we're not talking here about a strict claim right like because god made me with the possibility of going to heaven he therefore has to furnish me with what i need to go to heaven it's not what i'm saying rather god kind of owes it to himself here we're speaking loosely we're speaking analogically but god owes it to himself to provision his creatures with what they need in order to reach their full flourishing or their proper term so we're already here we're thinking about nature what nature entails in say and then in relation to god now it's common into mystic conversations of this sort to talk about the diverse states of human nature some of which are ahistorical and then some of which are historical which is to say that they're the different states of nature that we encounter in salvation history the a historical ones are not set out to muddy the waters or to confuse things or to posit an actual state of pure nature for instance but they're used as philosophical and theological tropes to help us clarify the other states so they reveal for us what is possible they reveal for us what is non-repugnant they reveal for us what could have been okay so let's talk about a couple of a historical things and then we'll talk about a few historical things so a historically which is to say this is a thing that didn't happen uh but it could have is the state of pure nature again a highly controverted theological topic which i do not intend to settle because i'm not confident to do so um but what do we mean by a state of pure nature well here we're talking about human nature left to itself prescending from or irrespective of the offer or loss of grace so we're just setting grace aside we're bracketing it and then we're just talking about nature on its own terms grace never having been introduced into the equation so the elevation of supernature or of grace that we experience in the christian life it implies the possibility of a non-elevation okay one is elevated from somewhere and that's the from somewhere to which we are speaking here so god could have created man without calling him to supernatural beatitude or giving him the means necessary for attaining to it we're not saying that god was weighing his options like laid up in his heavens like should i outfit him with everything he needs or should i leave him to languish without knowledge of an eternal destiny i'm not saying that but i'm not saying that it's not repugnant to human nature that it be left without grace so in this state we would be entirely without what is often referred to as original justice so original justice is a long conversation but here we can do a little thumbnail sketch basically original justice is that original state of our first parents where they would have been created in grace with their minds subordinated to god with their lower powers subordinated to their higher powers which is to say their passions would have been finally and perfectly attuned to their intellect and will and then with their bodies perfectly attuned to their souls and his romans commentary uh st thomas aquinas adds a fourth subordination namely that material creation would have been perfectly subordinated to man uh so when you're asking like you know what's the deal in the garden with predators well lions would have still eaten antelope and as much as that was the fulfillment of their line nature but man would not need have feared the attack of lions because he who had a perfectly ordered cosmos within himself would have radiated a kind of perfectly ordered cosmos without himself so in this instance the absence of grace would not have would not represent a fault and this is the whole point of this thought experiment that it's possible to imagine a state of nature where grace is not present and it doesn't represent a fault okay so in this state we would lack original justice so the mind would not be subordinated to god by grace the lower powers would not be subordinated to the higher powers right in what we call integral nature nor would the body have been subordinated to the soul so we wouldn't have had those associated privileges that you hear about like immortality or impassability so this is our first a historical consideration now another we're just kind of talking generally and then we're getting into the details about the historical states so we can talk then about what an elevated nature is so grace is what proportions man to his supernatural beatitude so it's sometimes common into mystic conversations to talk to to talk about a twofold beatitude so the kind of natural beatitude being that which would uh you know be encountered in the pages of the nicomachean ethics for instance okay so this would be an imperfect happiness uh that one could experience within uh the limited purview of human life left to its own resources so here we're talking then about our ultimate end our perfect end our fullest end and which grace alone can proportion man for so henceforth given the elevation of nature that person would always be called to the beatific vision all right to this sole true end this soul full end this soul and entire and downstream of an elevated nature the lack of grace can no longer be a simple absence it's no longer like you can go back to a theoretical state of pure nature okay uh you're effectively you know ruined for life i mean that non-pejoratively but it is to say that once one has had the taste of supernatural beatitude once one has come to experience it in his nature he will always have the desire for it even if uh yeah even if uh that desire has been perverted or blotted out in some way so lack of grace then in this understanding can no longer be a simple absence but it can only be a privation which word simply means the lack of something that is due or the lack of something that ought to be there okay so these are our two a historical considerations let's talk then about a historical situation as we find it well we already just uh described what happens at the beginning namely original justice so adam and eve having been created in grace mind subordinated to god lower power subordinated to higher powers body subordinate it's a soul with that order resonating into the material cosmos after that we speak of the next state being the state of fallen nature and then we can speak further of a redeemed nature so in the state of original justice sanctifying grace which is the grace of the whole person okay so this is what we would call an entity of habit a habit of being like health for the soul sanctifying grace would have not been merely a personal gift to our first parents right but it would have been something that they communicated to their posterity so a gift kind of do again speaking loosely analogically to human nature so those born of adam and eve had they not fallen would have been born in grace okay so that's our first historical consideration original justice and what it entails next talking about fallen nature fallen nature we said is not a return to a theoretical pure state of nature so we remain in a kind of supernatural state that's not to say that we have grace we've lost grace in this consideration but it is to say that we are proportioned now to the life of grace and that's something that we cannot quit ourselves of so we are now with uh you know we experience a kind of privation of the only means that permit us to attain to our true end so then the loss of grace is the fruit of fault and we experience it as such next redeemed nature in the redemption grace is no longer conferred on the nature itself rather it is given to those who are personally incorporated into christ so whereas previously grace would have been the kind of outworking of the life of the family now grace is only ever replied single la team one by one so each uh has a conversion experience um so i suppose it's common in some circles to uh kind of remember the day of one's conversion and until i kind of like recount that with a great joy or zeal within our tradition that day is the day of our baptism the day when sanctifying grace flooded the soul we were kitted out with all the infused virtues given the gifts of the holy spirit and their fruits and began to live a supernatural life we began to live in koatsyo biatitudinis the the beginning of heaven so these are just some considerations of nature supernatural and the historical states of man it may not seem entirely pertinent at this juncture but it will be helpful in understanding exactly what original sin is so then we turn now to original sin and say we said that grace is a habit of being what we call an entity of habit versus like an operative habit so a virtue would be an example of an operative habit so you have minds with which to know you have hearts with which to love and those faculties those powers of the soul can be trained by operative habits uh to act stably and permanently uh for the good in a way that's easy prompt and joyful so like faith being an operative habit of the mind and charity being an operative habit of the heart or will original sin is an entity of habit okay original sin like grace is an entities habit so original sin is just the disposition of a or i'm sorry an entity of habit is just the disposition of a complex nature where by that nature is well or ill-disposed to something so we said health sickness on the flip side of that we said grace and original sin on the flip side of that so what original sin denotes primarily is just the privation of original justice and the inordinate disposition of the parts of the soul so whereas formally we had this three-fold subordination so our minds to god our lower powers to our higher powers our bodies to our souls now that order no longer obtains but rather there is a kind of disorder okay there's a kind of chaos that reigns within our members so the loss of original justice entails the loss of grace the subordination of our minds and hearts to god that's the formal element of it effectively the loss of integral nature okay so our passions being well attuned to and regulated by intellect and will this is the kind of material element of original sin and then of those privileges associated with original justice which is to say immortality and impassability and this is the effective punishment of the original sin so you have the loss of grace as the formal element you have the loss of integral nature as a kind of material element and then you have the loss of those associated privileges as the kind of punishment attendant upon so then the loss of integral nature gives rise to conflicting or disorderly desire and here we're answering specifically to the question of whether we are born bad whether we're born bent broken etc okay the answer to that question is no we're not born bad but we are born disorderly so whereas formally we would have been able to see you know particular goods on offer and affirm those goods and interact with those goods in a way that was proportionate to the good and to the place that it occupies in our life now we find it more difficult so like formerly for instance you could you know kind of toddle past the kitchen you could see a plate of chocolate chip cookies uh perhaps they would be freshly baked and very you know delicious smelling and you can look at that and you can be like uh yes you know very delicious cookies i'm planning to have dinner in 45 minutes so i'm going to hold off or um oh i should offer them you know to sarah for a study break or you know i just ate dinner but i could use like a skosh more maybe i will take a cookie or a half a cookie so you could like look at a good thing and affirm its proper place within your life and kind of more broadly uh whereas now oftentimes you pass a plate of cookies and you're like i want to eat all of those twice or you see the cookies and then you black out and you wake up and you're like covered in chocolate smears and you're like what happened but the cookies are gone so whereas formerly it would have been easy to affirm the good in its proper place now we find it difficult a passage taken from saint thomas uh the sum of the theologia prima secunde question 82 article four response to the first through the bond of original justice being broken which held together all the powers of the soul in a certain order each power of the soul tends to its own proper movement and the more impetuously as it is stronger okay so the mind tends to its object knowledge the will tends to its object the good the passions tend to their objects the lovable or you know away from the hateful sensible good but we find it difficult now to order them hierarchically in a way that affirms their proper place so like we see things knowable and we just try to know all of them okay and perhaps they're things that ought not be known or perhaps needn't be known maybe they're things that are beyond our reach or maybe they're things that we are pursuing by the improper means or maybe there are things that are leading us to neglect what we ought study uh everyone has had this experience you know when you're trying to study for a final and all of a sudden you find yourself stress cleaning you're like i really need to know which household products are best for this burnished brass you know it's like you don't need to know that right now what you need to know is metaphysics it's just harder okay so we this registers in each of our faculties in different way but each tends to its own object impetuously but they're no longer coordinated and it's for this reason that we often refer to original sin just as concupiscence for shorthand because concupiscence is the most vehement okay so this would be like the desire for food for drink and for sexual intimacy those are the things that assert themselves with greatest kind of clamorous voice because they're necessary for the handing on of life okay so for the preservation of your own individual existence and the preservation of the existence of the race you need food drink and sexual intimacy and so those things are going to speak loudest and often most clamorously in such a way as to overrule your better judgment right or the higher tendency of the heart we speak then about a four-fold wound which derives from original sin so our minds are now tinged by ignorance our wills are twisted by malice and then in our passions we experience weakness and concupiscence weakness pertaining to the erasable power concupiscence pertaining to the concupiscible power i have a passage here taken from father thomas joseph white's book the light of christ where he describes these four wounds in beautiful fashion he says the first is ignorance which affects our intellect we are unable to grasp who god is personally and live in a kind of spiritual orphan hood regarding the knowledge of our creator the second is malice or egoism in the human will this is a self-referentiality of the human heart that tends to desire its own good above that of others and even in preference to the goodness of god this wound of sin causes in us a fundamental distrust of god and an effective antipathy to religious truths third is weakness that affects our emotional life of fortitude so that it is more difficult for us to struggle to obtain difficult goods we are typically slothful or indifferent in the face of serious moral demands finally there is concupiscence an exaggerated desire for sensate pleasures of food drink and sex wherein human beings seek rest or even personal transcendence primarily in the pleasures of the senses rather than in the goods of the spiritual life so that rings very true so to consider uh some final things then with regard to original sin in say before we talk briefly about its transmission we can ask the question does original sin destroy nature st thomas responds laconically uh no it doesn't so original justice is lost our inclination to virtue is weakened but our nature is unaffected he says in a way you can think like in terms of your math class like integers you can't um subtract from an integer without making it a different thing so if you were to subtract from human nature you would effectively make it a different thing you can't subtract from four and still have four you have something less than four and so too with human nature you can't subtract from the nature and still have human nature so human nature is meant to exist in grace and without that grace we are impoverished but that's not to say that our nature is totally depraved okay that's not to say that our nature has been wrecked or ruined beyond hope of repair st thomas explains that that total depravity is metaphysically impossible he says this now sin cannot entirely take away from man the fact that he is a rational being for then he would no longer be capable of sin wherefore it is not possible for this good of nature to be destroyed entirely so you can take some consolation in that you cannot entirely lose your rational nature for were you to lose it you wouldn't be able to sin okay so building upon this insight then we add that original sin is not a positive inclination to evil so we said that when the harmony of original justice is lost the various powers of the soul have their various opposite tendencies okay so inordinate inclination follows from original sin not directly but as it were indirectly by removal of the obstacle which is to say by the removal of original justice which formally secured the kind of order within our interior life so there you have it we are not born bad we are not born broken we are not uh born beyond repair we are born uh in a certain sense uh disorderly we are born inclined to a variety of goods a panoply of goods a menagerie of goods but we find it difficult to sort among them so then a brief word about transmission and then a final closing thought how is original sin transmitted so original sin has the character of fault through transmission from our first parents we spoke earlier about how we all have a kind of solidarity in the fall of adam it's spoken of saint thomas speaks of it or saint augustine speaks of it as a kind of masaluti luty being there the genitive form of the word clay we're all taken from the same clay from which adam was formed so we are born into a state of sin that justly calls for punishment the problem then is this original sin is fault fault is in the soul but god infuses the soul directly sin is not in the flesh strictly speaking but this is what the parents contribute namely their own genetic contribution so how do we explain the fact well again this is a hotly contested topic and again it's not a matter of strictly settled doctrine there's still some liberty for speculation on the matter some things have been ruled out but i'm just going to give you a short postcard version of one way in which st thomas describes it so st thomas insists that we are uh we contract original sin and that original sin is transmitted by origin this for him is a matter of reading of sacred scripture by one man sin entered into this world and by sin death okay so original sin cannot be understood as denoting imitation or suggestion it's not like adam sets for us a bad example and then we just fall into the trap right like a bunch of lemurs no what we're talking about here is more significant so saint thomas will go on to describe that all men born of adam may be considered in a certain sense as one man in as much as we have one common nature which we all receive from our first parents so st thomas does a kind of thought experiment like what if a man were to have been born from a man not in the line of adam he says in that instance he would not have contracted original sin because it's a matter of origin so we are members of one natural body to speak in an extended sense with adam as um in the sense in which like the different members of one body are all constituting one body and st thomas uses exactly this example and he speaks about adam as like the will of our body which commands the act of the entire body he writes this now the action of one member of the body of the hand for instance is voluntary not by the will of that hand but by the will of the soul the first mover of the members in this way then the disorder which is in this man born of adam is voluntary not by his will but by the will of his first parent who by the movement of generation moves all who originate from him even as the soul's will moves all the members to their actions so to speak then of transmission when the soul is united to the body when god infuses the soul and it is formed hymenomorphically with a genetic contribution of the parents one is constituted as a sinner because the soul contracts the stain or defilement through the nature of the matter and st thomas explains it in this way he says the contribution of the parents is a disposition to the transmission of the rational soul the genetic contribution by its own power transmits the human nature from parents to child and with that nature the stain which infects it for he that is born is associated with adam in his guilt through the fact that he inherits his nature from him by a kind of movement which is that of generation so we can speak about how human nature and the guilt that accompanies it is virtually present in the contribution of the parents now that's to kind of go over it super quickly and it merits far greater consideration it is for this reason that question and answer sessions were made um but as a kind of final note then uh let's consider what uh the good news is not to say that this is bad news this is clarifying news and in as much as it's clarifying news it's an object of contemplation which contemplation can lead us to the consideration of god who is enlightened to our mind and an emboldening unto our heart but let's talk about how our sinful solidarity of adam gives us a kind of hold again on a supernatural life again to speak analogically and improperly but here we go let's consider a little bit about baptism so what difference then does baptism make or how can we understand the redemption which has afforded us in christ right made present in the church and applied by the sacraments so we said that what we lost was original justice and in original justice we had grace we had a kind of integral nature right and we had these associated privileges that flowed from it so our minds were subordinated to god our lower powers to our higher powers and our bodies to our souls can we hope to regain that well saint paul says we can regain that and so much more so first grace is infused in the soul by baptism or perhaps extraordinarily by baptism of desire or by baptism of blood but ordinarily by baptism and in that infusion our minds are again subordinated to god which is to say by faith we can hear the words of first truth speaking by hope we can um trust that he who is omnipotent and merciful will give us everlasting life because he has promised to and by charity we can abide with him who is our supreme friend right we can we can rest in a kind of friendship with the lord so grace is infused in baptism it cleanses us of fault it makes us adopted sons and daughters of god it gives us all the virtues all the gifts of the holy spirit all the fruits of the holy spirit it constitutes us as worshipers right of the most high it makes us participate in the priesthood of the lord jesus christ it makes fruitful our minds right it emboldens our hearts so grace comes back and the practice of the sacrament of penance is about continually being renovated in that life of grace persevering in that life of grace rooting out habitual sin right which can be a major obstacle to our persevering in the life of grace so then what of integral nature okay with respect to integral nature we would love very much love for our lower powers to be perfectly subordinated to our higher powers but such is not often the way in which we experience the world but doesn't it sound a lot like the way that aristotle describes the movement from vice to virtue so in vice uh we delight in the evil right it's something that we find uh to be a second nature then from there one can move one not need not necessarily start in a vicious state but we're kind of putting this on a spectrum to a place of what he calls uh incontinence or accracia which means that we know what's good but we just can't choose for it we just can't persevere in our choice uh to obtain the thing and then next on the line is continence which i think a lot of people experience as their daily fair which is you know the good and you struggle to attain to it and you often do but it's always the fruit of struggle the promise with the life of virtue goes beyond mere continence the promise of the light virtue is that you would know what is good that you would desire it spontaneously and that you would find it easy prompt and joyful to persevere in that choice so the life of virtue imparts a veritable virtuosity in doing the good and so the whole drama of christian maturation the whole drama of being educated in the life of grace is that we can learn to the delight and the good in such a way that it no longer represents for us the fruit of a herculean struggle at every turn but it's a kind of uh delightful atmosphere in which we move and have our being okay so integral nature is progressively constituted over the course of the entirety of a christian life as christ tells the story of redemption in you we said grace is applied singalatim and its outworkings are applied singlatin finally those associated privileges of immortality and impassability these are deferred to the end right so this is something that we hope for in the vision of god in heaven and this is something that we look forward to in the general resurrection when at the end of the age all will rise some for glory and some unto perdition but ultimately will be reconstituted as human persons in the fullest sense and for those who look upon the face of god the joy that fills their minds and hearts will flood into their body by a kind of overflow and in that they will be made radiant and glorious but what we're talking about here is not a mere edenic nostalgia it's not a going back to what we had formally because all of this now is in the context of friendship with the lord jesus christ who has come to search and to save the lost and who has called us each by name and pursued us to the very limits of the world that we might not wander from him thank you well thanks very much father gregory a magnificent reflection on a very difficult and yet extremely important theological topic we do now have some questions from those of us coming uh those those students watching from home and the first one will come from anselm lafave who's one of our student leaders out at the university of oregon so anselm please go ahead and ask your question um hello uh thank you father um i was wondering if um because of these uh sort of additional gifts and privileges that are given to us beyond original justice in uh the life of grace and the salvation through christ um what does that does that have any bearing on the question of whether christ would have come had adam not sinned i might be asking you another unanswerable theological quandary there but um yeah yeah it's a great question um so at the beginning of the third part of the summa theologiae that part dedicated to a consideration of uh the incarnation the hypostatic union and the life of christ saint thomas asked the question of whether christ would have come had man not sinned and he gives a pretty modest response he says in these matters we have to search the scriptures and we have to weigh their testimony and it seems that in the scriptures what we have what what the scriptures lead with is the fact of the lord's coming as a response to sin not that the lord is merely reacting obviously to human initiative rather god goes before us and makes up for everything that we do but that principally the incarnation uh and the paschal mystery are for the purpose of uh repairing the damage that was done through sin so we can speak about it as merit we can speak about it as sacrifice we can speak about it as satisfaction we can speak about its redemption but we typically speak about it in terms of a response to sin but um as is uh you know commented on in a variety of places there are many effects of grace not only justification but also you know kind of divinization so the lord is about a work not merely of correcting wrongs but also of making us yet more perfectly conformed to the divine nature so like the apostle peter talks about us as hoping to enjoy this kind of partaking in the divine nature and i think psalm 78 says that you will be like gods and sons of the most high so while saint thomas is a kind of agnostic on the matter i think that we can see that there's a fittingness to christ having come regardless for the purpose of bringing human nature uh to its term which is to say bringing about this work of deification or divinization in an ultimate sense um so yeah that's just a small response to that great well we have time for some more questions and the next question will also be from one of our students uh from st louis university coming to us through zoom so colt and marks you're up next so colton please go ahead hello thank you father um so i was wondering um this understanding of original sin implies that um adam and eve would have been physical you know people beings um and so how do i guess we reconcile the understanding of original sin and inheriting it from two parents that were um that actually existed with like um scientific understanding of evolution and whatnot right that's an excellent question okay um so first i know very little about science and what i know i kind of take on faith rather than through science so the things that i'm repeating are things that i have read but i don't yet see them in the way that i see that all men are mortal socrates as a man therefore socrates is mortal so i think that a lot of these questions need to be settled scientifically like the debate between theistic evolutionism and intelligent design for instance i think i think that's a scientific question the way that it's been explained to me and i don't have the scientific competence to evaluate but i you know read certain things and i make judgments based on how that fits within a network of other philosophical and theological commitments so from what i understand based on the out of africa hypothesis or theory which you know seems to have many reasons for it and the type of genetic diversity that's presently uh kind of on offer in the human population that peligenism uh is uh is a superior uh and more viable explanation for or the origins of the human race um and what is more that if the population bottlenecked to a kind of narrow point that it never bottlenecked to a point fewer than a few thousand mating pairs um and this is all kind of pache comments about mitochondrial eve again the science of which i don't understand especially well so i don't want to kind of wade into waters for which i'm ill-suited so it seems that palligenism is the case and then it seems that we have to account for god's infusion of the soul and then a transmission of an original fault which tinges all persons because we're trying to preserve this understanding of a comprehensive solidarity in sin so certain solutions that i've read that i find satisfying are those proffered in an article in the american catholic philosophical quarterly by kenneth kemp in which he posits that while we have biological homo sapiens okay we do not necessarily have like theological homo sapiens uh during this bottlenecking uh in the particular region in africa under consideration um and what he posits is the infusion of rational souls into original pair which would have suffered this primordial sin and then all of their subsequent offspring would have been uh theological homo sapiens and they would have quickly uh incorporated through incest i suppose or outbred outcompeted those biological homo sapiens not yet theological homo sapiens and thereby ensuring that original sin would affect all of those persons from whom we ourselves are downstream so that's one option another option that i've heard described is that proposed in uh what's called domestic evolution which you can look up to mystic evolution.org it's a project of fathers nikonorostriaco thomas davenport james brent and john baptist coup so a collaborative venture to synthesize the best science the best philosophy the best theology the best scriptural likes of jesus on these matters uh so as to synthesize the uh a theory of theistic evolution with um our understanding of the science uh or with our understanding of the transmission of original sin with our understanding of the infusion of the human soul and etc um so i think that you'll find that an excellent resource rather than rehearse it i'll just say that the content of it is is online and that you can read it in its entirety but it follows a similar course which trying to account for this theological bottlenecking the comprehensivity of the spreading of sin uh while uh maintaining a kind of good concord with the scientific evidence and i think that some of these solutions cause people discomfort because it seems like a strange on taunt with you know unproven science and again i'm not i'm not competent to make that assessment because i don't know the science that well it seems again by the testimony of scientists whom i trust that it is uh vertical so we have to contend with that rather than shutting off our minds in a kind of feedistic way but i've heard you know good arguments for theistic evolutionism i read an article by avery dulles in first things which made a compelling case which forced me to reevaluate and nuance some of those things which you can find online um and i've read some of the the intelligent design stuff uh too to great effect so i do want to be sensitive to those different considerations uh just to say that i lack the i lack the confidence but thanks for your question well we have time for another question and this one will come to us from the university of south carolina grace regnier who's also one of our students there so grace it's great to see you on the call please go ahead my father thank you um for your lecture tonight i was wondering if you could further explain what you meant when you said that god sort of owes it to himself to give us what we need to flourish i've never heard that before so just wondering if you could kind of further explain that gladly yeah that's an excellent question so i think that when we distinguish between nature and grace we need to distinguish between what is do and what is not due and we don't want to make the claim that we have claim rights on god okay because that impinges upon god's sovereignty in a way that should make us feel uncomfortable and i think that you often hear descriptions of god's sovereignty that come through more pronouncedly in the reform tradition but we still we still you know within the within the christian tradition more broadly we still have these kind of considerations or kind of worries so we don't want to make it that somehow god is reactive to humanity right so a comparable situation is with like the offer of grace so we don't want to say for instance as one theologian proposed in the late middle ages that god considers giving grace and then he weighs what man would do if he were to be given that grace and then he gives grace if it is to be well used because such an explanation makes god passive with respect to us where we know that god is pure act and as a result of which he is initiating he is the protagonist of this work and it's one to which we need to consent and with which we need to cooperate but which god initiates from start to finish okay so in this consideration then we have a similar concern uh that we're not making god uh somehow uh like answerable to our claim rights but it seems to make sense that god in filling the universe as he does with all of these different creatures should make them to be well why well what's the purpose of creation okay so god doesn't need to create god doesn't need us for the fulfilling of some uh deficiency on his part rather st thomas talks about it as so god creates by a kind of overflow of love right he speaks about the good is diffusive of itself and so we can see it kind of fitting this in god's choice to create because he wants to afford creation the opportunity to participate in his divine life so all of creation is a manifestation of the glory of god and god permits us this bewildering variety of created things so that in contemplating the eco that kind of like ecosystematic harmony of rocks and trees and dinosaurs that was a veiled reference to the land before time um rocks and trees and dinosaurs and men and angels we would rise to the contemplation of god which would terminate ultimately in worship and our return to him and be attitude so god is making created things so that he might be known and so that we might enjoy him so if that's the case it doesn't make sense for god to make us and then leave us without all that we need um it'd be like yeah if you were um let's say you have a friend named joseph you know uh in south carolina and let's say that you wanted to go on an adventure with joseph and you're like alright we're gonna go hiking uh in the up country and i want you to bring everything that we need i just i just i'm just i just don't want you to bring shoes he'd be like wait a second if we're going hiking you know it seems like it stands the reason i should have shoes you're like i just want you to be most of the way but not all the way he'd be like that's strange and cruel and why would you do this to me um so so it seemed it would seem strange if god provisioned us with nearly everything that we needed right with a nature that suited us for natural things but without a super nature that suited us for our ultimate end and so god is wise and we you know perceive that a wise god acts wisely it perceives i mean it pertains to the wise man to order well so if god has created us as such it seems that he should at least offer grace right um and that in doing so he uh fulfills a duty to himself or that he owes it to himself so that's the kind of origin of that observation great we have another question this time from one of our uh domestic institute students coming to us uh from home so i'll read the question this is from sylvia krisczyk who's one of our uh yale domestic institute students and sylvia asks you father gregory some philosophers describe virtue as having the will to overcome our natural inclinations so let me say that again virtue is having the will to overcome our natural inclinations according to some philosophers and she asks you how would saint thomas respond right so excellent question in this understanding our natural inclinations are bad right because if virtue is a good thing right virtue taken from the latin virtues coming from you know the latin veer man uh or related to this word arete you know it's kind of excellence it's a kind of solidity of character uh if we're to esteem it a good thing and if it established itself as a good thing by suppressing inclination then we are led to reason that inclination is bad uh but saint thomas would react strongly against this because if we are inclined to bad things by nature then we are indeed ill-made and god is a bad maker so for saint thomas he would try to enumerate the different inclinations from the bottom to the top which incline us to the good for which our nature is suited so st thomas observes like we have this type of thing and this type of thing is built up by these types of goods and we see this type of thing interacting with these types of goods and so we can i mean having observed already that it thinks and that it moves we know that it's living and so we posit powers of the soul whereby it engages with those goods and so like when he talks about the natural law this is primus aquino question 94 article two he talks about these fundamental inclinations right so we're inclined to the good and here he has difficulty defining the good it's more of a phenomenological approach he says good is that which all men desire right or the good represents a kind of perfection or the good as a kind of final cause so these we just observe that we are inclined towards a thing on account of the fact that is good and we cannot be inclined towards a thing unless it is apprehended as good and then from that he builds up a picture of what it means to be good given what this thing is so on account of the fact that it's a substance it's inclined to the preservation of its existence right because all things desire their preservation and existence and he says on account of the fact that it is an animal it is inclined to procreation and education of its children which is to say it wants to not only preserve its own existence but preserve the ins the existence of its race or of its species and then from the fact that we are rational animals he says we observe that we are inclined to live well in society to know the truth about god to avoid offending those with whom we live to shun ignorance and this list isn't meant to be exhaustive but he enumerates us as such so it's worth repeating so saint thomas is effectively making the observation that there are things out there by which we are built up and so a virtue is about suiting our powers so that they engage well with those things out there because we recognize that like some things are good for eating and some things are not so like for instance chocolate chip cookies are good for eating oatmeal raisin cookies are not on account of the fact like if i'm about to eat an oatmeal raisin cookie i should be stopped in my tracks because that will represent like a grave deficiency of my humanity but it's good for me to be built up by chocolate chip cookies on account of the fact that they are delicious and good uh right so so there are some things out there that are good and there's some things that are not and virtue just tells the story of how we can be educated in and become more spontaneously inclined towards what is our true flourishing but here you see that there has to be a substantive understanding of what a thing is namely a nature and then what a thing is for namely its end and those conversations are difficult indeed well father gregory we uh we still have a lot more questions coming to us and so i hope you're i hope you've had enough chocolate chocolate chip cookies to keep you going here uh so a question from bart upart you part i hope i'm uh pronouncing that right he's one of our viewers through zoom he asks this according to the church of jesus christ of latter-day saints i think most of us know that as the mormon church humans will be punished for their own sins and not for adam's transgression so they believe that infants certainly inherit the effects death and inclination to sin but they don't inherit the responsibility for any sin as a result of adam's transgression how is this incorrect right so original sin in the kind of orthodox like traditional christian teaching registers as fault okay um so like saint augustine has much to say on this with respect to infant baptism right that we are not due heaven in the strict sense okay so i'm going to talk about some dark passages right now in the scripture which dark passages can be very vexing so i don't want to like leave you with these passages without affording resources for understanding them well but just to be mindful that these are these are tough these are contested and it's worth reading the fathers of the church on these passages but saint thomas aquinas thinks of a variety of different things in the scripture which seem to challenge our understanding of god's goodness okay so like one of which he names is asking hosea to marry gomer she's known to be a harlot she can't possibly will fidelity in the context of this marriage he says god has a kind of sovereignty over the nature of marriage for instance so it doesn't represent for him a departure in as much as he kind of is setting the terms okay and you keep going down the line when he talks about um the despoiling of the egyptians when the israelites leave god seems to indicate to them that they should borrow a bunch of stuff from the egyptians right and that they should deport with them well he says like private property is um so that's a vex question but there's a kind of universal destination of all goods all things belong to god by right god can reapportion them in the matter that he sees fit private property is good right it's it's we can speak about it as a right and we can speak about its well use but he says all of those things are ultimately returnable to god and he has the dispensation of them the last passage in this one particular response about which i'm thinking it concerns abraham and the command to kill isaac this is in genesis chapter 22 and he says that all of us by virtue of original sin incur the punishment of death okay uh so that's that's a difficult passage to read but saint thomas says that all of us by virtue of original sin incur the punishment of death and i bring that up so as to bring before our minds the fact that we are not owed salvation okay we are not owed salvation because i think a lot of us kind of by tendency uh you know kind of move in this direction like i'm basically a good person you know i haven't killed anybody so yeah i mean i only missed mass a few times this past year because like you know the eagles game was on early because they were playing in london and you know you gotta you gotta watch the eagles go birds um so saint thomas is saying like that logic does not obtain our being saved is a matter of our being saved and jesus christ is a universal media salvation salvation and he applies his grace to each human heart and it's a matter of our responding to it so like one 20th century theologian says that at each moment you know god is offering to even the most hardened sinners at least the grace sufficient to turn to him or to begin to pray okay so god is always gesturing offering god is always goading inviting but we are not owed salvation um and and the doctrine of original sin really brings that to the fore it really kind of heightens our awareness of that fact so the church has consistently taught yeah like for the reasons that i mentioned you know it's an ancient practice mentioned in uh acts like you can think about acts 10 and 11 the baptism of the whole household of cornelius we have been baptizing children since the beginning of the church and it does not make sense to baptize children unless they incur some some fault right and that that fault and the punishment associated with it both eternal and temporal needs to be contended with so i would suggest that the fundamental error about that is that it fails to acknowledge the fault right and are standing before god as you know in a state of fault of culpa right and our needing to be cleansed of that and to be healed and elevated so that we can attain the salvation by his good pleasure thanks father gregory uh you know uh what you some people might contend that eagles fans cannot be saved i'm not holding that position myself but maybe some of what you said is evidence in that direction if they no okay no sorry we won't go that direction um we have a question coming up from a student at st louis university coming to us through zumkatya kanapaki i don't know if i'm pronouncing that right katy you can correct my pronunciation i assume you're not an eagles fan but in any case please go ahead with your question katya hi father thank you um a lot of the discussion about the topic of original sin um i found the most interesting discussion has been about um original sin and the immaculate conception in our blessed mother we read in scripture that jesus went out into the desert and he experienced temptation there but my question is how do we reconcile that our blessed mother was conceived without sin did not have that original sin um and yet jesus experienced that temptation and if our blessed mother was tempted in any way was that the temptation of um concupiscence you know those needs for life like food um drink sexual intimacy and just how do we relate that with um her virginity thank you sure okay so a couple of thoughts about the blessed mother a couple of thoughts about the lord jesus so as regards the blessed mother you know the the doctrine of the immaculate conception um states specifically that whereas in the ordinary course um one is freed from original sin in the case of the blessed mother she was preserved from original sin so she partakes of the redemption of the lord jesus in peculiar fashion uh it can seem strange to us the kind of grace time travel that has to occur for that to be the case but saint thomas you know already has conceptual resources to account for this because he talks about you know if if the patriarchs are saved they are saved by faith and charity so the grace of the lord jesus christ is already operative in the old covenant right by by a faith in christus nascaturus the christ who will be born and so the blessed mother partakes of that grace in peculiar fashion then to speak of the lord's temptation i think here a helpful comparison is to his baptism so the lord is baptized but he doesn't need to be cleansed from sin so why would he be baptized a common way to read this among the fathers of the church is that the lord descends into the waters not to be cleansed by them but rather to impart to the waters their very capacity to cleanse okay so saint thomas teaches that all of the deeds and sufferings of christ save so he's not merely instructing us but he's actually dispensing salvation throughout the entirety of his life so at his conception he is saving at his baptism he is saving at the ascension he is saving and everywhere in between so in the baptism specifically he is imparting to the waters their uh potency to cleanse us of their sin by their contact uh with his divinized flesh and we can think about his temptation in similar fashion so the lord is not tempted in the way in which we are tempted to you know inordinate temptation or food drink and sexual appetite at least this is how saint thomas reads this passion but rather what we see are the temptations of the evil one the world of flesh and the devil they kind of come crashing up against his adam mantine divinized humanity why so as to impart to our humanity their capacity to withstand temptation so again here we see the lord saving he is not done unto by satan but rather he himself is in the driver's seat directing the course of our salvation

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Published: Thu May 07 2020