An Intellectual History of
Judaism and Christianity

HILR Fall 2015

SGL: B Ruml


12. Original Sin; Secret Mark

Augustine of Hippo

  • the corrupted will: orientation of the human will towards its own gratification;
  • Romans 3:12-19: the consequence of Adam's sin is death; the consequence of Jesus's obedience is life [in the Kingdom of God];
  • Paul: “I do the very thing I hate. ...Nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh”
  • Paul: I am “captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members.”
  • “We have inherited a compulsion to reenact Adam's alienation from God”

Augustine of Hippo (2)

  • Original sin is removed by baptism;
  • Pelagius: free will makes perfect obedience possible;
  • Pelagius: a Christian life => rigorous asceticism;
  • Pelagius: mortality is a natural attribute of humanity;

Augustine of Hippo (3)

  • Jacobs: “Augustine's emphasis on the universal depravity of human nature is curiously liberating.”
  • Peter Brown: “Augustine's emphasis on baptism as the only way to salvation [makes him] the advocate of moral tolerance.”

Roman Catholic Catechism: The Fall

  • Sin: humanity's rejection of God;
  • Sin: an abuse of the freedom that God gives;

Roman Catholic Catechism: The Fall

  • “The whole of human history is marked by the original fault freely committed by our first parents

Roman Catholic Catechism: The Fall

  • Satan: a good angel (created spirit), made by God, who by free choice radically and irrevocably rejected God;
  • The power of Satan is finite. Satan's actions may causes grave injuries but his actions are permitted by divine providence. It is a great mystery that providence should permit diabolical activity.

Roman Catholic Catechism: The Fall

  • “for in the day that you eat of it, you shall die”; (nope)
  • Man is dependent on ... the moral norms that govern the use of freedom.

Roman Catholic Catechism: The Fall

  • In that sin man preferred himself to God and by that very act scorned him. He chose himself over and against God, against the requirements of his creaturely status and therefore against his own good. Constituted in a state of holiness, man was destined to be fully "divinized" by God in glory. Seduced by the devil, he wanted to "be like God", but "without God, before God, and not in accordance with God".

Roman Catholic Catechism: The Fall

  • The control of the soul's spiritual faculties over the body is shattered; the relations [of man and woman] are henceforth marked by lust and domination.
  • Death makes its entrance into human history. (cf. biology)
  • For when man looks into his own heart he finds that he is drawn towards what is wrong.
  • [Adam] has transmitted to us a sin with which we are all born afflicted, a sin which is the "death of the soul".
  • Still, the transmission of original sin is a mystery that we cannot fully understand.

Roman Catholic Catechism: The Fall

  • Baptism erases original sin and turns a man back towards God, but the consequences [of original sin] for nature, weakened and inclined to evil, persist in man and summon him to spiritual battle.
  • By our first parents' sin, the devil has acquired a certain domination over man, even though man remains free. Original sin entails "captivity under the power of him who thenceforth had the power of death, that is, the devil".

Roman Catholic Catechism: The Fall

  • This dramatic situation of "the whole world [which] is in the power of the evil one" makes man's life a battle.
  • The whole of man's history has been the story of dour combat with the powers of evil, stretching, so our Lord tells us, from the very dawn of history until the last day.

What's the main difference between Judaism and Christianity?

cosmic monism v. cosmic dualism

The Secret Gospel of Mark

See you in my next course!