Annotation CCXLII

”But I am carnal, sold under sin.” — Romans 7:14

Whether the natural passions were in man before sin.

Chrysostom, [in] homily thirteen on the epistle to the Romans, seems to hint that the affections of the concupiscible and irascible faculty — natural [as they are] — were not in man before sin, but entered into man immediately after sin, by necessity of mortality. For thus he declares: “INTO man, together with death, there entered in also a throng of affections. For when the body was made mortal, then at last it necessarily admitted both concupiscence, and anger, and grief, etc. — all [things] which needed exceeding great constancy and wisdom, lest the violence 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 unbridled immoderateness of them effected this [sin].” To the same [point] looks [that] which he wrote [in] homily 18 on Genesis — [namely] that the concupiscence of the venereal thing [sexual desire] stole into man after sin, whereas before there had been none. His words run thus: “BEFORE [their] disobedience, the first parents imitated the angelic life, and there was no talk of the venereal thing. For how could there be, since they were not even liable to bodily necessities? And so from the beginning virginity received the palm of primacy: but after sin entered in through sloth, and access was opened to those [things] which are of sin, that [virginity] indeed flew away, inasmuch as [it fled] from those who had been made unworthy of so great a magnitude of virtue. But the law of the venereal thing stole in.” And below: “FOR after sin entered in through disobedience, and the sentence made them mortal, consequently the omnipotent God — governing, according to his wisdom, the duration of the human race — granted that our race should be increased through coition.” These sayings of Chrysostom are to be understood not of the natural affections themselves — which were in man even before sin, as [being] implanted in man himself in the first condition of [his] nature — but of the perturbation and excess of the affections, which followed sin. Whence prudently Chrysostom said not that after sin the affections entered in, but the throng of affections — that is, the perturbation and excess. These very words can also, in some part, be referred to the use and exercise of the natural passions. For it is agreed that both the use of the venereal thing, and the goads of anger, and the sense of pain, began after Adam’s fall.

Lucian the Monk, in the condemned Annotations upon Chrysostom, sifting the aforesaid words from the thirteenth homily — namely, “Those affections were by no means sin,” etc. — charges Chrysostom [with this]: that, against the common definition of the theologians, he taught that the disordered affections of mortals, and the innate concupiscence of sin, are not sin. But he wrongly expounded the saying of the holy man — which indeed is to be referred not to the affections of mortal man, corrupted after Adam’s fall, but to those affections, [still] whole [and intact], which man had received in his first formation.