| Letter#38 The Effects
of Original Sin
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| My dear Mr. Isaacs: |
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| In considering
the question of original sin, I naturally look back to my own experience, having taken to
things Catholic in my manhood after studying the teachings of the Church. Having arrived,
step by step, to belief in God, in revelation, in Judaism fulfilled in Christianity, in
the Catholic Church being the Church of the living God, and her being protected from error
in matters of faith and morals, some of her teachings, such as the Trinity, the Immaculate
Conception, the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, were accepted by me on her
infallible say so. This seemed quite reasonable to me, for if God speaks through His
Church, as I believe He does, then can she no more be in error than could God be in error,
in such a thing as original sin. Yet I had to be convinced that what the Church taught on the subject is not contrary to right-reasoning. Believing that God made all things "good," including man, I began to ask some searching questions: "Why are we living in a valley of tears, instead of a terrestrial paradise such as was the abode of our first parents during their days of obedience of God's will?" "Why do women suffer the pangs of childbirth, whereas animals bring forth their young unaided, without suffering?" "Why does man, and not animals, suffer the affliction of concupiscence?" "Why, like a furnace from which all sinful notions as so many sparks continually arise, is man kept struggling against the rebellion of his passions?" They are physical afflictions which must arise from the soul, which is the vital, the animating principle in man. The soul must have been wounded at some stage of its existence, for God could not have made it that way. The answer was found in original sin, the wounded state of the human soul. I found that my obstacle to an understanding of original sin was partly due to narrowing down the term to a personal transgression, for which the individual person alone suffered. And as I did not eat the "forbidden fruit," "why should I, and millions of others, be punished for a sin committed in the infancy of humanity?" "Why should the saints, with rare exceptions, have had to continually battle against inward evil forces?" This obstacle was overcome upon learning that when the Catholic Church speaks of original sin, she refers not to a personal, an actual sin, of which Adam was guilty, but rather a state, a condition of the soul. When the Church speaks of the fall of man, resulting from the sin of Adam, she refers to the wound that affected the nature of the soul of man, due to every person conceived of woman having received his nature from Adam, whose stain he inherits. There is but one exception, says the Church, that is the soul of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the mother of the Savior Jesus Christ. This Spotless Lily of Israel, the vessel from whom Jesus took His human body, was miraculously conceived without the stain of original sin, through the merits of her divine Son. For that reason she is designated the Immaculate Conception. Having overcome that obstacle, by making a distinction between actual sin and a state of sin, I realized that a further distinction had to be borne in mind in order to properly understand original sin. That is the difference between man as a natural and a supernatural personage. By natural, as the word tells us, reference is made to things that belong to nature, the characteristics or constitution such as man receives at birth through his parents. By supernatural, reference is made to the state, the condition of man that transcends, that is superior to those powers and exigencies that come to him through his parents. It is a gift, something of a divine nature which God bestows upon man gratuitously. It is what St. Peter called being "partakers of the divine nature" (2 St. Peter 1:4). By sin Adam lost the supernatural grace with which God had endowed him. Though deprived of that gratuitous gift, Adam lived on as a natural, but not a supernatural man, I had to keep this important fact continually in mind in order to understand what the Church means by original sin. Also, that Adam, who is the father of humanity according to the flesh and blood, is also the head and representative of humanity according to the spirit. Hence the loss was of a spiritual nature, a loss in which the descendants share as part of that Adamic humanity, as "from one man God created the whole human race" (Acts 17:26). No matter how profound and extensive the explanation of original sin may be, it remains a mystery, as do a thousand and one things in science, from that invisible thing called the electron to that visible immensity called the universe. Yet, as Father L.A. Lambert said, in his admirable "Tactics of Infidels,"
What I have said only echoes in my own language what the Catholic Encyclopedia says with authority, and more tersely.
Enough has been said, in this and my preceding letter, to show that there is warrant in Jewish writings for the Catholic concept of original sin. Also to explain what it is; and what some of its effects have been upon humanity. So you may expect soon to learn how the sin of Adam became "the starting point of Christian belief," as Rabbi S.... said, how atonement was made for it. |
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