Annotation CCXXXVI

”As by one man sin entered into the world,” etc. — Romans 5:12

Whether the sin of Adam passed to posterity not [as] guilt, but [as] punishment.

Chrysostom, expounding this passage and other passages akin to it, seems to hold three [things] concerning original sin, foreign to the common opinions of the theologians. The first of which is, that the sin of Adam passed to [his] posterity not [as] guilt, but [as] punishment — because, although one sometimes pays penalties for the offense of another, yet no one becomes a sinner from another’s sin, but each one is made wicked from his own crime only. The second is, that the punishment of this sin is not the damnation of the soul, but only the infirmity, corruption, and death of the body — since the death of the soul follows only those who, by free choice, sin voluntarily; but the death of the body comprehends both those who sin and those who do not sin. The third is, that the sin of the first parent brought us no detriment, but the greatest gains.

The first and second assertion he seems to build up [in] homily 10 on the epistle to the Romans, with these words: “WHAT, then, does this mean, ‘In whom all have sinned’? It is answered, that, he [Adam] having fallen, those also who did not eat of the tree were made, from that time, all mortal.” And a little below, in the exposition of that sentence, “By the disobedience of one man many were made sinners,” etc., he speaks in this manner: “IT SEEMS indeed to have no small question — [namely] that which is said, that many were made sinners on account of the disobedience of one. For, he [Adam] having sinned and been made mortal, [that] those also who were born of him should be such is nothing absurd. But that from his disobedience another should be made a sinner — what congruity and consequence, I beseech [you], has this? For it is found thus, that he who was [made] such would not even owe [any] penalties, since he became not a sinner from himself. What, then, does this word ‘SINNERS’ signify in this place? To me it seems to signify just as much as [to be] ‘liable to punishment, and guilty of death’ — [namely] that, furthermore, Adam having died, all were made mortal.” Again, in the exposition of the first epistle to the Corinthians, homily 39, explaining those words of the 15th chapter, “As in Adam all die, so in Christ all shall be made alive,” he seems to confirm the same, saying thus: “WHAT then? Tell me, did all in Adam die by the death of sin? How then was Noah

a just man in his generation?¹ how Abraham, how Job, how, in fine, many others? And how, tell me, shall all be made alive in Christ — and these especially, who are to be led away into gehenna? And so, if we wish this to be said of the body, the discourse will stand; but if of justice and sin, by no means.” And [in] homily 17 on chapter 6 of the same epistle [Romans], showing that the death of the soul happens not from the guilt of the first parent, but only from the actual sins of each, he speaks thus: “WHAT, then, shall I do,’ thou sayest, ‘do I perish on account of him — namely, Adam?’ By no means on account of him; for neither didst thou remain without sin. And if [it be] not the same sin, yet thou hast committed another.” And [in] homily 24 on the epistle to the Ephesians, expounding the last words of the final chapter, he relates the same more openly, saying: “CORRUPTIBLE is our body, but incorruptible the soul: let us not, therefore, corrupt it also. This [is what] that first sin (that is, of the first man) did. But [that] which, after the laver [of baptism], can corrupt even the soul, and make [it] susceptible of the immortal worm […].” To this also pertains [that] which, in the homily entitled To the Neophytes, he is thought to hand down — namely, that little infants, before baptism, are neither liable to any guilt, nor baptized for the remission of any guilt, but are baptized only for the sake of obtaining justification and inheritance. His words run thus: “THOU SEEST how many are the bounties of baptism? But to many, indeed, it seems that the grace of baptism consists only in the remission of sins; but we have already reckoned up ten honors of baptism. For this cause we baptize little infants too, although they are not defiled by sin — namely, that to them may be added holiness, justice, adoption, inheritance, and the brotherhood of Christ, that all [of them] may be his members, and [that they] may become a habitation of the Spirit.” From these sayings, therefore, Chrysostom seems to have shown the two former propositions.

The third proposition also he persuades with these words: “THAT, moreover, Adam having died, we were all made mortal, he showed openly and by many [arguments]. But what falls into question is: for what cause was this done? And if any of you should seek to learn [it], we shall say this: that not only have we received no harm from a death and condemnation of this kind, if we are wise, but — [being] made mortal — we have even made a gain: first, this, namely, that in a mortal body we may not sin; then, that we may have infinite arguments for philosophy [the moral life]. For both present and awaited death persuades [us] to keep measure, and to be composed and calm [as] temperate [men], and likewise [to be] freed from all viciousness. But together with these, or rather before these very [things], it brought many other goods,” etc. Thus far Chrysostom.

Whether there is any original sin.

From whose authority Julian, bishop of Eclanum [Celanensis], the chief champion of the Pelagian sect, at the end of the four books which he published against original sin, contended that Chrysostom was of the opinion of those who believe that there is no sin of origin transfused from the parents into the children. Which [opinion], in our age too, Lucian the Monk attributed to the same [Chrysostom], in the Annotations upon Chrysostom reprobated by the Council of Trent; and Erasmus of Rotterdam, in the Annotations on the fifth chapter of [the epistle] to the Romans; and Jacobus Faber, bishop of Vienne, in this

—[in this] part a follower of Pelagius, [does the same] in the Apologia of his commentaries on Paul: in which, from the aforesaid testimonies of Chrysostom, he strives to defend that which he himself, in the exposition of the fifth chapter [of the epistle] to the Romans, had wrongly written concerning original sin — affirming that original sin is nothing else than an obligation of the human race to bodily death, contracted from the offense of the first parent.

BUT that Chrysostom did not so think, appears from those [things] which he left written here and there concerning the infection of human nature, corrupted in the first parents — especially [in] homily 12 on the epistle to the Romans, in which these words are had: “WHEN Adam sinned, then his body too was made mortal and passible, very many vices of nature being received, and, moreover, a heavier and unbridled horse [the flesh] being rendered [unruly]. But Christ, when he came, made that [horse] lighter for us through baptism, rousing up the same by other spirit[ual aids].” And [in] homily 11 on the same epistle, pursuing the same more fully, he says: “OUR BODY, before the coming of Christ, was easily conquered; for together with death a great swarm, as it were, of affections had entered in. And so the same body was not very agile for that course which leads to virtue; for neither was there [the] Spirit to bring help, nor baptism, which could mortify [it]; but it ran after the manner of an unbridled horse, and went astray.” And again, [in] homily 13 on the same epistle, inculcating the same with words a little altered, he says: “INTO man, together with death, there entered a throng of affections. For when the body was made mortal, then at last it necessarily admitted both concupiscence, and anger, and grief, and all the rest [of the passions], which needed very great constancy and wisdom, lest the force of the flooding heat, and the tempest, should overwhelm reason in us — [reason] plunged into the whirlpool of sin. For those affections were by no means sin; but the immoderateness of them, [being] unbridled, effected sin.” Again, [in] homily 40 on the first [epistle] to the Corinthians, he manifestly pronounces that in the regeneration of baptism original sin is taken away — which he himself calls προέρριζον ἁμαρτίαν [proérrizon hamartían], that is, “radical sin,” inasmuch as [it is] drawn from the root of the first parent — saying thus: “GOD, in the laver of regeneration, touches the mind with grace, plucks out the radical sin, and makes the man such as he was of old, when he was created — nay, [makes him] more illustrious.”

FROM THESE [things] it is most clearly gathered that, according to Chrysostom’s opinion, from the sin of Adam there passed to [his] posterity not only the punishment of bodily corruption and death, but also the languor of the now-vitiated soul, and a certain immoderate heat of unbridled concupiscence — leading the soul away from the path of virtue, and dragging [it] to the deadly enticements of pleasures, and to the death of the spirit. Wherefore Augustine, refuting Julian — because from the aforesaid sayings of Chrysostom he strove to overthrow the transmission of original sin — writes these [things] in the first volume against him, in defense of Chrysostom: “DOST THOU dare thus to oppose to us the words of the holy bishop John [Chrysostom]? Far be it — far be it to believe or say this evil of so great a man! Far be it, I say, that John of Constantinople, speaking of the baptism of little ones (who have the liberation of the paternal bond through Christ), should resist so many and so great fellow-bishops of his — and most of all the Roman

Innocent, the Carthaginian Cyprian, the Cappadocian Basil, Gregory Nazianzen, [and] the Milanese Ambrose. For what those held, this John held, this he believed, this he taught.” These [things] Augustine [says].

ACCORDINGLY, when Chrysostom says that no one is constituted a sinner from the sin of the first parents, and excluded from the kingdom of heaven, and made liable to eternal damnation — he did not simply and altogether take away the sin of the human race, contracted from the first transgression of our fathers; but, unless I am mistaken, he meant to signify that Adam’s posterity are not sinners for this reason [only], that the first parents [alone] actually sinned, but that the posterity themselves also sinned in Adam, and together with Adam himself — inasmuch as all, by [reason of their] participation in the human species, are one and the same man with [their] progenitor Adam, and, as they participate [in] the same nature, so [they participate in] the vice of the same corrupted nature. For unless they too had transgressed in the first parent (in whom, as in a root, they were of old virtually contained), assuredly they would not be sinners from Adam’s sin. For no one (as Chrysostom rightly said) is made wicked both from a crime that is another’s and not participated in by himself.

BUT to that [point] which Chrysostom brought forward in the homily To the Neophytes — namely, that infants are neither defiled by sin, nor baptized for the remission of sins — Augustine, answering in the book already cited, noted that this sentence of John had been corrupted by the Pelagians, or badly translated. For they, in place of [that] which Chrysostom said, “Infants do not have sins,” put — with the words a little changed — “Infants are not defiled by sin,” so that he might seem to speak rather of that one sin transmitted from Adam than of others. But the uncorrupted reading of the Greek codices runs thus: “Διὰ τοῦτο καὶ τὰ παιδία βαπτίζομεν, καίτοι ἁμαρτήματα οὐκ ἔχοντα” — that is, “For this reason we baptize infants too, although not having sins.” By which words, as Augustine says, John does not deny that little ones are defiled by sin, but [only that they] have sins — that is, he does not deny that little ones are defiled by the sin of the first parent, and are baptized for the purgation of this sin; but he asserts that they have neither actual and proper sins, nor are baptized on account of proper and actual sins. And let these [things] be said for the elucidation of the first and second proposition of Chrysostom.

There now remains the third proposition of the same [Chrysostom], affirming that no detriment befell us from Adam’s condemnation, but innumerable and most ample benefits. To which opinion Augustine, and the rest of his followers, seem diametrically opposed — [they] who hold that from the sin and condemnation of Adam alone the whole human race is damned to eternal punishment. Chrysostom’s words, therefore, are to be taken so that we understand him to speak not of the spiritual condemnation of the soul to eternal death, but of the condemnation of bodily death — which brought forth for us all the gains already enumerated by him. But if anyone contend that these very words look also to the damnation of the soul, we shall say that they are to be interpreted in that sense in which the blessed pontiff Gregory pronounced the fault of the first parent to have been “happy” [felix], because it merited to have so great a Redeemer. These [things] for Chryso-

[These things] for the defense of Chryso[stom] I judge to be enough. Now it pleases [me] to subjoin certain words of St. Ambrose pertaining to this argument — but wrongly usurped by the heretics.

Ambrose, explaining this same pericope of Paul in the commentaries: “DEATH,” he says, “is the dissolution of the body, when the soul is separated from the body. There is also another death, which is called the second, in gehenna — which we suffer not by the sin of Adam, but [which] is acquired, on its occasion, by one’s own sins; from which the good are immune, only [in] that they were in hell [the underworld], but a higher [one], as [if] in a free [place], because they could not ascend to heaven.” Servetus the Anabaptist, in his Commonplaces, gathers from these [words] that Ambrose held that Adam, by his sin, brought upon [his] posterity only the death of the body, not of the soul. But [the things] which Ambrose asserts — not only in very many other places, but in the immediately preceding and following words — openly contradict this opinion: [namely] that the whole human race was corrupted in Adam sinning, and that in him, as in a mass [lump], all men were seized by the death of sin; writing thus: “IT IS MANIFEST, therefore, that in Adam all sinned, as [it were] in a mass. For he himself, [being] corrupted through sin — those whom he begot, all were born under sin. From him, therefore, [are] all sinners, because from him we all are.” And again, after the aforesaid words adduced by Servetus, he adds: “BY the sentence [given] in [the case of] Adam, all were held [bound] — [the sentence] whose bond [chirograph], [written] in the decrees, was blotted out by the death of Christ. But the sentence of the decree was, that the body of the one man should be dissolved upon the earth, but that the soul, held by the bonds of hell, should suffer perdition.” Thus far he [Ambrose]. It must be known, therefore, that the second death is twofold: the one, by which the lower hell separates the soul from God, and binds [it] to the punishments of gehenna; the other, by which the upper hell disjoins the soul from God, whether forever or for a time — as of old, before Christ’s death, it detained the souls of the saints in the bosom of Abraham; and still, after Christ’s death, it holds in Limbo the souls of infants departing without baptism, perpetually lacking the vision of God. Ambrose, therefore, denies that that former species of the second death follows from Adam’s sin, but teaches that it happens from the proper and actual offenses of each — which nearly all the theologians also approve. But the latter [species], which separates souls only from the divine vision, he plainly confesses to be inflicted on the human race by Adam’s sin. Read the following annotation.